The important contributions made by Richard Quinney to the study of corporate crime and the sociology of law, crime, and justice have influenced the development of the concept of state-corporate crime. This concept has been advanced to examine how corporations and governments intersect to produce social harm. State-corporate crime is defined as criminal acts that occur when one or more institutions of political governance pursue a goal in direct cooperation with one or more institutions of economic production and distribution. The creation of this concept has directed attention to a neglected form of organizational crime and inspired numerous empirical studies and theoretical refinements.

Arizona's Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, signed into law in April 2010, is already adversely affecting public health in the state. Our findings from a study on childhood obesity in Flagstaff suggest that the law changed health-seeking behaviors of residents of a predominantly Latino neighborhood by increasing fear, limiting residents' mobility, and diminishing trust of officials. These changes could exacerbate barriers to healthy living, limit access to care, and affect the overall safety of the neighborhood. Documentation of the on-the-ground impact of Arizona's law and similar state-level immigration policies is urgently needed. To inform effective policymaking, such research must be community engaged and include safety measures beyond the usual protocols.

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In recent years, much of the sociological analysis concerning the relationship between punishment and social structure has centered around theories of fiscal constraint and penal discipline. The fiscal constraint model suggests that levels of imprisonment will be sensitive to levels of available public revenue. The penal discipline model posits a relationship between unemployment and imprisonment that exists independent of rates of crime. These two propositions, with controls for region, crime, race, and urbanization, are tested using a cross-sectional analysis of the 50 states for 1970 and 1980. Contrary to the two theories, the findings indicate that neither public revenue nor level of unemployment were significantly related to interstate variation in rates of imprisonment. The distinction between southern and non-southern states appeared as the most significant predictor of imprisonment. Analyses of non-southern states indicated that only the rate of violent crime and the proportion of black males in the population were significantly correlated with variations in rates of imprisonment, though the relationship between revenue and imprisonment strengthened somewhat between 1970 and 1980.