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Congressional Record S. 15956 - Crime Control, Compensation for Victims of Crime

Abstract: The concerns of feminist and radical writers for women as victims of crime are set out. Their criticisms of quantitative work in general and the British Crime Survey in particular are mentioned. Data are presented from the survey showing that women victims of personal crime disproportionately suffer at the hands of people they know well, and of husbands especially. Such crimes are reported to the police less than crimes against males, and this is shown not to be an artefact of the degree of injury caused. The paper's purpose is to show that survey data, with all their imperfections, can be used to address the issues of concern.

The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013-2017) has given national consciousness to the problematic treatment of sexual offences in Australia's past. Yet there has been little historical research into the policing, prosecution and punishment of those crimes. This book examines Australia's treatment of sexual crimes in the 1950s, a decade well known for its political and social conservatism, its prudish views on morality, and its prescriptive gender roles for men and women. Fewer would know that this same decade saw soaring arrests, mounting criminal prosecutions, and intensifying public debates about how to deal with sexual offenders. Or that sexual offences on children attracted the most concentrated state attention and public concern. Sex Crimes in the Fifties uncovers this new history by drawing on transcripts of hundreds of criminal proceedings and extensive research in criminal justice archives. We examine the criminal trial itself, exploring how prosecutors, defence counsel, witnesses, juries and judges understood sexual crimes. We consider the experience of women testifying in rape trials, the prosecution of sexual crimes against children, the court's treatment of recent immigrants, the prosecution and punishment of homosexual men, the influence of psychiatric evidence, and the increasing public debates over the 'sex offender'. We show that the 1950s was indeed foundational to many of our contemporary beliefs about sexual crimes. This book makes a major contribution to our historical and socio-legal knowledge about sexual offences and criminal prosecution. It will be of interest to historians, criminologists, sociologists, and legal scholars as well as general readers interested in the treatment of these crimes in our past.

This paper assembles some theoretical resources for a project that investigates the ways in which thinking about politics has since the 1970s been bound up with thinking and action around crime. Such investigation is hampered by a dominant (neo-liberal) narrative of governance that tends to reduce crime policy to a 'contest' between tactics and technique. In contrast, we establish a political framework for theorizing crime and its control. This framework calls for close interpretive analysis of the ways in which disputes about the crime question are always in part contests between different political ideologies and the meaning and significance of their defining concepts. By revisiting penal developments of recent several decades with these questions in mind, one can get closer to the heart of what is at stake when crime is being discussed and acquire a better sense of why crime and its control are legitimately the subject of politics.

Our democracy is based on the existence of political parties that need to finance their activities. And this matter is not exempt from difficulties. Designing policies to regulate the way in which they obtain funds is an issue that always matters political theorists and has its correlation in the lack of uniform legislation on how it should be financed. But this issue presents an additional problem: the existence of corrupt practices in the way funds are obtained, and the appearance on the scene of organized crime, as a new patron in the functioning of politics. Fighting against this reality is a challenge, because corruption, as well as organized crime undermine public institutions and submerge a large part of the population into poverty and marginalization. Therefore, it is essential to design effective policies to combat both phenomena, which in many cases overlap each other. These issues will be analyzed in this work. ; Nuestra democracia se sustenta en la existencia de partidos políticos. Estos, para su funcionamiento necesitan financiar su actividad, lo que no está exento de problemas. Diseñar políticas que regulen la manera en que obtienen fondos es una cuestión que no deja de ocupar a los teóricos políticos y que tiene su correlato en la falta de una legislación uniforme acerca de cómo debe costearse su funcionamiento. Pero esta cuestión presenta un problema adicional: la existencia de prácticas corruptas en la manera de financiarse, y con la aparición en escena del crimen organizado, como nuevo mecenas en el funcionamiento de la política. Luchar contra esta realidad es un desafío, ya que tanto la corrupción como la criminalidad organizada, socavan las instituciones públicas y sumergen a gran parte de la población en la pobreza y la marginalidad. Por ello, diseñar políticas eficaces para combatir ambos fenómenos, que en muchos casos se solapan, es imprescindible. Este trabajo estará dedicado a analizar, precisamente, las cuestiones anteriormente mencionadas.

Based on the theoretical notion that racial hierarchy influences inequality in criminal justice outcomes, previous crime clearance studies have included victims' race as a salient predictor of clearance. However, Asian American victims are seldom studied, often dropped from the analysis or combined as "other" with smaller racial groups. The unique and dialectical position of Asian Americans in the U.S. racial stratification system, simultaneously considered as "honorary White" and stigmatized as "perpetual foreigner" and "yellow peril," should attract more research interest in the area of racial inequality in criminal justice outcomes. Using National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) data, the current study examines racial/ethnic differences in crime clearance by arrest, with special attention given to Asian victims in comparison to White, Black, Hispanic, and Native American victims. The survival analysis found no statistically significant difference in crime clearance between White and Asian victims, with their clearance likelihood higher than for victims from other minority groups. The current analysis also found that the use of a simpler White/non-White dichotomy or placement of Asians in a broad "other" category risks obscuring important differences in crime clearance between Asians and other minority groups.

Since December 2008, police forces in the UK have published crime statistics using an online crime mapping tool (www.police.uk). The drivers behind this were to help improve the credibility and confidence that the public had in police-reported crime levels, address perceptions of crime, promote community engagement and empowerment, and support greater public service transparency and accountability. This article captures the policy rationale behind this initiative, and draws together the research evidence on its impact. We argue that many of the original objectives relating to improving engagement and empowerment have yet to be realized, poor cartographic discipline has led to misinterpretation and confusion, and that the initiative instead has primarily become a tool for promoting political transparency. We suggest that future focus should be on improving the quality and cartographic visualization of the published information alongside the integration of social media functionality to enrich local dialog on crime issues.