refugee children, Watters’ book provides more generally significant insights into a wide array of issues relevant to contemporary refugees. Rather than concentrating on those who receive refugee status from host societies, Watters asserts “the focus of this book is not restricted to legal and administrative definitions of refugee children, but instead accords with what Zolberg has referred to as a ‘sociological’ definition ‘grounded in observable social realities’” (p. 2). In addition, Watters draws extensively from contemporary theorists of inequality, exclusion and domination—Michel Foucault, Aihwa Ong, Pierre Bourdieu, Homi Bhabha, Liisa Malkki among them—to create a refined appreciation of the ways that states and bureaucracies affect refugees’ understandings of themselves, their social position and their ability to act in their own interest. Refugee Children is based upon the analysis of refugees in several (mostly European) countries of settlement, including Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and especially the U.K., which according to the author is regarded by many stateless persons as the most desirable point of settlement. In addition, the book examines populations originating from and travelling through multiple world regions. Drawing from his own research as well as his reviews of journalistic and academic literature, Watters gives readers numerous first-hand accounts of the settings, interactions and assistance programs that refugee youth encounter. The author carefully attends to the origins of refugees, considering their history, religion and cultural background. Based on this, he questions both the assimilationist approach to refugee resettlement that would compel recent arrivals into the acceptance of host society practices in order to facilitate access to jobs and health care, as well as multicultural models that see refugees as inextricably immersed in the cultural and religious patterns of their country of origin, and as such, fundamentally unlike persons native to the host society. Championing neither, he regards both as paternalistic and potentially limiting to refugee children’s ability to make choices based upon their own outlooks, goals and understandings. In a like manner, Watters assesses models of resettlement in terms of their allocation of resources. He critiques both tight-fisted programs that fail to provide minimal levels of support as well as therapeutic regimes that assume all forced migrants to be deeply wounded and as such, in immediate need of culturally alien and sometimes unwanted rehabilitation. Despite its impressive scholarship, Refugee Children: Towards the Next Horizon is not simply an exercise in academic analysis. Rather, it offers valuable information with many practical examples drawn from successful programs devoted to refugee youth. If there is one downside to this book, it is that the volume is so rich in theories, examples, case studies, suggestions for practice and evaluations of the political and ethical implications of various approaches to working with young refugees, that readers may become overwhelmed. Its scholarly exuberance notwithstanding, Refugee Children: Towards the Next Horizon is a thought-provoking and sophisticated resource for scholars and practitioners interested in the experience of forced migrants in general and refugee youth in particular. The book does an impressive job of filling the conceptual, contextual and theoretical gaps that have, until recently, limited the breadth and quality of research on forced migrants.

Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse

Harvard Civil Rights: Civil Liberties Law Review

Summary David Finkelhor examines initiatives to prevent child sexual abuse, which have focused on two primary strategies—offender management and school-based educational programs. Recent major offender managment initiatives have included registering sex offenders, notifying communities about their presence, conducting background employment checks, controlling where offenders can live, and imposing longer prison sentences. Although these initiatives win approval from both the public and policy makers, little evidence exists that they are effective in preventing sexual abuse. Moreover, these initiatives, cautions Finkelhor, are based on an overly stereotyped characterization of sexual abusers as pedophiles, guileful strangers who prey on children in public and other easy-access environments and who are at high risk to re-offend once caught. In reality the population is much more diverse. Most sexual abusers are not strangers or pedophiles; many (about a third) are themselves juveniles. Many have relatively low risks for re-offending once caught. Perhaps the most serious shortcoming to offender management as a prevention strategy, Finkelhor argues, is that only a small percentage of new offenders have a prior sex offense record that would have involved them in the management system. He recommends using law enforcement resources to catch more undetected offenders and concentrating intensive management efforts on those at highest risk to re-offend. Finkelhor explains that school-based educational programs teach children such skills as how to identify dangerous situations, refuse an abuser’s approach, break off an interaction, and summon help. The programs also aim to promote disclosure, reduce self-blame, and mobilize bystanders. Considerable evaluation research exists about these programs, suggesting that they achieve certain of their goals. Research shows, for example, that young people can and do acquire the concepts. The programs may promote disclosure and help children not to blame themselves. But studies are inconclusive about whether education programs reduce victimization. Finkelhor urges further research and development of this approach, in particular efforts to integrate it into comprehensive health and safety promotion curricula.

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The Prevention of Childhood Sexual Abuse

To study the sexual assault of young children, two research bases (differing by unit of count) were extracted from the 1991 through 1996 NIBRS master files. One base summarized the information for each of the 60,991 victims of sexual assault, the incident characteristics, and (where available) information on their offender(s). The second base compiled information for each of the 57,762 victim-identified offenders in sexual assault incidents, their victims, and related incident characteristics.

Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement: Victim, Incident, and Offender Char

This article discusses the use of regression models for count data. A claim is often made in criminology applications that the negative binomial distribution is the conditional distribution of choice when for a count response variable there is evidence of overdispersion. Some go on to assert that the overdisperson problem can be “solved” when the negative binomial distribution is used instead of the more conventional Poisson distribution. In this paper, we review the assumptions required for both distributions and show that only under very special circumstances are these claims true.

Overdispersion and Poisson Regression

Following recent studies in Florida and Canada, we examine the effects of prison visitation on recidivism among 16,420 offenders released from Minnesota prisons between 2003 and 2007. Using multipl...

/pdf/blessed-be-the-social-tie-that-binds-the-effects-of-prison-1ltpvw6efw.pdf

Blessed Be the Social Tie That Binds: The Effects of Prison Visitation on Offender Recidivism

In an effort to reduce sex offense recidivism, local and state governments have recently passed legislation prohibiting sex offenders from living within a certain distance (500 to 2,500 feet) of child congregation locations such as schools, parks, and daycare centers. Examining the potential deterrent effects of a residency restrictions law in Minnesota, this study analyzed the offense patterns of every sex offender released from Minnesota correctional facilities between 1990 and 2002 who was reincarcerated for a new sex offense prior to 2006. Given that not one of the 224 sex offenses would have likely been prevented by residency restrictions, the findings from this study provide little support for the notion that such restrictions would significantly reduce sexual recidivism.

/pdf/does-residential-proximity-matter-a-geographic-analysis-of-2bnezs6d69.pdf

DOES RESIDENTIAL PROXIMITY MATTER? A Geographic Analysis of Sex Offense Recidivism

This study analyzes coverage by newspapers, network television news, and newsweekly magazines of mass killings that occurred between 1976 and 1996. The findings indicate that although virtually all...

Body-Count Journalism: The Presentation of Mass Murder in the News Media

Although Megan's Law was passed more than 10 years ago, very little is known as to whether it reduces sex offender recidivism significantly. Using a retrospective quasi-experimental design, we examine whether community notification has a deterrent effect by comparing the recidivism rates of 155 level 3 (“high public risk”) sex offenders released from Minnesota prisons between 1997 and 2002 who were subject to broad notification with two separate control groups who were not. The first control group (referred to as the prenotification group) contained 125 sex offenders released between 1990 and 1996 (the 7 years preceding the implementation of the Community Notification Act) who likely would have been subject to broad community notification had the law been in effect at the time of their release. The second control group (referred to as the non-notification group) was composed of 155 offenders (37 level 1 and 118 level 2) released between 1997 and 2002 who were not subject to broad community notification. The results from the Cox proportional hazards models reveal that broad community notification significantly reduced the risk of time to a sex reoffense (rearrest, reconviction, and reincarceration) compared with both control groups. The findings were mixed, however, for both non-sex and general reoffending. Whereas broad community notification significantly reduced the risk of timing to both non-sex and general recidivism compared with the prenotification group, no such effects were found in the non-notification group analyses. We discuss the implications of these results and attempt to explain why Megan's Law seems to reduce sex offense recidivism in Minnesota.

The impact of Megan's Law on sex offender recidivism: the Minnesota experience

Even though previous research has not examined mass murder prior to 1965, scholars have asserted that the mid-1960s marked the onset of an unprecedented and ever-growing mass murder wave. Using news accounts and the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) as sources of data, this study analyzes 909 mass killings that took place between 1900 and 1999. Although the mid-1960s marked the beginning of a mass murder wave, it was not unprecedented, because mass killings were nearly as common during the 1920s and 1930s. The results also show that familicides, the modal mass murder over the last several decades, were even more prevalent before the 1970s. Moreover, mass killers were older, more suicidal, and less likely to use guns in the first two-thirds of the 20th century. Although some have claimed that workplace massacres represent a new “strain” in mass murder, the findings suggest that the only new type of mass killing that emerged during the 20th century was the drug-related massacre.

Grant Duwe

Papers

Blessed Be the Social Tie That Binds: The Effects of Prison Visitation on Offender Recidivism

DOES RESIDENTIAL PROXIMITY MATTER? A Geographic Analysis of Sex Offense Recidivism

Body-Count Journalism: The Presentation of Mass Murder in the News Media

The impact of Megan's Law on sex offender recidivism: the Minnesota experience

The patterns and prevalence of mass murder in twentieth-century America