Homicide and Violent Crime

Mathieu Deflem is Professor of Sociology at the University of South Carolina, USA. He studied Sociology and Anthropology at universities in Belgium, England, and the United States, where he obtained his PhD from the University of Colorado in 1996. His research and teaching interests include sociology of law, policing, terrorism, popular culture, and sociological theory, areas in which he has published widely. He is series editor of Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance.

Contributed by criminal justice and sociology specialists from North America, the 13 chapters in this volume consider key issues and questions related to the sociology of violence and homicide, mainly in the US. They address the role of family and gender, including child murder, the Dallas Domestic Violence Task Force and its response to domestic violence, and female homicide offenders; institutions and identity aspects involved in violent crime, including the relationship between religion and violence in the context of the Manson Family, violence on college campuses, and serious forms of bias violence; the role of police and other state institutions, including trends in homicide clearances, police violence involving minority citizens, how police typically respond to instances of violence, and the role of the American Dream in racial violence; and global and comparative dimensions, including international trends of homicide, the role of poverty and homicide around the world, and strategies to address criminal homicide in Trinidad and Tobago.

• Introduction: Studying Violence and Killing; Mathieu DeflemPart I – Family and Gender1. The Murdering of Children; Melissa J. Tetzlaff-Bemiller 2. Coordinated Community Response: Toward a More Systematic Response to Domestic Violence in an Urban Setting; Denise Paquette Boots, Laura M. Gulledge, Timothy Bray, and Jennifer Wareham 3. Feminist Pathways and Female Homicide Offenders; Alesa Liles and Stacy MoakPart II – Institutions and Identity4. Durkheim, Totemism, and the Manson Family: Theorizing on the Relationship Between Religion and Violence; Danielle Sutton 5. A Decade After Virginia Tech: Considerations of Campus Safety and Security for Higher Education Institutions; Daniel Adrian Doss 6. The Relevance of Bias Violence in the 21st Century; Kayla Allison Part III – Police and State Power7. Solving Homicides: Understanding Trends and Patterns in Police Clearances of Lethal Violence; Wendy C. Regoeczi 8. Police Violence Across the Racial-Spatial Divide; Malcolm D. Holmes 9. A Multi-Level Theory of the State’s Monopoly on Violence: Explaining the Effect of the Police on Violence; Paige Vaughn 10. Considering an “Alternative Capacity to Desire”: Institutional Anomie Theory, the American Dream, and the Ontological Turn; James B. Pratt, Jr. Part IV – Across the Globe11. Global Trends in Homicide; Mateus Rennó Santos and Alexander Testa 12. It is Less about Wealth or Poverty than with Equality and Formal Social Control: An Analysis of the Determinants of the Homicide Rate in 145 Countries of the World; Claire Chabot and Marc Ouimet 13. Murder in a Twin Island Paradise: Trends and Strategies Implemented to Address Criminal Homicide in Trinidad and Tobago; Ericka B. Adams and Claudio G. Vera Sanchez