Religious ecology, floaters, and crime: the links between social capital, institutionally disengaged youth, and homicide

ABSTRACT

We consider two distinct research streams in macro-criminology. The first is how religious ecology, articulated as bridging and bonding capital, is linked to the rates of violence. The second concerns how institutionally disconnected youth, known as “floaters,” are highly vulnerable to violence because they fall outside their community’s umbrella of social control. Using county-level data on religious ecology, institutional engagement, and violence, we connect the two ideas with the following theoretical story line. When a community’s religious ecology is characterized by more bonding capital (versus bridging capital), such places provided fewer institutional entry points for crime-prone youth, thus increasing the proportion of floaters in the area. Because these floaters lack institutional social control, we should observe higher rates of violence as a result. Our analysis offers a social control mechanism by which social capital influences the rates of violence at the macro-level. We discuss the implications of our findings.

Notes

¹ We also tested the model with the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, with similar results.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth E. Brault

ELIZABETH E. BRAULT is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Louisiana State University and a member of the Crime and Policy Evaluation Research Group (CAPER). Her primary research interests involve social capital, religious ecology and returning citizens’ recidivism risk and needs. She currently serves on a Department of Justice grant in conjunction with the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections and spearheads the creation of and validation of a Needs tool to identify and address returning citizens’ needs to aid their successful reentry into their communities.

Edward S. Shihadeh

EDWARD S. SHIHADEH is a Professor of Sociology and Criminology at LSU, and is the coordinator of the Crime and Policy Evaluation Research Group (CAPER). He is an LSU senior Rainmaker Scholar, Distinguished Faculty recipient, and winner of the Chancellors Technology Transfer Award. Dr. Shihadeh received a large federal grant to develop algorithms that generate risk and needs scores for the Louisiana offender population. His research interests include race and crime, Latino immigration and crime, and the use of predictive analytics in a social context.