Lance Hannon

Villanova University | Nova · Department of Sociology

Perhaps reflecting a desire to emphasize the enduring power of rigidly constructed racial categories, sociology has tended to downplay the importance of within-category variation in skin tone. Similarly, in popular media “colorism,” or discrimination based on skin lightness, is rarely mentioned. However, when colorism is discussed, it is almost exc...

This study contributes to the research literature on colorism–discrimination based on skin tone—by examining whether skin darkness affects the likelihood that African Americans will experience school suspension. Using data from The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, logistic regression analyses indicated that darker skin tone significantly incr...

This study examines the conditioning effect of welfare benefits on the relationship between resource deprivation and metropolitan crime rates. We analyzed aggregate data for a sample of large metropolitan counties in 1990 (N = 406). Our welfare measure combined the cast-of-living-adjusted public assistance payment per poor person and the public ass...

Previous research has identified a positive relationship between prisoner reentry and crime rates. The relationship potentially reflects both the recidivism of reentering offenders and the broader impact of the releases on the social organization of the areas to which they return. This article explores how economic conditions moderate the associati...

Many journals publish the names of reviewers in annual acknowledgement lists. For prestigious outlets, being named on such lists can constitute legitimation of expertise. Although designed to motivate service, this practice can be leveraged to address an important problem in the study of peer review-reliance on tightly held proprietary data. While...

Previous research has reported that white survey interviewers remember black respondents’ skin tones in a much narrower range than recollections by black interviewers. This finding has been used to suggest that, in line with the one-drop rule, whites do not perceive meaningful differences between light- and dark-skinned black people. The authors re...

It is commonly argued that Black people may be more likely to be stopped by the police in majority White neighborhoods due to a natural tendency to first observe and then scrutinize that which seems out of the ordinary. Anecdotal evidence of police officers appearing equally drawn to White people in predominantly Black neighborhoods is sometimes pr...

The purpose of this study is to examine the reliability of the skin tone measures in the widely used American National Election Studies data collection (ANES 2016 Time Series). Low reliability in skin tone measurement can lead to false conclusions regarding theoretically important relationships. Consistent with previous reliability analyses based o...

Lance Hannon and Aaron Siegel on profiling and policing physical space as well as people.

Bolstering conclusions from previous studies, we offer new evidence of the low inter-rater reliability of the Massey-Martin (MM) skin tone scale using interviewer observation data from the American National Election Studies. Beyond replication, we also illustrate that a major source of the MM scale's unreliability is an unrealistic implementation s...

People frequently compare the racial composition of stopped individuals with the racial composition of the local residential population to assess unequal policing. This type of evaluation rests on the assumption that the census-derived population accurately reflects the population at risk to be stopped. For vehicle stops, existing research indicate...

Drug death rates in the United States have risen dramatically in recent years, sparking urgent discussions about causes. Most of these discussions have centered on supply-side issues, such as doctors overprescribing pain killers. However, there is increasing recognition of the need to go beyond proximate causes and to consider larger social forces...

The City of Philadelphia has faced significant litigation related to racial and ethnic disparities in stop-and-frisk practices. The Philadelphia Police Department has made much of its stop-and-frisk data publicly available in the name of transparency and to facilitate independent investigation (the data describe over 350,000 pedestrian stops with o...

This file contains some new analyses related to our Sociological Science paper: https://www.sociologicalscience.com/v3-10-190/

The current study assesses the intercoder reliability of one of the most important skin tone measurement instruments—the Massey–Martin scale. This scale is used in several high-profile social surveys, but has not yet been psychometrically evaluated. The current evaluation is only possible because, for the first time, the General Social Survey’s 201...

We replicate and reexamine Saperstein and Penner's prominent 2010 study which asks whether incarceration changes the probability that an individual will be seen as black or white (regardless of the individual's phenotype). Our reexamination shows that only a small part of their empirical analysis is suitable for addressing this question (the fixed-...

Numerous studies have shown that individuals can change how they racially self-identify over time, potentially in response to changes in educational and occupational attainment. The value of that evidence is somewhat diminished, however, by reliance on survey questions about racial identity that are inconsistent over time. This study offers new evi...

A number of studies have shown that, over time, some individuals check a different racial box when filling out surveys. The interpretation of these discrepancies has been the subject of considerable controversy, particularly regarding trends in how Latinas/os racially self-identify on U.S. Census questionnaires. While some argue that such trends mo...

Over the last decade, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has seen a significant increase in the number of discrimination claims based on skin shade. However, in some ways, substantiating colorism has proven to be more difficult than documenting racism, as skin tone data are rarely collected and few existing skin tone measures have been val...

The relationship between unemployment and suicide has changed over time and in particular during the Great Recession. Using state-level panel data covering the years 1979-2010, the study indicates that unemployment's impact was insignificant during the first half of the sample period, but was highly significant during the second half. In addition,...

Using the 2012 American National Election Study, the present article explored the relationship between interviewers’ assessment of respondent skin tone and their perception of respondent intelligence (n = 459). Results from logistic regression analyses indicated that Hispanic respondents with the lightest skin were several times more likely to be s...

Informed by recent research on the collateral consequences of the wars on crime and drugs, we hypothesize that high levels of adult incarceration are associated with high levels of juvenile delinquency. We test this hypothesis using panel data for North Carolina counties covering the years 1995 to 2009. A series of comprehensive regression models i...

Wacquant (2001) and others have argued that social control efforts directed at racial and ethnic minorities frequently shift institutional form and become more nuanced as societies modernize, even as the underlying function persists. This study examines the connection between southern lynching and housing segregation. We argue that legal, political...

There is a long history of social science research on the importance of race for determining life outcomes. However, there are relatively few social science studies on the importance of skin tone within racial groups. Some recent research has documented the quantifiable advantages associated with having a lighter skin shade, particularly in terms o...

Previous research has suggested that prisons can both reduce and increase crime. These counterbalancing effects will have different timings. Prison reduces crime by denying those currently behind bars the opportunity to commit further offenses. However, the prison experience and the stigma of an incarceration record can be criminogenic. Once releas...

Previous studies have shown that as the percent black or percent Hispanic grows, that group’s residential segregation from whites tends to increase as well. Typically, these findings are explained in terms of white discriminatory reaction to the perceived threat associated with minority population growth. The present analysis examines whether these...

Traditionally, research on the tremendous variation in the use of incarceration across time and space has focused on the issue of whether imprisoning more offenders reduces crime. More recently, research has begun to explore the collateral consequences of mass incarceration for the families and communities of those imprisoned. The current study add...

During the past thirty years, U.S. poverty has remained high despite overall economic growth. At the same time, incarceration rates have risen by more than three hundred percent, a phenomenon that many analysts have referred to as mass incarceration. This paper explores whether the mass incarceration of the past few decades might have impeded progr...

Previous studies have shown that as the percent Black or percent Hispanic grows, that group's residential segregation from Whites tends to increase as well. Typically, these findings are explained in terms of White discriminatory reaction to the perceived economic and political threats associated with minority population growth. The present analysi...

Psychiatric approaches have usually been used to explain male serial homicide. But multifactor explanations of the phenomenon suggest that aspects of culture and social structure may also play important roles. The current study attempts to evaluate the multifactor approach by examining whether cultural and structural variables might contribute to e...

Sociologists and criminologists have become increasingly concerned with nonlinear relationships and interaction effects. For example, some recent studies suggest that the positive relationship between neighborhood disadvantage and violent crime is nonlinear with an accelerating slope, whereas other research indicates a nonlinear decelerating slope....

Drug dependence mortality appears to be highly concentrated in certain disadvantaged populations and in certain disadvantaged areas. Using a relatively large sample of census tract data for New York City, 1991-1995 (N = 2,037), the present study examines the structural covariates of drug dependence mortality rates. Spatially lagged negative binomia...

Criminologists have shown great interest in comparing the strength of the relationship between poverty and violent crime for whites and blacks. The present paper argues that the standard approach of comparing race-specific coefficients from logarithmic metric OLS and/or Poisson-based regressions has led to erroneous conclusions in this literature....

Objective. This study explores the wide variation in homicide rates among extremely poor neighborhoods. Methods. Using cross-sectional Census tract data for New York City (N= 2,042), the present analysis employs robust regression techniques to estimate the relationship between community resource deprivation and homicide for a subsample of 227 neigh...

The social disorganization and anomie perspectives generally suggest that poverty's criminogenic effect is racially invariant. These perspectives imply that policies that alleviate economic deprivation will equally reduce rates of violent crime in neighborhoods that are predominately white and neighborhoods that are predominately black. In contrast...

The subculture of violence thesis suggests that African Americans are disproportionately likely to respond to minor transgressions with lethal force because of a culturally defined need to protect one’s reputation and a normative aversion to legal forms of dispute resolution. Using data on over 950 non-justifiable homicides from police files, the p...

The present study investigates the social and demographic correlates of fire death rates for large metropolitan counties (N=199). Data were derived from the 1990 census and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Multiple regression analyses revealed that age of housing, prevalence of mobile homes, and the proportion of the population renting had si...

Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) were analyzed to test two competing hypotheses regarding how poverty affects the relationship between delinquency and educational attainment. The cumulative-disadvantage perspective argues that poor youth suffer greater consequences for their involvement in delinquency than middle- and uppe...

Criminal opportunity theory suggests that community economic deprivation has two countervailing effects on property crime: it causes strain and disorganization which may encourage some individuals to offend, but it also simultaneously lessens opportunities to engage in property crime by reducing the supply of worthwhile targets in an area. The pres...

The present article investigates the issue of whether and how moral commitment regarding violence conditions the relationship between a set of social environmental variables and violent delinquency. Three mutually exclusive hypotheses were evaluated using data from the National Youth Survey. The first, emanating from a purely environmental perspect...

In 1996 the U.S. federal government enacted a welfare reform bill aimed at reducing public assistance to the poor. This legislation may have implications for future levels of property crime. In this study we examine whether differences in levels of AFDC assistance and rates of welfare participation among 406 large metropolitan counties affected var...

Government officials have resolved to carry out major changes in the U.S. welfare system, changes that may affect the incidence of homicide. This study examined the issue of whether welfare aid to the poor has served a criminal justice policy function of limiting the frequency of lethal violence. Multiple regression procedures were employed to test...

Several authors have argued that criminologyisan androcentric discipline. This study examined bothrecent and earlier crime and delinquency literature inorder to investigate changes in the degree ofandrocentrism in criminology. Articles were sampled from fourmajor criminology journals from the periods 1974-1978and 1992-1996 (n = 202 and n = 174, res...

Conservatives generally believe that government largess has created a morally defective welfare subculture. Some argue that excessive welfare payments contribute to high homicide rates by undermining individual responsibility and attachment to traditional social institutions. Liberals, on the other hand, suggest that higher welfare benefits may red...