Bill Mccarthy

• Professor at University of California, Davis

Politicians and pundits commonly tout campaigning on crime and policing as an effective strategy for winning elections. Yet, scholars have only recently started examining the contributions of both variables to voting. The available research shows that scholars disagree, however, about whether crime and policing, independently or jointly, increase o...

Quantitative analyses show that police stop and frisks are highly concentrated by neighborhood. Interview and ethnographic studies show that police routinely share information about neighborhood attributes including crime rates and demographic characteristics such as racial and ethnic composition and economic conditions. Investigations suggest that...

Relatively few theoretical criminologists are recognized for their lasting impact on public policy, and it is therefore instructive to reconsider a scholar whose influence endures. Donald Cressey wrote a theoretically driven Presidential Commission essay that inspired the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). He also advanced a...

RM Daley mobilized Chicago police, the Cook County courts, and state prisons in a massively punitive assault on crime. This deflected attention from teardowns of housing projects RM’s father built and from the absence of replacement housing in hyper-segregated neighborhoods. RM shifted attention to “gangs, guns, and drugs,” tightening a criminal ju...

In 2010, Jon Burge was finally convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. Yet the case also involved a 30-year cover-up, supervised torture, and the code of silence. An important sidebar ruling by the judge prevented presentation of evidence that Burge had enforced this code of silence to hide his torture crimes. Burge served three years in j...

The late 19th and 20th century Great Migration of southern Black Americans permanently changed Chicago, with Mayors RJ and RM Daley overseeing its segregated neighborhoods. The dual Daley dynasty spanned more than four decades, including ML King’s 1960s housing marches and activist Fred Hampton’s assassination. With RM Daley’s apparent knowledge, a...

Twenty years after Andrew Wilson’s 1982 torture, Jon Burge remained a free man. From 2002–2006 a “special state’s attorney” with Daley machine connections led a multimillion-dollar investigation that scapegoated Police Superintendent Richard Brzeczek for “dereliction of duty” in neglecting a letter he sent Daley about Burge’s suspected torture. The...

In 1992, 15-year-old Joseph White shot and killed DeLondyn Lawson about a gambling debt at Tilden High School on Chicago’s South Side. RM Daley’s Automatic Transfer Act fast-tracked White for a homicide trial in adult court. The media portrayed White as a violent gang member, although neither White’s nor Lawson’s mothers saw their sons as involved...

Chicago is confronting a racial reckoning that we explain with an exclusion-containment theory of legal cynicism. Mayors RJ and RM Daley used public and private funds to exclude and contain South and West Side predominantly Black neighborhoods where Police Detective Jon Burge supervised torture of over 100 Black men. A 1982 case involved Andrew Wil...

RJ and then RM Daley used public and private funds to build structures that separated Chicago’s downtown business districts from the city’s South and West Side neighborhoods. This shut out and contained Black and Brown residents within hyper-segregated neighborhoods, excluding them from the city’s growing resources. RM Daley’s “iron fisted” law enf...

Princeton historian Eddie Glaude observes that James Baldwin was revolutionary when he insisted that to understand White Americans required turning their thoughts upside down. Thus White people want to believe that police “serve and protect” everyone equally; yet we show that complaints about police misconduct are concentrated in racially segregate...

Chicago is confronting a racial reckoning that we explain with an exclusion-containment theory of legal cynicism. Mayors RJ and RM Daley used public and private funds to exclude and contain South and West Side predominantly Black neighborhoods where Police Detective Jon Burge supervised torture of over 100 Black men. A 1982 case involved Andrew Wil...

Chicago is confronting a racial reckoning that we explain with an exclusion-containment theory of legal cynicism. Mayors RJ and RM Daley used public and private funds to exclude and contain South and West Side predominantly Black neighborhoods where Police Detective Jon Burge supervised torture of over 100 Black men. A 1982 case involved Andrew Wil...

We join Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s structural theory of the racialized U.S. social system with a situational methodology developed by Arthur L. Stinchcombe and Irving Goffman to analyze how law works as a mechanism that connects formal legal equality with legal cynicism. The data for this analysis come from the trial of a Chicago police detective, Jon...

A growing literature advocates for using a labor perspective to study sex work. According to this approach, sex work involves many of the costs, benefits, and possibilities for exploitation that are common to many jobs. We add to the field with an examination of job attributes and mental health. Our analysis is comparative and uses data from a pane...

We call for a further appreciation of the versatility of concepts and methods that increase the breadth and diversity of work on law and social science. We make our point with a review of legal cynicism. Legal cynicism's value, like other important concepts, lies in its versatility as well as its capacity for replication. Several classic works intr...

Research findings show that legal cynicism—a cultural frame in which skepticism about laws, the legal system, and police is expressed—is important in understanding neighborhood variation in engagement with the police, particularly in racially isolated African American communities. We argue that legal cynicism is also useful for understanding neighb...

For several decades, the study of gender and crime has generally eclipsed a focus on sex and crime. This change reflects new understandings of all three concepts – sex, gender, and crime. It also reflects a shift from a focus on males and the crimes they commit to one that includes females and their involvement in illegal behavior. This entry summa...

Using a wide array of official and unofficial data spanning two decades in the neighborhoods of Chicago, we explore connections between legal cynicism, the electoral regime of Mayor Richard M. Daley, and citizen calls for police assistance and police reports of drug crime. We find that the disproportionate concentration of legal cynicism about law...

Significance Cynicism about lawlessness and police crime prevention and protection efforts is often high in predominately African-American neighborhoods, but residents persist in calling 911 and requesting police assistance. These calls continue to rise in neighborhoods that have recently experienced further increases in racial isolation, incarcera...

Many studies document links between income poverty, material hardship, and mental health; however, we know less about the mental health consequences of within-person changes in income poverty and material hardship, particularly for low-income workers. The authors examine these relationships with longitudinal data from a sample of frontline service...

There is a growing body of evidence linking racial discrimination and juvenile crime, and a number of theories explain this relationship. In this study, we draw on one popular approach, Agnew's general strain theory, and extend prior research by moving from a focus on experienced discrimination to consider two other forms, anticipated and vicarious...

Objectives This study assesses the impact of family instability during childhood on adult intentions to seek healthcare when depressed or in pain, adding to research on the long‐term consequences of family instability and on care seeking. Methods Logistic regression is used with survey data collected from nearly 600 service workers in Sacramento,...

Weitzer (2009) notes that the sex work employment triangle involves three groups: workers, clients, and various third parties; the latter includes pimps, facilitators, brokers, managers, and others who help organize or facilitate sex work. Our research focuses on the third group, and in particular on managers who work in legal or licensed sex indus...

A large body of research shows a link between stigma and poor health; yet stigma is complex and involves several processes. This paper employs a social determinants of health perspective to shed light on the link between work and one dimension of stigma—discrimination. It examines discrimination and depression with data from a comparative study of...

Aims: Research from several countries has demonstrated the prevalence of exposure to alcohol’s second-hand effects. This study adds to this literature with an examination of the relationships between exposure and grades and school satisfaction among the US college and university students. Methods: The study used pooled cross-sectional data from the...

Stigma is a widely used concept in social science research and an extensive literature claims that stigmatisation contributes to numerous negative health outcomes. However, few studies compare groups that vary in the extent to which they are stigmatised and even fewer studies examine stigma's independent and mediating effects. This article addresse...

Purpose This study examined adolescent rape in light of two popular stereotypes of young rapists. The “deficit” view emphasizes various sexual, psychological, or social problems, whereas the “entitlement” perspective highlights instrumental motivation, confidence, and gender-based privileges. Methods The study analyzed data on adolescent males fro...

Explanations of adult involvement in sex work typically adopt one of two approaches. One perspective highlights a variety of negative experiences in childhood and adolescence, including physical and sexual abuse, family instability, poverty, associations with "pimps" and other exploiters, homelessness, and drug use. An alternative account recognize...

Perceptions of the danger of crime are typically discussed in the context of people's fear that they will be harmed by offenders. We shift the focus and examine the association between perceived danger and offending and the contribution of these perceptions to the well-established relationship between violent victimization and crime. We hypothesize...

In this article, we examine various legal strategies used to regulate the sale and purchase of sexual services. We use three broad categories to structure our discussion: full criminalization, partial decriminalization, and full decriminalization. In each section, we discuss laws directed toward the control of sellers, buyers, and third parties. We...

Prominent explanations of the overrepresentation of Black Americans in criminal justice statistics focus on the effects of neighborhood concentrated disadvantage, racial isolation, and social disorganization. We suggest that perceived personal discrimination is an important but frequently neglected complement to these factors. We test this hypothes...

A number of studies document a negative relationship between adolescent sexual intercourse and high school educational experiences and outcomes; yet, this research risks conflating the consequences associated with sex in romantic relationships with those that result when sex occurs in other relationship contexts. We predict that, compared to abstin...

Scholars are often pessimistic about adolescent dating, linking it to increases in depression, interpersonal violence, conflict with parents, school failure, associations with delinquents, substance use, and offending. Yet, the various dimensions of dating may have opposing consequences. The closeness offered by adolescent romantic love may fill an...

Dans cet article, nous 6tudions comment la relation entre sexe et ddinquence a variC, des annees pr6cCdant la Grande DPpression i celles qui l'ont suivie, en passant par les annies mOmes de la Crise. Nos donnkes sont tirCes de rapports de tribunaux de Toronto; nous testons plusieurs facons d'expliquer les changements observk, en nous basant sur la...

Homeless youth establish a variety of relationships with people they meet on the street. These associations generate different levels of the intangible resources of trust, commitment, and reciprocity that contribute to a person's social capital. We argue that the relationships homeless youth describe as “street families” resemble the fictive kin co...

A power-control theory of the gender-delinquency relationship draws attention to differences in familial control practices. We extend the theory to address how parental agency and support for dominant attitudes or schemas influence male as well as female delinquency. This extension emphasizes that differences in structure, particularly between more...

In his controversial challenge to criminologists, Jack Katz argues for a reexamination of situational factors that precipitate criminal acts, specifically those that concern crime's sensual dynamics. According to Katz, people's immediate social environment and experiences encourage offenders to construct crimes as sensually compelling. Although ins...

Much of the research focusing on conventional occupations concludes that mentored individuals are more successful in their careers than those who are not mentored. Early research in criminology made a similar claim. Yet contemporary criminology has all but ignored mentors. We investigate this oversight, drawing on Sutherland's insights on tutelage...

In recent years, popular media has drawn attention to “mean girls” and their negative treatment of others, particularly other females. But while the attention to girls' aggression and their mistreatment of their peers highlights understudied aspects of female behavior, it neglects the beneficial aspects of female friendship. We argue that compared...

Résumé Le capitalisme de consommation est devenu dominant dans les pays occidentaux. Un train de vie jugé « normal » coûte de plus en plus cher et la plupart des adolescents nord-américains en sont parfaitement conscients. Il n’est donc pas surprenant que beaucoup d’entre eux estiment qu’ils n’ont pas assez d’argent personnel pour participer conven...

Key Words crime, rational choice, social and human capital, game theory s Abstract This paper begins with a summary of the rational choice approach and its implications for the study of criminal behavior. I then review research on offending that uses the rational choice approach in conjunction with more sociological orientations. I also summarize r...

■ Abstract This paper begins with a summary,of the rational choice approach and,its implications for the study of criminal behavior. I then review,research on offending that uses the rational choice approach,in conjunction,with more sociological orientations. I also summarize,research on game,theory and demonstrate,how,it can be effectively used to...

The paper pays particular attention to gender-and age-linked differences in forms of indirect, relational and direct, physical forms of delinquent aggression, as well as to sequential links of these forms of delinquent aggression to depression and drug and alcohol abuse. A power-control theory of the gender-delinquency relationship that draws atten...

Several theoretical traditions offer insights into individual success in conventional activities. We extend this work, suggesting that explanations of success also apply to crime: although prosperity in licit or illicit activities has several unique antecedents, success in either endeavor is influenced by common faactors. Most research on conventio...

A substantial body of research suggests that, in spite of the risks associated with co-offending, offenders frequently choose to work together. Dominant theories of crime, as well as those of decision making in general (e.g., game theory), typically assume that people's choises are based on instrumentally rational calculations; however, research on...

Contemporary studies of Sutherland's differential association theory argue that people learn about crime predominantly or exclusively through exposure to attitudes and motives that legitimize such behaviours. I suggest that Sutherland's writings demonstrate an equal concern with more direct exposure to crime; that is, with tutelage in criminal meth...

Combining insights from Granovetter′s research on embeddedness, Coleman′s work on social capital and Sutherland′s theory of differential association, we suggest that embeddedness in networks of deviant associations provides access to tutelage relationships that facilitate the acquisition of criminal skills and attitudes, assets that we call "crimin...

The correlation between class and delinquency often observed in areal studies and assumed in prominent sociological theories is elusive in studies of individuals commonly used to test these theories. A restricted conceptualization of class in terms of parental origins and the concentration of self-report survey designs on adolescents in school have...

Contemporary sociological theories of delinquency emphasize background and developmental factors while neglecting adverse situational conditions. This study uses data from youths on the street and in school to test an integration of strain and control theories that spans background and situational factors. After background and street exposure varia...

This article documents the living conditions of a sample of adolescents (N = 390) who had left home and were living on the street in Toronto, Canada The majority of these youth had spenta considerable amount of time without adequate shelter, food, or income; furthermore, many were involved in a variety of illegal activities and had been incarcerate...

How well do conventional perspectives on homicide account for the social distribution of femicide, or the killing of females? An analysis of 670 cases of femicide in Toronto and Vancouver from 1921 to 1988 provides stronger support for an alternative perspective that acknowledges both the intimate, domestic character of femicide and the historicall...

Criminologists have been reluctant to pursue the idea that situational factors encourage criminal activity. Following Gibbons's work on ‘criminogenic situations’, we investigate the ‘criminogenic’ nature of homelessness. Using data on a sample of homeless youth (N = 390) in Toronto, Canada, we find that a significantly greater proportion of...

Life on the street is hard for anyone, but it can be especially treacherous for homeless youth. Reconnecting to the traditional avenues into adulthood, whether school, job training, or employment, is imperative if these youth are to escape the hardship of the streets. In their chapter in On Your Own without a Net: The Transition to Adulthood for Vu...