Institute of Criminology Public Seminars: 'Work and Crime: Mechanisms of Desistance'

Speaker: Professor Julie Horney, Penn State University.

Research over the last decade has provided strong evidence of an inverse relationship between work and crime at the individual level. In spite of the accumulated evidence that work can play an important role in curtailing criminal behaviour, we know relatively little at present about the mechanisms through which work affects individual involvement in crime, especially among serious adult offenders. In this seminar Professor Horney will describe a study that aims to advance our understanding of the relationship between work and crime through an analysis of monthly employment and offending histories of a sample of males sentenced to a state correctional institution. Employing a fixed-effects approach that focuses on within-person change, the study asks whether criminal involvement varies concurrently with the characteristics of particular jobs held, and whether the extent of criminal involvement depends on the degree of personal commitment to those jobs. The study also provides the first empirical assessment of a routine activities framework by determining whether any observed employment effects are mediated by changes in time spent in leisure activities that are likely to provide situational inducements to crime.

Julie Horney is Professor of Crime, Law and Justice in the Department of Sociology at Penn State University. She received her BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a PhD in psychology from the University of California at San Diego. Her research in the areas of criminal case processing, legal impact analysis, and individual patterns of criminal and violent behaviour has been funded by the National Institute of Justice and the National Science Foundation, and reports of that work have been published in journals such as Criminology, the American Sociological Review, and the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. She is the co-author (with Cassia Spohn) of Rape Law Reform: A Grassroots Revolution and Its Impact (Plenum, 1995). She served in 2004-05 as President of the American Society of Criminology and is also an ASC Fellow. In her current research she has used life event calendars to explore individual patterns of violence among incarcerated male and female offenders. She is interested in situational analyses of crime and violence that focus on the contemporaneous influences of local life circumstances on criminal involvement.

All seminars start at 5.30pm,and are held in Seminar Room B3, Institute of Criminology, Sidgwick Ave, Cambridge, CB3 9DA. A drinks reception in the basement foyer will follow this seminar for attendees.

The IoC Public Seminar Series is open to all interested in attending, with no ticket required. If you wish to be added to the seminar mailing list, please contact: Joanne Garner, on: jf225@cam.ac.uk