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15 J. Ethnicity Crim. Just. 1 (2017)

handle is hein.journals/wecj15 and id is 1 raw text is: JOURNAL OF ETHNICITY IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE 2017, VOL. 15, NO. 1, 1-20 Routledge http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15377938.2016.1261059 Taylor&Francis Group Acculturation and fear of crime among Hispanics Fei Luoa and Jihong Solomon Zhaob aDepartment of Social Sciences, Texas A&M International University, Laredo, Texas, USA; bDepartment of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas, USA ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Fear of crime has attracted significant attention in academic Received 11 February 2016 research. One area that has largely been overlooked concerns Accepted 11 November 2016 fear of crime correlates among Hispanics, the largest ethnic KEYWORDS minority group in the United States. Their unique cultural Acculturation; Hispanics; background as immigrants make them different from Non- crime-specific fear at home; Hispanic Whites and African Americans, and they all go through fear of crime in the the acculturation process to some degree. However, the neighborhood influence of acculturation has seldom been incorporated into the analysis. The current study attempts to use the acculturation thesis to examine two different types of fear among Hispanic residents in Houston, Texas. The findings suggest that acculturation is a significant predictor of crime- specific fear at home, but not of fear of crime in the neighborhood. Introduction Public fear of crime emerged as a serious social problem in the late 1960s, when the President's Commission on Crime reported that fear was widespread and under- mined the quality of life in American society (Doran & Burgess, 2012). Public opinion polls in the 1970s found that 44% of citizens were worried about walking alone at night because of fear. Today, the drop in the levels of public fear is mar- ginal because 34% of citizens reported similar levels of fear (Smith, Marsden, & Hout, 2013). A direct consequence of public fear is that people adopt avoidance behaviors and withdraw from social activities to minimize the risk of victimization (Lane & Meeker, 2004). Besides, fear of crime undermines social trust among neighbors and causes a series of detrimental influences on people's psychological health (Ferraro & LaGrange, 1992; Stafford, Chandola, & Marmot, 2007). Researchers speculated that the negative influence of fear of crime may have sur- passed crime itself (Farrall, Bannister, Ditton, & Gilchrist, 2000; Warr, 2000). CONTACT Fei Luo fei.Iuo@tamiu.edu Texas A&M International University, Department of Social Sciences, Laredo, TX 78041-1900. Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/wecj. 0 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

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