Neal Shover

Structures and Careers in Burglary

Neal Shover — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 08:26:05 PDT

The Social Organization of Burglary

Neal Shover — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 08:13:44 PDT

The social organization of systematic burglary is discussed and briefly compared to earlier work on systematic offenders. Salient aspects of both the internal and external social organization of burglary are presented, especially as these are related to the problems of burglary. It is suggested that burglary continues to be more like the social organization of professional theft, as this was presented by Sutherland, than check forgery and armed robbery, as these have been depicted in recent literature. Some possible reasons for this are presented. Finally, it is suggested that the social organization of burglary can be expected to continue to change as a result of macrolevel changes in the economy and in the nature of security forces.

The Organization and Impact of Inspector Discretion in a Regulatory Bureaucracy

Neal Shover et al. — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 08:09:23 PDT

Recent trends in regulatory bureaucracies in the United States indicate a shift toward detailed, rigid mandates. In part, this movement represents an attempt to weave an increasingly seamless web of non-discretionary policies for field-level inspectorates. This paper examines the organization of inspection and enforcement practices in such an agency--the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. The creators of the enabling legislation and the agency top executives went to great lengths to circumvent inspector discretion. Questionnaire and interview data on the agency's inspector corps suggest that such efforts were only partially successful. Not only do field-level personnel employ discretionary practices, but the nature of the regulated industry structures the context of inspector discretion. We show a relationship between corporate size and the exercise of inspector discretion. We also show that patterns of inspector discretion affect the size of civil fines imposed for regulatory violations.

The Later Stages of Ordinary Property Offender Careers

Neal Shover — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 08:00:23 PDT

Few sociologists have studied the later stages of careers in deviance and criminality. This paper describes how 36 ordinary property offenders, released from confinement from four months to 28 years earlier, changed their perspectives toward life and criminal behavior as they got older. Changes in criminal behavior resulted from two types of occurrences in the men's lives: temporal and interpersonal. Some of the age-related changes differ little from those experienced by non-offenders. Consequently, the findings challenge critical assumptions about offenders employed by proponents of the death penalty and other repressive crime control measures.

Street Crime, Labor Surplus, and Criminal Punishment, 1980-1990

Neal Shover et al. — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 07:52:22 PDT

Conventional wisdom holds that variation in state use of criminal punishment is produced principally by variation in the rate of street crime. Neo-Marxist variants of conflict theory predict that use of punishment by capitalist states also varies with economic conditions generally and with the size of the labor surplus in particular. Many investigators have found support for this relationship, but recurring design and analytic shortcomings of their studies limit confidence in it. We test for the labor surplus/punishment relationship using a theoretically more appropriate sample and methodology. Residual-change regression analysis is applied to crime, demographic, economic, and prison-commitment data for a sample of 269 United States urban counties for the period 1980 to 1990. It identifies independent contributions to change in state use of imprisonment by change in violent street crime and in the proportionate size of both the young male population and the labor surplus. The findings, therefore, lend further support to and strengthen confidence in neo-Marxist theories of official punishment.

Crime on the Line. Telemarketing and the Changing Nature of Professional Crime

Neal Shover et al. — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 07:42:19 PDT

New opportunities for crimes of acquisition grew significantly in the second half of the twentieth century, but the criminological consequences of this development are poorly charted. We examine offenders who have stepped forward to exploit one category of the new opportunities. Drawing from interviews with 47 criminal telemarketers, we present a picture and interpretation of them, their pursuits and their lifestyles. As vocational predators, they share several important characteristics with the professional thieves sketched by earlier generations of investigators. Like the latter, they pursue a hedonistic lifestyle featuring illicit drugs and conspicuous consumption, and they acquire and employ an ideology of legitimation and defence that insulates them from moral rejection. Unlike professional thieves, however, telemarketing criminals disproportionately are drawn from middleclass, entrepreneurial backgrounds. They are markedly individualistic in their dealings with one another and with law enforcement. Finally, their work organizations are more permanent and conventional in outward appearance than the criminal organizations created by blue‐collar offenders, which were grounded in the culture of the industrial proletariat. Our findings show how the backgrounds and pursuits of vocational predators reflect the qualities and challenges of contemporary lucrative criminal opportunities. Like the markets that they seek to manipulate and plunder, the enacted environments of professional criminals embrace infinite variations, and are largely indistinguishable from the arenas that capacitate legitimate entrepreneurial pursuits.

Book Review: Green, S. P. (2006). Lying, Cheating, and Stealing: A Moral Theory of White-Collar Crime

Neal Shover — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 07:30:59 PDT

Book Reviews : Corporate Crime, Marshall B. Clinard and Peter C. Yeager

Neal Shover — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 07:25:05 PDT

"Experts" and Diagnosis in Correctional Agencies

Neal Shover — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 07:18:02 PDT

Almost three years as a caseworker in correctional institutions and interviews with twelve practitioners in the field underlie this study of institutional diagnosis, or classification. The procedure was essentially to determine the process by which novice prepro fessional employees learn the techniques and diagnostic argot of institutions, interview and "diagnose" inmates, and train their successors.

Tarnished Goods and Services in the Marketplace

Neal Shover — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 07:10:12 PDT

Sex Roles and Criminality: Science or Conventional Wisdom?

Neal Shover et al. — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 07:01:43 PDT

It is argued that past theoretical work on female crime and delinquency has employed and built upon a set of nonrational sexist assumptions which have rarely been explicitly articulated in the work itself. And yet the theory on female misconduct cannot be adequately comprehended without an awareness of this accompanying set of assumptions. Until these ideas are critically examined and subjected to empirical scrutiny, progress will not be made in understanding female criminality and the allegation that it is on the increase.

Cultural Explanation and Organizational Crime

Neal Shover et al. — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 06:47:53 PDT

Both the number and influence of organizations increased dramatically during the 20th century, which helps explain why the problem of organizational crime has received attention from investigators. Growing interest in organizational and corporate crime has been matched by interest in organizational culture. Variation in organizational culture is employed to explain many aspects of organizational performance, from effectivenessin goal attainment to criminal conduct. There are reasons, however, to be critical of theoretical constructions and empirical investigations of organizational culture. There is both considerable ambiguity about its meaning and an implicit assumption of intra-organizational cultural uniformity. Cultural explanations were developed principally in case studies, empirical analyses are flawed, and supportive post hoc interpretations ofinteresting or enigmatic findings are commonplace. The influence of hierarchy and agency as constraints on organizational culture has received insufficient attention. We interpret the appeal of organizational culture despite the absence of demonstrated predictive value, and we call for additional research on sources of variation in organizational crime.

Dialing for Dollars: Opportunities, Justifications, and Telemarketing Fraud

Neal Shover et al. — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 08:48:32 PDT

Opportunities for deviant economic exploitation grew significantly in the second half of the twentieth century. Drawing from interviews with forty-seven fraudulent telemarketers, this article describes the backgrounds and pursuits of one type of deviant actor that has stepped forward to exploit these opportunities. The men and women interviewed for this research were reared in middle-class, disproportionately managerial and entrepreneurial families. Their class and family backgrounds provided them with high, but ill-defined, expectations for material success. Their preparation for successful conventional careers was unremarkable. As a result, they were predisposed to economic activities that required few credentials but provided a high income. Once involved in and aware of the deviant nature of their endeavors, continuation in fraud was facilitated by the income it produced and the lifestyle it permitted, by self-definitions enhanced by their manipulative abilities, and by acquisition and use of a vocabulary of motive that deflected blame. An augmented version of sociological strain theory provides an analytic vantage point from which to examine the backgrounds, aspirations, and perspectives of those involved in fraudulent telemarketing.

The Origins of Criminal Sentencing Reforms

Neal Shover et al. — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 08:34:55 PDT

This paper explores the explanatory utility of two broad perspectives on correctional reform, one informed by materialism and the other by a functionalist interpretation of state policy. Using state-level demographic, economic and political data, we examine some structural antecedents of criminal sentecing reform in the United States during the period 1971-1982. Using stepwise regression procedures, variables derived from the materialist perspective prove superior to variables derived from the functionalist perspective as predictors of the extensiveness of changes in criminal sentencing codes. While the findings are encouraging, they reinforce the need for a more complex model of change in law.

Studying and Teaching White-Collar Crime: Populist and Patrician Perspectives

Neal Shover et al. — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 08:13:41 PDT

White-collar crime is both an integral part of undergraduate criminology courses and textbooks and the subject of enduring analytic controversy. Much of the latter can be traced to two conflicting but unrecognized conceptual paradigms employed by investigators and teachers when they examine white-collar crime: Populist and Patrician. These perspectives differ in definitional approach to the concept, explicit recognition of the criminality of offenses committed by respectable citizens, how much attention is paid to the victims and costs of white-collar crime, the analytic centrality of criminalization, and the variables and dynamics that purportedly explain variation in offending. Preference for one or the other analytic paradigm to some extent is predictable on the basis of a scholar's educational background, type of institutional placement and disciplinary training. Explicit acknowledgment and pedagogical use of conflicting paradigms hold the potential to enhance students' ability to think critically about white-collar crime. It also makes clear that the disagreements that plague this area of inquiry are deeply rooted and thus are unlikely to be resolved soon.

Gender Role Expectations of Juveniles

Neal Shover et al. — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 07:55:21 PDT

This paper discusses the development of two five-item Likert scales that classify juveniles' gender role expectations as highly traditional to nontraditional. One is composed of behavioral expectations that juveniles define as traditionally feminine and the other is composed of expectations they define as traditionally masculine. With a sample of junior and senior high school students, correlational and factor analyses of scale items were conducted to assess the validity of the assumptions of bipolarity and unidimensionality common in theoretical conceptualizations of gender roles. The results suggest that feminine and masculine role expectations are not bipolar opposites and do not form a unidimensional continuum.

Responses of the Criminal Justice System to Legislation Providing More Severe Threatened Sanctions

Neal Shover et al. — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 07:18:14 PDT

In 1971, the Tennessee legislature enacted legislation providing for mandatory jail sentences and driver's license revocations for anyone convicted of driving while intoxicated. This new law had no demonstrable impact on the highway traffic fatalities rate-the intended objective. This paper explores the reasons for this apparent lack of impact. Data suggest that, while there was some increase in the severity of sanctions imposed on drunken drivers, there was still a consistent tendency to suspend the jail sentences and grant drivers restricted driving privileges. Nor is there any reason to believe that the police intensified their efforts to apprehend larger numbers of drunken drivers. Thus, the more severe sanctions threatened in the new law were generally mitigated in practice. Some possible interpretations for this are offered.

Gender Roles and Criminality: Some Critical Comments

Neal Shover et al. — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 07:10:36 PDT

This paper investigates the recent claim that women are becoming increasingly involved in aggressive or serious criminal activities. On the basis of an a priori classification of aggressive crimes, a review of three different types of data reveals no unambiguous pattern of change in women's criminality. Several theoretical problems which hove inhibited the systematic development of the relationships between gender roles and criminality are discussed. Particular attention is paid to the lack of conceptual precision that characterizes the use of the terms gender and aggressive crime.

Masculinity and Delinquency

Neal Shover et al. — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 07:05:25 PDT

A strong positive association between masculinity and delinquency is on important assumption in theories which explain why (1) males are more delinquent than females and (2) females are becoming increasingly delin-quent. Self-report measures obtained from 1002 junior and senior high school students from a large Southeastern city constitute the data for an examination of the first of these relationships. Factor analytic procedures were used to identify the components of masculinity: leadership, aggressive-ness, competitiveness, ambitiousness, and successfulness. Separate models of masculinity, opportunity, attachment to conventional others, and belief in the moral validity of low are constructed for status, property, and aggressive offenses. For females, masculinity has no direct effects on any type of delinquency. For males, masculinity is directly related only to status offenses. The results are inconsistent with analyses of females' delinquency that emphasize their adoption of masculine characteristics.

Age, Differential Expectations, and Crime Desistance

Neal Shover et al. — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 06:58:53 PDT

We specify an individual-level model linking crime desistance to estimates of legal risk, differential expectations, degree of past success at legitimate and criminal pursuits, and age. OLS and logistic regression procedures are used to estimate the model using longitudinal data on serious, previously imprisoned offenders. As predicted, age decreases estimates of the likely payoffs from crime and legitimate employment. Contrary to predictions, age is unrelated to the perceived legal risk of renewed criminal participation. Age, past success at avoiding confinement, expectations of success from crime, and level of education are significant predictors of crime desistance. Neither the perceived legal risk of crime nor expectations of success through straight pursuits significantly predict desistance. We suggest an interpretation for these anomalous findings.