/pdf/preventing-crime-what-works-what-doesn-t-what-s-promising-1jp2dkc4ik.pdf

Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising. Research in Brief. National Institute of Justice.

Criminal careers have long occupied the imaginations of criminologists. Since the 1986 publication of the National Academy of Sciences report on criminal careers and career criminals, a variety of theoretical, empirical, and policy issues have surfaced. Data on key criminal career dimensions of prevalence, frequency, specialization, and desistance have raised theoretical questions regarding the patterning of criminal activity over the life course. Recent research has identified important methodological issues, including the relationship between past and future criminal activity, and potential explanations for this relationship: state dependence and persistent heterogeneity. Advanced statistical techniques have been developed to address these challenges. Criminal career research has identified important policy issues such as individual prediction of offending frequency and career duration, and has shifted the focus toward the interplay between risk and protective factors.

The Criminal Career Paradigm

1. Introduction 2. Literature review: A. General criminal careers B. Organize around contentious issues 3. Data overview 4. Prevalence and incidence 5. Onset age and incidence 6. Specialization 7. Onset sequences 8. Co-offending 9. Chronicity 10. Offending trajectories 11. Career length 12. Discussion.

Key Issues in Criminal Career Research: New Analyses of the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development

Part I. Strategies for Reducing Crime: 1. Strategies for reducing recidivism 2. Assessing the evidence 3. Incapacitation 4. Perspectives on rehabilitation Part II. The Effectiveness of Rehabilitation Programs: 5. Academic education and life skills training 6. Vocational education, correctional industries and employment programs 7. Cognitive behavioral therapy programs Part III. Targeting Specific Types of Offenders: 8. Sex offender treatment 9. Juveniles 10. Domestic violence Part IV. Management and Treatment of Substance Abusers: 11. Drug courts 12. Outpatient and incarceration-based drug treatment Part V. Control, Discipline and Punishment: 13. Correctional boot camps 14. Intensive supervision and electronic monitoring Part VI. Conclusions: 15. What works?

/pdf/what-works-in-corrections-reducing-the-criminal-activities-33tc9sv9hy.pdf

What Works in Corrections: Reducing the Criminal Activities of Offenders and Deliquents

The impact of state prison populations on crime is typically estimated by applying the lambda, the individual crime rate, of prisoners or arrestees. We outline the problems with this approach, attempt to reanalyze the widely divergent lambdas derived in past research, and make adjustments necessary to use lambdas for estimating the incapacitation impact. The result is an uncertain estimate of 16 to 25 index crimes averted per year per each additional prisoner. We argue that regression analysis can provide a better estimate of the impact of prison population growth. Applying the Granger test to pooled state data over 19 years, we found that prison population growth leads to lower crime rates but that crime rate changes have little or no short-term impact on prison population growth. Next we regressed crime rates on prison population and conclude that, on average, at least 17 index crimes are averted per additional prisoner. The impact is limited mainly to property crime.

Prison population growth and crime reduction

Recent research on the functions of imprisonment has begun to provide quantitative, empirical knowledge of its rehabilitative and deterrent effects.' Much less is known, however, about the incapacitative effect of imprisonment. While it has long been understood that the physical segregation of prison inmates prevents them from engaging in some criminal activity (as well as much non-criminal activity) during the period of their confinement, quantitative estimates of the size of this effect have been lacking.2 Leaving aside all deterrent or rehabilitative and counter-rehabilitative effects, it is of some interest to know whether

The Incapacitative Effect of Imprisonment: Some Estimates

At a minimum, a theory of law must meet three criteria. First, it must be a theory, that is, a collection of logically connected propositions linking law and other variables.1 To say that the propositions should be connected logically is to require that they be deduced from assumptions. The propositions may have any source whatsoever (dreams, druginduced hallucinations, etc.), but they become a theory only when they are given this logical structure. Second, the variables must, in some way, be measurable. The theory should state how they are to be measured. This requirement means that it is possible, at least in principle, to check the propositions of a theory empirically. Third, the theory must state what sort of evidence is admissible to test its validity and what the implications of different kinds of evidence are. It is of particular interest in this connection to know whether a theory is formally deterministic or stochastic. A deterministic theory is regarded as complete. Specification of some variables fully determines

Donald Black's Sociology of Law: A Critique

Allan Horwitz and I are in full agreement about the value of studying the extralegal sources of statutory law (such as vagrancy legislation) or of governmental social control (whether or not it is identified as law). A good deal of my own work has concerned just this (Greenberg, 1977; 1980; forthcoming; Humphries and Greenberg, 1981; forthcoming; Loftin et al., 1981). To study these extralegal sources of law, one need not exclude a priori conventional, commonsensical or naive explanations, for common sense and naivete are not always wrong, nor are they excluded by the fact that other sorts of explanations may also be enlightening. It is for theory and research to determine the relative importance of competing explanations under different conditions. Arbitrarily to exclude a set of plausible variables from consideration, as Horwitz does when he asserts that "legal rules . . . are not themselves what explains law,"' is to restrict the range of what science can tell us. If we are concerned with the administration of vagrancy law, I would expect legal rules to have fairly low explanatory power (Foote, 1956); in other contexts, I might expect more.2 The distinction Horwitz makes between independent and dependent variables can be pushed too far. As I noted in my critique, when variables mutually influence one another,

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/3053353

David F. Greenberg

Papers

The Incapacitative Effect of Imprisonment: Some Estimates

Donald Black's Sociology of Law: A Critique

Resistance to Conventionality in the Sociology of Law: A Rejoinder to Horowitz