Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Catholic University of America, 1938. / "Annotated bibliography": p. [167]-198.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Criminal Justice." Includes bibliographical references (p. 186-194).

Proefschrift--Amsterdam. / "Literatur": p. 269-274.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 170-188).

Diss. (Ph. D.)--Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 357-371).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 304-319).

This study analyzes crime novels written around the turn of the twenty-first century that blur the boundaries between “serious” fiction and genre fiction. I argue that these novels represent violence, not as an isolated event or action, but as a pervasive cultural logic. In other words, they frame violence as a cultural and institutional problem, instead of as a disruptive social anomaly, and they thereby expose violence as a constitutive force in a world and era in which social relations are always already mediated by the disciplinary apparatus of institutions. Novels like Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Nuruddin Farah’s Secrets, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, draw attention to the cultural logic of violence by reproducing conventions associated with more traditional crime fiction—a crime to be solved, a “detective” figure, and the gradual revelation of clues—but these novels break with traditional crime fiction in one important way: they do not follow a trajectory of crime and punishment. Such a trajectory necessarily limits our understanding of violence to isolated actions that can be punished and to individuals who can be reformed. By breaking with the logic of crime and punishment, these novels position violence as a master narrative or as an interpretive lens that invites readers to engage in a critique of institutionalized and systemic violence. This investigation traces how this new practice of crime narrative seeks to exile readers from horizons of expectations that would ordinarily be associated with crime fiction. These contemporary novels constitute a new crime fiction subgenre: a narrative that, through the use of new conventions, forces its readers to confront the limits of canonical forms and to consider violence as a contemporary master narrative. / text

The main purpose of this study is to determine if a Bayesian approach can better capture and provide reasonable predictions for the complex linkage between crime and income inequality. In this research, we conduct a model comparison between classical inference and Bayesian inference. The conventional studies on the relationship between crime and income inequality usually employ regression analysis to demonstrate whether these two issues are associated. However, there seems to be lack of use of Bayesian approaches in regard to this matter. Studying the panel data of China from 1993 to 2009, we found that in addition to a linear mixed effects model, a Bayesian hierarchical model with informative prior is also a good model to describe the linkage between crime rate and income inequality. The choice of models really depends on the research needs and data availability. / text

This thesis conducted a secondary quantitative analysis to test predictors of punitive attitudes about the best overall and youth crime reduction methods in Saskatchewan, and to examine an integrated perspective developed from Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. My research questions were twofold: 1) What are the valid predictors of punitive attitudes toward overall and youth crime respectively? 2) Is there a difference in punitive attitudes between overall crime and youth crime? For my research methodology, I relied on a secondary quantitative analysis of data from Taking the Pulse of Saskatchewan 2012, a survey conducted by the Social Sciences Research Laboratories (SSRL) of the University of Saskatchewan. The data used in this thesis was taken from Section (F), Crime and Public Safety in Saskatchewan, and Section (H), demographics. I examined three types of predictors: demographics, fear of crime, and perception of crime trends. The demographic variables were gender, age, education, marital status, race, and total annual household income. The relationship between these predictors and the public’s punitive attitudes were first examined with a bivariate analysis. Then logistic regression analysis was used to determine the effect of a selected predictor of punitive attitudes when other predictors were controlled. This thesis reported three major findings. First, the mutual predictors of punitive attitudes towards overall and youth crime are age, education, marital status, and perceived crime trends, while gender is significant only for overall crime, and race is significant only for youth crime when other variables are controlled. Secondly, with regard to the magnitude of influence, the variables perceived crime trends and education are the strongest predictors among all the predictors considered in this study, but any single predictor only has small impact on punitive attitudes. Finally, respondents are generally less punitive towards youth crime than overall crime. This thesis revealed that an integrated Bourdieuian perspective used in this study helped link the predictors in a more explanatory manner, and contributed to a more critical and contextual understanding of punitive attitudes. The empirical results reported in this thesis produced knowledge about punitive attitudes in Saskatchewan, and contributed to the literature on predictors of such attitudes.