Ted G. Chiricos

• William Julius Wilson Professor at Florida State University

Using the cumulative disadvantage theoretical framework, the current study explores whether school suspension and expulsion provide an indirect path through which race and ethnicity affect the likelihood of experiencing arrest, any incarceration, and long-term incarceration in adulthood. To address these issues, we use data from Waves I, II, and I...

Several studies have compared the criminal court sentences given to transferred juveniles with those given to adults, but this research has reported inconsistent findings. Additionally, some research has found that mode of conviction can interact with offenders’ characteristics, resulting in stronger or weaker effects of these factors among defenda...

There is a disciplinary assumption in our field that surveys with low response rates produce biased estimates, which leads to the use of simple rules for judging the quality of survey data (Pickett, 2017). Surveys with “low” response rates fail this “response rate test” and become difficult to publish. Most of our research methods texts list these...

Much prior research has demonstrated that race and ethnicity are associated with harsher punishment outcomes among adult defendants in the criminal court. However, few studies have explored these disparities in the sentencing of juvenile offenders who have been transferred to the adult court, and this research has reported conflicting findings. Mor...

Drawing on the group threat perspective, this paper examines the perception of criminal threat from undocumented immigrants and its relation to both contextual measures of threat and public support for enhanced controls against undocumented immigrants. With data from a national telephone survey of non-Latino adults (N = 1,364), we estimate the pred...

Popular support for enhanced border and internal controls to deal with undocumented immigration is examined in relation to contextual measures of group threat as well as perceived levels of cultural and economic threat posed by undocumented immigrants. Results from a national survey of non-Latino respondents (N = 1,364) indicate that presumed threa...

Recent theoretical advancements of the racial threat model of punitiveness suggest that because youthful offending has driven crime trends in recent decades, and because racially exclusive conceptions of childhood have historically structured public opinion on juvenile justice, Black criminal stereotypes may be especially consequential for attitude...

Scholars emphasize that attitudes toward rehabilitation and views about punitive polices are distinct phenomena with seemingly unique etiologies. However, few existing studies examine the sources of public views about juvenile rehabilitation, or “child saving,” and none engage a measure of racial attitudes. At the same time, recent theoretical work...

Objectives. This article examines two questions. First, does interracial contact increase or decrease Whites' perceptions of Blacks' criminality? Second, does it affect Whites' perceived victimization risk, and, if so, is the effect mediated by the perceived criminality of Blacks as compared to the perceived criminality of different racial and ethn...

The juvenile justice system was founded on, and until recently developed around, the idea that society should afford delinquents more leniency and rehabilitative care than adult criminals because of their lower levels of physical and cognitive development and, thus, diminished culpability for law violations and higher amenability to treatment. The...

In the United States, there are well-known racial, ethnic, age, and sex differences in incarceration rates. Younger offenders are more likely to be sentenced to prison than are older offenders. Black and Hispanic rates of incarceration are six to eight times that of White offenders and males are 14 times as likely as women to be sentenced to prison...

Recent theoretical extensions of threat theory have posited that Whites frequently view Blacks as a criminal threat because of stereotypes linking race and crime. Several studies have found indirect support for this hypothesis and have shown that the percentage of neighborhood residents who are Black is positively associated with the perceptions of...

Designation as a “Habitual Offender” is an enhanced form of punishment which unlike, “Three Strikes” or “10-20-Life,” is entirely discretionary. We use Hierarchical Generalized Linear Modeling to assess the direct effects of race and Latino ethnicity on the designation of Habitual Offenders as well as the effect of both static and dynamic indicator...

Florida statutes allow for the application of enhanced sentences to defendants designated as “Career Offenders.” The application of these laws is discretionary and as such, prosecutors seek the designation for a fraction of the defendants who qualify. Utilizing Hierarchical Generalized Linear Modeling, this paper examines whether individual attribu...

Environmental sociologists argue that the public has grown increasingly concerned about environmental issues. Yet, little is known about public perceptions of environmental offenses and if these offenses are viewed as serious crimes. This study utilizes survey data from a national random sample of households (N = 876) and examines: (1) if environme...

The Hispanic population is now the largest and fastest growing minority in the United States, so it is not surprising that ethnic threat linked to Hispanics has been associated with harsher crime control. While minority threat research has found that individuals who associate blacks with crime are more likely to support harsh criminal policies, the...

This article examines whether and in what ways punitive attitudes toward criminals can be understood as having roots in two hypothesized sources of anxiety in western society. The first is the danger of crime and its salience and the second is economic insecurity. Both have been seen as sources of growing perceptions that the State is failing in it...

Florida law allows judges to withhold adjudication of guilt for individuals who have been found guilty of a felony and are being sentenced to probation. Such individuals lose no civil rights and may lawfully assert they had not been convicted of a felony. Labeling theory would predict that the receipt of a felony label could increase the likelihood...

This study examines the relationship between assessments of the risk of punishment and self-reported involvement in three illegal behaviors in a sample of college-aged respondents. It is found that those respondents who had not yet committed a particular offense were more likely to perceive a greater certainty of punishment than those with experien...

A relationship between fear of crime and the racial composition of place has been widely assumed but seldom tested. Interviews conducted with a random sample of adults residing in a major state capital in the early months of 1994-at the height of a media-driven panic about violent crime-are used to test the proposition that as the percentage of bla...

As legislatures proliferate novel “enhancements” to criminal sentencing, such as “three-strikes” and related provisions, and as criminologists debate their effects, the role of existing enhancements, such as habitual offender statutes, has received little empirical attention. This article explores the effect of race in the decision to prosecute and...

This study examines the relationship between punitive attitudes toward criminals, two measures of economic insecurity and a measure of blame for stagnating incomes that targets welfare, affirmative action, and immigration. In effect, we are testing whether punitiveness toward criminals is part of a general constellation of resentment toward what Ga...

Florida law allows judges to withhold adjudication of guilt for persons who have either pled guilty or been found guilty of a felony. This provision may apply only to persons who will be sentenced to probation, and it allows such individuals to retain all civil rights and to truthfully assert they had not been convicted of a felony. This paper exam...

This paper assesses whether support for harsh punitive policies toward crime is related to the racial typification of crime for a national random sample of households (N=885), surveyed in 2002. Results from OLS regression show that the racial typification of crime is a significant predictor of punitiveness, independent of the influence of racial pr...

Recent work in the area of media and fear of crime suggest that both program content and audience traits are important factors in predicting fear of crime. Working from these premises, this article explores the relationship between watching television and fear of crime among twelve different audience sub-samples and six program types. Additionally,...

This article examines whether the social structural factors predicting violence against women are different from those predicting violence against men. Using sex-specific, aggravated assault rates from Florida counties (n = 60), this regression analysis tests three principal explanations of violent victimization: routine activities, social disorgan...

Local news programming from three television stations in Orlando, Florida was analyzed for racial and ethnic content in relation to crime. The data show that Blacks are not overrepresented among TV news suspects relative to their proportion in the population or among those arrested in Orlando. Hispanics are slightly overrepresented in relation to t...

Most recent unemployment-crime (U-C) research is informed by the possibility that unemployment could both increase motivation for crime and decrease criminal opportunities. The mediating links of motivation and opportunity, though often assumed, have almost never been measured. We directly test for the potential mediating effects of opportunity and...

Compared with Whites, African Americans generally have less positive attitudes toward the police (ATP) and this is most often attributed to the differential nature of citizen–police interaction experienced by Blacks and Whites. It has been suggested that the media play an important socializing role, in the form of “vicarious” police contacts, in ge...

Compared with Whites, African Americans generally have less positive attitudes toward the police (ATP) and this is most often attributed to the differential nature of citizen–police interaction experienced by Blacks and Whites. It has been suggested that the media play an important socializing role, in the form of “vicarious” police contacts, in ge...

The United States and the Czech Republic have become more punitive in their responses to criminal behavior. Criminal justice policy may reflect popular opinion to some degree. Using survey data collected in Florida in 1997 and in the Czech Republic in 1998, we identify significant predictors of punitive attitudes for individual citizens of both cou...

This paper examines the relationship between perceived racial and ethnic composition of neighborhood and criminal threat, which is operationalized as the perceived risk of criminal victimization. To address this question, we use interviews with a statewide random sample of 3,000 Florida residents conducted in the fall of 1996. This is the first ass...

Data from a 1997 survey of 2, 250 Florida residents are used to assess whether and how the reality of crime influences the relationship between watching TV news and fear of crime. Local crime rates, victim experience, and perceived realism of crime news operationalize the reality of crime and are included in ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates o...

Communication studies increasingly recognize the audience's critical role in receiving and interpreting media messages. Research into audience attributes that distinguish ''media effects,'' on the fear of crime (FEAR) has been limited-particularly as it relates to the reception of news. This study is based an a survey of 2,092 adults in Tallahassee...

Building on a previous analysis of types of crime and characteristics of offenders in Time magazine articles about crime during the post-World War II period, this study extends exploration of ideologies of crime in the news by examining reports about the causes of crime and commands of what to do about crime in Time magazine. The authors argue that...

This study explores the relationship between media portrayal of crime and conditions in the political economy. Based on a content analysis of articles about crime appearing in Time magazine during the post-World War II period, it is argued that news about crime is ideological, that is, it gives an inadequate and distorted picture of the contradicto...

Long cycles in capitalist development have been utilized as an analytical tool for political economic theory1 and to explain major shifts in the social structure within capitalist political economies.2 However, the potential impact that these massive changes in the political economy have on the historical development of criminal justice institution...

Since the pioneering work ofRusche and Kirchheimer (1939), the theoretical links between labor surplus and punishment have seen extensive development. Eleven of those links described here are mediated by economic, political, and ideological factors such as the value of labor, the systemic needs of capitalism, and the ideology of judges and their co...

Evidence for a relationship between unemployment and imprisonment has been regarded as “elusive” and “conflicting.” Such conclusions have been based primarily on aggregate-level data. Individual-level data have provided only indirect evidence for this relationship. This research considers prosecution, incarceration, and length of incarceration outc...

The unemployment/crime rate relationship (U-C) has been described recently as “inconsistent,” “insignificant,” and “weak.” Prior assessments of the U-C relationship have used no more than 18 U-C studies, and no more than 7 with 1970s data. In this paper, I review the findings of 63 U-C studies, 40 of which involve data from the 1970s when unemploym...

The unemployment/crime rate relationship (U-C) has been described recently as “inconsistent,” “insignificant,” and “weak.” Prior assessments of the U-C relationship have used no more than 18 U-C studies, and no more than 7 with 1970s data. In this paper, I review the findings of 63 U-C studies, 40 of which involve data from the 1970s when unemploym...

Perceptual deterrence researchers have used simple cross-sectional correlations between prior behavior and current perceptions to study the effect of legal threats on social control. Such designs are inadequate because they: (1) confuse the causal ordering of perceptions and behavior, and (2) fail to take into account other inhibitory factors in an...

This paper reports on the first longitudinal study to consider the relationship between perceptions of legal sanctions and self-reported criminality. The longitudinal design helps to address the problem of interpreting causal order that traditionally has troubled deterrence researchers using cross-sectional data. Self-reports of unlawful behavior (...

A major limitation of deterrence research has been its almost exclusive concern with objectively measured formal sanctions. This paper examines the relative and cumulative impact of perceived informal as well as formal sanctions upon self-reported marijuana use for 321 randomly chosen university students. Both types of sanction are strongly and ind...

This study is an empirical assessment of the work release program in the Florida Division of Corrections An experimental design was used in which, randomly, 188 persons were assigned to a work release group and 93 to a control group. Follow-up interviews were conducted in the community, and recidivism data were obtained from Division of Corrections...

The "conflict perspective" has generated considerable critical interest in the mechanisms of criminal sanctioning. Among the hypotheses generated by conflict criminology is the proposition that "when sanctions are imposed, the most severe sanctions will be imposed on persons in the lowest social class" (Chambliss and Seidman, 1971:475). This paper...

With few exceptions, empirical tests of deterrence theory have limited themselves to a consideration of crimes that are mala in se, such as homicide or the seven “Crime Index” offenses; and they have been based upon analyses of aggregate data that are available from official sources, such as Uniform Crime Reports and National Prisoner Statistics. I...

Florida law allows a judge the option of withholding adjudication of guilt from defendants who are being placed on probation. For persons accused of a felony, this step affords an opportunity to avoid the stigma associated with the status of “convicted felon.” Social and legal characteristics of 2,419 consecutive felony probation cases are examined...

Data from National Prisoner Statistics and Uniform Crime Reports are used to re-examine the relationship between rates of crime and the certainty and severity of punishment in the states of the United States. Recent research by Gibbs and Tittle using similar data to test deterrence hypotheses are extended in two ways: (l) by examining the relations...

Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. Mode of access: World Wide Web. Advisor: Dr. Ted Chiricos, Florida State University, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 21, 2004). Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2004. Includes bibliographical references.