Suchergebnisse

The Focused Offender Disposition (FOD) Program was established by the Bureau of Justice Assistance in 1988 as one of many responses to the growing numbers of drug-involved offenders coming to the attention of the criminal justice system. The basic purpose of FOD was to develop and test a needs assessment classification system that courts could use for directing drug offenders into the most appropriate type of treatment program. A secondary purpose was to examine the efficacy of urine monitoring as an alternative to treatment. The centerpiece of FOD was the Offender Profile Index (OPI), an assessment instrument that yielded a numerical score that suggested four alternative interventions — long-term residential treatment, short-term residential treatment, outpatient treatment, and urine monitoring only. This article offers some preliminary findings on the project and offers suggestions for the implementation of similar efforts.

Significant numbers of intravenous drug users come into contact with the criminal justice system on a regular basis. This presents a number of significant implications for both case processing and the provision of services. The risk of HIV infection among IV drug-using offenders is higher than that of non-offending IV users, and as such, the potential for the spread of the virus in correctional settings needs to be addressed Although the courts have examined the issues of mass HIV screening of inmates and the segregation of HIV-infected prisoners, no definitive decisions with national implications have emerged.

Many disciplines study human behavior. Each discipline has its own perspective on why humans exhibit particular behaviors, and on the origins of social problems and their solutions. Specialists from various fields see social issues through their own set of assumptions. The purpose of this text is to present these differing perspectives. The student will gain a richer understanding of the social issues themselves and of how social scientists and specialists from other related disciplines approach them. Forty authors from fifteen institutions and a variety of disciplines have contributed to this book. As an intentionally cross-disciplinary text, Many Voices gives special attention to the roles and relationships of religion and culture. In many aspects of society, the effects of culture and religion are powerfully intertwined. An understanding of one helps us understand the other. It also helps us understand that there are, indeed, many voices behind the social issues and problems of our time.

The relationship between drug use and criminal behavior has been of primary interest to researchers and practitioners for most of this century. As such, it is the purpose of this article to examine the historical underpinnings of current perceptions and to suggest an organizational paradigm for interpreting current drugs-crime literature. An overview of the literature and issues suggests that there is strong empirical evidence of the statistical overlap between drug using and criminal behavior. Further, drug use is seen as increasing and sustaining criminal behavior. However, a wide body of research suggests that drug use and crime have a complex recursive nature to their relationship, and that drug use, in spite of a long history of public perceptions, cannot be viewed as a direct and simple cause of crime. A review of subcultural, role, and ecological theory suggests that drug use and crime may emerge from the same etiological variables and become an integral part of a street-drug-using lifestyle and subculture. Radical theory argues that the drugs/crime relationship is created by social policy that makes drugs illegal. It is argued that this perspective fails to recognize the complexity of the drugs/crime relationship. The existing research suggests the need for increasing treatment availability and increasing economic opportunities within the framework of a careful review of drug policy and enforcement.

It is the purpose of this paper to examine the role of etiological research in the study of drug abuse, the problems in etiological research imposed by the nature of the phenomenon of drug abuse and the dominance of epidemiological studies, and to offer some suggestions for advancing research on the etiology of drug abuse. It is argued that the statistical rarity of drug abuse and the pressure to conduct epidemiological studies have resulted in the application of the methodology that does not meet the needs of etiological research. Suggestions are made that research on the initiation, continuation or cessation of drug abuse must develop a procedure for integrating conceptually and methodologically the variety of substances used simultaneously and sequentially. Further, it is suggested that research must integrate the power of survey methodology and statistical explanation with the understanding of the subject's perception and definition of the initiation and sustaining of use.

It is the purpose of this paper to examine the major research issues in the study of the relationship between crime and drugs and to examine the relevant research literature as it applies to those issues. Typologies are constructed for both criminal and drug using behavior and it is argued that the relationship between crime and drugs should be examined for each type of crime and each type of drug. A variety of issues regarding the nature of the relationship are discussed. These issues include the statistical association, causal priority, heroin use and increased, sustained and type of criminal activity, the direction of the causal effect and the ecology of crime and drugs. Finally, it is argued that a longitudinal design is necessary before the complexities of the nature of the crime-drug relationship can begin to be unraveled.

AbstractThe purpose of this article was to examine the ecological perspective as an explanation of criminal and drug‐using behavior and to present data from a pilot study on the areal distribution of crime and drugs. We found that individuals engaged in narcotics use, those engaged in criminal behavior, and those engaged in both resided in the same area of the community. Those who used other types of drugs were less likely to reside in the same areas as those engaged in criminal behavior. Thus, we concluded narcotics users and criminals were drawn from the same population and both behaviors may be produced by the same environmental variables, rather than have an individual causal relationship.