Showing papers in "Crime and Justice in 1980"

Research in Criminal Deterrence: Laying the Groundwork for the Second Decade

Abstract: Deterrence theory has been developed primarily by economists, who have viewed potential criminals as rational decision-makers faced with an array of illicit opportunities characterized by costs (time, possible adverse legal consequences, and so forth) and payoffs. The crime decision is thus characterized in a way that fits the well-developed theoretical framework of decision-making under uncertainty. Herbert Simon and others have questioned the descriptive accuracy of this theory, and are beginning to uncover systematic patterns in decision-making that violate the predictions of the economic theory: this work could usefully be incorporated into the crime choice framework. One of the most important issues for further research in this area is the way in which potential criminals acquire information about criminal opportunities and the effectiveness of the criminal justice system. A simple "realistic" model of threat communication can be outlined that yields deterrence-like effects, even though no one is wel...

Criminal Career Research: A Review of Recent Evidence

Abstract: A criminal career may consist of a single, undiscovered, venial lapse or a high level of sustained involvement in serious crime. Modern criminal career research derives largely from policy concerns about the likely crime preventive effects of incapacitative sanctions. Consequently, criminal career research tends to be more concerned with sustained than with venial criminal careers. If a small number of individuals commits a disproportionate number of serious criminal acts and if they can be identified and confined early in their careers, the argument goes, significant numbers of serious criminal offenses could be prevented. The leading criminal career research, much of it unpublished, has produced useful results, but cannot give much guidance on sanctions use to policy makers. Less than 15 percent of the general population will be arrested for commission of a felony and about one-half of these will never be arrested for another. Very roughly, only 5 percent of the population will demonstrate the beginning...

Urban Police and Crime in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract: Interest in the history of police and crime has been strong over the past half generation. From the traditional historians' point of view, the resulting scholarship has grown not only in amount but in "sophistication," as sociologists and political scientists have contributed not only their work but often their methods and approaches. This development, however, seems to present problems as well as advantages. The history of police, as first outlined in rather traditional case studies of nineteenth-century Boston and New York, has clearly benefited from the myriad of subsequent approaches. The original accounts have been not so much challenged, with few exceptions, as enriched by later ones which stress points that had been at least relatively slighted: cross-national comparisons with London, the search for legitimacy, class conflict, social control, battles over social values. Most disagreements appear to be matters of emphasis, the result of differing angles of approach, or perhaps of the differing times...

The Prisoners' Rights Movement and Its Impacts, 1960-80

Abstract: Even as some prison officials and academics brand judicial intervention in matters of prison policy and administration as misguided and counterproductive, some prisoner advocates despair of the capacity of law reform to produce meaningful prison reform. The prisoners' rights movement should be seen as a sociopolitical movement like the civil rights movement or the women's movement. From this perspective, individual case holdings that have dominated the attention of legal academics are less significant than the capacity of law reform efforts to shape and sustain a prisoners' rights movement with adherents inside and outside of prison. It is also important not to adopt too narrow a view of the impacts of the prisoners' rights movement. Simple studies of compliance with judicial decrees do not capture the complexity of changes occasioned by legal activity. To appreciate fully the impacts of the prisoners' rights movement on prisons and prisoners' lives, it is necessary to consider such secondary effects as c...

Crime and Justice in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England

Abstract: Recent historical studies concerned with the period of the English industrial revolution illuminate many relationships between crime and the criminal law, and social and economic change. The creation and abolition of the capital code and the invention of the penitentiary and the police suggest the importance of threats to political authority in deciding policy. Other studies emphasize the place of crime in popular culture, while quantitative work shows the importance of economic fluctuations, moral panics, war and the new police in explaining the level of prosecutions. Most suggestive for further work is the upper class assault on popular mores, poor men's property, and old economic orthodoxies. New legislation and new levels of enforcement, as well as less premeditated changes in English capitalism, created crimes where none had existed, and probably caused a crisis of legitimacy for the English criminal law. What emerged may have been not only a modern system of criminal law and enforcement, but a moder...

Biology and Crime

Abstract: Research into biological factors in the etiology of crime has long been out of favor in the United States. Yet all human behavior is partly the result of physiological causes, and it is a reasonable hypothesis that both nature and nurture influence antisocial behavior. Recent research has tested that hypothesis and results seem to confirm it. A growing body of research has consistently found that identical twins are likelier both to have criminal records than are fraternal twins. Adoption studies have found that, controlling for the criminality of the adoptive parents, adopted children whose biological parents had criminal records are likelier themselves to have criminal records than are adopted children of noncriminal biological parents. Psychophysiological studies of the autonomic nervous system, primarily using skin conductance measures, suggest that repetitively antisocial people tend to have low arousal levels and slow skin conductance recovery. These factors may play a role in learning to avoid anti...

A Critique of Marxist Criminology

Abstract: Within the past few years, a marxist school of criminology has developed in England and the United States. In both countries, this school arose in part because of a dissatisfaction with "mainstream" criminology; especially in the United States, political radicalism provoked by the turmoil of the sixties also played a part. The theoretical antecedents of marxist criminology include "labeling" and "conflict" theories of crime and the origins of the criminal law. Though its writings to date have too often been marred by vacuous rhetoric and polemic, the marxist school has usefully called attention to a number of important questions, in particular questions concerning the relations between social structures and economic systems and the criminalization of certain forms of behavior. To date, relatively little empirical research has been done by marxist criminologists; much of the important scholarly writing on crime from a marxist perspective has in fact been done by social historians. Marxist criminologists te...

Continental Cures for American Ailments: European Criminal Procedure as a Model for Law Reform

Abstract: As the gap widens between the ideal of adversary procedure and the practice of bargained justice, European ways of organizing the criminal process have gained attention. European criminal procedure, characterized by the dominating position of the judge before and at trial, appears to offer a workable alternative to the traditional adversary process. Although French and West German systems of pretrial investigation, prosecutorial discretion, and adjudication appear fundamentally different from American practice, only the last is substantially different in practice. American plea bargaining has no analogue in France or West Germany. Despite the existence of an investigating magistrate in France, French and German practices as to organization and control of pretrial investigation are not significantly different from American practice. Prosecutorial charging discretion is limited to less serious offenses in West Germany; however, neither in France nor in West Germany is prosecutorial decision-making effective...