Criminal Patterns Research Articles

Crime in the waste oil industry

In the late 1970s, a new pattern of criminality appeared: the illegal disposal of toxic wastes by previously legitimate waste oil dealers, especially by selling a mixture of liquid toxic wastes and waste oils as fuel oil. This pattern of crime was caused by changes in the social conditions determining economic self‐interest in the petroleum industry, and by changes in the criminal law regarding the disposal of toxic wastes. Official crime rates have remained low despite widespread criminal behaviors because of the power of affected industries to limit the enforcement of criminal laws.

Cycles of Illegality: Antitrust Violations in Corporate America

Cycles of Illegality: Antitrust Violations in Corporate America

Heroin use and criminal careers

The relationship between heroin use and crime has been the subject of continuing debate. While the principle focus of this debate has been the causal nexus between heroin and crime, a related controversy exists regarding the nature of addict criminality. Some have argued that heroin addicts are impulsive and opportunistic criminals, while others maintain that addicts are sophisticated criminal entrepreneurs. The present study based on career history interviews with 30 “hard core” street addicts, suggests that both positions may be relevant at different times in the addict's career. These addicts clearly identified a preferred “main hustle,” but did find it necessary to deviate from their main hustle at various times in their careers. This paper seeks to identify those conditions under which addicts are likely to maintain and, conversely, deviate from established patterns of criminality.

MODELING THE SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION OF URBAN RESIDENTIAL BURGLARY

This paper considers the relationship between criminal activity patterns and urban structure. The model of the rational burglar is extended to a simple spatial domain. A set of equilibrium conditions are obtained which relate the criminal activity pattern to a systematic underlying relation between localized risk and opportunity. These conditions suggest that spatial trends in urban crime may be more than mere artifacts of map patterns. Residential burglary data for Indianapolis, Indiana, are used to test the model. Localized effects dominate the autoregressive term in the empirical model. The spatial trend, or autoregressive structure of these data, is shown to be related to variation in localized risk and opportunity as suggested by the theoretical model.

Why Are Communities Important in Understanding Crime?

People commit crimes. And people are crime's victims, directly in crimes of violence, indirectly when their property is taken or destroyed, more indirectly still when the property taken or destroyed belongs to their community or government or organization. Much modern criminological theory and research have accordingly attempted to understand individual patterns of criminality and victimization. What social, psychological, economic, cultural, and biological factors cause individuals to commit crimes? Why some and not others? What are the patterns of individual criminality, of individual "criminal careers"? When and why do people become criminally active? When and why do they desist? How many crimes do they commit, of what types? How can we identify high-rate offenders? How can the state, individuals, or organizations intervene in individuals' lives to prevent or curtail or deter or incapacitate involvement in crime? Why and where and when do individuals become victims of crime? Who become crime victims?

Changing Criminal Patterns in Buenos Aires, 1890 to 1914

Despite the recent development of a broad literature on urbanization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America, the topics of public order and crime have eluded careful study.1The historiography of Argentine urbanization evokes questions about social control, but we know little more about changing patterns of crime and policing than did contemporary observers. Immigration, labor organization, class struggle, and political violence have all been the subjects of scholarly inquiries that suggest both high levels of disorder and the necessity of official responses.2

Alcohol, Drug Use, and Delinquent and Criminal Behaviors among Male Adolescents and Young Adults

This paper examines the relationship between reported delinquent and criminal behavior and drug use patterns among male adolescents and young men in the United States. In an effort to refine prior analyses on the subject, pattern of alcohol use is viewed as a variable worth considering in conjunction with heroin and/or cocaine use patterns. The analysis indicates that the drug patterns relate differentially to the selected indicators of delinquent and criminal behavior and that generalizations about these relationships depend on the nature of the criterion behavior and on ethnic group differences. It is concluded that the clearly excessive criminality of hard drug users does not make hard drug use a powerful predictor of criminality in the population as a whole, since a relative few of all criminal acts are committed by hard drug users and that pattern of alcohol use is a salient variable.

Improving the Ability of Jurors to Comprehend and Apply Criminal Jury Instructions

The complexity and linguistic construction of jury instructions can inhibit jurors' ability to comprehend and apply the law. Study 1 analyzes questions asked by actual deliberating jurors in order to identify sources of juror misunderstanding in criminal pattern jury instructions. Instructions concerning “reasonable doubt,” criminal “intent,” the use of evidence concerning prior convictions, and the general duties of jurors, are selected for further investigation. Study 2 uses videotaped trial materials to pinpoint linguistic problems that confuse jurors and interfere with their abilities to accurately comprehend and apply the selected pattern jury instructions. Available knowledge concerning psycholinguistics is then applied to rewrite the troublesome instructions; in addition, legal expertise is consulted to help assure that the rewritten instructions are legally valid. Study 3 demonstrates that the rewritten instructions improve jurors' understanding relative to Pattern or No instructions. Overall, the research indicates the availability to the criminal justice system of improved methods for instructing jurors accurately and effectively in the law.

A Comparison of Sentencing Strategies Between States

A dynamic descriptive model of the criminal justice system is implemented for the states of Missouri and Texas. The differences between sentencing strategies, prison population movements, and criminal behavior patterns are examined. Results for optimization of sentencing strategy and estimates for separate incapacitative and deterrent effects are provided from the discrete time model in each state, and comparisons are offered.

Crime and the Development of Modern Society; Patterns of Criminality in Nineteenth-Century Germany and France

Crime and the Development of Modern Society; Patterns of Criminality in Nineteenth-Century Germany and France

Patterns of Criminality in New South Wales, 1788–1973

This study presents the initial report of the author's research on the history of the New South Wales criminal justice system. Following a review of available crime statistics from 19th and 20th century New South Wales, the major methodological obstacles to the longitudinal study of criminality are discussed, and corrective measures are suggested which permit use of existing data for illustrative and analytical purposes. Long term trends in the rate of serious offences against persons, property, and sexual morality in New South Wales reflect patterns typical of most Western industrial societies; gross trends over the history of New South Wales have been downward, with slight reversals occurring since World War II in the cases of acquisitive crime and sexual offences. Multiple regression analysis was employed in an effort to discern with greater precision the determinants of the trends in question; the over representation of males in the early 19th century and the urban growth characteristic of 20th century New South Wales emerged as the most significant correlates of the forms of criminality under investigation. The study concludes with a discussion of strategies for future research in historical and comparative contexts.

Strategies in Typology Construction

Numerous sociologists (Gibbs, 1960; Block Geis, 1964; Gibbons, 1965; Ferdinand, 1966; Clinard and Quinney, 1967; and Driver, 1968) have long recognized the heterogeneous nature of the subject matter defined as crime and delinquency. They have argued that it is not plausible to expect the same or similar social conditions to emerge as causal for all forms of crime and delinquency; therefore, it is necessary to subclassify the subject matter of crime and delinquency into homogeneous types to be studied somewhat independently. However, while this state of affairs may be the case, it should not be confused with social reality, and interpreted to mean that the ostensively heterogeneous nature of the subject matter entitled crime and delinquency dictates the employment of typologies. The subject matter of every research area is phenomenologically heterogeneous. It is the role of social scientists to formulate theories which describe the underlying order or regularity. Up to now theories of crime and delinquency have been limited in their scope of application, that is, no principle of regularity has been discovered which is applicable to all or even most acts of crime and delinquency. Rather limited principles of regularity have been found workable in limited sub-areas of the field. Hence, the subject matter designated as the field of crime and delinquency appears to require a typology. Furthermore, since even these empirically limited theories are relatively ambiguous and underdeveloped, what constitutes the appropriate types also remains unclear.1 Lacking clear theoretical guidelines, some sociologists (e.g., Gibbs, 1960; Scott, 1959; and Dentler and Monroe, 1961) have attempted to construct typologies on the basis of empirical interrelationships between different criminal and delinquent patterns, that is, combining as one criminal-delinquent type those criminal and delinquent patterns which show a high empirical interrelationship. Still others (e.g., Gibbons, 1965; Ferdinand, 1966; and Clinard, 1967) have attempted to construct typologies in terms of concepts frequently employed to explain crime and delinquency, that is, combining as one criminal-delinquent type those criminal and delinquent patterns which show a strong relationship to the same causal variables. In this paper we will discuss these two

Criminal Homicide in Western Nigeria 1966–1972

This research began as an attempt to add a codicil to the work on homicide done by Paul Bohannan in the 1950s.2 Although Bohannan looked at events in the colonial period, his appreciation of the way in which cultural norms are expressed in legal institutions is still relevant. The criminal code in Western Nigeria is almost entirely British; it is applied by Nigerian judges to Nigerian accused who are counselled by Nigerian lawyers. The crime of homicide is universal. How a man kills, whom he kills, his motive for killing, and why it is most often a man who kills another man, may all be primarily determined by culture. The precise influence of social and cultural factors upon criminal patterns is impossible to measure. Yet to ignore what cannot be isolated is to commit a gross, but it seems to me inescapable, error. Often it seemed what was possible to tabulate was the least important information, that the conclusions which could be substantiated were trivial or irrelevant. Homicide recommended itself as a crime serious enough to test the efficacy of the Western Nigerian criminal justice system. Yet there are few conclusions here about the nature of that system’s authority. As elsewhere, in Western Nigeria the institutions of criminal justice seem to sit on the surface of the society. The criminal processes are unfamiliar to most people. Often after an accused is taken into custody it is difficult to find relatives or friends to inform about the progress of his case. At the moment of arrest, an accused steps into a totally strange, and largely foreign, world, one from which he may never return. What follows does not attempt to explain such subtle and difficult aspects of criminal law in Western Nigeria; it is an attempt to describe the way in which one particular serious crime was handled by Western Nigerian legal institutions during a specific period of time.

Crime and the Respectable Woman: Toward a Pattern of Middle-Class Female Criminality in Nineteenth-Century France and England

Crime and the Respectable Woman: Toward a Pattern of Middle-Class Female Criminality in Nineteenth-Century France and England

The attitudinal effects of group discussions between young criminal offenders and community volunteers

The notion that positive effects might result from structured meetings between offenders and non-offenders has been active in corrections for some time. The idea was basic to the community-based recreational projects of the 1930s through to the present day. In one of the few experimental investigations, Shulman demonstrated that community-based activity groups composed of both prosocial and antisocial children yielded positive changes in the home and classroom behavior of the problem children. Comparable data were not collected on the behavior of the normal children. While the trend toward community involvement in corrections is very apparent today'^>, there have been no experimental investigations of the value such programs within institutions. The most obvious theoretical base for including community volunteers in group work with incarcerated offenders is differential association theory. Following Sutherland and Cressey', attitudes and beliefs favorable toward law breaking are learned through association with criminal patterns and isolation from anti-criminal patterns. It is now conventional wisdom that incarceration and hence forced association with criminal others may serve to maintain or even increase deviant attitudes, beliefs and values. There is some research support'^E.' 3) fgj. ĵ jg jj^^ j ^ jg ^^^^ clear that the effects of incarceration depend upon the institutional regime. A simple and direct deduction from differential association theory would be that a means of increasing association with non-criminal others during incarceration would serve to inhibit the fixation of criminal patterns or even facilitate the acquisition of anti-criminal patterns. However, as the Sutherland and Cressey*'' statement stands, one would also expect non-offenders to take on some criminal attitudes and beliefs. As the Burgess and Aker's'*' operant reformulation of differential association theory makes clear, the degree and direction of association effects are dependent not simply upon association but upon the conditions under which association occurs. The effects may be controlled by structuring the meetings with reference to the conditions which are most facilitative of desired outcome. One necessary condition is exposure to anti-criminal patterns and one function of community volunteers is to provide such alternative views on matters related to law violations. Further, the a,lternative views and behaviors exposed should be presented in a concrete manner, in explicit detail and the reinforcement contingencies associated with suggested behaviors should be outlined clearly. Such conditions represent the ones under which models, instructions and suggestions may exert attitudinal and behavioral control''''. This study investigated the feasibility of using community volunteers in counseling and was a demonstration project on the effects of short-term structured group counseling in prisons, (i' Weekly (4 to 8) meetings were held within an institution

XYY survey in an institution for sex offenders and the mentally ill.

REPORTS associating an extra Y chromosome with tallness and anti-social behaviour have originated from surveys conducted mainly in maximum security institutions1. Although it has been suggested that the anti-social behaviour is directed largely against property rather than persons2, no definite criminal pattern has been found and crimes have ranged from malicious mischief to murder3,4. In addition, a few 47,XYY individuals have been detected with no apparent criminal or anti-social history1. Sex offences have been implicated in several instances2,5–7 and a recent study8 noted that two 47,XYY patients were persistent homosexuals. In the following survey, 200 tall anti-social men at Atascadero State Hospital in California were studied in order to obtain additional information on the incidence of sex chromosome aneuploids.

The Criminal Patterns of Boston Since 1849

This study is based upon the annual arrest reports of the Boston police from 1849 to 1951 for seven major crimes: murder, manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, assault, burglary, and larceny. When the rates of these crimes are examined collectively, they show a distinct downward tendency. Murder, larceny, and assault have shown a clear decline in the last one hundred years, while burglary and robbery have shown a downward tendency, although specific events have resulted in periodic upswings, bringing these crimes to new high levels in recent years. Manslaughter increased dramatically around the turn of the century but has declined recently from these initial high levels. Only forcible rape has shown a clear tendency to increase over the last one hundred years. It is hypothesized that three types of factors have affected these crime rates. First, the attitude and policy of the police toward specific kinds of crimes is directly relevant. Second, national events like wars and economic depressions have left t...

The reliability and validity of interview data obtained from 59 narcotic drug addicts.

The reliability and validity of interview data obtained from 59 narcotic drug addicts.

Current Trends in the Rehabilitation of Narcotics Addicts

It is generally accepted that the rehabilitabe taken of the more traditional punitive tion of drug addicts has been characterized and medical-psychiatric treatment methods, more by failure than success. Until re cently the professional had little hope of PUNITIVE METHOD achieving successful treatment of addicts that would enable them to abstain permaMany laws make it a crime to sell, purchase, nently from drug use. The complexities or possess—without a legitimate medical of the narcotics possession laws add to the prescription—those that have been often complicated psychosocial makeup of classified by the World Health Organiza the addict and present the worker with tion as dangerous drugs or to possess a the difficult task of trying to keep the addict hypodermic syringe unless prescribed by a completely abstinent in order to avoid crimphysician. As a consequence, an addict inal involvement while at the same time who possesses these illegally may be arrested treating the conditions that may have preand imprisoned. Furthermore, since the cipitated and reinforced the continuance addict usually has to procure them from an of drug use. illicit and expensive source of supply, a This paper will present a typology of criminal pattern of obtaining funds to four treatment frameworks that have been purchase the necessary is generally developed recently, each having achieved instituted. In this respect, practically all some degree of success, and that offer more addicts are criminals who violate the law; hope for the future. In addition, note will they are imprisoned in considerable num bers for what may be long periods of time.

The "Short Con" Man

This article describes and analyzes ten Negro short-con men who were part of a larger sample of 400 offenders interviewed and tested at the District of Columbia Reformatory (actually a penitentiary), at Lorton, Va. It was hypothesized that offenders with a confidence-game criminal pattern would constitute a cer tain social and psychological type different from that of offenders with other criminal patterns. Comparisons demonstrated this to be the case. The con men under study were all characterized by the facts that they were isolated, marginal, hedonistic, mobile, exploitative, nonviolent, undisciplined, unsuccessful, recidivistic, institutionalized, sociopathic offenders. All had domineering mothers who taught them, at an early age, the necessity for, and the practice and reward of, deceit. This early training in deceit and nonviolence shaped the type of criminal pattern they chose in later years. They rarely committed offenses that were not related to confidence games. Although they learned their "trade" from the big con, they lacked the finesse, skill, and in dustry necessary to become successful in their criminal career. They rationalized away their brand of crime as really not crimi nal and condemned many other types of crime. They derived pleasure, as well as financial reward, from "putting the mark down."