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The primary objective of this study is to determine the effect of a victim's race on the likelihood of him or her being seriously injured during the commission of an interracial crime. We also assess the probability of a homicide occurring during an interracial crime. A multilevel city analysis shows that black offenders are no more apt than white offenders to injure their victims seriously during an interracial robbery or rape. A black offender also does not have a greater proclivity to kill his or her victim during the commission of an interracial crime. Some evidence suggests that white victims are more likely than black victims to suffer serious physical harm during an aggravated assault. Results also reveal that contextual factors related to racial animosity, such as residential segregation, white-to-black economic inequality, and black-to-white unemployment, fail to have any moderating effect on either the severity of victim injury or the likelihood of a homicide occurring during an interracial crime. Overall, the results generated in this study tend to cast doubt on the validity of racial animosity theory. Our findings also lead us to question the veracity of the often made claim that black-on-white crimes are punished more severely because these types of offenses are somehow more heinous in circumstance. At least in regard to serious victim injury and victim death, black-on-white crime is no more violent than white-on-black crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a conceptual model articulating the mechanisms by which racial threat is theorized to affect social control, focusing specifically on the influence of the relative size of the black population on the likelihood that the police will arrest a black citizen suspected of a violent criminal offense. A multilevel analysis of 145,255 violent crimes reported to police in 182 cities during 2000 shows only qualified support for racial threat theory. Controlling for the amount of race-specific crime reported to police, our findings reveal that black citizens actually have a lower probability of arrest in cities with a relatively large black population. This finding tends to cast doubt on the validity of the racial threat hypothesis. No evidence buttresses the claim that economic competition between whites and blacks affects arrest probabilities. However, results show that in cities where racial segregation is more pronounced blacks have a reduced risk of being arrested relative to whites. Crimes involving black offenders and white victims are also more apt to result in an arrest in cities that are racially segregated. These findings support the view that racial segregation is an informal mechanism to circumscribe the threat of potentially volatile subordinate populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using longitudinal data calibrated in daily intervals and a vector ARMA (VARMA) study design, we investigate the causal relations among the number of crimes reported to the police, the frequency of arrest, and the number of defendants held in pretrial jail confinement. Results show a lagged negative effect of frequency of arrest on reported crime. As the number of arrests made by police increases, the number of index crimes reported to authorities decreases substantially the following day. Additionally, the analysis reveals a significant positive contemporaneous relationship between criminal activity and arrest levels. No feedback effects among the three variables are noted. In sum, our findings add empirical support to the thesis that the instantaneous and lagged relationship between crime and clearances are of opposite sign. That is, criminal activity increases arrest levels instantaneously, or at least relatively so, while the negative effect of arrest levels on crime levels transpires more gradually. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a response to a comment on the article The Impact of Sentencing Guidelines on Jail Incarceration in Minnesota which applied an autoregressive integrated moving average analysis to estimate the impact of Minnesota's sentencing guidelines effective in May 1980, on the number of convicted felons sentenced to jail. The analyses on the article are flawed and the procedures they advance for handling imbedded missing data in the dependent series are neither supported in the literature nor logically sufficient, valuable lessons can be drawn from the exchange. Linking determinate sentencing reform to prison populations can have unintended consequences. Specifically, determinate sentencing reforms that place limits only on the growth of prison populations may result in substantial increases in jail use and thereby may erode policymakers' efforts to produce desirable long-term effects on overall incarcerated populations. Further, the organizational imperative to maintain the prison population at an acceptable level may supplant the more distant, more abstract goal of equity in criminal sentencing. Broad sentencing reform efforts that include constraints on jail use are warranted.

Although available empirical evidence suggests that Minnesota's Determinate Sentencing Law has had little effect on prison incarceration, it is still uncertain whether the sentencing guidelines affected jail use. A few recent studies imply that the guidelines have had a positive effect on jail incarceration rates. Accounts have pointed to preexisting trends, more severe sanctioning of repeat property offenders, and judicial concern with prison overcrowding as possible underlying causes of this observed increase. Using longitudinal data and an ARIMA study design, we investigate the validity of these competing explanations. Our findings show that the onset of the sentencing guidelines increased judicial use of the jail sanction beyond the effect of preexisting trends. In addition, the effect of mitigated dispositional departures from the no prison/prison outcome on jail use is salient only when prison population levels are high. This latter finding supports the thesis that judicial concern with prison overcrowding motivated judges to circumvent the guidelines in order to shift the burden of incarcerating offenders from the state to the local level The policy implications of these results for determinate sentencing reform are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an interrupted time-series design, this research note analyzes the long-term effect of Minnesota's sentencing guidelines on reducing unwarranted disparity in sentencing outcomes that fall within their scope of authority. Unwarranted disparity is defined as residual variation not attributable to legally mandated sentencing factors. Findings suggest that although the sentencing guidelines initially reduced disparity for the no prison/prison sentencing decision, inequality began to revert to preguideline levels as time passed. Further analysis revealed that the guidelines had a permanent impact on reducing disparities in decisions on the length of prison sentence. Overall we observed an 18% decline in disparity for the no prison/prison outcome and a 60% reduction in inequality for the judicial decision as to length of prison sentence, Two explanations for the reversionary trend in the no prison/ prison series are highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]