Theoretical and empirical research pertaining to the influence of gender on sentencing outcomes has focused almost exclusively on the gender of offenders. What this literature has not fully considered is how the gender of crime victims might affect sentencing outcomes. Using data for offenders convicted of three violent crimes in the seven largest metro counties in Texas in 1991, the authors find evidence that offenders who victimized females received substantially longer sentences than offenders who victimized males. Results also show that victim gender effects on sentence length are conditioned by offender gender, such that male offenders who victimize females received the longest sentence of any other victim gender/offender gender combination. However, whereas these effects are observed for sentence length, no victim gender effects are observed on whether offenders received an incarcerative or nonincarcerative sentence. The authors address the implications of their findings for theory and subsequent research.

Objective. Many studies find that females benefit from their gender in sentencing decisions. Few researchers, however, address whether the gender-sentencing association might be stronger for some crimes, such as minor nonviolent offending, and weaker for other offenses, such as serious violent crime. Method. Using a large random sample of convicted offenders in Texas drawn from a statewide project on sentencing practices mandated by the 73rd Texas Legislature, logistic regression and OLS regression analyses of likelihood of imprisonment and prison length illustrate the importance of looking at sentencing outcomes not only in terms of gender but also in terms of crime type. Results. Specifically, we find that the effect of gender on sentencing does vary by crime type, but not in a consistent or predicted fashion. For both property and drug offending, females are less likely to be sentenced to prison and also receive shorter sentences if they are sentenced to prison. For violent offending, however, females are no less likely than males to receive prison time, but for those who do, females receive substantially shorter sentences than males. Conclusions. We conclude that such variation in the gender-sentencing association across crime type is largely due to features of Texas' legal code that channel the level of discretion available to judges depending on crime type and whether incarceration likelihood or sentence length is examined.The sentencing of criminals has been the subject of repeated exploratory inquiry by social scientists, particularly sociologists. Since the work of Nagel and Weitzman (1971) and Pope (1975), who found that women appear to receive preferential treatment in sentencing over males, efforts to explain this disparity have centered around two theories: chivalry and the more recent focal concerns. As our literature review highlights, efforts to decipher how the sentencing process may benefit females are, at times, inconsistent. We view our study as additional fuel to the sentencing dialogue and, in parn Direct correspondence to S. Fernando Rodriguez, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX 79968 hfernando@utep.edui. Data and code book will be provided to those who wish to replicate these findings. The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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Objective. We advance social disorganization theory by examining homicides disaggregated by motive and gang relation and by using data from El Paso, Texas-a predominantly Latino city with high levels of immigration and poverty. Methods. We analyze homicide data from the El Paso Police Department's detective logs, 1985-1995, as well as data from the 1990 U.S. Decennial Census. Results. Key measures of social disorganization tend to be associated with homicide but these relationships vary across type of homicide. Immigration and percent African American show no connection with any homicide measure, while percent Latino is only positively associated with gang-related homicides. Conclusion. Overall, social disorganization is useful in understanding homicide in El Paso, but race/ethnicity and immigration do not operate as predicted. These results add important knowledge to a growing literature regarding the neighborhood-level associations between immigration, Latinos, and crime.Latinos and immigrants are rapidly growing segments of the U.S. population and central to current debates about crime in the media and politics. But criminological research on these groups is scarce and its contribution to these discussions is limited. Given that politics and media often perpetuate the stereotype of the "dangerous criminal immigrant," and some surveys show that large percentages of white Americans hold negative stereotypes about immigrants and Latinos (Brader, Valentino, and Suhay, 2008;Geiger, 2006), there is a pressing need for theoretically-based empirical research to shed light on the relationships between crime, immigration, and Latino.Criminological theory, as well as conventional wisdom, typically argue that immigration promotes criminal activity (see Wadsworth, 2010), but this view is not supported by a series of recent studies (see recent reviews in Kubrin

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