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There are two common contingencies that affect the extent to which the law coerces conduct: the jurisdiction and the offense. The jurisdiction in which crime is committed or contemplated reflects the nature of the legal threat (e.g., its certainty and severity), while the offense reflects behavior-specific barriers to effective legal threats. This paper reports a comparison of deterrent effects in two jurisdictions with widely differing penalties for marijuana use. The results indicate that both jurisdictional and offense characteristics are important, and that legal mechanisms were more important in that jurisdiction that had the least severe penalty for marijuana use, thereby suggesting that enforcement patterns were more important than the severity of the penalty. Moreover, extralegal controls were important mechanisms of social control in each jurisdiction.

The abolition of the insanity defense in Idaho in 1982 was the first time in recent years that an American jurisdiction had eliminated that traditional, common-law defense. Drawing upon questionnaire responses from legislators, prosecuting attorneys, and psychiatrists, we examine the circumstances surrounding this precedent-setting legislation. We conclude that the conservative ethic stressing personal responsibility for conduct, legal and illegal, seems to have been influential in bringing about the new law, although future constitutional challenges may raise issues about extension of the doctrine of strict liability in criminal cases.

Theoretical and empirical work concerning socioeconomic status (SES) and delinquency has mainly been devoted, throughout the past decade, to specifying the conditions under which SES and delinquency are likely to be highly related. Three broad categories of conditions, with 12 particular subconditions, have been hypothesized as specifiers of the SES/delinquency relationship. Here, we review the recent empirical literature as it bears on these potential specifications. The results do not support any of the conditional hypotheses about SES and delinquency, and they again challenge the idea that a negative SES/delinquency relationship is general and pervasive. Almost all of the recent research finds some condition under which SES and delinquency are significantly related, however, and several of the specification hypotheses have not been thoroughly enough investigated to permit firm conclusions about their potency. This poses a quandary for scholars trying to understand delinquent behavior. Possible responses to the situation are discussed.

The study of crime suffers from an inattention to the social consequences of criminal acts. Conceiving crimes within the larger context of "hazard," data are reported on the relative seriousness of conventional and white‐collar crimes, as well as other hazards, using a sample of Washington state respondents. The results indicate that there is an inverse relationship between the perceived likelihood of a hazard and its seriousness. Generally, the more immediate the threat of a hazard, such as white‐collar crimes, the more serious it is perceived to be. There are also implications from these consequences for perceptions of institutional effectiveness and interpersonal relationships. This suggests that future studies of the consequences of criminality, especially white‐collar and corporate violations, might be directed toward the notions of risk and, eventually, social trust.