April 2022: Special Issue – Inside the Criminology of Carlo Morselli
Volume 64, No. 2 | Go to abstracts
Articles
Page 1
Inside the Criminology of Carlo Morselli
Martin Bouchard, Frédéric Ouellet
Page 7
Anomie Reconsidered: Exaggerated Aspirations, Risk-Taking and Criminal Achievement
Pierre Tremblay, Carlo Morselli, Mathieu Charest
Page 35
Getting By: Low Wages and Income Supplementation
Alexandra Nur, Holly Nguyen
Page 59
The Effect of Prosocial and Antisocial Relationships Structure on Offenders’ Optimism towards Desistance
Anne-Marie Nolet, Yanick Charette, Fanny Mignon
Page 82
Exploring the Reciprocal Relationship Between Serious Victimization and Criminogenic Networks
Hana Ryu, Evan McCuish
Page 101
The Interurban Network of Criminal Collaboration in Canada
Peter J. Carrington, Alexander V. Graham
Abstracts
Inside the Criminology of Carlo Morselli
Martin Bouchard, Frédéric Ouellet
Carlo Morselli’s research inspired numerous scholars around the world to integrate criminal achievement indicators and social network data into their research programs. As a professor of criminology for over 20 years at the Université de Montréal, Morselli was part of a generation of scholars who acted as brokers between Canada’s two official languages. This volume of the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice brings together research inspired by his legacy. Morselli’s interests were diverse; we selected manuscripts revolving around two major themes in his career: the development of criminal achievement as a conceptual and empirical framework, and the innovative use of social network data in new contexts of criminological interest, such as the role of social networks in individuals’ relative optimism towards desistance, or in future victimization.
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Anomie Reconsidered: Exaggerated Aspirations, Risk-Taking and Criminal Achievement
Pierre Tremblay, Carlo Morselli, Mathieu Charest
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Getting By: Low Wages and Income Supplementation
Alexandra Nur, Holly Nguyen
We examine income-generating strategies of “getting by” in a sample of young adults who have an offending record. First, we examine if human capital, conventional social capital, and criminal social capital are associated with decisions to supplement legal income with income from informal or illegal activities. Second, we explore which of those factors differentiate supplementing with informal activities from supplementing with illicit activities. Random effects linear probability models are used to analyze a subsample of the Pathways to Desistance Study, a longitudinal data set of adolescents who have begun the transition to adulthood. We find that, among individuals in low-wage jobs, neither conventional social capital nor conventional human capital was related to supplementing legal work with informal work. Criminal social capital and low legal wages in the prior year increased the probability of supplementing legal work with illicit income-generating activities. The current study corroborates previous findings that many individuals are engaged in various income-generating activities. Different mechanisms are associated with decisions to supplement licit work with informal work as opposed to supplementing licit work with income-generating crime.
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The Effect of Prosocial and Antisocial Relationships Structure on Offenders’ Optimism towards Desistance
Anne-Marie Nolet, Yanick Charette, Fanny Mignon
At the end of his career, Carlo Morselli started to be interested in how the structure of social relations could influence offenders’ prospects for reintegration and desistance. This article analyzes the data from his research project on that topic. The impacts of offenders’ relationships have traditionally been discussed from a dichotomous, risk-centered perspective opposing antisocial and prosocial peers. Social network studies allow a step back and a global view of the contexts and processes in which relationships shape trajectories. This article focuses on the ego networks of offenders as they reintegrate with society and sheds light on triadic patterns associated with increased optimism toward desistance. Interviews were conducted with residents of halfway houses (48 men and 24 women), with offenders followed by a community agency (25 men), and with incarcerated youth offenders (24 male teenagers). Structured interviews addressed multiple aspects of the lives of the offenders, including their social relations, prosocial and antisocial. A mixed-method approach was used to understand the influence of social relations in the perception of desistance potential success. First, logistic regressions were used to assess the effect of individual’s and egocentric networks’ characteristics on optimism toward desistance. Second, case studies of ego network sociograms illustrate the results and suggest hypotheses about processes that may explain them. Results show that optimism is higher when prosocial personal networks are denser, and is lower when antisocial networks are open, and as antisocial peers are connected to prosocial ties. The implications of these patterns for offenders’ desistance and network-based interventions are discussed.
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Exploring the Reciprocal Relationship Between Serious Victimization and Criminogenic Networks
Hana Ryu, Evan McCuish
Reducing explanations of victimization to a person’s risky lifestyle has stalled growth in theories of victimization. Drawing from Carlo Morselli’s contributions to social network analysis, the current study extended past research on community-based co-offending networks and victimization in two ways. First, the current study more comprehensively measured a person’s criminogenic network by also examining the contribution of conflict ties and social ties to victimization. Second, we investigated whether serious victimization was prospectively associated with social network characteristics. Data were used on 99 participants from the Incarcerated Serious Violent Young Offender Study who had criminogenic connections within the city of Surrey, BC. Time-dependent covariate survival analysis was used to model the relationship between network characteristics and time to victimization. Time-series ordinary least squares regression was used to examine whether serious victimization predicted network characteristics. Participants with a greater number of co-offending ties experienced serious victimization significantly later. As evidence of the reciprocal nature of the victimization–network relationship, victimization predicted a greater number of future criminogenic connections in the co-offending tie, social tie, and prison tie networks. Findings have implications for network-based intervention models.
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The Interurban Network of Criminal Collaboration in Canada
Peter J. Carrington, Alexander V. Graham
The interurban network of criminal collaboration in Canada is described, and possible explanations for its structure are explored. The data include all police-reported co-offences in the 32 major cities of Canada during 2006–09. Component analysis and graph drawings in network space and in geospace elucidate the structure of the network. Quadratic assignment procedure multiple regressions, repeated separately on the networks of instrumental and noninstrumental co-offences, test hypotheses about possible determinants of the network structure. The cities form one connected component, containing two clusters connected by a link between Toronto and Vancouver. One cluster, centred on the triad of Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa, comprises the cities in Ontario and Quebec, with weak links to cities in the Atlantic provinces. The other cluster, centred on Vancouver, comprises the cities in the four western provinces. The structure is strongly correlated with the residential mobility of the general population, which in turn is strongly correlated with intercity distances. The correlation with mobility is less strong for instrumental than for noninstrumental crimes. The structure of this co-offending network can be explained by criminals’ routine activities, namely ordinary residential mobility, but the alternative explanation of purposive interurban criminal collaboration is more plausible for instrumental crime.