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OP-10.
- AGGRESSION AND LAW
OP-10.1.-MANAGING
THE THREAT OF VICTIM RETALIATION: DRUG ROBBERS AND INFORMAL SANCTION THREATS
Topalli,
V., Wright*, R. and Jacobs*,
B.
Department of Criminal Justice, Georgia State University, USA. *
Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Missouri at St.
Louis, USA
The purpose of this study was to address a gap in the criminological
research on active offenders; The notion that risk of victim
retaliation--arguably the ultimate informal sanction -- influences criminal
decision-making. On its face, retaliation would appear to be a serious
consequence of many offenses, especially those perpetrated against victims who
themselves are involved in crime. It would seem reasonable to assume that
offenders who engage in these activities risk swift and potentially fatal
consequences at the hands of their victims. Paradoxically, there is the
observation that a major benefit of preying on fellow criminals is that they
cannot go to the police (e.g., Wright and Decker, 1997). Why should offenders
elect to reduce their chances of getting arrested at the cost of increasing
their odds of being killed? What is it that allows them to accept this
putatively greater risk? Despite ample speculation on their part, criminologists
lack any systematic empirical data on whether and, if so, how the threat of
victim retaliation influences criminal behavior before, during, and after
offenses. This represents a crucial gap in our understanding of both deterrence
and of the contagion-like processes through which violence is contracted and
contained (Loftin, 1986). Data were drawn from in-depth, systematic interviews
with 25 currently active drug robbers recruited from the streets of St. Louis,
Missouri. To be considered an active drug robber, an offender theoretically had
to have (1) robbed at least one drug dealer in the last three months, and (2)
committed at least three such robberies in the previous year. The drug robbers
were located through the efforts of two street-based field recruiters, both of
whom were themselves members of the criminal underworld. Our findings from these
interviews indicate that drug robbers engage in a set of strategically oriented
behaviors we refer to as Retaliation Threat Management Techniques (including the
use of Intimidation, Anonymity Maintenance, and Hypervigilance) in order to
enhance the enactment of their violent crimes and to control the ability of
their victims to gain retribution post-offense.
OP-10.2.-VICTIMS
AND VENDETTAS: LAW AS AN INSTRUMENT
OF REVENGE IN EARLY ENGLISH COMMON LAW
Greenberg,
J.
Department of History, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA
Although we in our modern litigious society are accustomed to the
practice of using law in order to harass our enemies and seek vengeance
against those who have harmed us, we are less aware of the historical roots
of this phenomenon. This paper
explores the medieval and early modern English common law tradition
that underlies the practice. As
it happened, medieval law was particularly well suited for such a use, since the
appeal of felony–in essence a private suit for a criminal wrong–permitted
victims and their kin to vent anger and aggression by carrying out a legal
vendetta against the alleged harm-doer. Prominent
among those who waged these vendettas were parents of murdered children, widows
of murdered husbands, and peasants who wanted to cheat their lords out of
manorial dues. Evidence suggests
that in most of these cases anger played an important role in motivating
plaintiffs who brought appeals of felony. Two
related themes–the emerging distinction between crime and tort, and the
state’s attempt to monopolize the prosecution of serious offenses–are also
treated, since they led to the decline of such appeals.
The paper concludes that while victims and their kin eventually lost the
right to seek vengeance, in the end they gained the valuable advantage of being
represented by the might and power of the state.
OP-10.3.-AN
EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF THE PERCEPTUAL CHARACTERISTICS OF DISPOSITIONALLY
AGGRESSIVE INDIVIDUALS: STREET ROBBERS' JUDGMENTS OF POINT LIGHT DISPLAYS
Topalli,
V.
Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Georgia State University
- and The National Consortium on Violence Research.
In psychology, empirical research in aggression and hostility has been
carried out in the laboratory using
college student populations. In criminology, the study of aggression has been
limited to its role in crime. The present study represents an attempt to
integrate the experimental methodology of social and perceptual psychology with
qualitative methods of criminology to explore the perceptual characteristics of
dispositionally aggressive individuals -- street robbers. Active street robbers (recruited off the streets of
St. Louis) were administered standardized psychological measures of aggressive
attitudes including The Aggression Questionnaire (Buss & Perry, 1994) and
the Vengeance Scale (Stuckless and Goranson, 1992; previously validated on
non-criminal subject populations). They were then asked to describe specialized
video-taped visual models depicting simple human social interactions, called
Point Light Displays (PLDs). Previous research using PLDs indicates they are
capable of eliciting judgments of hostility and aggression from individuals
based on physical and affective stimulus features (Topalli & O’Neal,
1995). Responses from the street robber group were compared with those from two
control groups; demographically matched control subjects (individuals who live
in the same neighborhoods as our street robbers but were not offenders
themselves) and a second, more traditional control group comprised of
individuals recruited from undergraduate criminology and psychology classes at
the University of Missouri–St. Louis. In comparison to demographically matched
and experimental control participants street robbers scored significantly higher
on aggression measures. Also, a significant relationship between these measures
and PLD content judgments was evidenced. Finally, street robbers were more
likely than both control groups to describe the PLDs as containing firearms and
weapons, and depicting street violence and victimization. We contend that these
results are most consistent with a motivation-based selective perception model
of cognitive functioning, in which an individual's environment and
environment-specific behavioral repertoire determine how ambiguous social
interactions are.