German and U.S. incident-level homicide files are extracted from the Freiburg Cohort Study and Houston, Texas, respectively, to compare characteristics of criminal homicide perpetrated by persons ages 14 to 30 years between the mid-1980s and 2001. Findings indicate that many of the characteristics of offenders, victims, their relationships to one another, and methods of killing are not culture specific, particularly for female offenders. However, despite a substantial difference between the two areas in overall homicide levels, the offending rates for this 14- to 30-year-old group are 5 to 6 times the overall national rates in each country. Findings further indicate that peak ages for homicide offending by males are 2 to 5 years older for German nationals and immigrants than for specific racial and/or ethnic subgroups of U.S. offenders. Support is found in both countries for the concept of an aging out of crime in the case of homicide.
Brewer, V.E., Damphousse, K.R., & Adkinson, C.D. (1998). The role of juveniles in urban homicide: The case of Houston, 1990-1994. Homicide Studies , 2, 321-339.
2.
Bullard, R.D. (1987). Invisible Houston: The Black experience in boom and bust. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.
3.
Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2001, March 15). Homicide trends in the U.S. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Available at www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/
4.
Cheatwood, D. (1995). Drug policy as a cause of violence: The drug war in America and implications for Europe. European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law, and Criminal Justice, 3(1), 239-251.
5.
City of Houston, Planning & Development Office. (1996, June). Economic profile for Houston, Texas. Houston, TX: Author.
6.
Clark, D.E., & Wildner, M. (2000). Violence and fear of violence in East and West Germany. Social Science and Medicine, 51, 373-379.
7.
Elder, G.H. (1985). Life course dynamics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
8.
European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics (FR Document #PC-S-ST [99] 8 DEF). (1999). Strasbourg, Germany: Council of Europe European Committee on Crime Problems .
9.
Farrington, D.P. (1986). Age and crime. In M. Tonry & N. Morris (Eds.), Crime and justice, an annual review of research (Vol. 7, pp. 189-250). Chicago: University of Chicago Press
10.
Federal Bureau of Investigation.(Multiple years). Uniform crime reports. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice.
11.
Frase, R. (2001). Sentencing in Germany and the United States: Comparing apfels with apples (Research in Brief). Freiburg, Germany: Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law.
12.
Gartner, R. (1990). The victims of homicide: A temporal and cross-national comparison. American Sociological Review, 55, 92-106.
13.
Glueck, S., & Glueck, E. (1950). Unraveling juvenile delinquency. New York: Commonwealth Fund.
14.
Grundies, V., Höfer, S., & Tetal, C. (2001). Basisdaten der Freiburger Kohortenstudie: Prävalenz und Inzidenz polizeilicher [Basic data from the Freiburg Cohort Study: Crime prevalence and incidence based on police records]. Freiburg , Germany: Max-Planck-Institute.
15.
Johnson, R.A., Hoffmann, J.P., Su, S.S., & Gerstein, D.R. (1997). Growth curves of deviant behavior in early adolescence: A multilevel analysis. Journal of QuantitativeCriminology, 13, 429-467.
16.
Killias, M. (1993). Gun ownership, suicide and homicide: An international perspective. In A. Alvazzi del Frate, U. Zvekic, & J. J. M. Van Dijk (Eds.), Understanding crime: Experiences of crime and crime control (UNICRI, Publication No. 49, pp. 289-302 ). Rome: UNICRI.
17.
Killias, M. (2000, November). Guns, violent crime, and suicide in 21 countries: Are guns a threat to women? Paper presented to the American Society of Criminology Annual Meeting, Los Angeles.
18.
LaFree, G. (1995). Race and crime trends in the United States, 1946-1990 . In D. F. Hawkins (Ed.), Ethnicity, race, and crime: Perspectives across time and place (pp. 169-193). Albany: State University of New York Press.
19.
———. (1999). A summary and review of cross-national comparative studies of homicide. In M. D. Smith & M. A. Zahn (Eds.), Homicide: A sourcebook of social research (pp. 125-146). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
20.
Lattimore, P.K., Trudeau, J., Riley, J.K., Leiter, J., & Edwards, S. (1997). Homicide in eight U.S. cities: Trends, context and policy implications (NCJ 167262). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice.
21.
Lester, D. (1991). Crime as opportunity: A test of the hypothesis with European homicide rates. British Journal of Criminology , 31, 186-188.
22.
Lundsgaarde, H.P. (1977). Murder in space city: A cultural analysis of Houston homicide patterns. New York: Oxford University Press.
23.
Lynch, J. (1988). A comparison of prison use in England, Canada, West Germany, and the United States: A limited test of the punitive hypothesis . Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, 79, 180-217.
24.
Nagin, D.S., Farrington, D.P., & Moffitt, T.E. (1995). Life-course trajectories of different types of offenders. Criminology, 33, 111-139.
25.
Osgood, D.W. (2000). Poisson-based regression analysis of aggregate crime rates. Journal of QuantitativeCriminology, 16, 21-43.
26.
Rademacher, L. (1994). Burger bewafen sich [Burger bewafen to itself] . Focus, 12, 74.
27.
Sampson, R.J., & Laub, J.H. (1993). Crime in the making. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
28.
Savelsberg, J.J. (1995). International perspectives on gun control. N.Y. Law School: Journal of International Comparative Law, 15 (2 & 3), 259-263.
29.
Savolainen, J. (2000). Inequality, welfare state, and homicide: Further support for the institutional anomie theory. Criminology, 38, 1021-1042.
30.
Sessar, K. (1981). Rechtliche und soziale Prozesse einer Definition der Totungskriminalitat [Conditions of a definition of criminal acts]. Freiburg, Germany: Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law.
31.
Statistisches Bundesamt. (1991). Statistics for 1991 for the German Republic. Stuttgart, Germany: Metzler Poeschel.
32.
Statistisches Landesamt Badem-Württemberg. ( 1996). Statistics for Baden-Württemberg, 1995 (Vol. 506). Stuttgart, Germany: Metzler Poeschel.
Titterington, V.B., & Abbott, B.P. (2004). Space city revisited: Victim-offender relationship in Houston homicide. Violence & Victims, 19, 83-95.
35.
U.S. Bureau of the Census. (1990). 1990 census of population and housing. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
36.
van Tubergen, F., Maas, I., & Flap, H. (2004). The economic incorporation of immigrants in 18 Western societies: Origin, destination, and community effects. American Sociological Review, 69, 704-727.
37.
World Health Organization. (1995). World health statistics annual. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization.
38.
Zimring, F.E., & Hawkins, G. (1997). Crime is not the problem: Lethal violence in America . New York: Oxford University Press .
