We specify and test a rational choice model of corporate crime. This model includes measures of the perceived costs and benefits of corporate crime (for both the firm and the individual), perceptions of shame, persons' assessment of the opprobrium of the act, and contextual characteristics of the organization. Consistent with this model, we find that intentions to commit four types of corporate crime are affected by sanction threats (formal and informal), moral evaluations, and organizational factors. Net of the various incentives and disincentives for corporate crime, persons' personal moral code was found to be a very important source of inhibition. In fact, when moral inhibitions were high, considerations of the cost and benefit of corporate crime were virtually superfluous. When moral inhibitions were weak, however, persons were deterred by threats of formal and informal sanctions and by organizational context. We contend that theoretical models of corporate crime and public policy efforts must contain both instrumental (threats of punishment) and deontological (appeals to morality) factors.

Evidence that juries treat corporate defendants less favorably than individual defendants is often cited in support of the widely held view that juries are biased against wealthy “deep-pocket” defendants. Such evidence confounds defendant wealth and defendant identity. In two juror simulation experiments involving citizens on jury duty, these factors were separated by manipulating whether the defendant was described as a poor individual, a wealthy individual, or a corporation; the defendant's assets were described identically in the latter two conditions. In Experiment 1, liability was significantly more likely, and awards were significantly greater, for corporate defendants than for wealthy individual defendants, but verdicts against poor versus wealthy individuals did not differ. In Experiment 2, awards were larger against wealthy individuals who engaged in commercial rather than personal activities, and awards in the personal activity condition were larger against corporations than wealthy individuals. There was little evidence for a defendant wealth effect on juror judgments. While juries do appear to treat corporations differently, the explanation may have more to do with citizens' views about the special risks and responsibilities of commercial activity.

Police officers regularly construct their work in terms of a morality that is so pronounced that it must arise from unique aspects of their role in society. I draw on fieldwork conducted in a patrol division of the Los Angeles Police Department to develop an explanation for the prevalence of police morality. Three components of the police function create potent dilemmas that their morality helps ameliorate: the contradiction between the police's ostensible aim to prevent crime and their inability to do so; the imperative that they run roughshod over the ambiguity inherent in most situations they handle; and the fact that they invariably act against at least one citizen's interest, often with recourse to a coercive force that can maim or kill. Reliance on moralistic understandings for the police's mission provides a salve for these difficulties; however, it can also work to harm police-community relations. Paradoxically, the police's reliance on morality can encourage or condone overly aggressive actions that are, in fact, contradictory to the virtuous self-definition officers often construct.

Through presentation of ethnographic research findings on court-appointed defense attorneys, this article examines plea bargaining as a component of a recursive process for deciding whether a case should be settled immediately or proceed further. The decisionmaking process has three types of activities: assessing the offer for a guilty plea, negotiating the terms of a plea bargain, and counseling the defendant and deciding on a course of action. Until a criminal case is actually settled either through a final plea agreement or a jury trial, this decisionmaking process occurs over and over again. Viewed as a component of this recursive process, plea bargaining encompasses multiple episodes of negotiating behavior as well as a wide range of formal litigation proceedings. Perhaps more important, plea bargaining and trial procedures can actually be seen to converge. I conclude that this mode of plea bargaining is not merely an effective method for representing defendants but perhaps equally or more effective than trial. Some important limitations of the findings are also discussed.

This article analyzes the growing trend in legal and sociolegal theory to place a pivotal emphasis on the internal/external distinction. To provide a better understanding for the application of this distinction, the author elaborates on its origins in the philosophy of social sciences. Using detailed legal examples, he then develops a theory of a practice to help serve as an organizing concept for many applications of the distinction. Finally, applying this background and the notion of a practice, the author analyzes the different uses of the distinction in legal and sociolegal theory.

Interrupted time series designs are commonly used to assess the impact of gun control legislation, as well as other legal and policy changes. Three common problems in the use of these designs—(1) selection of an appropriate control series, (2) specification of the intervention model, and (3) specification of the time series studied—raise questions about the validity of the conclusions reached in research on the impact of gun control. We illustrate these problems with a critical reassessment of Loftin et al.'s (1991) evaluation of the 1976 District of Columbia Gun Law. We then use monthly homicide data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Center for Health Statistics to illustrate how careful consideration of these three design issues results in a significantly different conclusion about the effectiveness of the District of Columbia Gun Law.

Recent legislative responses to a perceived increase in hate crimes have resulted in efforts to quantify the rates of occurrence of such crimes. However, there remains little understanding of the processes by which statutory requirements are implemented at the level of front-line personnel like the police. This article examines the situated decisionmaking practices of police detectives in two divisions of a large urban police department charged with collecting official hate crime data. The authors argue that police detectives engage in certain routine practices in order to determine the hate-related status of an incident and that these practices are inflected by the particular institutional arrangements of the divisions and the department in which they operate. They describe in detail the various categorization practices employed in these two divisions and the ways that a seemingly common orientation to the prevalence of hate crimes have differential consequences for the reporting of hate crimes in each division.

This essay examines the restructuring of policing currently taking place in developed democratic societies. It argues that restructuring is occurring under private as well as government auspices and will have profound effects on public safety, equity, human rights, and accountability. These effects are discussed, along with the trade-offs they represent for public policy. The driving forces behind restructuring are fear of crime, the inability of government to satisfy society's longing for security, the commodification of security, the rise of mass private property, and cultural individualism. The essay concludes with a prediction about the future of policing and suggests policies that are needed to avoid restructuring's harmful effects.

We discuss capriciousness in decisions to charge homicide defendants with capital crimes. We propose using Shannon Information to assess capriciousness in a charging system and apply Shannon Information to analyze new data from San Francisco County, California. We show that about two-thirds of the potential systemic capriciousness is removed by the explanatory variables available. The one-third remaining is dependent on inherently unstable features of charging practices that necessarily produce capriciousness.

Numerous commentaries and empirical studies have suggested that while a substantial proportion of incoming law students are interested in careers in “public interest law,” by the time they graduate only a small minority take jobs in that sector. However, none of these studies have been based on a panel study having data on both job preference before students began their studies and information about the actual first job taken. This Research Note fills that gap by updating an earlier study of the University of Wisconsin Law School class of 1976. We find that while over half the respondents expressed some interest in public interest law before beginning law study, only 13% actually took a job in legal aid, as a public defender, or in a nonprofit organization. Analysis of respondents who initially expressed an interest in nontraditional jobs shows that political orientation and participation in a social action law program during law school are the strongest predictors of who in fact took a nontraditional job.

The strength of research designs is relative. Compared with true experiments, quasi-experimental designs are weak. Compared with cross-sectional designs, they are strong. One can further strengthen inferences from quasi-experiments by examining a broader pattern of data. We agree with Britt, Kleck, and Bordua when they recommend that researchers expand the range of inquiry. We disagree with them when they recommend that researchers restrict it. The District of Columbia study is largely consistent with the available evidence, but it does not prove that restrictive handgun licensing will always reduce firearm deaths.

McDowall, Loftin, and Wiersma (1996) avoid our criticisms of the univariate interrupted time series design (ITSD) by misstating our criticisms, by addressing what they claim we “implied” rather than what we plainly stated, and by ignoring crucial points in our article in this issue (Britt et al. 1996). We reiterate: McDowall et al.'s (1992) conclusions regarding the alleged efficacy of the Washington, D.C., handgun ban (mislabeled by McDowall et al. as a licensing law) collapsed once any of three improvements were made to their analysis: (1) use of a more appropriate control series, (2) use of a more appropriate, theoretically based specification of the intervention model, and (3) use of an alternative, extended time series beyond the period studied by McDowall et al. (1992). Nothing McDowall et al. (1996) write has rebutted our assertions.

In measuring the impact of court-ordered prison reforms on state budgets, Taggart (1989) challenged Harriman and Straussman's (1983) conclusion that court decisions have affected state spending for corrections. This Research Note explores important questions left unanswered by both studies: (1) What impact did the courts have on cases litigated during the 1980s? (2) Why are the courts able to influence spending in some states but not others? The results support Taggart's conclusion that spending for corrections follows an incremental pattern. Judicial influence on state budgets declined during the 1980s as courts narrowed the scope of prison reforms.