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19 J. Res. Crime & Delinquency 1 (1982)

handle is hein.journals/jrcd19 and id is 1 raw text is: EDITOR'S COMMENTS For the last decade it has been generally accepted by sophisticated students in the field of delin- quency prevention that there is little direct relationship between delin- quent behavior and religious commitment. Important as grounds for this view was Hirschi and Stark's article appearing in Social Problems, entitled Hellfire and Delinquency. The paper was widely quoted and often cited as the definitive study on the question. In this issue of the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquen- cy, Rodney Stark and two colleagues, Lori Kent and Daniel Doyle, re- examine the question. They conclude that religious belief does indeed have a restraining influence on delinquent behavior; however, in order for it to be made manifest, the environment must be one in which re- ligious belief is the norm. It is in highly secularized communities that the restraining power of religious commitment is seriously undermined. This article is important because of its findings and the implications of those findings in the development of delinquency prevention programs. It is also a superb example of the evolution of research, a process of continued refinement and incremental development. The second article in this issue of the Journal is by Mark Warr, Jack Gibbs, and Maynard Erickson, who describe an attempt to test two theories of criminal law. The first of these, the consensual theory, is that law expresses the fundamental and widely held values and beliefs of society. The second is conflict theory, according to which law repre- sents an expression of the interests of the dominant class in society, a set of interests that often are imposed on a public whose own interests do not coincide with those of the dominant class. The paper is an addition to the growing body of research in the sociology of law which has de- veloped in the last two years. The findings of these researchers, whose work in this area of study is among the most respected in the country, are clearly problematical; and the authors are not inhibited in their conclusions. They assert bluntly that advocates of the two contending theories of criminal law do not deserve further hearings until they curb their appetite for oversimplification. The next three articles shift attention away from the general topic of crime and delinquency and focus on the issue of society's responses to the identified offender. They deal in different ways with one of the most important contemporary questions in penal and sentencing policy. That question concerns, briefly, the extent to which prediction of future behavior should be permitted in decision making about the character and duration of the state's control over those found to have committed an offense. In recent years a number of writers have argued that, be- JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN CRIME AND DELINQUENCY, JANUARY 1982 1

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