Suchergebnisse

Individualistic myths and the crime master narrative -- Risks and contexts: an alternative paradigm for understanding criminality -- Criminogenic trauma: social history and the life course -- Institutional failure: state intervention as criminogenic risk -- Criminogenic contexts: immediate situations, settings, and circumstances -- Poverty: structural risk and criminal behavior -- The criminogenics of race in a divided society: racialized criminality and biographical racism -- Individualistic myths and the disregard of context: deconstructing "equally free autonomous choice" -- Reorienting the law: context-based legal reforms -- Pursuing social justice: an agenda for fair, effective, and humane crime policy.

Unprecedented numbers of mentally ill persons are now housed in prisons and jails in the United States and elsewhere in the world. In many jurisdictions penal institutions have become the default placement for the mentally ill, in lieu of more humane and appropriate facilities in which to treat them. This article briefly reviews some of the causes of the unprecedented influx of the mentally ill into prisons and jails, examines the characteristics of these environments that render them singularly inappropriate placements in these cases, and discusses the various ways that the pains of imprisonment can exacerbate rather than alleviate various forms of mental illness and psychological vulnerability.

Changing middle-class sensibilities led to the removal of executions from public view. It is argued that psychological secrecy, in which the public learns only selected details about the person executed & the execution process, developed to maintain the civil ordering function of the execution, ie, its instructional, moralizing value. An attempt to demystify the death penalty is made through the reversal of the dehumanization of the capital defendant & depersonalization of the execution process. The life & 1992 execution of Robert Alton Harris in CA are examined in detail. 199 References. J. Ferrari

Death qualification has been shown to have a number of biasing effects that appear to undermine a capital defendant's Sixth Amendment right to a fair jury. Attitudes toward the death penalty have shifted modestly but consistently over the last several decades in ways that may have changed the overall impact of death qualification. Specifically, the very large gap between black and white Americans' current support for capital punishment raises the question of whether death qualification procedures disproportionately exclude African Americans from capital jury participation. In order to examine this possibility, we conducted two countywide death penalty attitude surveys in the California county that has the highest percentage of African American residents in the state. Results show that death qualification continues to have a number of serious biasing effects—including disproportionately excluding death penalty opponents—which result in the significant underrepresentation of African Americans. This creates a death‐qualified jury pool with the potential to be significantly more likely to ignore and even misuse mitigating factors and to rely more heavily on aggravating factors in their death penalty decision making. The implications of these findings for the fair administration of capital punishment are discussed.

AbstractBandura's research and theory on the mechanisms of moral disengagement demonstrate the various ways that persons distance themselves from their mistreatment of others to avoid or circumvent ethical constraints that should and otherwise would govern their behavior. This article examines the serious problem of prisoner abuse through the lens of moral disengagement theory to understand in part why such abuse occurs and persists. This application of moral disengagement theory underscores the importance of addressing these social psychological dynamics in any program of prison reform and the need for further research in a setting that traditionally has resisted in‐depth empirical examination.

This study evaluates aspects of newspaper reporting about death penalty cases and capital defendants. In a content analysis of newspaper coverage of a representative sample of 26 death penalty‐eligible defendants who were brought to trial in California, we found that articles tended to cite primarily from law enforcement and prosecutorial sources, focused very heavily on the characteristics of the crime, and omitted or de‐emphasized most other aspects of the case. News coverage generally failed to place the criminal behavior of the defendant in any social historical or contextual framework from which readers (as potential voters and jurors) could grasp the potential mitigating elements of the case. We conclude that newspaper coverage of capital crimes may influence public support for the death penalty, and undermine public appreciation of the role of social contextual factors in crime causation in general. It also may bias the perspective with which potential jurors approach specific capital trials and even contribute to the lack of instructional comprehension that has been found to plague the death sentencing process.

The continued use of solitary confinement has sparked international public health and human rights criticisms and concerns. This carceral practice has been linked repeatedly to a range of serious psychological harms among incarcerated persons. Vulnerabilities to harm are especially dire for persons with preexisting serious mental illness ("SMI"), a group that is overrepresented in solitary confinement units. Although there have been numerous calls for the practice to be significantly reformed, curtailed, and ended altogether, few strategies exist to minimize its use for people with SMI and histories of violence against themselves or others. This case study describes the "Oregon Resource Team" (ORT), a pilot project adapted from a Norwegian officer-led, interdisciplinary team-based approach to reduce isolation and improve outcomes for incarcerated persons with SMI and histories of trauma, self-injury, and violence against others. We describe the ORT's innovative approach, the characteristics and experiences of incarcerated people who participated in it, its reported impact on the behavior, health, and well-being of incarcerated persons and correctional staff, and ways to optimize its effectiveness and expand its use.

This study extends the risk factors model of background or social history analysis to the lives of incarcerated mothers. Interviews were conducted with a sample of incarcerated mothers. The presence of a number of criminogenic influences such as poverty, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and witnessing violence in the lives of women incarcerated for primarily nonviolent—largely drug-related—offenses and in the lives of their children were identified. The implications of these findings for understanding female criminality and breaking the so-called cycle of crime are discussed.

This article addresses the problematic lack of available data on jail isolation. It discusses the potential significance of the practice of isolating jail inmates and the basis for believing that punitive isolation in jails is at least as widespread as in prisons. It also summarizes some of the information that recently has become available about the use of isolation at one notorious jail complex—Rikers Island—where the practice has been reported on and debated perhaps more than any other, and uses Rikers as both an instructive case study and cautionary tale. Finally, the article briefly reviews what is known about the significant risk of serious harm that isolated confinement is known to represent and acknowledges the need for reliable data gathering, meaningful outside monitoring, and effective oversight.

Intro -- Contents -- Foreword by Craig Haney -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Names -- Introduction -- Part I. Stereotypes and Frames -- 1. The Nature of Gang Stereotypes: What Is a "Gang-Related" Crime? -- 2. "Increasing Status in the Gang": Fast Thinking and Overcharging in Gang-Related Crimes -- 3. Is This a Just World? How Stereotypes and Beliefs Change-A Personal Story -- 4. Frames and Facts: Contesting the Gang Frame -- 5. Cracks in the Frame: Subtyping and Stereotypes-A Personal Story -- 6. Crooked Frames: Giving Stereotypes a Boost -- Part II. Dehumanization -- 7. There Is No Such Thing as a Gang Member: Priming, Prototypes, and the Subconscious -- 8. Course Correction: Police, Racism, and China-A Personal Story -- 9. "Us" and "Them": Racism and the Psychological Basis for Mass Incarceration -- 10. "I Did What You Said I Did. But I'm Not Who You Say I Am.": Jacqueline Montañez and the Fundamental Attribution Error -- Part III. The Struggle for Justice: Reframing Stereotypes and Overcoming Demonization -- 11. Don't Start Acting Human on Me Now: Prosecutors, Police, and Jail-A Personal Story -- 12. I Am Not a Hired Gun: Reframing and the Expert Witness Role -- 13. Humanizing Justice -- Epilogue to the Stories -- References -- Index.