Law Commons^™

Deterrence, Brutalization, And The Death Penalty: Another Examination Of Oklahoma's Return To Capital Punishment, William C. Bailey

Sociology & Criminology Faculty Publications

A replication and extension of a weekly ARIMA analysis (1989–1991) by Cochran et al. (1994), which appeared in Criminology, confirms that Oklahoma's return to capital punishment in 1990, after a 25-year moratorium, was followed by a significant increase in killings involving strangers. Moreover, a multivariate autoregressive analysis, which includes measures of the frequency of executions, the level of print media attention devoted to executions, and selected sociodemographic variables, produced results consistent with the brutalization hypothesis for total homicides, as well as a variety of different types of killing involving both strangers and nonstrangers. No prior study has shown such strong …

Crime In Public Housing: Clarifying Research Issues, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Tamara Dumanovsky, J. Phillip Thompson, Garth Davies

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, crime and public housing have been closely linked in our political and popular cultures. Tragic episodes of violence have reinforced the notion that public housing is a milieu with rates of victimization and offending far greater than other locales. However, these recent developments belie the complex social and political evolution of public housing from its origins in the 1930s, through urban renewal, and into the present.

Stereotypes abound about public housing, its management, residents, and crime rates. In reality, variation is the norm, and it is these variations that affect crime. The study of crime in public …

Declining Homicide In New York City: A Tale Of Two Trends, Jeffery Fagan, Franklin E. Zimring, June Kim

Faculty Scholarship

The mass media pay plenty of attention to crime and violence in the United States, but very few of the big stories on the American crime beat can be classified as good news. The driveby shootings and carjackings that illuminate nightly news broadcasts are the opposite of good tidings. Most efforts at prevention and law enforcement seem more like reactive attempts to contain ever expanding problems rather than discernable public triumphs. In recent American history, crime rates seem to increase on the front page and moderate in obscurity.

The recent decline in homicides in New York City is an exception …

Objectivist Vs. Subjectivist Views Of Criminality: A Study In The Role Of Social Science In Criminal Law Theory, Paul H. Robinson, John M. Darley

All Faculty Scholarship

The authors use social science methodology to determine whether a doctrinal shift-from an objectivist view of criminality in the common law to a subjectivist view in modern criminal codes-is consistent with lay intuitions of the principles of justice. Commentators have suggested that lay perceptions of criminality have shifted in a way reflected in the doctrinal change, but the study results suggest a more nuanced conclusion: that the modern lay view agrees with the subjectivist view of modern codes in defining the minimum requirements of criminality, but prefers the common law's objectivist view of grading the punishment deserved. The authors argue …