Suchergebnisse

The relationship between sociology and the lawhas not been a very stable one. It has barely passed from the stage of flirtation to that of courtship, though the dependence of each upon the other seems obvious enough to some scholars in each discipline. The two communities have long seemed content to live in symbiotic rather than commensal relations. There are a number of reasons why it is difficult to consummate a stable marriage at this time, if not in the long run.

The history of criminal statistics bears testimony to a search for a measure of 'criminality' present among a pop, a search that led increasingly to a concern about the 'dark figure' of crime-ie, about occurrences that by some criteria are called crime yet that are not registered in the statistics of whatever agency was the source of the data being used. Contending arguments arose about the dark figure between the 'realists,' who emphasized the virtues of completeness with which data represent the 'real crime' that takes place, & the 'instit'ists,' who emphasize that crime can have valid meaning only in terms of organized, legitimate soc responses to it. These arguments are examined in the context of police & survey statistics as measures of crime in a pop. It is concluded that in exploring the dark figure of crime, the primary question is not how much of it becomes revealed, but rather what will be the selective properties of any particular innovation for its illumination. Any set of crime statistics, including those of survey res, involve some evaluative, instit'al processing of people's reports. Concepts, definitions, quantitative models, & theories must be adjusted to the fact that the data are not some objectively observable universe of 'criminal acts,' but rather those events defined, captured, & processed as such by some instit'al mechanism. HA.

The relative absence of formal provision for the resolution of conflict among org's in the US legal system results in each one controlling others in the system through constraints on the processing of people & information as inputs to their org's. Focus is on the specific case where the courts attempt to control the behavior of the police through the exclusionary rule, esp as set forth in the Miranda decision. Data on interrogations of suspects in field patrol settings show that arresting officers always had evidence apart from the interrogation itself as a basis for arrest. It would appear that the introduction of Miranda-type warnings into field settings would have relatively little effect on the liability of suspects to criminal charges, esp in felony cases, assuming current police behavior with respect to arrest. HA.