Social Conditions and Cross-National Imprisonment Rates: Using Set-Theoretic Methods for Theory Testing and Identifying Deviant Cases

Abstract

Macro-level theories of punishment suggest that particular social conditions explain national imprisonment rates over place and time. Important causal factors underlying these theories include a country’s level of development, criminality, socioeconomic inequality, and political volatility. Based on a sample of 166 nations and set-theoretical methods, the present study uses the formal logic standards of necessity and sufficiency to evaluate the empirical merits of these widely assumed causal relations. After summarizing the confirmatory evidence and patterns of exceptional cases, results are discussed in terms of their implications for refining current macro-level theories of punishment and future testing of them through the conjunctive analysis of set-theoretic relations.

Homicide Investigations in Context: Exploring Explanations for the Divergent Impacts of Victim Race, Gender, Elderly Victims, and Firearms on Homicide Clearances

“…CACC has been used increasingly in the criminological literature to examine contextual variability in a wide range of outcomes including reporting crimes to police (Rennison, Dragiewicz, & DeKeseredy, 2013), sentencing (Hart, Miethe, & Regoeczi, 2014; Lockwood, Hart, & Stewart, 2015), bystander intervention in violent victimizations (Hart & Miethe, 2008), sex offender community notification decisions (Koetzle Shaffer & Miethe, 2011), weapon choice in sexual homicides (Heng Choon & Beauregard, 2016), and lethal outcomes in sexual assaults (Mieczkowski & Beauregard, 2010). In fact, a recent special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice was devoted solely to studies that use CACC in criminal justice research (Caplan, Kennedy, Barnum, & Piza, 2017; Drawve, Thomas, & Hart, 2017; Hart, Rennison, & Miethe, 2017; Miethe, Troshynski, & Hart, 2017; Rennison & DeKeseredy, 2017; Venger, 2017).…”

Difference and punishment: Ethno-political exclusion, colonial institutional legacies, and incarceration

“…Other researchers reveal similar patterns in democratic as well as non-democratic states (e.g. Miethe et al., 2017; Ruddell, 2005; Ruddell and Urbina, 2004, 2007). Still others examine links between group threat and other forms of punitiveness cross-nationally, such as in terms of increased police funding and presence (Stults and Baumer, 2007) or support for capital punishment (Dambrun, 2007; Jacobs and Carmichael, 2002; Kent, 2010).…”

“…One prominent line of thought in cross-national studies of incarceration draws on the group threat thesis , which points towards racial and ethnic hostility as a predictor of state actions like imprisonment, to explain a positive relationship between the presence of minority groups within a state and incarceration rates cross-nationally. Building on the arguments of scholars such as Herbert Blumer (1958) and Hubert Blalock (1967) regarding racial and ethnic relations, this growing body of research contends that punitiveness—and incarceration in particular—rises in states in which members of dominant groups may perceive threat from rising minority presence (Jacobs and Kleban, 2003; Miethe et al., 2017; Ruddell, 2005; Ruddell and Urbina, 2004, 2007). Incarceration, according to this argument, is a direct response to growing ethnic minority group presence within a state (King and Wheelock, 2007).…”

Sense of Place and Feelings of Safety: Examining Young Adults’ Experiences of their Local Environment using Mobile Surveys

“…; Hart ; Miethe et al. ). Therefore, when considering the opposite outcome to fear of crime (i.e., feelings of safety and security), we should not assume that feelings of safety are caused by, for example, the opposites to known correlates of fear of crime such as incivility.…”

“…This association also implies that a one-unit decrease in incivility would result in some decrease in fear of crime. 6 However, existing case-oriented scholarship (e.g., QCA [Ragin 2013] and CACC [Miethe, Regeoczi, and Hart 2008]) demonstrates that "context matters" and that the relationship between predictor variables and outcome variables can be better defined by causal asymmetry than linear relationships (Hart et al 2017;Hart 2017;Miethe et al 2017). Therefore, when considering the opposite outcome to fear of crime (i.e., feelings of safety and security), we should not assume that feelings of safety are caused by, for example, the opposites to known correlates of fear of crime such as incivility.…”