Suchergebnisse

This article examines the structure of probation decision making on the perceived "need" level of probationers and the pursuant prescription of "treatment." Although male and female probationers did not direr in their cumulative "need" level, significant differences by sex were found in the factors used by the probation officers to arrive at their decision or in the relative weights assigned to them. A multivariate analysis indicates that gender‐role expectations and stereotypes weigh heavily in the officers' decision making and guide the application of treatment. The implications of such gender‐based rehabilitation are drawn and discussed.

This study examines the dynamics of potentially violent encounters between police and public. It is based on systematic observation of about 350 eight‐hour tours of duty by patrol officers in three precincts of New York City during the summer of 1986. It compares the tactics and resulting outcomes found in encounters handled, respectively, by patrol officers believed by their peers to be especially skilled at minimizing violence and a cross section of all other patrol officers. Its major conclusions are (1) violence, even verbal aggression, is relatively rare in police work: (2) most conflict is dampened by the arrival of the police, leaving little scope for the use of defusing tactics: and (3) the behavior of officers judged by colleagues to be skilled in minimizing violence is measurably different from the behavior of "average" patrol officers, and in ways that suggest that colleagues may be good judges of on‐street performance.

This article examines two widely held beliefs concerning the nature of "careers" of wife assault. Most researchers and members of the public believe that assaultive behavior in marriage, once begun, tends to continue for the life of the marriage. It is also commonly believed that minor violence (e.g., slapping, shoving, throwing things at a spouse) is unrelated to severe assaults (e.g., punching, kicking, using a weapon). These beliefs are based on the most severe cases of wife battering, as described by the media and by women in shelters. Despite these beliefs, we suggest that wife assault is similar to other forms of deviance and crime, in that desistance is common and engaging in minor forms of deviance is a risk factor for engaging in major forms of deviance and crime. The article reports a study using data on a sample of 380 married respondents who reported some violence in their marriage in 1985 and were reinterviewed in 1986. The findings indicate that most marital violence is transient, but even minor violence by a wife poses a risk of escalation to more dangerous assaults by a husband. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Interest in the privatization of punishment has increased substantially during the past decade. The rising costs of incarceration and steady increases in the incarcerated population have stimulated governmental enthusiasm for the transfer of certain correctional responsibilities to the private sector. Advocates and critics of privatization differ regarding the ultimate benefits of private sector participation in the correctional process. In an effort to shed light on some of the conflicting claims of advocates and critics, this paper analyzes the origins of interest in privatization in America during both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The analysis suggests that scrutiny of the historical record may provide insights that will be useful in the development of policy that can successfully anticipate and avoid hazards to the success of correctional privatization.

Stanley Cohen (1985) maintains that the methods of control, whether exclusionary or inclusionary, are linked with the emergence of a bifurcated population of hard‐core, intensely antisocial offenders and mildly deviant but more prosocial offenders. The latter basically is a quasi‐normal population that was handled informally before the emergence of a formal criminal justice system and inclusionary programs. It tends to include dissipative, self‐indulgent, mild offenders who in adulthood often become dependent on inclusionary programs and the society of other mild deviants for structure in their lives.When applied historically to juveniles in Massachusetts this formulation suggests a steady transformation of established inclusionary programs with rehabilitative goals into exclusionary programs with punitive, retributive goals. It also implies a gradual extension of the definition of delinquency to include more nearly normal populations as additional inclusionary programs are inaugurated.

The compositional effects of relatively large young‐adult cohorts on the total rate of serious crimes is well established. The more subtle effect of relative cohort size on age‐specific crime rates, suggested by Richard Easterlin, is more controversial. The literature contains no adequate test of Easterlin's hypothesis as it relates to crime. To provide an adequate test of Easterlin's theory, this study includes age‐specific rates and measures of relative cohort size and controls for age and period in an age‐period‐relative‐cohort‐size model. Using arrest data from the Uniform Crime Reports (Part I crimes) for the years 1960, 1965, 1970, 1975, 1980, and 1985, the analysis provides support for Easterlin's theory for property crimes, that is, for robbery, burglary, and larceny (but not for motor vehicle theft). Though these relationships were small in comparison to those between age or period and age‐specific crime rates, they were generally statistically significant and were replicated with data from 1962, 1967, 1972, 1977, 1982, and 1987. The relationships between relative cohort size and assaultive crimes provided little consistent support for Easterlin's theory.

This research examines police decisions to report child abuse. A questionnaire was administered to 142 law enforcement officers at both municipal and county police agencies in a southern county. Vignettes were used to determine the response of police to several abuse events that differ in their nature and seriousness. Other items measured include dogmatism, knowledge of the reporting law, and experience reporting child abuse. The results indicate that the primary contributors to police decisions are definition of the behavior as serious, perception that the behavior is criminal, and race of the family. Conclusions and inferences are made regarding how these perceptions are formed and their impact on police discretion.

This paper examines the theoretical import of disaggregating self‐reported delinquency data into two constituent parts: (1) prevalence data, which record the proportion of any group involved in crime, reject the decision to participate in crime, and (2) incidence data, which record the frequency of offending within the subgroup of participants, reject the decision to repeat a previously committed offense. The importance of this conceptual distinction is that different causal facts may be involved in these separate offending decisions and those differences would be obscured if the data were not disaggregated. We review major delinquency theories to determine if theoretical variables are more strongly related to the prevalence or the incidence of delinquency. Multivariate models tentatively suggest that the distinction between prevalence and incidence should be maintained, although additional research with more serious offenses is needed.

This examination of Hagan et al.'s (1985, 1987) power‐control theory of delinquency and gender finds that gender and delinquency are related to the relative authority of parents at work in ways unexpected by power‐control theory. Support is found, however, for the power‐control thesis pertaining to parental control and risk‐taking attitudes. In reconciling differences between these findings and those of Hagan et al., the conclusion is that relations of affiliation as well as parental authority are important determinants of delinquency and its relationship with gender.

In 1972, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Furman v. Georgia that the death penalty as administered constituted cruel and unusual punishment. This ruling also invalidated the death sentences of over 600 inmates in the United States, who subsequently had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. This article examines the institutional and postrelease behavior of the 47 Furman inmates in Texas from 1973 to 1986. Prior to the release of these inmates into the general prisoner population, prison officials and clinicians stated that they were dangerous and constituted a substantial threat to other inmates and to the security staff. The institutional and release behavior of the Furman inmates is compared with that of a cohort of like violent offenders. The Furman inmates committed few serious rule violations. They did not kill other inmates or staff. A minority of inmates in both groups committed the majority of prison rule violations. Of the 31 Furman inmates released on parole, 1 committed a new homicide. No cohort inmate killed again. The conclusion is that the execution of these 47 inmates would not have greatly protected society.

In a further study of the addiction‐crime relationship, 214 narcotic addicts were classified according to their criminal involvement during a 2‐year preaddiction period. The sample was divided into two groups—those who reported involvement in any of 20 categories of criminal activity (N = 108) and those who reported no such activity (N = 106). The criminal behavior and drug‐use patterns of the two groups were then compared during subsequent addiction and nonaddiction periods. As expected, the impact of addiction was much more prominent in the low‐crime group. The implications of results for rehabilitation strategies are discussed.

One of the most influential studies in the history of criminological research is Sheldon and Eleanor Gluecks' Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency (UJD) (1950). The research design of the UJD study was strong, but the conceptual and statistical analyses performed by the Gluecks were ofen lacking in both methodological and theoretical rigor. As a result, the Gluecks' study has been criticized from both a methodological and ideological perspective. This research reanalyzes the original Glueck data, with a specijic focus on variables relating to family characteristics of 500 oficially defined delinquents and 500 nondelinquents. Using multivariate analyses we find that mother's supervision, parental styles of discipline. and parental attachment are the most important predictors of serious and persistent delinquency. On the other hand, background factors (e.g., parental criminality and drunkenness, broken homes, crowding) have little or no direct effect on delinquency, but instead operate through the family process variables. By reanalyzing the original UJD data, this study contributes to the current literature on family lve and delinquency and provides an updated assessment of the Gluecks' contributions to criminologv.

Many aspects of the criminal career are amenable to empirical analysis, and in recent years we have witnessed a proliferation of research in the areas of individual offense frequency, arrest frequency, career length, and crime‐switching patterns. This research analyzes the effects of explanatory variables on the rate at which officially detected juvenile offenders move from one crime type to another, and the statistical techniques used take advantage of the longitudinal nature of the data. An arrest is considered an event that occurs at a given point in time, and event history analysis is used to model the transition rate from one crime type to another as a function of offense history and offender characteristics. This transition rate encompasses two aspects of the criminal career process: the rate at which arrests take place and the likelihood of transition from arrest to arrest.

This study examines the effect of security‐related stressors (e.g., wars and more prolonged states of belligerence) on violent crime patterns. Two alternative hypotheses are put forward: the cohesion hypothesis, which predicts a decrease in criminal violence in times of increased security‐related stress, and the legitimation‐habituation hypothesis, which predicts an increase in criminal violence in such periods. The study uses monthly data collected in Israel over 15 years. Security‐related casualties and incidents are the security‐related stressors, homicide and robbery are the measures of criminal violence, and economic and sociodemographic indicators are the control variables. The analysis uses a multiple regression model with autoregressive errors. The reported number of casualties had a significant marginal positive effect on homicide, thus supporting the legitimation‐habituation hypothesis. Such an effect could not be detected for the robberies series. Inflation increments had a strong positive effect on both series, and rates of unemployment had a significant marginal positive effect on robbery but not on homicide. The effects of the various stressors are not contemporaneous but extend to several months ahead. Some theoretical aspects of the findings and their implications for Israeli society are discussed.

The study of specialization in offending careers is relevant to the key theoretical issue of whether different types of offending reject only one underlying theoretical construct (such as delinquent tendency) or several different constructs. This research improves on previous studies of specialization in offending careers in three ways: (1) It is based on the complete juvenile court careers of a very large sample of offenders (nearly 70,000). (2) It uses a fine‐grained classification of 21 offense types. (3) It uses a new measure of the strength of specialization, the Forward Specialization Coefficient (FSC). Both transition matrices and offending careers are studied.The major findings from the transition matrices are (1) there was a small but significant degree of specialization in offending superimposed on a great deal of versatility: (2) the degree of specialization tended to increase with successive referrals, and this was not due to more versatile offenders dropping out: and (3) the relative extent to which offenders specialized in different offenses held for two jurisdictions (Maricopa County, Arizona, and Utah), both sexes, and all ages.The analyses of offending careers showed that the most specialized offenses were runaway, burglary, motor vehicle theft, liquor violations, incorrigibility, curfew, truancy, and drugs. Nearly 20 percent of the offenders were identified as specialists. The conclusion is that, while offending was versatile to a first approximation, delinquency theories should attempt to explain specialization and specialists in order to yield more accurate quantitative predictions about offending careers.