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It has been claimed that the rational choice perspective, which sees criminal behavior as the outcome of decisions and choices made by the offender, can provide a useful framework for analyzing crime control policies. By developing the concept of "choice‐structuring properties," which refers to the constellation of opportunities, costs, and benefits attaching to particular kinds of crime, this paper attempts to develop rational choice theory in order to improve analysis of crime displacement—a concept frequently invoked by the critics of opportunity‐reducing measures of crime prevention.

This paper begins with a conceptual analysis of the idea of white‐collar crime. It considers data relevant to popular images of white‐collar crime and outlines a general theory of crime explicitly applicable to both ordinary and white‐collar crime. This theory is compared with traditional explanations of white‐collar crime, and several explicit empirical tests of rival views are described.

Routine activities deliver easy crime opportunities to the offender. Astute planners and managers can interfere with this delivery, diverting flows of likely offenders (such as adolescents) away from streams of suitable targets (such as television sets). They can engineer traffic to provide "natural surveillance." Past trends encouraged crime rate increases, but the developing metropolitan facility could reverse this, privatizing substantial portions of metropolitan turf.

The purpose of this paper is to identify systematic sources of discrepancies in the macro‐level research on racial inequality and rates of violent crime. A review of the literature suggests three likely sources of discrepant results across previous studies: differing operationalizations of racial inequality, differing samples, and differing specifications. The analyses reveal that while sample composition appears to be relatively unimportant, operationalization of racial inequality in terms of socioeconomic status (SES) rather than income can lead to very different conclusions. For certain models, SES‐based measures are clearly superior to income‐based measures. However, slight modifications of the regression models can render the effects of racial inequality in SES nonsignificant. These results call for a skeptical assessment of previous evidence indicating a positive relationship between racial inequality and rates of violent crime.

Evaluations of correctional treatment programs for criminal offenders and of school‐based delinquency prevention programs based on Guided‐Group Interaction (GGI) and similar interventions are critically reviewed. One study—the Provo Experiment—provided convincing evidence for the superiority of a community treatment program involving GGI over incarceration (for persons who would otherwise be incarcerated) and modest superiority over probation (for persons who would otherwise be assigned probation). Some evaluations of school‐based prevention programs involving GGI derivatives that have been cited as supporting the efficacy of these programs are flawed and may be misleading. A new experimental evaluation of a school‐based intervention based on a GGI derivative implies that it increased delinquent behavior among students exposed to it.

Criminal Careers and "Career Criminals" edited by Alfred Blumstein, Jacqueline Cohen, Jeffrey A. Roth, and Christy A. Visher.

The present study tests the validity of a common‐cause model in explaining both serious substance use and serious delinquent behavior among youths. Longitudinal data on 441 male and 441 female adolescents are analyzed. Youths originally tested at Time 1 when they were 12, 15, or 18 years old were retested three years later when they were 15, 18, or 21 years old. The results provide modest support for a common‐cause model. While a number of predictor variables drawn from control theory and differential association theory are related to both behaviors, those drawn from the literature on psychological correlates of adolescent deviance tend to be more strongly related to subsequent serious substance use than to serious delinquency. The findings suggest that there is a degree of etiological independence in serious adolescent substance use and serious forms of delinquency. The implications of these results for theory development and policy implementation are discussed.

This article examines the discretionary judgments and reporting practices of police officers, in their apprehension of 528 defendants subsequently remanded for psychiatric assessment in a forensic unit located in Toronto, Canada. Analysis of arrest documents indicated that police routinely invoked labels of mental illness and dangerousness, and that they recommended psychiatric assessment in over a third of cases that eventuated in clinical remands. A significant relationship was yielded between police judgments and clinical assessments concerning the dangerousness of defendants. The police reports of forensic patients demonstrated the tendency of arresting officers to recommend psychiatric assessment as a vehicle for ensuring the dual application of judicial and therapeutic interventions. These police records were replete with moral assessments about mentally disordered defendants and with a number of strategies designed to influence the subsequent decisions of other legal and psychiatric authorities. In this study the police functioned as forensic gatekeepers, alerting clinicians and other officials to signs of mental disorder and criminality and to appropriate courses of action. At the initial point of arrest, the police assisted in laying the groundwork for the subsequent institutional careers of medicolegal subjects.

This study investigates the impact of ethnic origin on the attribution of criminal offenses to faces seen in portrait photographs. The underlying hypothesis is that ethnic stereotypes are a result of the way people perceive themselves and other groups (that is, the relation of in‐groups to outgroups) and that ethnic stereotypes directly affect a person's readiness to attribute particular offenses to given portraits. Thus, this study explores cross‐ethnic and intra‐ethnic offense attribution.

Police and court records rarely reject the prevalence of delinquent acts of elementary school‐aged children. Data are presented on conduct problems during the elementary school years in regard to how well they predict adult delinquency and chronic offending. In addition, the paper presents prevalence estimates of illegal and serious conduct problems occurring prior to high school, such as fighting, the), truancy, firesetting, vandalism, marijuana use, and delinquency. Policy implications are discussed in view of the fact that early onset of serious conduct problems is ominous for chronic offending to develop at an age when children are not yet judged to be criminally responsible.

The central issue examined here is the effect that community setting, relative to other factors, has on victimization and fear of crime among the elderly. Findings are from 1,410 in‐home interviews in two retirement communities (age homogeneous) and two age‐heterogeneous communities. Victimization of elderly is low in all communities, and although nearly half of the respondents have some fear of crime, the percentage reporting great fear of crime is low. Victimization and fear of crime are only weakly related to one another, and the regression model for each does not account for much variance. But both are significantly related to the type of community, and fear of crime is also related to other variables. The greater the age density of the community (greater concentration of elderly), the less crime and less fear of crime. Living arrangements, sociodemographic variables, and health status of the elderly as indicators of personal vulnerability to crime are not related to victimization, but are related to fear of crime, and effects of community setting on fear of crime are reduced when these other variables are taken into account. Suggestions for other, unmeasured, sources of variations and implications for future research are presented.

This paper describes the extent of missing data within the Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR), collected as part of the Uniform Crime Reporting Program of the FBI. The yearly SHR provides coded information on the victim, the offender, and the circumstances of all reported homicides in the United States. Thus, the data allow the computation of specific kinds of homicide rates, such as those involving family members, acquaintances, and strangers. However, missing data within reported events, primarily on offender characteristics and thus the victim/offender relationship, present a serious obstacle to the accurate calculation of such rates. The authors propose computational procedures designed to compensate for missing data and empirically evaluate the impact of these procedures on comparative analyses of homicide rates for cities, metropolitan areas, and states.

The relationship between women's narcotics use and crime is examined among Anglo and Chicana methadone maintenance clients. Three types of analyses are employed: (1) the temporal ordering between narcotics involvement and criminal activities: (2) comparisons of crime levels before and after critical events in the addiction career including narcotic initiation, addiction, last daily use, first treatment entry, and first treatment discharge; and (3) crime levels as a function of increasing narcotics use. Women in this study demonstrate extensive criminal involvement and some also engage in dealing and/or prostitution. Property crime activities precede the addiction career for many women but, once addicted, the amount of property crime committed appears to be generally regulated by narcotics use levels. After the addiction career, property crime decreases substantially. Chicanas, in general, display higher baseline pretreatment criminal activity and show fewer changes in crime levels than Anglo women in reaction to events such as treatment or termination of addiction career.

Explaining Delinquency and Drug Use by Delbert S. Elliott, David Huizinga, and Suzanne S. Ageton.Taking Care of Business: The Economics of Crime by Heroin Abusers by Bruce D. Johnson, Paul J. Goldstein, Edward Preeble, James Schmeidler, Douglas S. Lipton, Barry Spunt, and Thomas Miller.Pathways from Heroin Addiction: Recovery Without Treatment by Patrick Biernacki.

In view of (1) escalating national attention and political and judicial activity centering on capital punishment during recent years and (2) concomitant changes in police killing rates, this paper investigates the impact of the death penalty on rates of lethal assaults against the police for the post‐Furman period, 1973–1984. In keeping with recent investigations of deterrence and general homicides, multiple regression is used as a means of controlling for the influence of possible confounding variables in examining the capital punishment/police killings relationship. Consistent with previous investigations, the present analysis provides no indication that our national return to capital punishment since Furman has had a systematic impact on police homicides. Law enforcement officers are not afforded an added measure of protection in death penalty compared to abolitionist states, nor is there anything but a chance association between the rate of police killings and the level of use of the death sentence for convicted murderers.