Thursday, July 14, 2011

Annotated Bibliography- Criminology

Author:

Alice

Cook, P. J. (2010). Property crime-yes; violence-no. Criminology & Public Policy, 9 (4). The author of this article is a professor at Duke University. He discusses the relationship between business cycle and crime against property and persons in the U.S. He references a study published within the issue. The author stresses that business cycles are complex experiments with many crime-related variables changing simultaneously. He identifies and defines plausible mechanisms relating the business cycle to crime, including criminal opportunities, drugs and alcohol. Cook believes that the business cycle affects robbery and theft crimes but does not affect personal crimes. According to this article, economic recessions come with extensive commentary in the media about how failing economic conditions can give an explanation for increases in crime rates. This discussion has been fueled by criminologists with 150 years of study on the subject. From a policy perspective, Cook points out that this interest might be justified by the use of apportioning credit or blame for observed crime fluctuations. The author finds a positive link between the business cycle and crime. This finding is useful in forecastingcrime rates and budgeting accordingly. Additionally, the macroeconomic study of the crime rate is a good test for a familiar hypothesis regarding criminal behavior, that crime substitute\'s lawful opportunity. In this view, the rate of crime should increase with a reduction in economic opportunity that takes place during a recession, just as most criminals have low income and poor employment prospects.
Crotty, W. S. (1998). Presidential Assassinations. Society, 35 (2). The author of this article is an associate professor of political science at Northwestern University. He examines presidential assassinations in the United States. He defines assassinations of political consequence as the murder of an individual, whether of public prominence or not, in an effort to achieve political gain. The author points out that any assassin will deliberate on how to assault his victim--the time, the place, the weapon to be used and the nature of the encounter. Among the assassinations reviewed in this article is President John F. Kennedy\'s murder, the killing of Reverend Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers and Lincoln Rockwell. The continuing assassinations in concert with a decade of seemingly endless violence brought serious concern to Americans. The author classifies the assassinations into five categories to serve to explain patterns of assassination in the United States compared to other nations. These categories are; Anomic assassination, Elite substitution, Tyrannicide, Terroristic assassination and Propaganda by deed. In Crotty\'s comparison of the level of assassinations in the United States with other nations, he finds that the United States has an alarmingly high level of political assassinations. The author examines the commonalities that appear in the assassination attempts directed against US presidents or presidential candidates by randomly categorizing the assassinations into similarities common to the victims and those related to the assailants. In the author\'s findings, the notion of rationality is never intended to express the idea of the pre-planning of the particulars of the act. Instead, it implies that the execution of the victims has a substantial relationship to a policy objective the schemers wish to accomplish. In other words the execution is politically motivated. He concludes that the major factor differentiating assassinations in America from those in other nations is dependent on this distinction. This article can serve as a foundation for criminologists studying political assassinations in the US as well as in other nations.
Haslett, D. W. (2003). Murder and the Exception for Fair Competition. Social Theory & Practice, 29 (4), October. The author of this article is a professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Delaware. He presents an analysis on the proposed solution to the ducking puzzle created by Christopher Boorse and Roy Sorensen. The puzzle is constituted to provide insights and information related to various murder cases and at the same time offer a keen understanding into the deep structure of morality. It is believed that the solution to the puzzle might provide new insight into what, exactly, constitutes murder. In particular, the author emphasizes on the solutions that were presented which are significant in the conceptualization of murder and ethical structure. Moreover, he presents various cases that are commonly encountered in relevance to human behavior and the occurrence of murder, together with the given solutions. The proposed solution presupposes a deontological code of morality, a code in which what one does can be morally wrong independently of its being, or causing, any non-moral harm. For an individual to be guilty of, and hence chargeable for, having violated a general obligation or any other obligation, there must exist no excusing or justifying conditions. Examples of excusing conditions include lunacy and innocent mistake of fact, that, without justifying doing what the obligation usually prohibits, nonetheless negate any fault for having done it. An excusing condition that, for any responsibility, negates guilt for having violated it is that the supposed violation was not anticipated. Conversely, justifying conditions, like defending against an unlawful attack, are conditions that rationalize one\'s doing what the obligation usually prohibits. Furthermore, Haslett discusses the comments of Boorse and Sorensen regarding the puzzle cases, together with their own explanations. This article provides a possible solution to the ducking puzzle which has been unsolved for one decade now.
Lester, D. (1987). Murders and Suicide: Are They Polar Opposites. Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 5 (1). The author of this article is a professor of Psychology at Richard Stockton State College. He explores the relationship between suicidal and murderous desires. He reviews Freud\'s psychological theory and Henry and Short\'s sociological theory in trying to find if there is a link between murder and suicide. The author also examines a number of empirical studies that bear on the issue. From these reviews, the author finds that there is not sufficient information as yet to confirm or disconfirm that murder and suicide are polar opposites, but suggestions are made for future research needed to answer this question.  Lester notes that murder is easily seen to be an act of aggression, but suicide also can similarly be seen as an act of aggression. It is not uncommon for murderers to complete suicide after murdering their victims. In his findings, individuals do not typically murder and complete suicide in most societies. For instance, only 4of murderers complete suicide in the US. Furthermore, in most societies, different socio-demographic groups murder from those who complete suicide. For example, in the US, white males complete suicide at the highest rate while black males murder at the highest rate. He concludes that individuals who murder differ from those who complete suicide and that race is one of the strongest differentiators although age also distinguishes the two types of individual. The author also points out that all murderers are not alike. He distinguishes between the over-controlled murderer (who is composed, quiet, and unaggressive most of the time, but who detonates sporadically into dramatically aggressive behavior) and the under-controlled murderer (who is constantly assaultive to any aggravation or insult), each of who handle their violent impulses very differently. In the same way, suicidal people differ. This study helps criminologists in understanding the relationship between suicidal and murderous desires.
Lyman, J., Davis, G., & Kovandzic, T. (2004). A Comparison of Three Sources of Data on Child Homicide. Death Studies, 28 (7). All the authors of this article are professors at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Alabama, USA. The aim of this study was to compare data sources used to study trends in homicide among young children The authors compared data from death certificates, medical examiner reports, and Uniform Crime Reporting Program for homicides among children age 5 years or younger in Jefferson County, Alabama between 1988 and 1998. This study was carried out in consideration that the United States has the highest rates of childhood homicide and firearm-related deaths among industrialized countries. The authors matched the records from each source independently to records from the other two sources. The authors used Kappa coefficients to measure the chance-corrected agreement between sources. According to their findings, the strongest correlations were for victim\'s gender and race while the weakest were for victim\'s relationship to the offender and offender\'s gender. Death certificates and medical examiner data demonstrated excellent agreement and provided a comprehensive count of homicides in Jefferson County, whereas Uniform Crime Reporting comparisons had lower correlations. This suggests that the two sources they can be used interchangeably, depending on the goals and scope of a study. Although underreporting of homicide in young children by the UCR Program occurred in this study, the author points out that this is not necessarily the case in other parts of the country. He recommends that researchers can compare the number of homicides reported by the UCR to the number that occurred according to DC data to get an indication of the level of UCR reporting in the geographic region of interest. This study concluded that the Uniform Crime Reporting is a valuable source of child homicide data in the United States that is underutilized in public health research.
Cook, P. J. (2010). Property crime-yes; violence-no. Criminology & Public Policy, 9 (4). The author of this article is a professor at Duke University. He discusses the relationship between business cycle and crime against property and persons in the U.S. He references a study published within the issue. The author stresses that business cycles are complex experiments with many crime-related variables changing simultaneously. He identifies and defines plausible mechanisms relating the business cycle to crime, including criminal opportunities, drugs and alcohol.
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