Richard Wright

Georgia State University | GSU · Criminal Justice and Criminology

A study of more than 60,000 police traffic stops found that college-educated officers were more likely than other officers to stop drivers for less serious violations, perform consent searches, and make arrests on discretionary grounds. These results are consistent with those of prior research indicating that college-educated officers are more achi...

In this study, we explore the role humor plays in the narrated identities of drug dealers, in their negotiation of the threat of formal punishment, and in their cultural membership and authority. By drawing from interview and observation data gathered from 33 active drug dealers residing in St. Louis, Missouri, we find that humor facilitates identi...

It has been long recognized that cash plays a critical role in fueling street crime because of its liquidity and transactional anonymity. In this paper, we investigate whether the reduction in the circulation of cash on the streets associated with electronic benefit transfer (EBT) program implementation had an effect on crime. To address this quest...

Research Summary To reduce individual and social harms, most nations prohibit certain psychoactive drugs. Yet, prior scholarship has suggested that prohibition reduces illicit drug sellers’ access to law and thereby increases predation against and retaliation by them. No prior study, however, has directly tested that theory by comparing drug seller...

When we think about young people dealing drugs, we tend to picture it happening on urban streets, in disadvantaged, crime-ridden neighborhoods. But drugs are used everywhere—even in upscale suburbs and top-tier high schools—and teenage users in the suburbs tend to buy drugs from their peers, dealers who have their own culture and code, distinct fro...

This study explores the relationship between gossip, decision-making and deterrence among active drug dealers. Drawing from interviews with, and observations of, 33 active drug dealers, we find that gossip shapes the ways in which these offenders respond to threatened sanctions. Gossip about others getting busted, acting sketchy and avoiding detect...

Because of their illicit status, drug dealers robbed in the course of doing business cannot go to the police. Thus, the deterrent, compensatory and retributive benefits of formal justice are unavailable to them. Informal avenues of redress represent their only means of obtaining justice. This article, based on interviews with 20 recently robbed, ac...

Background Illicit drug sellers have limited access to formal mediation and therefore are rational targets to predators. As such, dealers are especially reliant on retaliation to deter victimization. Prior scholarship on dealers, retaliation, and deterrence has focused largely on general deterrence, or the effect of punishing one person on others....

It has been long recognized that cash plays a critical role in fueling street crime due to its liquidity and transactional anonymity. In poor neighborhoods where street offenses are concentrated, a significant source of circulating cash stems from public assistance or welfare payments. In the 1990s, the Federal government mandated individual states...

Drug dealers are infamous for overcharging customers and handing over less than owed. One reason rip-offs frequently occur is blackmarket participants have limited access to formal means of dispute resolution and, as such, are attractive prey. Yet drug dealers do not cheat every customer. Though this is implicitly understood in the literature, spar...

Illicit drug traders are more likely to be victimized because they cannot report crimes committed against them to the police. Their inability to access law is seen as a major precipitating factor in retaliatory violence. But, as we demonstrate, sometimes victimized drug traders do ask for formal mediation. Based on evidence from prior research comb...

High rates of violence are characteristic of many urban drug markets because the individuals therein abide by a set of informal rules known as the code of the street. This code governs interpersonal conduct that emerges from the social circumstances found in various communities in America. Drug market participants who subscribe to this code view vi...

Irony is a kind of communication in which shared knowledge about a particular context is formed as a counter-intuitive statement with hidden meaning. Irony is important because it branches the tree of knowledge and balances morality. This paper reviews the definition and value of irony; examines ironic works on crime and control; proposes an irony...

The aim of this article is to describe and explain the development of drug user groups in the UK and elsewhere by drawing on a case study of one of the earliest drug user association formed in England in 1983, known as the Drug Dependents’ Association. By way of context, a literature search was conducted to find other examples of original case stud...

Antidrug legislation and enforcement are meant to reduce the trade in illegal drugs by increasing their price. Yet the unintended consequence is an increase in informal control—including retaliation, negotiation, avoidance, and toleration—among drug users and dealers. Little existing theory or research has explored the connections between informal...

Active offender research contributes to criminology, but a major concern for active offender researchers is that they will be victimized in the course of their work. With that concern in mind, experienced criminologists have recommended strategies for minimizing danger during research, but they have done so in a largely atheoretical manner. This pa...

Drawing from in-depth interviews with 52 active street criminals, this article examines the grounded theoretic implications of bounded rationality for retaliatory street violence. The bounds on rationality that this article explores are anger, uncertainty, and time pressure. These bounds create imperfections in the retaliatory decision-making proce...

The transfer of drugs from one person to another does not always involve a fair sale. Gifts and frauds are also common. Although the rationality perspective has dominated and made important contributions to the study of drug transfer, this article proposes a new theory of drug sales, gifts, and frauds. The theoretical lens of pure sociology is used...

The law discriminates against low status offenders, but so too might criminologists during the course of their research. In this paper, we address the following question: Does the social status of lawbreakers have an effect on their likelihood of being recruited to offender-based research? The answer to this question is important for reasons that e...

The past quarter century has witnessed the emergence of a rich methodological literature devoted to various ways of tapping into the offender’s perspective on crime. Whatever its virtues, that literature has remained almost wholly atheoretical. We recently introduced a preliminary theory of research grounded in the perspective of pure sociology. In...

No one would disagree that scientific research has been unethical—even criminal—at times. Institutional review boards (IRBs) play a fundamental role in protecting people from unethical criminological research. At the same time, IRBs, as social entities, are subject to a wide range of influences that may affect their decisions regarding the ethicali...

The BJS turns 60 this year. To mark the occasion the editors have chosen two articles from each of the Journal's six decades that, in their view, have had a significant and enduring impact on sociology. Each of the articles is accompanied by contemporary commentary that critically assesses its legacy. While the articles chosen represent just a frac...

This article reports the results of an empirical study designed to determine what features of the immediate environment are important to juvenile house burglars in their selection of targets. The study involved two main subject groups: (i) convicted juvenile burglars; and (ii) adult householders. Subjects were presented with photographs of houses a...

The life histories of drug dealers suggest that victimizations sometimes mark turning points toward the end of criminal careers, which is a criminologically important but neglected empirical connection that we label the “victimization–termination link.” We theorize this link thusly: When serious victimizations occur in the context of crime, a break...

Street robbery is widely seen as the epitome of acquisitive instrumentality, yet recent research suggests that the crime may be designed more to send a message than to generate capital. Drawing from in-depth, semistructured interviews with active offenders, we find that moralistic street robbery is a response to one of three types of violations. Ma...

Goldstein's (1985) concept of systemic violence has contributed substantially to criminological thought and research, but its power can be enhanced by connecting it to a broader typology of social life: the resource exchange—social control typology. That typology connects systemic violence logically with two important yet neglected forms of drug ma...

The past quarter century has witnessed the emergence of a substantial literature devoted to the mechanics of recruiting, paying, and interviewing currently active offenders. Absent from that literature, however, is a theoretical framework within which to understand, test, modify, and further develop efforts to locate such offenders and gain their c...

In an influential study of gender and the accomplishment of street robbery in the United States, Miller (1998) demonstrated that whereas there were few gender differences in the motivations for such crimes, men and women typically committed them in strikingly different ways. Other recent work has similarly established both convergence within and di...

Motivation is the central, yet arguably the most assumed, causal variable in the etiology of criminal behavior. Criminology's incomplete and imprecise understanding of this construct can be traced to the discipline's strong emphasis on background risk factors, open to the exclusion of subjective foreground conditions. In this article, we attempt to...

The research reported here is based on a comparison of active residential burglars and a matched control group regarding their willingness to commit a burglary at varying levels of certainty of arrest, severity of penalty, and anticipated reward. Initial analyses revealed that few controls were willing to offend regardless of risk, penalty, or rewa...

The notion that informal sanction threats influence criminal decision-making is perhaps the most important contribution to neoclassical theory in the past 15 years. Notably absent from this contribution is an examination of the ways in which the risk of victim retaliation—arguably, the ultimate informal sanction—mediates the process. The present ar...

Recent work in criminology has highlighted the central role of retaliation in shaping criminal violence in America's inner cities. Most of this work, however, has been based on male offenders. It has also failed to consider whether and how gender structures payback in real-life settings and circumstances. In this paper, we analyze in-depth, semi-st...

Admit it. When someone wrongs you, you want to get back at them. Despite Biblical injunctions to turn the other cheek, most of us are reluctant to do so. The urge to get even is so ingrained in the popular imagination that it has spawned a whole genre of Hollywood movies in which a peace-loving hero is driven to avenge the harm done to a loved one...

Research into the situational dynamics of street robbery in the United States has identified a commitment to street culture, and participation in the self-indulgent activities promoted by that culture, as primary etiological mechanisms operating in the phenomenological foreground of such offences. Little research, however, has been undertaken on th...

For all of the media attention it has received in the United States, Europe and elsewhere, carjacking remains an under-researched and poorly understood crime. In this article, we explore the decision-making processes of active carjackers in real-life settings and circumstances, focusing on the subjective foreground conditions that move such offende...

Criminological researchers have devoted substantial attention to the nature and dynamics of residential burglary, but the role played by gender in shaping this offense remains largely unexplored. Feminist ethnographers have documented the fact that streetlife is highly gendered, and that this typically serves to marginalize women's participation in...

The notion that informal sanction threats influence criminal decision-making is perhaps the most important contribution to neoclassical theory in the past 15 years. Notably absent from this contribution is an examination of the ways in which the risk of victim retaliation - arguably, the ultimate informal sanction - mediates the process. The presen...

After tracking one another closely for decades, the U.S. robbery rate increased and the burglary rate declined in the late 1980s. The authors investigate the impact of crack on this divergence using a two-stage hierarchical linear model that decomposes between-and within-city variation in crime rates for 142 cities. Given its prominence in discussi...

In comparison with its quantitative counterpart, the teaching of qualitative methods in criminology and criminal justice has been largely neglected. Part of the explanation for this neglect is a widespread recognition that access to appropriate study sites is dangerous and difficult. Student researchers cannot rush the delicate process of penetrati...

This article reports the results of an experiment designed to explore (a) the environmental cues used by active residential burglars in choosing targets, and (b) the extent to which such offenders possess specialized cognitive abilities (commonly referred to as expertise) that might facilitate this decision-making process. Forty-seven active reside...

Little is known about the nature of women's participation in residential burglary, an offense statistically dominated by males. This paper examines women's involvement in residential burglary by comparing the characteristics of female burglars to those of their male counterparts and by outlining a typology of female burglars which emphasizes their...

Criminologists long have recognized the importance of field studies of active offenders. Nevertheless, the vast majority of them have shied away from researching criminals “in the wild” in the belief that doing so is impractical. This article, based on the authors' fieldwork with 105 currently active residential burglars, challenges that assumption...

This paper reports two studies of recognition memory performance in groups of juvenile residential burglars. Memory performance of the burglars was compared in Experiment 1 with police officers and a group of adult householders. In Experiment 2 a second group of juvenile burglars was compared with a group of juvenile offenders who had no experience...

The offender’s perspective is perhaps the most neglected area of criminological inquiry (see, for example, Walker, 1984). This perspective, however, is of crucial importance to the formulation of both theory and policy. In regard to theory, for example, the factors often observed to be associated with crime must be linked to criminality through the...

The paper reports some of the findings of a study which investigated opioid users' views on and use of available treatment services in Britain. Samples were drawn from among addicts currently receiving a prescription from a National Health Service (NHS) clinic, a general practitioner and a private practitioner and addicts who were currently depende...

The paper investigates the contention that prescribing opioids to regular users leads to a reduction in non-drug crimes. It also examines the nature of the relationship between addiction and crime and some of the factors which influence this relationship. As part of a study of opioid users currently receiving a prescription for methadone or heroin...

The paper presents the findings of a research project which included the study of the drug-taking careers of regular opioid users. Samples were drawn from among addicts currently receiving a prescription from a NHS clinic, a general practitioner and a private practitioner and addicts who were currently dependent solely on black-market supplies. The...

In this paper, we draw upon the findings of research conducted at the Institute of Criminology, Cambridge to assess the strength and nature of the association between drinking and burglary. The study was. based on interviews with offenders currently serving sentences for residential or non-residential burglary. The analysis revealed that most offen...

Traditional methods of crime control directed at the offender and more recent measures directed at the environment in which crimes typically occur are both based on unproven assumptions about offenders’ perceptions and decision-making. The potential effectiveness of preventive measures is dependent on the validity of these assumptions. Unless a cri...

Using information obtained from police files, the characteristics of group rapes were compared to those of rapes involving a solitary attacker. A number of important differences emerged from which it was concluded that, whereas some assaults by individual offenders may reflect personal propensities or pathology, group rapes originate in the dynamic...

This article reports results of a survey of police officials, prosecuting attorneys, and members of homosexual groups in the seven states that had decriminalized private homosexual behavior between consenting adults. Despite the dire predictions of many, the responses indicate that, among other things, decriminalization has had no effect on the inv...

Good Samaritans and other bystanders play a critical role in determining the course and outcome of criminal events. This article, based in part on interviews with Samaritan crime victims, suggests that Samaritans who attempt to prevent crimes or apprehend criminals are motivated by a different set of factors than Samaritans who come to the aid of v...

Interviews with the wives of forcible rapists and incest offenders at Atascadero State Hospital indicated that, among other things, the wives were more highly educated than their husbands. The women appeared to gain considerable satisfaction from the offenses of their husbands, perhaps because it put them in the role of martyrs, a role that may hav...