Revoking Early Conditional Release Measures in Spain
Summary (2 min read)
Introduction
- Over the past thirty years, local access to food stores has become an increasing concern for retail planners and policy makers.
- Most notably, successive investigations by the UK government’s Competition Commission into the supply of groceries have identified local ‘areas of concern’ where retail provision is regarded as problematic.
- In order to examine these effects empirically, the authors adopt a stated-preference approach (Louviere, Hensher and Swait, 2000).
- The authors apply this approach to consumers from neighbourhoods with different levels of deprivation to assess the effect of levels of household deprivation as a moderator of consumers’ perceptions of choice.
Recent policy issues: ‘retail diversity’
- As Guy (2009) has documented, the term retail diversity has come to the fore in retail planning and competition debates over the past five years in the context of supermarket competition, ‘clone towns’, brand concentration, and questions over the extent to which small independent and specialist stores should be encouraged and protected.
- The authors argue that retail diversity is key to the ability of a particular centre to adapt and thrive in the face of environmental and competitive forces.
- The composition of the store mix is one determinant of consumers’ satisfaction with their local store assortment.
- Marjanen (1997) suggested subjective distance is not linearly related to objective distance because closer and shorter distances tend to be overestimated, and longer distances underestimated.
- Previous research has identified links between social deprivation and store choice.
Method
- To test their hypotheses, the authors adopted a stated-preference approach.
- Second, because the method is experimental it allows stronger inferences of causality than can be derived from survey-based approaches using real market observations.
- Finally, although the hypothetical nature of the task does impose some limitation on the external validity of the findings, stated preference methods are very well able to capture respondents’ preference functions and have been shown to be adept at predicting real market behaviours (for reviews see Louviere, 1988; Louviere et al., 2000).
- Retail fascias present in Worcester at the time included Tesco (two major outof-town stores), Tesco Express (three outlets), Sainsbury (one high street and out-of-town store), Somerfield (two outlets) and the Cooperative Group (three outlets).
- The city has a population of around 95,000, with a socio-economic profile almost identical to England as a whole.
Sample and Procedure
- Nine neighbourhoods were selected that varied over three levels of social deprivation, measured using the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD).
- The overall IMD is conceptualised as a weighted area-level aggregation of the specific dimensions of deprivation (ODPM, 2004).
- In each location, a starting point for recruitment was randomly selected, after which additional respondents were recruited from the same area by door knocking until over 30 interviews had been successfully completed within each neighbourhood.
- The procedure resulted in 288 completed householder interviews.
- Respondents received four scenarios, one at a time, and the interviewer asked for each how satisfied the respondent would be with the store mix in terms of retail choice (see Figure 1).
Experimental Design
- The experimentally designed store mixes were presented on show cards as shown in Figure 1.
- Tesco is the largest multiple operator of supermarkets and superstores in the UK and has by far the largest market share of the four main operator brands.
- In addition, the store mixes included a Somerfield supermarket.
- Finally, the authors allowed for systematic variation of the presence of multiple instances of Tesco’s main supermarket format on the show cards, enabling us to test for the effect of additional supermarkets of the same brand (in this case using Tesco) in the area on satisfaction with the store mix.
- At the 15-minute edge of town location the options were: (4) a Tesco supermarket, (5) a Tesco branded small store (Tesco Express) and/or (6) an ASDA supermarket.
Findings
- The sample for this paper consisted of 288 households, distributed evenly across the local areas selected to reflect areas of high, medium and low levels of deprivation and local access.
- In addition, the model included the products of these attributes and attribute interactions with the deprivation dummies.
- Secondly, respondents in neighbourhoods that are classified as moderately deprived appear to perceive less value (0.61) in having an ASDA store in their mix, especially if they already have a Sainsbury in their mix (another 0.34 drop on the log scale).
Discussion, conclusions and implications
- Second, the authors find that the presence of a small independent store adds to satisfaction but only when overall provision is rated low.
- The presence of a second Tesco at 15 minutes travel added very little to the satisfaction levels but the presence of a different supermarket brand (e.g. ASDA or Morrisons) significantly increased satisfaction levels, even when stores were located 15 minutes away.
- They suggest that low levels of provision, and/or a lack of brand variety act as constraints on consumer choice; and conversely, a larger number of stores and a greater variety of store brands help maximise consumer choice and welfare by positively influencing consumers’ satisfaction with their local mix of grocery stores.
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Cites background from "Revoking Early Conditional Release ..."
...Secondly, for an effective change in criminal and prison policies in Spain for women inmates (Yague, 2007; Cid and Tebar, 2012)....
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References
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"Revoking Early Conditional Release ..." refers background in this paper
...…on the one hand, parolees may have, in general, a better prognosis of risk than open prisoners, given that for achieving parole the person needs to have spend a relevant period in the community without reoffending (more than one year in Catalonia, according to the research of Tébar, 2006b)....
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...…in the health of the parolee may result in a prison recall if there is an assessed risk of reoffending. a) Re-offending This cause of revocation is usually construed as committing a crime but not a misdemeanour, according to the Criminal Code provisions and the rule of law (Tébar, 2006a)....
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...…takes), prisoners that have served a relevant part of the sentence as a remand prisoner (that excludes the possibilities of classification) and prisoners with high levels of misbehaviour in prison (good conduct being a legal requirement for being granted early release) (Tébar, 2006b)....
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...…in which two concerns should be most relevant: the concern for humanity – accepting that open regime and parole are more humane sanctions than closed prisonand the concern for rehabilitation – that takes into account the interest of society as a whole in preventing recidivism (Tébar, 2006a)....
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...The Spanish Constitutional Court has held 5 that this type of parole is grounded on the 4 On the Spanish legal framework see generally Vega (2001), Renart (2003), Tébar (2006a) and Cid and Tébar (2010a)....
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Frequently Asked Questions (5)
Q2. What are the two ways to be early conditional released?
Spanish law provides two ways to be early conditional released while serving a prison sentence: open-regime (with include home detention curfew) and conditional liberty or parole.
Q3. What is the minimum mandatory period before reaching the third treatment category?
For sentences longer than five years imposed for offences related to terrorism, organised crime, sexual offences against victims under thirteen the minimum mandatory period before reaching the third treatment category is perceptive and cannot be judicially lifted afterwards.
Q4. What are the reasons for revocation of a parole?
As for the grounds for revocation, the Spanish Criminal Code (section 93.1) provides the following two general causes: re-offending and the breach of the license obligations.
Q5. How does the judge decide if a parole revocation is necessary?
In practice some Prison Judges decide parole revocation when the offence is flagrant, by means of considering there has been a breach of the license conditions or that the criteria required to access parole is no longer fulfilled.