Selective Incapacitation Revisited

The term incapacitation is an important criminological concept that implies that the offender's capacity to commit new crimes is to be concretely obstructed or reduced through confinement. The purpose of selective incapacitation is to select those particularly prone to violence and to incapacitate them. The paper presents a critical analysis of the risk prediction enterprise. The paper addresses the accuracy of prediction, the ethics of prediction, and in particular the research culture within which research on prediction occurs.     

Wound Ballistics,Reasonable Force and Anini's Incapacitation

Lawrence Nomayagbon Anini, 26 years old, was Nigeria's most notorious armed robber. His image was larger than life, dwarfing those of Ishola Oyenusi, the King of robbers in the 1970's and Youpelle Dakuro, the army deserter who masterminded the most vicious daylight robbery in Lagos in 1978 in which two policemen were killed.

Anini spear-headed a four-month reign of terror between August and December 1986 that gripped part of Nigeria. While he and his gang reigned, they killed, maimed, kidnapped, robbed, and raped their victims. The episodes were replicated with increasing sophistication, brazenness and arrogance. At the end of it all, 20 persons—11 policemen and nine civilians were dead. Indeed, Anini's siege on Nigeria has been described as “a nightmare” and “a metaphor of horror.”

Perhaps Justice Omo-Agege, the Chairman of the First Benin Robbery and Firearms Tribunal which tried Anini and his cohorts, said it best when he wrote:

Anini will forever be remembered in the history of crime in this country, but it would be of unblessed memory. Few people if ever, would give the name to their children.     

Incapacitation and Just Deserts as Motives for Punishment

Law and Human Behavior - What motivates a person's desire to punish actors who commit intentional, counternormative harms? Two possible answers are a just deserts motive or a desire to...     

Comment on Thomas Mathiesen's Selective Incapacitation Revisited

Law and Human Behavior -     

Incapacitation and imprisonment: prisoners' involvement in community-based crime

Abstract

The impact of incapacitation on prisoners' offending behaviour is a neglected area of research. The aim of this study was to examine the extent and nature of prisoners' involvement in community-based crime in the UK. Participants were selected from nine prisons in the UK and consisted of 360 prisoners, 81 females and 279 males. Offenders were interviewed to assess levels and forms of involvement in community-based crime and perceptions of other prisoners' involvement. Levels of prisonization and institutional and demographic characteristics were used to identify vulnerability to involvement in community-based crime. Twenty-five per cent of the sample admitted personal involvement and 63% reported other prisoners' involvement in a diverse range of crimes. Analyses revealed prisoners involved in community-based crime are likely to be young, male recidivists who hold prisonized attitudes. Prisoners who are white, prisonized and recidivist reported highest levels of other prisoners' involvement in community-based crime. No age or gender differences delineated prisoners' reports of others' involvement. The results show that incarcerating offenders may not prevent their involvement in community-based offending. Discussion centres on the characteristics of involved prisoners and considers the implications of the results for rehabilitation and penal policy.     

Human Electrical Muscular Incapacitation and Effects on QTc Interval

Human Electrical Muscular Incapacitation (HEMI) is used to subdue combative individuals. Changes in cardiac electrical activity have been proposed as the cause of death in a small fraction of these individuals. The current study sought to determine whether changes in QTc interval occur after HEMI exposure. Twenty‐four participants had EKG readings before a 5‐second HEMI exposure and within 30 min after exposure. All subject EKGs were read by a data‐blinded cardiac electrophysiologist who calculated a QT corrected (QTc) interval. QTc interval was calculated using Bazett method. QTc prolongation was defined as >430 ms and a threshold of 30 ms for identifying QTc lengthening. Five participants experienced QTc prolongation and six had QTc lengthening. One participant developed QTc prolongation exceeding 500 ms, which carries a risk of developing multifocal ventricular tachycardia. These results suggest that HEMI exposure may cause EKG changes with a risk of ventricular tachycardia.     

The Incapacitation Effect of First-Time Imprisonment: A Matched Samples Comparison

Objectives

The logic of incapacitation is the prevention of crime via the forced removal of known offenders from the community. The challenge is to provide a plausible estimate of how many crimes an incarcerated individual would have committed, were s/he free in the community rather than confined in prison. The objective of this study is to provide estimates of the incapacitation effect of first-time imprisonment from a sample of convicted offenders.

Methods

The data are official criminal records of all individuals convicted in The Netherlands in 1997. Two different analytical strategies are used to estimate an incapacitation effect. First, the offending rate of the imprisoned individuals prior to their confinement in 1997 provides a “within-person counterfactual”. Second, imprisoned offenders are paired with comparable non-imprisoned offenders using the method of propensity score matching in order to estimate a “between-person counterfactual”. Incapacitation estimates are provided separately for juvenile imprisonment (ages 12–17) as well as adult imprisonment (ages 18–50), and for male and female offenders.

Results

The best estimate is that 1 year of incarceration prevents between 0.17 and 0.21 convictions per year. The use of additional data sources indicates that this corresponds to between roughly 2.0 and 2.5 criminal offenses recorded by the police.

Conclusions

The current results suggest that, insofar as imprisonment is used with the primary goal of reducing crime through incapacitation, a general increase in the use of incarceration as the sanction of choice is not likely to yield major crime control benefits.     

The Silence of the Lambdas: Deterring Incapacitation Research

This essay provides an economist’s perspective on criminological research into incapacitation effects on crime. Our central argument is that criminologists would do well to substantially scale back the enterprise of trying to estimate the various behavioral parameters central to a micro-level approach to measuring incapacitation effects, including the annual rate of offending outside of prison (λ) and the lengths of criminal careers. One problem with this line of research is practical: for example, mean estimates of self-reported criminal activity by incarcerated prisoners are quite sensitive to reports by the most criminally active offenders. But the larger concern is conceptual—the incapacitation effects from a given change in sentencing policy may be undermined by the possibility of replacement effects, and at the same time omit other benefits that may arise from deterrent effects on crime. A more promising approach is to identify plausibly exogenous changes in sentencing policy in order to estimate the net impact on crime from the combined effects of incapacitation, deterrence and replacement.

Prolonged Electro-muscular Incapacitation in a Porcine Model Causes Spinal Injury

Conducted electrical weapons are designed to cause temporary electro-muscular incapacitation (EMI) without significant injury. The objective of this study was to assess the risk and cause of spinal injury due to exposure to a benchtop EMI device. Porcine subjects were exposed to 19 and 40 Hz electrical stimuli for a prolonged duration of 30 sec. X-ray imaging, necropsy, and accelerometry found that lumbosacral spinal fractures occurred in at least 89% of all subjects, regardless of the stimulus group, and were likely caused by musculoskeletal fatigue-related stress in the lumbosacral spine. Spinal fractures occurred in the porcine model at an unusually high rate compared to human. This may be due to both the prolonged duration of electrical stimulation and significant musculoskeletal differences between humans and pigs, which suggests that the porcine model is not a good model of EMI-induced spinal fracture in humans.     

Incapacitation: Revisiting an Old Question with a New Method and New Data

We use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to obtain estimates of the number of crimes avoided through incapacitation of individual offenders. Incarcerated individuals are matched to comparable non-incarcerated counterparts using propensity score matching. Propensity scores for incarceration are calculated using a wide variety of time-stable and time-varying confounding variables. We separately analyze juvenile (age 16 or 17) and adult (age 18 or 19) incapacitation effects. Our best estimate is that between 6.2 and 14.1 offenses are prevented per year of juvenile incarceration, and 4.9 to 8.4 offenses are prevented per year of adult incarceration.

The Risk Assessment Enterprise: Selective Incapacitation or Increased Predictive Accuracy

Law and Human Behavior -     

Estimating the Number of Crimes Averted by Incapacitation: An Information Theoretic Approach

This paper presents an information theoretic approach for estimating the number of crimes averted by incapacitation. It first develops models of the criminal history accumulation process of a sample of prison releasees using their official recorded arrest histories prior to incarceration. The models yield individual offending trajectories that are then used to compute the number of crimes these releasees could reasonably have been expected to commit had they not been incarcerated—the counterfactual of interest. The models also afford the opportunity to conduct a limited set of policy simulations. The data reveal a fair amount of variation among individuals both in terms of the number of crimes averted by their incarceration and the responsiveness of these estimates to longer incarceration terms. Estimates were found not to vary substantially across demographic groups defined by offender race, gender, or ethnicity; variations across states and offense types were more pronounced. Implications of the findings and promising avenues for future research are discussed.

Pyrolysis products of structure fires

Common floor-coverings, carpet, synthetic turf, vinyl flooring and pad (underlay) were exposed to a real-life fire environment consisting of an ordinary combustible fuel load in a room. Samples of the floor-coverings were recovered immediately after extinguishment and subjected to laboratory testing using heated head space and charcoal trap-carbon disulphide extraction. Polyethylene/polypropylene synthetic turf and polyurethane padding were found to present a significant volatile signature after such exposure. In a second test, several floor-coverings were burned in a room fire involving the use of three common petroleum products. None of the floor-coverings presented significant interference to identification of these accelerants in the post-fire debris; however, they were found to generate volatiles which might be mistaken for synthetic blends or specialist solvents. The difficulties and value of reproducing full-scale environments and their effects on combustibles are discussed.     

The immediate problems of aircraft fires

Fires that occur either while aircraft are in flight or as a consequence of a crash remain life-threatening possibilities despite progress in technology and adoption of safety precautions. This article details some of the likely causes of aircraft fires, the resulting dangers in the immediate environment, prospects for survival, and recommends additional measures that may help avoid future accidents.     

Against Prevention? A Response to Harcourt's Against Prediction on Actuarial and Clinical Predictions and the Faults of Incapacitation

This article reviews Bernard Harcourt's Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age (2007), in which he criticizes the use of actuarial prediction methods in the contexts of policing and sentencing. I focus on the latter context. I argue that Harcourt has identified an important, and not exclusively American, trend and develops a valid critique of it that should be pushed further. From a theory of punishment perspective, I argue that Harcourt's critique is no less applicable to clinical prediction methods than to the use of actuarial ones. Harcourt's arguments, however, beg a more general explanation of the flaws of incapacitation as a justification for punishment. If we base our objection to the use of prediction methods on such larger grounds, questions arise as to the legitimacy of other practices that are not considered punitive but rather "regulatory" or "preventive."     

Significance of hydrocyanic acid formation during fires]

Cyanide concentrations of blood samples from fire victims autopsied in the Institute of Legal Medicine, Munich, have been determined. In 25% of 48 analyzed cases cyanide concentrations from 0.52 microgram to 6.24 microgram Cyanide/ml blood have been detected. These results are compared to former studies and the higher mean level in our collective is emphasized. The importance of hydrocyanid acid in the toxicity of fire gases is evidently greater, than assumed. Hydrocyanic acid may be produced from nitrogen continaing polymers during combustion. The quote of these polymers in clothing, furniture, and also in equipment of cars is increasing. Therefore, it is necessary to take more notice of the formation of hydrocyanic acid during combustion, even though carbon monoxide is in general the main toxic agent in fire gases.     

Significance of cyanide in medicolegal investigations involving fires

This article presents the significance of cyanide in medicolegal investigation of fires. It discusses the various aspects of fire investigation and the pathophysiology of cyanide toxicity and evidence interpretation in fire investigations.     

城市地铁火灾的特点及防护措施

随着经济的发展和人口的增多,地铁作为人们出行的交通工具的重要性越来越被人们所重视。但是,地铁火灾的发生率及严重的损失同样令人担忧。本文分析了地铁火灾的特点,并提出了预防地铁火灾的措施及对策。     

Free radical production from controlled low-energy fires: toxicity considerations

Most fire departments respond within the first 5 min of notification of a fire. If fire victims are found at that stage by the firefighters, then incapacitation or death has occurred during the initial low-energy phase where smoke is being produced. Studies have shown that during this initial low-energy phase of the fire, gases commonly thought responsible for incapacitation or death are frequently not present in concentrations adequate to cause this result. In the current study free radicals, measured by electron spin resonance spectroscopy, were trapped in concentrations that we consider incapacitating, thus providing an explanation for "incapacitation without cause." This finding points the way to the design of more efficient temporary protective equipment for those who are in a high fire hazard environment, such as airline passengers, and suggests the idea of establishing a thermodynamic marker for the relative toxicity of building materials.