Darrell Steffensmeier receives American Society of Criminology award

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Darrell Steffensmeier, the John Kramer Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Penn State, recently received one of his field’s most prestigious honors.

Steffensmeier was named the recipient of the American Society of Criminology’s (ASC) 2023 Edwin H. Sutherland Award. Established in 1960, the award recognizes outstanding scholarship within the field of criminology. According to ASC, the award “may be based on a single outstanding book or work, on a series of theoretical or research contributions, or on the accumulated contributions by a senior scholar.”

In addition to receiving the award, Steffensmeier presented a lecture at ASC’s annual meeting in Philadelphia in November and will write the lead article for the winter issue of the society's flagship journal Criminology.

“The award was very special,” Steffensmeier said. “First, because Sutherland’s writings had a large influence on my research and writings. Second, because the award was also a recognition of colleagues, current and former students, and my family — all of whom were major players in my ‘criminological’ life and career.”

A faculty member at University since the mid-1970s, Steffensmeier’s research has focused primarily on how stratification — gender, age, race, class, place — and culture influence crime levels and societal-legal responses to crime. He and fellow researchers Jessie Slepicka at Penn State, Jennifer Schwartz at Washington State University and Hua Zhong at The Chinese University of Hong Kong recently published the article, “Twenty-First Century Trends in Girls’ Violence and the Gender Gap: Triangulated Findings from Official and Unofficial Longitudinal Sources,” in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence.

Building upon previous research conducted by Steffensmeier going back to the 1970s, the study examined 21st century trends in adolescent girls’ violence according to data obtained from the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) arrest and juvenile court referral statistics; National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) victimization data; and three sources of self-reported violent offending: Monitoring the Future, Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System and National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

“This article is an update to previous research I’ve published on trends in girls’ violence going back to 1980, which I then updated in the early 1990s and early 2000s,” Steffensmeier said. “Gender and crime is something I’ve been researching for really half a century — I published my first research on it in the 1970s. I was one of the first to question the argument that the women’s movement and gender equality would lead to a lot more crime.”

While media outlets in recent years have reported on a purported narrowing of the gender gap in terms of violent crime among boys and girls, the recent study found no systemic change in the gender gap when examined across four categories of violent crime — homicide, simple assault, aggravated assault and the Violent Index, which is the sum of arrests for homicide, aggravated assault and robbery.

However, two divergent patterns emerged over the past several decades, one showing a small decline in female-to-male arrests for homicide and the other showing a modest rise in female-to-male arrests for simple assault, prompting further investigation and clarification of official as opposed to non-official data sources. Official sources refer to data collected by government-sponsored agencies — UCR arrest statistics and juvenile-court referral statistics — that are a by-product of underlying violent behaviors of girls and changes in enforcement practices.

Notably, other nationally representative sources of information collected independent of law enforcement indicate little, if any, change in the gender gap in girls’ and boys’ violence levels including for simple assault, according to the researchers. These sources, including reports of assault victims in NCVSs, self-reports of violence by adolescents in Monitoring the Future surveys and additional self-report surveys independent of law enforcement, also showed significant declines in both girls’ and boys’ violence. Recent violence rates are about half the size compared to the early 2000s, according to Steffensmeier.

“I see our study as a bearer of good news,” Steffensmeier said. “There has been little or no change in the gender gap and declining levels of violent offending among teen youth of both sexes.”

A former researcher for the Pennsylvania Crime Commission and past president of the International Association for Study of Organized Crime, Steffensmeier has received numerous grants through the years, including a recent one from the National Institute of Justice to study the causes of serious forms of white-collar corporate financial crime.

He’s also the author of several books, including “The Fence: In the Shadow of Two Worlds” and “Confessions of a Dying Thief: Understanding Criminal Careers and Illegal Enterprise,” which received awards from the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the American Society of Criminology, respectively.

Steffensmeier said he plans to retire from University at the end of the 2023-24 academic year. Nevertheless, he remains fully committed to his research, which includes his current book project, “Are Women Changing the World of Crime?”

“I plan to continue working on projects with colleagues and former students,” he said. “I’ve slowed a bit with age, but I still have some fire in the belly.”