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Full-Text Articles in Criminology

Social Divisions And Coercive Control In Advanced Societies: Law Enforcement Strength In Eleven Nations From 1975 To 1994., Stephanie L. Kent, David Jacobs Jan 2015

Social Divisions And Coercive Control In Advanced Societies: Law Enforcement Strength In Eleven Nations From 1975 To 1994., Stephanie L. Kent, David Jacobs

Stephanie Kent

Conflict theory suggests that economic stratification poses a threat to order, so we should expect increased inequality to lead to a greater capacity for coercive control. The police are the primary agency that uses force to preserve order, yet we know little about the effects of economic divisions on police size in advanced nations besides the United States. The generality of findings based on a fixed-effects panel design applied to 11 developed nations should provide increased insight about how coercion is used to preserve domestic order. Other social divisions that should matter include minority presence and unemployment. With economic development, …


Who Survives On Death Row? An Individual And Contextual Analysis, David Jacobs, Jason T. Carmichael, Zhenchao Qian, Stephanie L. Kent Jan 2015

Who Survives On Death Row? An Individual And Contextual Analysis, David Jacobs, Jason T. Carmichael, Zhenchao Qian, Stephanie L. Kent

Stephanie Kent

What are the relationships between death row offender attributes, social arrangements, and executions? Partly because public officials control executions, theorists view this sanction as intrinsically political. Although the literature has focused on offender attributes that lead to death sentences, the post-sentencing stage is at least as important. States differ sharply in their willingness to execute and less than 10 percent of those given a death sentence are executed. To correct the resulting problems with censored data, this study uses a discrete-time event history analysis to detect the individual and state-level contextual factors that shape execution probabilities. The findings show that …


Killings Of Police In U.S. Cities Since 1980: An Examination Of Environmental Andpolitical Explanations, Stephanie L. Kent Jan 2015

Killings Of Police In U.S. Cities Since 1980: An Examination Of Environmental Andpolitical Explanations, Stephanie L. Kent

Stephanie Kent

Most research on killings of police in urban areas attempted to link lethal violence against officers to the violence and disorder in the communities they work. Yet support for this relationship is inconsistent. Fewer studies considered whether local political arrangements affect killings of police. This study attempts to remedy this gap by using recent data to investigate the relationship between the political conditions of large U.S. cities and the number of homicides of police officers in the line of duty in the years 1980, 1990, and 2000. Negative binomial regression analyses suggest that racial income inequality and the size of …


Vigilantism, Current Racial Threat, And Death Sentences, David Jacobs, Stephanie L. Kent, Jason T. Carmichael Jan 2015

Vigilantism, Current Racial Threat, And Death Sentences, David Jacobs, Stephanie L. Kent, Jason T. Carmichael

Stephanie Kent

Capital punishment is the most severe punishment, yet little is known about the social conditions that lead to death sentences. Racial threat explanations imply that this sanction will be imposed more often in jurisdictions with larger minority populations, but some scholars suggest that a tradition of vigilante violence leads to increased death sentences. This study tests the combined explanatory power of both accounts by assessing statistical interactions between past lynchings and the recent percentage of African Americans after political conditions and other plausible effects are held constant. Findings from count models based on different samples, data, and estimators suggest that …


Killings Of Police In U.S. Cities Since 1980: An Examination Of Environmental And Political Explanations, Stephanie L. Kent Oct 2013

Killings Of Police In U.S. Cities Since 1980: An Examination Of Environmental And Political Explanations, Stephanie L. Kent

Stephanie Kent

Most research on killings of police in urban areas attempted to link lethal violence against officers to the violence and disorder in the communities they work.Yet support for this relationship is inconsistent. Fewer studies considered whether local political arrangements affect killings of police. This study attempts to remedy this gap by using recent data to investigate the relationship between the political conditions of large U.S. cities and the number of homicides of police officers in the line of duty in the years 1980, 1990, and 2000. Negative binomial regression analyses suggest that racial income inequality and the size of the …