A Typology of Street Criminal Retaliation

Criminologists have long recognized that retaliatory violence diffuses outward from discrete conflicts, often in contagion-like fashion. No understanding of the source of this spread is possible without first documenting the modalities that fuel it. Retaliation has variation, and it is important to catalog that variation if the concept of crime as social control is to be more effectively understood. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 33 street offenders, and using qualitative techniques of analytic induction, constant comparison, and domain analysis, this article offers a typology of retaliation to refine understanding of a process that at present, remains only loosely developed.