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Religious congregations' experiences with crime victimization are an under-researched and poorly understood phenomenon. Religious congregations represent a street crime target as a potential source of money, electronics, furniture and other goods, or as places where potential victims come and go. Furthermore, religious congregations are potential targets of bias crimes, especially certain minority religious traditions. This study examines survey data from a national sample of 1,385 religious congregations to investigate the role of religious tradition, criminal opportunity/routine activities factors, and surrounding structural disadvantage on criminal events experienced by congregations. We examine overall, property, and violent crime. We find that opportunity factors and structural disadvantage foster overall reported crime, as well as property and violent crime separately. By contrast, religious tradition is only associated with violent crime, specifically threats of violence. Jewish and Muslim congregations are more likely to report experiencing violent incidents, and report experiencing them more often. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has demonstrated that concentrated disadvantage and other measures are strongly associated with aggregate-level rates of violence, including across racial and ethnic groups. Less studied is the impact of cultural factors, including religious contextual measures. The current study addresses several key gaps in prior literature by utilizing race/ethnic-specific arrest data from California, New York, and Texas paired with religious contextual data from the Religious Congregations and Memberships Survey. Results suggest that, net of important controls, (1) religious contextual measures have significant crime-reducing associations with violence; (2) these associations are race/ethnic specific; and (3) religious contextual measures moderate the criminogenic association between disadvantage and violence for blacks. Implications for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies suggest a decline in the relative Black effect on violent crime in recent decades and interpret this decline as resulting from greater upward mobility among African Americans during the past several decades. However, other assessments of racial stratification in American society suggest at least as much durability as change in Black social mobility since the 1980s. Our goal is to assess how patterns of racial disparity in violent crime and incarceration have changed from 1980 to 2008. We argue that prior studies showing a shrinking Black share of violent crime might be in error because of reliance on White and Black national crime statistics that are confounded with Hispanic offenders, whose numbers have been increasing rapidly and whose violence rates are higher than that of Whites but lower than that of Blacks. Using 1980-2008 California and New York arrest data to adjust for this 'Hispanic effect' in national Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data, we assess whether the observed national decline in racial disparities in violent crime is an artifact of the growth in Hispanic populations and offenders. Results suggest that little overall change has occurred in the Black share of violent offending in both UCR and NCVS estimates during the last 30 years. In addition, racial imbalances in arrest versus incarceration levels across the index violent crimes are both small and comparably sized across the study period. We conclude by discussing the consistency of these findings with trends in economic and social integration of Blacks in American society during the past 50 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our goal in this article is to contribute conceptually and empirically to assessments of the racial invariance hypothesis, which posits that structural disadvantage predicts violent crime in the same way for all racial and ethnic groups. Conceptually, we elucidate the scope of the racial invariance hypothesis and clarify the criteria used for evaluating it. Empirically, we use 1999-2001 averaged arrest data from California and New York to extend analyses of the invariance hypothesis within the context of the scope and definitional issues raised in our conceptual framing-most notably by including Hispanic comparisons with Blacks and Whites, by examining the invariance assumption for homicide as well as the violent crime index, by using discrete as well as composite disadvantage measures, and by using census place localities as the study unit. The mixed findings we report from our comparisons (across Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics; offense types; and type of disadvantage) suggest caution and uncertainty about the notion that structural sources of violence affect racial/ethnic groups in uniform ways. We conclude that the hypothesis should be regarded as provisional, and its scope remains to be established as to whether it applies only under narrow conditions or is a principle of general applicability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]