ABSTRACT
At the macro-social level, historical, cultural, and structural conditions create systematic variation between and within societies in the attribution of blame. One of the most ambitious macro-social theories of homicide has been developed by Jack P. Gibbs and Mark C. Stafford. Robert K. Merton's paper addressed violent crime only elliptically, in describing the sociological implications of the values of "business class culture." Marxist theories thus bridge macro- and individual levels of explanation. Some studies of imprisonment rates of whites and non-whites in states and regions of the United States suggest that the seriousness of crimes for which official actions are taken accounts for most of the variation in racial differentials in arrests, convictions, and sentencing. Crime patterns are interpreted "in terms of the location of targets and the movement of offenders and victims in time and space". The goal is to account for predatory crime that involves direct contact between offender and victim.
