Police response to domestic violence: making decisions about risk and risk management

Assessing and responding to risk are key elements in how police respond to domestic violence. However, relatively little is known about the way police make judgments about the risks associated with domestic violence and how these judgments influence their actions. This study examines police decisions about risk in domestic violence incidents when using a risk assessment instrument. Based on a sample of 501 risk assessments completed by police in Australia, this study shows that a limited number of items on the risk assessment instrument are important in police officers' decisions about risk. Statistical analyses show that the victim's level of fear contributes to police officers' judgment on the level of risk and their decisions on which risk management strategy should be used. These findings suggest that research on police responses to domestic violence needs to pay greater attention to situational dynamics and the task requirements of risk-based decision making.     

A microeconomic model of the demand of civil justice: is one institutional context better than another?

The paper analyzes how institutional elements affect the decision to file of risk neutral agents. In particular, we introduce an objective probability of winning given by the combination of a precedent-weight parameter (defining the type of legal system) and a transparency factor. 603,000 simulated trials, shaped upon our model, reveal two main findings: (1) the transparency level matters in terms of inefficient decisions; (2) a precedent driven system is not necessarily more efficient. Hence, policy makers should invest in increasing the level of information among courts and between courts and the parties both in civil and common law systems.     

Sustainability through an integrated approach to decision making? A law and regulation case study

Many legal fields are relevant to all kinds of problems; however, decision makers often take a narrow approach, looking only at the base of the claim or the issue they are established to consider. This can led to imbalanced outcomes. There is a particular risk of this in respect of decisions regarding key societal challenges, which might be the subject of law and policymaking from several different perspectives. This paper explores the need and bases for a more integrated approach to decision making. It does so using a case study, and explores a range of laws that could be relevant to a business seeking to use technology and resources that could address climate change, the different decisions that courts can make (with a focus on the nature of the action, outcome and forum), and the resulting conflicts, synergies and areas of enquiry.     

Risk calculation and precautionary uncertainty: two configurations within crime assessment

This paper explores two configurations of thinking about crime amongst law enforcement agencies and private sector security managers: ‘risk calculation’ (concerned with everyday, calculable probabilities and impacts and their management) and ‘precautionary uncertainty’ (concerned with events that might be incapacitating, yet are not calculable by probability assessments). The paper explores their respective constituent concepts and fields of application in crime assessment, drawing upon qualitative research-in-progress in Belgium. Risk calculation, as applied to crime, starts with past data on routines that link perpetrators with targets that lack capable guardians. Precautionary uncertainty focuses on potential impacts that are highly disabling and potentially wide-spreading (contagion, knock-on effects), asking how such impacts can be contained and recovered from. Risk and uncertainty are shown to be related to ‘rational-instrumental’ and ‘deliberative-constitutive’ approaches as developed by Fisher’s work in the field of law, which offers a meta-narrative in relation to which they can be positioned. Finally, the paper asks if these two crime assessment methods should be seen as distinct or as merging. On the basis of criteria of conceptual sharpness, openness to public debate and justiciability, the authors champion the maintenance of a clear distinction between risk and uncertainty.     

The Impact of Court Delays on the Prosecutor and the Defendant: An Economic Analysis

One important aspect of the economic theory of criminal court delay is to understand how the prosecutor and the defendant make their decisions, and how these respond to changes in trial delay. If both parties jointly maximise expected utility, trial delay may increase or decrease the number of trials, depending upon the decision makers' attitudes towards risk. The main policy implication is that providing the criminal courts with more resources in the form of additional judges and court capacity may lengthen the trial queue rather than shorten it. This is a counterintuitive result contrary to popular belief.     

“The roughest form of social work:” How court officials justify bail decisions

Growing research has analyzed quantitative patterns of bail decisions and outcomes, but we know far less about how court officials justify their bail decisions. To enhance understanding of how bail decisions—and their resulting pretrial outcomes—are generated, we interviewed 104 judges, prosecutors, and public defenders in a northeastern state. Court officials in our study reported three primary justifications at bail: ensuring defendants return to court, preventing crime, and lessening harm. The first two justifications have been suggested in the literature, but the latter is novel and encompasses two secondary justifications: lessening criminal legal system harm and lessening societal harm. We show how these justifications and the decisions they enable blend risk management with rehabilitation and emerge from court officials’ shared assumption of defendants’ social marginality but varied beliefs about what to do about such marginality pretrial. Each justification allows for distinct, but at times overlapping, bail decisions. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories of court official decision-making, research on racial and socioeconomic inequality, and bail reform policy.     

Modeling the Evolution of Legal Discretion.An Artificial Intelligence Approach

Abstract. Much legal research focuses on understanding how judicial decision‐makers exercise their discretion. In this paper we examine the notion of legal or judicial discretion, and weaker and stronger forms of discretion. At all times our goal is to build cognitive models of the exercise of discretion, with a view to building computer software to model and primarily support decision‐making. We observe that discretionary decision‐making can best be modeled using three independent axes: bounded and unbounded, defined and undefined, and binary and continuous. Examples of legal tasks are given from each of the eight ensuing octants and we conclude by saying what this model shows about current legal trends. We should stress that our taxonomy has been based on our observations of how discretionary legal decisions are made. No claim is made that our model is either complete (providing advice in every domain) or exact, but it does help knowledge engineers construct legal decision support systems in discretionary domains.     

There's Nothing New in Dying Now: Will Welfare Attorney Decision Making at End of Life Make a Real Difference?

Advance care planning is a way to express value‐based preferences in order to guide future treatment decisions following loss of decision‐making capacity. It aims to ensure that one's critical values continue to influence healthcare decisions, particularly at end of life. The Mental Capacity Act 2005 permits adults with capacity to appoint welfare attorneys to act as their proxy decision‐makers following loss of capacity. A focus group study was used to explore the views and perceptions of lawyers and health professionals to attorney decision making at end of life. Whilst participants gave a guarded welcome to the introduction of healthcare and welfare attorneys, potential challenges were identified, based upon professional norms and expectations. A shared consensus was that the realization of the full potential of proxy decision making was likely to be a theoretical, rather than real, benefit. Opinions were divided on elemental tenets such as prospective autonomy, best interests, and the potential for conflict.     

Outsourcing,Discretion, and Administrative Justice: Exploring the Acceptability of Privatized Decision Making

This study explores what happens to administrative justice and to the acceptability of frontline decisions in privatized and marketized models of service. Through the case study of privatized welfare‐to‐work in Israel, it shows the fundamental tension between outsourced discretion and traditional conceptions of administrative justice in which the trustworthiness of decisions relies on the idea that decision makers have no personal interest in the outcome of their decisions. It finds that in the Israeli case, contractors' financial interests were widely perceived as putting their professionals into a conflict of interest, thereby undermining trust in their decisions. At the same time, the study finds the program's managerial performance mechanisms did not provide an alternative legitimacy argument for the acceptability of decisions. The study also analyzes the ways policy makers reconstructed the decision‐making systems to regain public acceptance of frontline decisions, while discussing both the potential and the limits of legitimizing outsourced discretion in such complex public services.     

Conducting Cost Benefit Analyses in Criminal Justice Evaluations: Do We Dare?

The last decade has witnessed a demand for evidence-based programs in virtually every field of social research. Presumably evidence will help inform officials as to which programs are likely to yield successful outcomes as well as help practitioners operate programs with best practices. But program effectiveness is only half the answer. The other half is affordability. Policy makers make budget-constrained decisions. A decision to implement a program in one area means cuts in programs in some other area. Evaluations that report only effectiveness findings cannot contribute much toward social program decision making. Evaluators must start to provide information on both costs and effectiveness or costs and benefits. This paper presents some of the challenges of incorporating cost benefit analysis into traditional criminal justice program evaluations. It presents illustrations of the conceptual and measurement issues to be faced evaluating programs in such areas as private security, juvenile delinquency, police interventions, and correctional rehabilitation when researchers attempt to add cost analysis to program inputs and try to convert outcomes into monetary units. It raises issues regarding availability, program externalities, hidden resources, and inadequacies of outcome measures. It concludes with some general guidance for evaluators on conducting such analyses and a checklist of questions to consider when deciding between cost effectiveness analysis and cost benefit analysis.     

Sex offender risk assessment: Consideration of human rights in community protection legislation

Objectives. Risk assessments provided to judicial decision makers as a part of the current generation of legislation for protecting the public from sexual offenders can have a profound impact on the rights of individual offenders. This article will identify some of the human rights issues inherent in using the current assessment procedures to formulate and communicate risk as a forensic expert in cases involving civil commitment, preventive detention, extended supervision, or special conditions of parole. Method. Based on the current professional literature and applied experience in legal proceedings under community protection laws in the United States and New Zealand, potential threats to the rights of offenders are identified. Central to these considerations are issues of the accuracy of current risk assessment measures, communicating the findings of risk assessment appropriately to the court, and the availability of competent forensic mental health professionals in carrying out these functions. The role of the forensic expert is discussed in light of the competing demands of protecting individual human rights and community protection. Conclusion. Actuarial risk assessment represents the best practice for informing judicial decision makers in cases involving sex offenders, yet these measures currently demonstrate substantial limitations in predictive accuracy when applied to individual offenders. These limitations must be clearly articulated when reporting risk assessment findings. Sufficient risk assessment expertise should be available to provide a balanced application of community protection laws.     

The Influence of Public Sentiment on Supreme Court Opinion Clarity

We examine whether public opinion leads Supreme Court justices to alter the content of their opinions. We argue that when justices anticipate public opposition to their decisions, they write clearer opinions. We develop a novel measure of opinion clarity based on multifaceted textual readability scores, which we validate using human raters. We examine an aggregate time series analysis of the influence of public mood on opinion clarity and an individual‐level sample of Supreme Court cases paired with issue‐specific public opinion polls. The empirical results from both models show that justices write clearer opinions when their rulings contradict popular sentiment. These results suggest public opinion influences the Court, and suggest that future scholarship should analyze how public opinion influences the written content of decision makers’ policies.     

Potential Impact of Research on Adolescent Development on Juvenile Judge Decision‐making

This paper discusses how biological and psychological literature on the developmental differences between juveniles and adults may affect juvenile judges in their “dual role” as retributive and rehabilitative decision‐makers in juvenile cases, specifically focusing on sentencing. Particularly, it discusses potential influences of this research on adolescent development regarding four factors known to be integral in juvenile judge decision‐making: legal factors, characteristics of juvenile offenders, and individual structural and social contexts in which judges’ decisions are made. To conclude, implications and recommendations stemming from this discussion are considered.     

The Influence of Actuarial Risk Assessment in Clinical Judgments and Tribunal Decisions about Mentally Disordered Offenders in Maximum Security

Research has shown that actuarial assessments of violence risk are consistently more accurate than unaided judgments by clinicians, and it has been suggested that the availability of actuarial instruments will improve forensic decision making. This study examined clinical judgments and autonomous review tribunal decisions to detain forensic patients in maximum security. Variables included the availability of an actuarial risk report at the time of decision making, patient characteristics and history, and clinical presentation over the previous year. Detained and transferred patients did not differ in their actuarial risk of violent recidivism. The best predictor of tribunal decision was the senior clinician's testimony. There was also no significant association between the actuarial risk score and clinicians' opinions. Whether the actuarial report was available at the time of decision making did not alter the statistical model of either clinical judgments or tribunal decisions. Implications for the use of actuarial risk assessment in forensic decision making are discussed.     

A social psychological critique of the Saudi terrorism risk reduction initiative

Of great concern to policy makers and detention system administrators who face the need to release detainees suspected of terrorism is how to do so in ways that minimize risk to national security. Among responses taken by detention system administrators is the establishment of so-called ‘deradicalization’ (or ‘disengagement,’ or ‘terrorism risk reduction’) programs in which select detainees may participate to promote their own release. The present analysis critiques the Saudi terrorism risk reduction initiative in accord with two social psychological theories that are especially pertinent to the topic – identity theory and frame alignment theory – and offers policy suggestions based upon the theoretical strengths and weaknesses of the Saudi model.     

Naming Names: The Impact of Supreme Court Opinion Attribution on Citizen Assessment of Policy Outcomes

The manner in which political institutions convey their policy outcomes can have important implications for how the public views institutions' policy decisions. This paper explores whether the way in which the U.S. Supreme Court communicates its policy decrees affects how favorably members of the public assess its decisions. Specifically, we investigate whether attributing a decision to the nation's High Court or to an individual justice influences the public's agreement with the Court's rulings. Using an experimental design, we find that when a Supreme Court outcome is ascribed to the institution as a whole, rather than to a particular justice, people are more apt to agree with the policy decision. We also find that identifying the gender of the opinion author affects public agreement under certain conditions. Our findings have important implications for how public support for institutional policymaking operates, as well as the dynamics of how the Supreme Court manages to accumulate and maintain public goodwill.     

Gender,race, bias and perspective: OR,how otherness colours your judgment

This discussion considers assumptions about judges and judging and suggests that despite what is sometimes perceived as increasing diversity on the bench and in the legal profession, outsider decision makers’ membership of the jurisprudential community is still marked by ‘otherness’. The argument draws upon my ongoing interest in the law's concern with the concepts of ‘objectivity’, ‘neutrality’ and ‘perspective’. I argue that the legal system is inherently suspicious of ‘otherness’ and most specifically so when ‘others’ occupy positions of ‘judgement’. The consequence is to render decisions made by ‘otherised’ judges liable to attack for bias in a way that decisions made by insiders simply are not. The argument is illustrated by a review of a number of challenges made on the ground of ‘bias’ or recusal motions to judges whose failure to match the white Anglo hetero-normative standard of ‘the judge’ is seen as a limit on their ability to be ‘impartial’. The examples used range across many jurisdictions, from Australia, Canada, the US and a challenge to the impartiality of a decision of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).     

Roles and Power within Federal Problem Solving Courtroom Workgroups

Problem solving (PS) courts (e.g., drug, family, gang, prostitution, reentry) are becoming more commonplace. Today, PS courts exist or are planned in nearly all of the ninety‐four U.S. federal districts. These courts focus on integrating therapeutic jurisprudence into the courtroom environment while emphasizing group decision‐making processes among courtroom workgroup members. In this legal setting, courtroom workgroup teams, regularly consisting of judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, probation officers (POs), and treatment providers engage a collective, case management approach to decision making with shared power among team members. However, despite the court's therapeutic and collaborative design, we find that POs wield powerful influence in decision making. Informed by sixteen months of qualitative fieldwork, including semistructured interviews, observation of courtroom workgroup meetings, and court observations in five federal PS courts in three federal districts, we find that POs exert undetected informational, technical, and relational power within the PS courtroom workgroup. This role and its accompanying power transforms POs into key decision makers, regardless of PS court type, workgroup dynamics, and decision‐making style. The POs' role makes them critical contributors to the outcomes in federal PS courts with important implications for punishment decisions in the federal justice system. With an increasing number of PS courts currently in the planning stages at the federal level, our study has implications for the structure and decision outcomes in these growing courtroom workgroups.     

Expert Approaches to Communicating Violence Risk

There has been virtually no empirical study of the way in which evaluating clinicians communicate their conclusions about the risk of violence toward others. Risk communication has become particularly important in recent years, serving as the link between empirical data from recent studies and the understanding and use of such data by evaluators and decision makers. The present study considered how psychologists and psychiatrists, identified as experts in violence risk assessment, responded to eight vignettes that systematically measured preferences for risk communication. The vignettes involved the presentation of the following factors in a 2 × 2 × 2 within-subjects design, counterbalanced for order: (1) risk model (prediction vs. management), (2) risk level (high vs. low risk of the individual being assessed), and (3) risk factors (the predominance of static vs. dynamic risk factors). A total of 71 individuals (41 psychologists, 2 sociologists, and 28 psychiatrists) responded to a survey mailed to 100 individuals, for a response rate of 71%. Participants were asked to rate the value of six forms of risk communication for each of the eight vignettes. There were few significant differences between the ratings assigned by psychologists and those assigned by psychiatrists. The most highly valued form of risk communication involved identifying risk factors applicable to the individual and specifying interventions to reduce risk. A repeated-measures multivariate analysis of variance yielded a main effect for risk level and an interaction between risk level and risk factors. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed.