Crime and Social Organization: Advances in Criminological Theory, Volume 10
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The author(s) shown below used Federal funds provided by the U.S. Department of Justice and prepared the following final report: Document Title: Crime and Social Organization: Advances in Criminological Theory, Volume 10 Author(s): Elin Waring ; David Weisburd Document No.: 183328 Date Received: June 29, 2000 Award Number: 97-IJ-CX-0031 This report has not been published by the U.S. Department of Justice. To provide better customer service, NCJRS has made this Federally- funded grant final report available electronically in addition to traditional paper copies. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. Crime and Social Organization Edited by Elin Waring and David Weisburd Advances in Criminological Theory Volume 10 Series Editors Freda Adler and William J. Laufer FINAL REPORT PROPERTY OF National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NURS) /.-- Date: :E/:/: MD 20849-6000 A This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. To Albert J. Reiss, Jr. -. e: This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. CONTENTS 00 Forward Jeremynk Travis i Editor's Introduction Elin Waring and David Weisburd V 1. Clarifying Organizational Actors: The Contributions of Albert J. Reiss, Jr. to the Sociology of Deviance and Social Control Diane Vaughan 1 2. Patterns of Juvenile Delinquency and Co-offending Joan McCord and Kevin P. Conway 19 3. Conceptualizing Co-offending: A Network Form of Social Organization Elin Waring 40 4. The Generality of the Self-Control Theory of Crime David F. Greenberg, Robin Tamarelli and Margaret S. Kelley 64 5. Organized for What? Recasting Theories of Social (Dis)organization . m .Robert J. Sampson 136 6. Social Selection and Social Causation as Determinants of Psychiatric Disorders Beat Mohler and Felton Earls 157 7. Authority, Loyalty, and Community Policing Peter K.Manning 171 8. The Romance Of Police Leadership Stephen D. Mastrofki 209 9. From Criminals to Criminal Contexts: Reorienting Crime Prevention Research and Policy David Weisburd 266 10. Evidence-based Policing: Social Organization of Information for'Soci3- Control Lawrence W Sherman 294 0 Authors 333 This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. e Figures Figure 6.1 Predicted Relationship between the prevelance of psychopathology and Socioeconomic Status for Social Causation and Social Selection Models Figure 6.2 Observed Relationships between the Prevalence of Schizophrenia and Substanceuse Disorder and Socioeconomic Status Tables Table 2.1. Crime, Age and Co-offending Table 4.1. Proportions Admitting Involvementa in Dubious Behaviors Table 4.2. Diagonally-Weighted, Standardized Least Squares Estimates of Confirmatory Factor Analysis Model for Males Table 4.3. Diagonally-Weighted, Standardized Least Squares Estimates of Confirmatory Factor Analysis Model for Females Table 4.4.Stress Statistics for Multidimensional Scaling Analyses Table 4.5. Coordinates of Variables in First Dimension of Four-Dimensional Multidimensional Scaling Analysis. ’.. -2- This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. Foreword It is difficult today to imagine a time when criminologists or criminal justice policy makers did not recognize the importance of social organization in understanding crime and the criminal justice system. But this was indeed the case before Albert J. Reiss, Jr. began his pathbreaking work in sociology, criminology, and criminal justice research more than four decades ago. Back then, with few exception~,criminologiststook a unidimensional approach, 1_” viewing crime as a series of isolated events, focusing solely on the offender and the offense, with scant attention to the broader social context in which crime is committed. What practitioners might learn from research was accordingly limited. It is no wonder that the response to crime was based on a similar approach, with little thought to the complex web of factors essential to 0 consider in crafting prevention and other crime control strategies. Today, thanks to A1 Reiss’s pioneering work, policy makers as well as criminologists use this hndamental concept-social organization-as a standard analytical tool. What we at the National Institute of Justice refer to as “understanding the nexus” of crime and other social variables has become a major objective in research and practice. Analyses of the social, organizational, and even the physical environment of crime and the justice system response are now the rule rather than the exception. The same perspective animates policy making and practice. This type of analysis has caused the bar to be raised, with research becoming-: more complex (and difficult),but with the payoff well worth the effort-richly textured, finely nuanced ‘L results, more inspired conclusions. 1 This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. There is space here to cite only a few of the ways AI introduced and investigated the study of crime and justice in their social context. He was among the first scholars to plead for shifting the emphasis from studying offenders and their crimes in isolation, toward a perspective that includes the networks of relationships binding offenders one to another. What he termed “co-offending” is a construct that has helped clarify what happens when people act in concert to commit crime. He introduced new ways of thinking about crime control, demonstrating that the way the police go about the job of reducing crime is itself a function of how they are organized and of (ever-changing) external factors. He used a similar organizational focus to alert researchers to why the data they trust so implicitly may not be as reliable and valid as they would like to think. Data are generated by organizations shaped by forces that affect the quality of the information produced. Drawing again on his grounding in sociology, A1 gave criminologists a 0 valuable field research tool, “systematic social observation,” used for the study of policing. More recently, he was a major force in shaping the design of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, a long-term study of how community, family structure, ethnicity, gender, and a host of other variables influence the origins of criminal behavior. He called the investigators’ attention to the dynamic nature of communities and of the consequent need to track change over time, and he created a new set of measures for the processes that put people at risk for crime. These and other products of AI Reiss’s fertile imagination continue to have incalculable heuristic effects. t: It is no exaggeration to say that innovations like problem-oriented policing, community- based approaches to crime prevention, the analysis of “hot spots,” crime mapping, and more .. 11 This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. recent constructs like “collective efficacy,” which sees the informal social control mechanisms of e neighborhoods as potent forces for preventing crime, have gained currency in large part because of AI Reiss’s groundwork. A large part of NIJ’s portfolio is a testament to his influence on criminal justice research. In partial payment of the debt the field owes to this singular individual, editors Elin Waring and David Weisburd have prepared thisfestschrifr. It is the outgrowth of NIJ’s interest in bringing together a group of leading scholars who, as A1 Reiss’s intellectual progeny, share his view that understanding social organization must be at the heart of research and practice. Their studies--the proof of paternity-use his road maps as points of departure from which to launch and extend their own explorations and to chart new territory: in situational crime prevention, strategies for building research into the structure of police departments, the implications of community policing for police organization, the utility of “social disorganization” as an explanatory factor, the parallels between co-offending groups and licit groups, the viability of a single-cause theory of crime, the validity of “neighborhood” as an explanatory factor when neighborhoods change... and more. The editors and authors of this volume, and NIJ, its sponsor, offer this tribute to A1 Reiss with a string attached.