Race Of Offender Research Articles

Revisiting the Quality and Use of Race-Specific Homicide Data

Our research revisits prior work by Neapolitan (2005) on the quality and use of race-specific homicide data. Neapolitan reported that correlations between Black homicide offending rates based on arrest data and rates based on data from the Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) for samples of large U.S. cities are only moderately strong. He proposed that, given these findings, the respective rates cannot be regarded as valid indicators of the same concept. We extend Neapolitan’s research by estimating regression models to determine the extent to which conclusions about the structural covariates of Black homicide offending rates differ depending on the specific measure of the dependent variable. In addition, we have computed three different Black homicide offending rates with the SHR data: (1) A rate based on single victim/single offender incidents; (2) a rate based on all offenders of known race; and (3) a rate based on the number of Black offenders when the race of offender has been imputed. Our analyses reveal that, consistent with Neapolitan’s findings, the correlations between the Black offending rate based on the arrest data and the various SHR-based rates are only moderately strong. In the regression analyses, explained variance is comparatively low in the model with the Black offending rate based on arrest data. However, the regression coefficients do not diverge much across models. Overall, our results suggest that empirical findings and substantive conclusions about city-level covariates of Black offending rates might be less sensitive to the selection of data source than is often assumed.

Prosecutorial discretion for domestic violence cases: an examination of the effects of offender race, ethnicity, gender, and age

Much of the existing literature on courts and sentencing has focused on judicial decision-making. Prior research on prosecutorial decision-making is more limited, with even less attention paid to the prosecution of domestic violence cases. The research that has been conducted has produced inconsistent results regarding the effects of legal and extralegal variables. The current study focuses on the effects of extralegal suspect characteristics on the decision to dismiss domestic violence cases in a large Midwestern county from June 2009 to December 2009. The findings demonstrate that gender and race have a strong influence on prosecutors’ decisions to dismiss charges in domestic violence cases. Contrary to the focal concerns perspective, however, the results indicate that males and Black and Hispanic offenders are more likely to have their cases dismissed. Implications for future research are discussed.

Margo Wilson’s Influence Continues

Drawing on Margo Wilson and Martin Daly’s cross-national research on the spousal “sex ratio of killing” (SROK), this study examines the overall, relationship-specific, and age-specific SROKs for Texas’ six largest cities. This analysis of Supplementary Homicide Reports for the cities of Austin, Dallas, El Paso, Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio indicates that overall sex ratios of killing in Texas were comparable to the United States, whereas four of the six cities had higher intimate partner sex ratios of killing than the state or nation. Wide variation of intimate partner SROKs based on offender age, race, and weapon was also found.

Racial Context and Crime Reporting: A Test of Black’s Stratification Hypothesis

Contextual factors that contribute to race differences in reporting crime to the police are an important element in Donald Black’s theory of the behavior of the law, yet few studies have investigated whether these differences vary depending on social context. The present study investigates whether the relationships between victim and offender race and the reporting of crime are moderated by the level of racial stratification in a given place as Black’s stratification hypothesis would predict. Using victim survey data from 40 metropolitan areas, as well as data from other sources, we find results that are consistent with Black’s stratification hypothesis, namely, that victim and offender race are more strongly associated with the reporting of crime in those metropolitan areas where the gap in economic status between blacks and whites is larger and the groups are more residentially segregated. The theory, however, is unable to account for the high rates of reporting of black-on-black assaults found across the 40 metropolitan areas. The question of how the needs of black victims may outweigh their reluctance to call the police is an important issue for future research.

Who Lives and Dies on Death Row? Race, Ethnicity, and Post-Sentence Outcomes in Texas

A substantial body of research has explored the extent to which the race of offenders and victims influences who receives a death sentence for capital crimes. Little is known about how race and ethnicity might pattern death-row outcomes. Drawing upon evidence from male offenders sentenced to death in Texas during the years 1974 through 2009, we extend recent research by examining whether the race and ethnicity of offenders and victims and a number of offender, victim, and crime attributes influence the likelihood of executions and sentence relief (whereby prisoners leave death row). Cox regression analyses are used in conjunction with a multiple-imputation method for handling a modest amount of missing data. The results show that cases involving minorities—with black or Latino offenders or victims—have lower hazards of execution than cases in which both offenders and victims are white. Victim and offender race and ethnicity have little to no independent effect upon the hazard of sentence relief.

JUVENILITY AND PUNISHMENT: SENTENCING JUVENILES IN ADULT CRIMINAL COURT*

The study outlined in this article addressed a key limitation of prior research on the punishment of juveniles transferred to adult court by employing propensity score matching techniques to create more comparable samples of juvenile and young adult offenders. Using recent data from the Maryland State Commission on Criminal Sentencing Policy, it tested competing theoretical propositions about the salience of juvenile status in adult court. Findings indicate that even after rigorous statistical matching procedures, juvenile offenders are punished more severely than their young adult counterparts. We found no evidence that this “juvenile penalty” is exacerbated by an offender's race or gender, but it does vary starkly across offense type and mode of transfer, being driven primarily by drug crimes and discretionary waivers. The import of these findings is discussed as they relate to the future of juvenile justice policy regarding the continued use of juvenile transfer to adult court.

Effects of race, sex, and victims' reasons for victim‐offender dialogue

AbstractThis study focuses on victim‐offender dialogue files archived by Ohio's Office of Victim Services (OVS). The OVS director was interested in knowing why only one in four initiated dialogue files complete actual face‐to‐face dialogue. Victim offender dialogue programs based on restorative justice theory have been shown to increase victim and offender satisfaction, decrease offender recidivism, and increase the rate of restitution. An archived data analysis on a sample (N = 212) of OVS completed and will‐not‐proceed files revealed offender race did not have a significant effect on dialogue completion rate. However, victim sex was found to have a significant effect on dialogue completion. Included are descriptive analyses of victims' stated motivations for seeking dialogue. Victims who state specific motivations for participation in dialogue were no more likely to complete dialogue than those who did not. Results lead to several suggestions regarding other uses of restorative dialogue in the contexts of severe crime and felonies.

Striking Out: Race and Support for Police Use of Force

This research examines whites’ and blacks’ support for police use of force using a survey‐based experiment that varies the race of the offender across four different scenarios. Bivariate results show that the race of the offender influences blacks’ approval for the use of force by police, but does not affect whites’ approval. Multivariate analyses examine whether the factors influencing support for police use of force vary depending on the race of the offender. Results indicate that the predictors for approval of police use of force differ by the race of respondent, the race of offender, and the appropriateness of the use of force. The implications of the results for police–community relations are discussed.

Racial Bias in Case Processing: Does Victim Race Affect Police Clearance of Violent Crime Incidents?

Prior studies have illustrated racial differences in perceptions of police legitimacy. African‐Americans’ views, however, appear to be complex, shaped by perceptions of over‐enforcement of crimes committed by African‐American offenders coupled with under‐enforcement of crimes involving African‐American victims. Using data from the 2002 National Incident‐Based Reporting System, we examine whether victim race (alone, and in combination with offender race) affects police case clearance of four types of violent criminal incidents (homicide, aggravated assault, rape, and robbery) as a potential explanation of African‐Americans’ reduced levels of support for the police. Results suggest that the race of the victim, particularly in combination with the race of the offender, is related to police clearance of violent criminal incidents, but that this relationship is not as strong as those between agency, offense type, and situational characteristics of the incident. Implications for research and policy on police—community relations are discussed.

A New Look at the Gender Gap in Offending

A consistent research finding is that males commit more crime than females—a phenomenon known as the gender gap in offending. Recently it has been reported that this gap in violent offending has narrowed. What is unclear is whether the reported convergence in offending is an accurate reflection of changes in violent offending or an artifact of the data used: official records and self-report offending data. An additional lack of clarity is whether the reported convergence remains once the race and age of offenders are accounted for. This study used an alternative source of data—victimization data—to address 2 fundamental questions: Has the gender gap in violent crime offending changed over time? And has the gender gap changed once the offender's race and age are accounted for? Examining 18 disaggregated offender groups from the 1992 to 2001 National Crime Victimization Survey, this study demonstrates virtually no change in the violent crime gender gap over time. Results clearly point to gender stability regardless of the age or race of the offender. In those rare instances where change was measured, it was in the form of gender convergence resulting from a decline in male violent offending rates that exceeded the decline in female offending rates. The findings highlight the importance of accounting for offenders' race and age to avoid overgeneralized and possibly misleading conclusions.

Victim-Offender Racial Dyads and Clearance of Lethal and Nonlethal Assault

Previous clearance research provides an incomplete test of theories emphasizing the role of both victim and offender status in police discretion. Using National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) data, we investigate the impact of both victim's and offender's race, and, in particular, victim— offender racial dyads on homicide clearance by arrest, using event history (survival) analysis, so that time to clearance and censoring are considered. We also compare models for homicide clearance with those for aggravated assault. For homicides, results indicate that incidents with non-white offenders are more likely to be cleared by arrest than those with white offenders, regardless of victim's race. In contrast, for aggravated assault, dyads are important: incidents involving white victims and offenders are most likely to be cleared, with incidents involving non-white parties least likely to be cleared. Furthermore, the impact of victim—offender racial dyads on clearance is smaller for homicide than for aggravated assault.

Homicides Clearances

A number of studies in the homicide clearance literature combine arrest and exceptional clearances into a single category. This study addresses the question of whether these divergent homicide case outcomes are influenced differently by various aspects of the case. Using National Incident-Based Reporting System data on homicides from 1996 to 2002, the authors analyze logistic regression models of cases cleared by arrest and exceptionally cleared. Our results show that although certain factors have similar influences on both arrest and exceptional clearances, victim gender, offender race, weapon use, victim/offender relationship, and circumstances have differing impacts on case outcomes. The findings challenge recent research findings on clearances suggesting that exceptional clearances are almost solely politically motivated, and implications for measuring clearance are discussed.

Race and Violent Offender “Propensity”: Does the Intraracial Nature of Violent Crime Persist on the Local Level?

In the 1980s, some scholars suggested black violent offenders had a “propensity” to select white victims. Subsequent research demonstrated, however, that violent offenders tend to victimize intraracially. One weakness of this research was its reliance on national-level data. Using national-level estimates to calculate expected values of interracial offending implicitly assumes people have access to each other across the nation. Segregation patterns suggest otherwise. This study examines whether the propensity of violent offenders to select victims intraracially holds up if expected values are calculated locally. Findings indicate that violent offenders do tend to select victims intraracially at the local level, but that the intraracial character of violent offending varies by crime, offender race, and locale. For most cities in the analysis, assault is predominantly intraracial across offense/offender categories. For a few cities, however, criminal assault is less intraracial than expected (with white offenders victimizing interracially more than random selection would predict).

Estimating the Number of Crimes Averted by Incapacitation: An Information Theoretic Approach

This paper presents an information theoretic approach for estimating the number of crimes averted by incapacitation. It first develops models of the criminal history accumulation process of a sample of prison releasees using their official recorded arrest histories prior to incarceration. The models yield individual offending trajectories that are then used to compute the number of crimes these releasees could reasonably have been expected to commit had they not been incarcerated—the counterfactual of interest. The models also afford the opportunity to conduct a limited set of policy simulations. The data reveal a fair amount of variation among individuals both in terms of the number of crimes averted by their incarceration and the responsiveness of these estimates to longer incarceration terms. Estimates were found not to vary substantially across demographic groups defined by offender race, gender, or ethnicity; variations across states and offense types were more pronounced. Implications of the findings and promising avenues for future research are discussed.

Police Response to Crime

Based on victim accounts provided by the National Crime Victimization Survey from 1992 to 1999, this paper examines issues related to police responses to reported incidents of assault, robbery, and rape. The primary goal was to determine the extent to which victim and offender race influence police responsiveness at various stages of the criminal justice system. The data indicate that overall, police exert more effort when victims are white. They arrive faster at the scene of the crime, and demonstrate more follow-up effort after the crime has taken place. However, they do not exert more, or less effort, during their initial visit to the crime scene, when there is proximate contact with the victims. This suggests that contextual factors may affect the penchant for discrimination. This relationship held even after controlling for other factors such as poverty, weapon use, injury to the victim, and location.

Does Race Matter? Examining the Relationship Between Co-Offending and Victim Characteristics for Violent Incidents Involving Female Offenders

Using National Incident-Based Reporting System data from 1998, the current study examines important factors concerning the situational context of violent incidents. First, the study explores the relationship between co-offending groups and several victim-related measures. Second, the study uses an intersectional approach to determine the extent to which these relationships may or may not be conditioned by offender(s) race. Two findings are notable in terms of offending differences among females: (a) race conditioned the relationship between offending group and victim(s) sex for robbery incidents and (b) race conditioned the relationship between offending group and the social distance between victim(s) and perpetrator(s) for aggravated assaults.

The ‘Usual Suspects’

A key issue in contemporary criminology is the role that social status, and particularly race, plays in legal processes. Previous research suggests that criminal justice proceedings-including arrest, conviction, and sentencing rates-are influenced by victim and offender race, but rarely examines the role of race in reporting events to the police. The following research uses data from the rape sub-sample of the National Crime Victimization Survey of households 1992-2001; logistic regression analyses are conducted to determine how victim and offender race influence reporting of rape to the police, controlling for other incident characteristics. The findings suggest that rapes with a Black perpetrator are much more likely to be reported to police, regardless of whether the victim is white or Black.

The effect of offender characteristics on offense specialization and escalation

The primary goal of this research is to investigate whether adolescent correlates of criminal behavior also serve as correlates of specialization and escalation in the criminal career. Prior research on offense sequences has focused on (1) establishing the existence of specialization and escalation and on (2) testing whether observed patterns of offense sequences differ across age and race of offender. We use data on 2,294 offenders from the Predicting Parole Performance in the Era of Crack Cocaine study (Haapanen & Skonovd, 1999). A series of multinomial logit models test for significant behavioral, social, and psychological correlates of the likelihood of offender specialization and escalation. The results show that without taking into account offender characteristics, there is evidence of specialization and escalation comparable to that found in prior research. Once offender background characteristics are controlled statistically, overall evidence of specialization and escalation is significantly reduced, indicating that (1) background characteristics are important predictors of types of offending and (2) background characteristics help to explain patterns of offending across the criminal career.

Born to crime: Cesare Lombroso and the origins of biological criminology

Introduction Criminal Man Female Offender Race and Crime Scientific Police Juvenille Delinquency Theory and Law after Lombroso Conclusion Bibliography Index

Race and the Death Penalty

Scholars have learned a great deal about race and the death penalty. Yet the field has limitations: (1) prior research focuses on African Americans and Hispanics but ignores Asian Americans; (2) researchers have not explored Donald Black's (1989) plan to eliminate discrimination called the “desocialization of law.” Black notes that jurors who do not know the race of the offender and victim cannot discriminate. Black then outlines proposals aimed at removing race information from trials, while still providing jurors with relevant legal information. We address both issues through an experiment in which mock jurors (N = 1,233 students) recommended a sentence in a capital murder trial consisting of four conditions: (1) Asian American-white; (2) white-Asian American; (3) African American-white; (4) race of offender and victim unknown. The results suggest that Asian Americans are treated the same as whites, while African Americans continue to suffer from discrimination. Here, we consider the potential role of social status in such outcomes. The results also suggest that African American offenders and unknown offenders face the same odds of a death sentence. Here, we consider two potential interpretations. On one hand, jurors in the unknown condition could have seen an African American offender and a white victim in their “mind's eye,” effectively merging the conditions. On the other hand, death sentences could be the same in the conditions for distinct reasons: Death sentences could be high in the unknown condition because of relational distance between the juror and offender, while death sentences could be high in the African American-white condition because of discrimination. We conclude by considering the theoretical and public policy implications of both the central findings.