Death penalty views in China, Japan and the U.S.: An empirical comparison

Many nations impose the death penalty, yet most of the literature on capital punishment has focused on Western nations, particularly the U.S. China and Japan are two retentionist nations. Based on the data collected in 2005, this study examined the level of death penalty support and views on capital punishment among college students from China, Japan, and the U.S. It was found that Chinese respondents reported the highest level of death penalty support, followed by Japanese and U.S. students. Respondents from China and Japan were more likely to believe in the deterrence value of capital punishment than their U.S. counterparts. Views on retribution differed among the respondents. U.S. students were most likely to feel that innocent people are sentenced to death. In multivariate analyses, deterrence was the strongest correlate of death penalty views among Chinese and Japanese respondents, followed closely by retribution. For both Chinese and Japanese students, the barbarity of government taking the life of a person was the strongest predictor for opposing the death penalty. For U.S. respondents, retribution was the strongest reason for supporting capital punishment and the barbarity of executions was the strongest reason for opposing the death penalty.     

A general theory of crime and computer crime: An empirical test

Computer crime has become a global issue and continues to rapidly grow; however, few studies had examined the applicability of a general theory of crime in explaining computer deviance. Using a panel of 2,751 Korean youths, the current study examined whether low self-control theory can be useful as a theoretical framework for explaining computer crime. The results indicated the applicability of low self-control theory in explaining both illegal download of software and illegal use of others’ personal identification online. Consistent with the theory's prediction, opportunity variables, especially hours of computer use, were found to be significant predictors of computer crime. The shortcomings of the current research and the directions for future research were discussed.     

Product counterfeiting and the media: examining news sources used in the construction of product counterfeiting as a social problem

Product counterfeiting has received increased attention due to its economic and public health impact. Media framing of product counterfeiting shapes how the public and policymakers understand the problem. While there is a large body of literature examining crime and the media generally, empirical studies have yet to focus on the media construction of product counterfeiting. This study presents the results of a content analysis using a random sample of newspaper articles referencing product counterfeiting in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal from 2000 to 2009. Articles were coded for common patterns in sources of information. While the results indicate the presence of a wide variety of themes, product types, and industries, government and business sources are overrepresented among the sources cited, leading to some level of consistency in the presentation of the impact of and appropriate responses to product counterfeiting. Implications for understanding how the public and policymakers understand product counterfeiting are discussed.     

Official crime rates and victim surveys: An empirical comparison

This paper compares the Uniform Crime Reports (UCRs) to the results of the National Crime Survey (NCS). Six Part I offenses are used to form the basis for comparison across twenty-six large American cities. The two data sources are conceptually comparable. Empirically, the NCS reveals significantly higher rates for all offenses but auto theft. The two sources are compatible in that the UCR revealed the same distributional pattern as the NCS. Thus it was concluded that the UCR provides an accurate indicator of the relative occurrence of criminal acts.     

Parricide: an empirical analysis of 24 years of U.S. data

Empirical analysis of homicides in which children have killed parents has been limited. The most comprehensive statistical analysis involving parents as victims was undertaken by Heide and used Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) data for the 10-year period 1977 to 1986. This article provides an updated examination of characteristics of victims, offenders, and offenses in parricide incidents using SHR data for the 24-year period 1976 to 1999. The analysis proceeds in two stages. First, offense (homicide circumstances), victim (age, race), and offender (age, race, sex) correlates are reported. Second, juvenile involvement in incidents in which parents were killed is examined and a determination is made whether changes in youth involvement in parricide offenses are discernible over the 24-year period. The article concludes with a comparison of findings that emerged from 24 years of data with those from the earlier 10-year period and the discussion of the significance of these findings.     

The rate of surplus value and crime. A theoretical and empirical examination of Marxian economic theory and criminology

Radical criminology is often dismissed on the claim that it is not empirically verifiable. In this paper we argue that grounding the radical approach in Marx's theory of surplus values creates an empirically testable Marxian theory applicable to understanding rates of criminal offending and official responses to criminal behavior. Our analysis demonstrates that the rate of surplus value is a statistically significant predictor of the rate of property crimes known, property crime arrests, violent crimes known, violent crime arrests and total index crimes known to police in the U.S. from 1950 to 1974 controlling for the effects of predictor variables identified in earlier research on crime rates. The theoretical implications of this finding and the importance of the theory of surplus value to the development of radical criminology are also discussed.     

The choice of crime: An empirical analysis of juveniles' criminal choice

This article applies the theory of individual rational choice to micro data on the criminal activity of juveniles. The individual choice model is developed and applied to data on 1,171 files on property offenses adjudicated by the Family Court between 1972 and 1976.It is found that the type of crime chosen, as indicated by the charge at the time of arrest and the final charge, is influenced by sex, age, number of prior referrals to the court, ethnic extraction, and place of residence of the juvenile. As the effect of each of these individual characteristics on the probability of selecting the various crimes differs, the choice of crime exhibits dynamic features; as the individual age increases, and as the number of prior referrals to court increases, the probabilities of selecting particular crimes change. These features are examined by generating the probabilities and examining the patterns which emerge.     

美国知识产权保险透视

引 言20世纪90年代伊始,美国政府在政策上推行新经济思维,集中精力和资金投入高科技领域,大力支持产业界创立知名商业品牌,让知识成为美国未来发展的新动力。作为新经济政策的最大受益者,美国公司无一不把保护知识产权作为企业的生命线,谁拥有更多知识产权谁就更具有竞争力。勿庸置疑,知识产权已成为美国新经济的排头兵。然而,随着知识产权客体的不断扩大和授予量的不断增加,卷入知识产权侵权诉讼的可能性也愈来愈大。1 而对于美国公司来讲面临知识产权侵权诉讼威胁尤其令人头痛,原因在于解决知识产权争端的费用十分昂贵,特别是诉讼费,一般…     

Male and female child murderers: an empirical analysis of U.S. arrest data

Recent U.S. cases of murders by children below age 11 have captured national headlines. A review of the literature reveals that little is known about this population of juvenile homicide offenders (JHOs). Most studies on juvenile murderers have used small clinical samples, focused on adolescents, and concentrated on male offenders. Studies that have used Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) data have found significant gender differences among juveniles below 18 years arrested for murder. This study investigated gender differences among 226 juvenile murderers ages 6 through 10 involved in single-victim incidents using bivariate and multivariate statistical techniques. Consistent with previous research, bivariate analyses revealed gender differences with respect to the type of weapon used, age of the victim, relationship to the victim, and circumstances of the crime. Logistic regression analysis identified female JHOs as more likely to use a knife, kill a family member, and kill a victim below age 5, when compared with male JHOs. From these findings, profiles of young male and female JHOs can be drawn. The article concludes with a discussion of the study's implications for prevention and treatment. The authors recommend that future research in gender differences among young children focus on examining psychological, neurological, and sociological variables not included in the SHR data set.     

An empirical examination of AMBER Alert ‘successes’

The AMBER Alert system was designed to recover endangered missing children through the solicitation of citizen assistance via swift public announcements. Rigorous empirical support for AMBER Alert's effectiveness has been lacking, but since its inception program advocates and public safety officials have lauded the system's ability to “save lives”, often basing their optimism on AMBER Alert “success” stories. However, in this paper quantitative and qualitative analyses of 333 publicized and celebrated AMBER Alert “successes” suggest AMBER Alerts rarely result in the retrieval of abducted children from clearly “life-threatening” situations, and that most of the publicized successes involved relatively benign abductors and unthreatening circumstances. The routine conflation of such apparently mundane cases with rare dramatic successes by AMBER Alert advocates suggests popular portrayals of AMBER Alert are overly sanguine. The potentially negative effects of this and policy implications are discussed.     

Administrative interventions on police shooting discretion: An empirical examination

In August, 1972, the New York City Police Department promulgated administrative shooting guidelines and shooting incident review procedures far more restrictive than former statutory “defense of life” and “fleeing felon” justifications for police shooting. Using a data base that includes all reported New York City police firearms discharges and serious assaults on police between 1971 and 1975, this article examines the effects of the new guidelines and procedures on shooting frequencies, patterns, and consequences.Great decreases in “fleeing felon” shootings, “warning shots,” and shooting-opponent injuries and deaths were found to be associated with the new rules. This change also appeared to have a favorable effect on line-of-duty officer deaths and serious injuries. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

“Censorship liberally administered”: Press,U.S. military relations in the Spanish‐American War

This study is a reappraisal of press censorship during the Spanish‐American War of 1898. The accounts of censors and correspondents written during or shortly after the war are compared to answer three questions: How did the censorship system work? What factors caused its effectiveness to vary? How did the press respond? The study argues that the war's most effective censors were the correspondents, who mostly competed for stories that did not pose risks to military security. The conflicting priorities of military and political leaders often blocked the censors, who reviewed newspaper dispatches as much to gain information as to protect secrets.     

An empirical examination of commutations and executions in post-Furman capital cases

A review of the literature on capital punishment reveals evidence that the death penalty was imposed capriciously in the past. Previous research on executive clemency in capital cases revealed similar forces in operation. In the voluminous literature surrounding capital punishment, however, relatively little contemporary empirical work focuses directly on the characteristics of the final clemency decision to commute or execute, especially post-Furman. In this paper I explore some of these elements and find that several extralegal factors, possibly including political motivation, still may play a role in this highly discretionary decision-making process.     

U.S. CLS

This essay offers a brief account of the rise of cls thought in the United States and of its development within a largely hostile legal academy. As the essay suggests, cls thought has been variously deformed, arrested, normalized, and diffused – leaving the contemporary American legal academy in a state of suspended animation. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Measuring U.S. innovative activity: business data at the U.S. Census Bureau

Innovation is seen as a source of strength and vitality in the U.S. economy. Better measures of innovative activity—including but not limited to innovation alone—could improve what we know about the sources of productivity and economic growth. The U.S. Census Bureau collects data on some measures of innovative activity that research shows affect economic performance. But understanding how the effects work requires more than just measures of innovative activity. It also requires solid statistical information about core measures of the economy so we can rule out the possibility that a measure of innovative activity merely proxies for something omitted from or measured poorly in the core data. Gaps in core measures can be filled by better integrating existing data and by more structured collections of new data. Versions of this paper were presented at the NSF/SRS Workshop, Advancing Measures of Innovation: Knowledge Flows, Business Metrics, and Measurement Strategies, Arlington VA, June 6–7, 2006, and circulated to the Advisory Committee on Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economy, Economics and Statistics Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce. This paper is unofficial and thus has not undergone the review accorded to official Census Bureau publications. Lucia Foster, Ron Jarmin, Jeffrey Mayer, Thomas Mesenbourg, and Daniel Weinberg, and the editors made valuable comments. However, the views expressed in the paper are those of the author and not necessarily those of the U.S. Census Bureau.