Explore the vast range of titles available.

Dozens of cross-national studies of homicide have been published. Virtually all have reported an association between inequality and homicide, leading scholars to draw strong conclusions about this relationship. Unfortunately, each of these studies failed to control for poverty, even though poverty is the most consistent predictor of area homicide rates in the US empirical literature and a main confounder of the inequality—homicide association. The cross-national findings are also incongruent with US studies, which have yielded inconsistent results for the inequality—homicide association. In the present study, I replicated two prior studies in which a significant inequality—homicide association was found. After the original results were replicated, models that included a measure of poverty were estimated to see whether its inclusion had an impact on the inequality—homicide association. When effects for poverty and inequality were estimated in the same model, there was a positive and significant poverty—homicide association, while the inequality—homicide association disappeared in two of three models. These findings were consistent across different samples, data years, measures of inequality, dependent variables (overall and sex-specific homicide rates) and estimation procedures. The new results are congruent with what we know about poverty, inequality and homicide from the US empirical literature and suggest that the strong conclusions drawn about the inequality—homicide association may need to be reassessed, as the association may be a spurious result of model misspecification.

Objectives. We took advantage of a natural experiment to assess the impact on suicide mortality of a suite of Russian alcohol policies. Methods. We obtained suicide counts from anonymous death records collected by the Russian Federal State Statistics Service. We used autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) interrupted time series techniques to model the effect of the alcohol policy (implemented in January 2006) on monthly male and female suicide counts between January 2000 and December 2010. Results. Monthly male and female suicide counts decreased during the period under study. Although the ARIMA analysis showed no impact of the policy on female suicide mortality, the results revealed an immediate and permanent reduction of about 9% in male suicides (Ln ω 0  = −0.096; P = .01). Conclusions. Despite a recent decrease in mortality, rates of alcohol consumption and suicide in Russia remain among the highest in the world. Our analysis revealed that the 2006 alcohol policy in Russia led to a 9% reduction in male suicide mortality, meaning the policy was responsible for saving 4000 male lives annually that would otherwise have been lost to suicide. Together with recent similar findings elsewhere, our results suggest an important role for public health and other population level interventions, including alcohol policy, in reducing alcohol-related harm.

The expansion of the penal system has been one of the most dramatic trends in contemporary American society. A wealth of research has examined the impact of incarceration on a range of later life outcomes and has considered how the penal system has emerged as a mechanism of stratification and inequality in the United States. In this article, we review the literature from a comparatively new vein of this research: the impact of incarceration on health outcomes. We first consider the impact of incarceration on a range of individual outcomes, from chronic health conditions to mortality. We then consider outcomes beyond the individual, including the health of family members and community health outcomes. Next, we discuss mechanisms linking incarceration and health outcomes before closing with a consideration of limitations in the field and directions for future research.

In Russia, rates of alcohol consumption and homicide are among the highest in the world, and already-high levels increased dramatically after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Rates of both, however, vary greatly among Russia’s 89 regions. We took advantage of newly available vital statistics and socioeconomic data to examine the regional covariation of drinking and lethal violence. Log-log models were employed to estimate the impact of alcohol consumption on regional homicide rates, controlling for structural factors thought to influence the spatial distribution of homicide rates. Results revealed a positive and significant relationship between alcohol consumption and homicide, with a 1% increase in regional consumption of alcohol associated with an approximately 0.25% increase in homicide rates. In Russia, higher regional rates of alcohol consumption are associated with higher rates of homicide.

While there is considerable empirical evidence that social disorganization is positively associated with crime rates in urban areas, the empirical literature on rural social disorganization and crime faces three crucial limitations: inconsistent results, reliance on official crime statistics and the failure to test the full model. We overcome the two latter limitations via the British Crime Survey. Using data from respondents living in rural areas of 318 postcode sectors, we employed weighted least squares regression to estimate the effects of (1) the exogenous sources of social disorganization on our intervening measures of community organization and (2) all variables on victimization rates. This represents the first test of the full social disorganization model in the literature on rural crime and we find very little support for it. Our results suggest a reassessment of the conclusions drawn about how social disorganization and crime are related in rural communities.

Between the 1980s and 2000s, the USA experienced wide swings in violence rates. These swings were not experienced equally across urban, suburban, and rural areas. We employed UCR and NCS/NCVS data to compare aggravated assaults rates in rural, suburban, and urban areas between 1988 and 2005. As expected, urban aggravated assault rates tended to remain the highest. However, the crime decline was much greater for urban relative to suburban and rural areas. Further, NCS/NCVS rates were not always higher than UCR rates for a given time and location. In the latter years, UCR–NCVS rate ratios were close to one for suburban and rural areas but remained about 1.5–2.0 in urban areas. This urban–nonurban difference has implications for testing criminological theories in non-urban areas.

There is a growing body of research on the effects of incarceration on health, though there are few studies in the sociological literature of the association between incarceration and premature mortality. This study examined the risk of male premature mortality associated with incarceration. Data came from the Izhevsk (Russia) Family Study, a large-scale population-based case-control design. Cases (n = 1,750) were male deaths aged 25 to 54 in Izhevsk between October 2003 and October 2005. Controls (n = 1,750) were selected at random from a city population register. The key independent variable was lifetime prevalence of incarceration. I used logistic regression to estimate mortality odds ratios, controlling for age, hazardous drinking, smoking status, marital status, and education. Seventeen percent of cases and 5 percent of controls had been incarcerated. Men who had been incarcerated were more than twice as likely as those who had not to experience premature mortality (odds ratio = 2.2, 95 percent confidence interval: 1.6—3.0). Relative to cases with no prior incarceration, cases who had been incarcerated were more likely to die from infectious diseases, respiratory diseases, non–alcohol-related accidental poisonings, and homicide. Taken together with other recent research, these results from a rigorous case-control design reveal not only that incarceration has durable effects on illness, but that its consequences extend to a greater risk of early death. I draw on the sociology of health literature on exposure, stress, and social integration to speculate about the reasons for this mortality penalty of incarceration.

Objectives We propose and test a multilevel theoretical model of crime concentration by combining criminal opportunity and social disorganization into a single hierarchical model. Our theoretical model simultaneously answers calls to integrate routine activities theory and social disorganization theory and provides a logical framework for understanding the connections between neighborhood context and micro-spatial environmental conditions. Methods To test our theory we used multilevel negative binomial regression with controls for spatial dependence to estimate street segment level crime counts. Results Findings showed the expected direct effects on street segment-level violent and property crime of both micro- and neighborhood-level characteristics. Our results for cross-level interaction effects provided evidence neighborhood context moderates the association between street segment-level variables and crime. Model comparisons using likelihood ratio tests revealed that including neighborhood-level characteristics improved explanatory power relative to single level models. Conclusions This study lends support to a multilevel theory of the law of crime concentration that includes both neighborhood and street segment level conditions.

This article reviews what we have learned about social structure and homicide during the last 30 years, paying close attention to empirical tests of subculture, strain (both absolute and relative deprivation), and social disorganization theories. First, this review reveals that researchers have difficulty operationalizing culture in terms of values and instead often rely on regional location or group membership as a proxy for subculture. Though the findings relating subculture to homicide are inconsistent, however, culture should not be ignored. Second, the positive relationship between poverty and the spatial distribution of homicide rates is the most consistent finding in this literature, while empirical evidence of the effects of inequality on homicide is neither as strong nor as consistent. Finally, social disorganization is more consistent in explaining the variation of homicide rates than the subcultural and relative deprivation models, with elements of disorganization such as city size, family disruption, and heterogeneity all showing relatively consistent effects.

The goal of this study was to determine the risk of homicide victimization associated with an underlying pattern of hazardous drinking. Data were from the Izhevsk Family Study (IFS), a large-scale, population-based case-control study. There were two sets of cases: all men aged 25 to 54 years living in Izhevsk during October 2003 through October 2005 who were (1) homicide victims (n = 45) or (2) homicide victims or died of injuries of undetermined intent (n = 156). Controls were selected at random from a population register. The exposure, an ongoing pattern of hazardous alcohol consumption, was variously defined as drinking more than 20 liters of ethanol in the prior year, consumption of nonbeverage alcohols at least once per week, and a set of behavioral measures of problematic drinking. Extensive information was obtained via interviews with proxy informants living in the same household as cases and controls. Each measure of hazardous drinking was associated with increased risk of violent death, and nearly 60 percent of homicides were attributable to hazardous drinking. Results provide strong evidence of an association between an underlying pattern of hazardous drinking and vulnerability to violent death.