How Large Should the Strike Zone Be in “Three Strikes and You're Out” Sentencing Laws?

So-called three strikes and you're out sentencing laws for criminal offenders have proliferated in the United States. The laws vary considerably in their definitions of what constitutes a strike. This paper adapts the classic Poisson process model of criminal offending to investigate how varying sentence lengths and definitions of what constitutes a strike affect the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of these sentencing laws. In particular, it asks whether, by using different definitions for the first, second, and third strikes or different sentence lengths, one can make the resulting incarceration more efficient in the sense of incapacitating more crimes per cell-year served.     

Appeals to community and crime prevention

This paper considers the growing appeals to the idea of community in criminal justice policy and the involvement of actual communities in criminal justice initiatives. It draws on a completed two year research study of a number of community-based crime prevention initiatives in the South East of England. The paper considers the nature of community to which appeals are made in criminal justice discourse and policies, the contribution of community to the practices of social order and the nature of community representation and participation in crime prevention initiatives. It is argued that appeals to community in crime prevention, and crime control more generally, embody shifts in what constitutes the legitimate responsibilities of individuals, collectivities and the state. This has a number of implications, the first of which is a redrawing of the cost of policing and security services. Additionally, there is an associated shift in blame for failure. Finally, actual community involvement in crime control gives rise to new structures and forms of local governance that evoke key questions about the regulation of social relations, the nature of conflict resolution, citizenship, democracy and social justice.     

Constructing an index of officially recorded crime: The use of confirmatory factor analysis

Researchers using officially reported crime statistics must frequently combine rates of individual crimes into a single composite. The most popular composite is the FBI Crime Index, which is the sum of the seven Part I crimes; alternatives include forming separate indices for personal and property crimes and weighting the crime categories by their seriousness before summing them. In this paper we construct crime composites through the use of confirmatory factor analysis methods. The results suggest that the measurement assumptions of conventional crime indices are problematic and demonstrate how more satisfactory alternatives can be developed with confirmatory factor analysis techniques.     

Social control theory: The salience of components by age,gender, and type of crime

Most social control theorists do not consider definitions of delinquency problematic. Beginning with the assumption that crime is a unitary concept, researchers have combined a variety of non-normative items to create additive delinquency scales. Rarely is consideration given to whether the causes of crime differ for distinct types of criminal activity. Furthermore, the classic social control model doesnot predict that bonding variables operate differently for distinct age and gender categories. Consistent with the structuring perspective, the present research attempts to refine the social control model by specifying conditions under which the model predicts different forms of delinquency. This study examines social control theory using survey data from middle- and high-school students (N=2926). Logit regression analysis revealed that the model which best explains personal crime differs from the model which best explains property crime. Also, certain components of the model were more powerful predictors of criminal behavior for different age-gender groups. The importance of model specification is demonstrated and the implications for social control theory are discussed.     

Expanding coupled shock fronts of urban decay and criminal behavior: How U.S. cities are becoming “hollowed out”

This work attempts to formalize an emerging paradigm in criminology, examining the structural consequences of feedback between community physical decay and behavioral pathologies caused by the social disintegration resulting from that decay. Adaptation of a standard reaction/diffusion approach produces a model of radially expanding coupled traveling-wave shock fronts of interrelated contagious physical decay and criminal activity. The standard threshold theorem associated with the model equations suggests that currently advocated triage policies, which recommend the virtual abandonment of bad communities behind the expanding front, will fail spectacularly. The model suggests that, just as the hollowing-out process has a complex, synergistic and dynamic structure, so, too, must interventions be interactive and mutually reinforcing, adaptively, targeted at communities in all stages of the phenomenon.     

Marxism and the criminal question

The question considered is whether it is possible to trace a theoretical strategy for a criminal policy on the basis of Marx's work. The answer offered is that Marxian political and economic analysis does not supply any general theory of criminality and that any attempt to formulate such a theory (as in Lenin, Paukanis or Gramsci) necessarily leads to authoritarian and regressive conceptions of crime and punishment. Nevertheless the authors maintain that it is possible to trace three theoretical suggestions within Marxian thought which allow of a fruitful approach to the criminal question. The first suggestion relates to the economic roots of many aspects of modern criminality; the second regards the Christian and bourgeois superstition of moral liberty and individual culpability; the third suggestion deals with the lack of a guaranteed social space as the prime root of crime. These theoretical suggestions permit clarification of the social character of penal responsibility and this character points to the need for the socialization (but not deregulation) of criminal treatment.This essay grew out of a reply to a questionnaire drawn up by La questione criminale, an Italian review which tries to approach the criminal question from a Marxist standpoint.     

Satanism: Myth and reality in a contemporary moral panic

In the last decade, there have been many allegations about the prevalence of occult or Satanic criminality, which is believed to be involved in many offenses ranging from vandalism to child abuse and serial murder. Some have advocated the creation of specialized police units to combat the supposed threat. On the other hand, most of the alleged evils are very poorly substantiated, and highly questionable statements have been widely circulated. In fact, the current concern about the occult appears to have all the hallmarks of a classic moral panic, where a peripheral issue is suddenly perceived as a major social menace. This paper discusses the limited foundation of truth underlying the present crime-wave; and suggests that the panic reflects the moral and political agenda of extremists from the fundamentalist religious Right. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** AW502017 00005     

The dynamics of penal reform

Over the past two decades, a vast body of literature has developed that examines various penal reforms. However, several writers have argued this literature is empirically weak and theoretically overgeneralized. To advance the penal reform literature, it has been suggested that micro-studies informed by multiple theoretical frameworks be employed. This study responds to this call by providing a case study of intermediate punishment. Specifically, the study explores a reform's origins, operations, and outcomes, and how the motivations and activities of several control agents impact this process. A major finding associated with this reform effort is a piling up of sanctions. The piling up of sanctions exposes offenders to a number of punitive and rehabilitative controls, which often leads to violations and returns to the correctional system. To adequately interpret this and other reform process findings, several frameworks, including organizational, political economy, and professional ideology, are necessary. In particular, Cohen's (1984) notion of deposits is useful in describing the relationships that underly the reform process.     

Spectacularizing Crime: Ghostwriting The Law

Beginning with an examination of the process whereby punishment turns its point of application from body to subject, and its scene of application from public to private -- as Foucault outlines in Discipline and Punish -- this paper attempts to complicate Foucaults thesis of a shift from corporeal visibility to invisibility as it appears in his account of the withdrawal of punishment from a public, spectacular domain into the no less public yet private sphere of the prison by attending to the transformations of spectacle itself which accompanied this process of disembodiment. The embodied spectacle of punishment -- the states theatre of cruelty -- gave way to a disembodied discursive explosion of images of crime and punishment, and this process can be traced through the texts of Bentham (Panopticon Letters, Fragment on Ontology) and Dickens (Great Expectations). Foucaults dichotomy between the spectacle of public punishment and the disciplinary, non-spectacular prison overlooks the importance of images of crime and punishment which come to pervade public discourse and imagination as part of the installation of the disciplinary régime. Spectacularizing entails a move from the specific, embodied singularity of spectacle to the condition of a generalized, disembodied, and continual insistence: it is this that constitutes and characterizes the shift from spectacular sovereignty to disciplinary surveillance. This spectacularizing is akin to the spectre: some thing that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other (Derrida). The spectre haunting the nineteenth century was the criminal, and that centurys rationalizing of crime and punishment was based upon a fear of the spectral itself.     

The effects of delay on voice recognition accuracy

Two experiments were conducted in which 176 listeners heard male and female objectively defined high- and low-recognition voices and then attempted to identify these voices from a voice parade containing 20 distractors after either 10, 40, 100, or 130 minutes (experiment 1), or 10 minutes, one day, seven days, or 14 days (experiment 2). In experiment 1 delay had no overall effect, although further analysis revealed that the shortest delay did produce better performance than all other delay conditions. Further, high-recognition voices were better identified than low-recognition voices. In experiment 2 delay had an overall effect, with the shortest delay interval again being significantly better than all other conditions, which did not differ among themselves. High- and low-recognition voices, however, did not exhibit a statistically significant difference, although these two factors entered into a marginally significant interaction. Theoretical speculation and forensic implications were drawn.This research was funded by the British Home Office, research grant no. RES 741/1/1, although the views expressed are not necessarily those of the funding body.     

Developing a Multicenter Randomized Trial in Criminology: The Case of HIDTA

In criminal justice, as in other fields, an experimental study conducted ata single site does not offer a solid basis upon which to make strong publicpolicy recommendations. To date, criminal justice researchers have reliedupon two general approaches to overcome the limitations of single-siteexperimental research. The first, termed ``meta-analysis, seeks tocombine independent studies to identify consistent effects across criminaljustice settings or contexts. The second, sometimes termed replicationstudies, seeks to replicate investigations in multiple criminaljustice jurisdictions. In this paper we describe a related approachdeveloped in clinical studies in medicine and examine its applicabilityin criminal justice settings. Termed a multicenter clinicaltrial, this method demands the implementation ofa single experimental protocol at multiple sites. We contrast themulticenter approach with other methods and provide a substantiveexample of an ongoing multicenter criminal justice study. We begin byexamining the specific limitations of current approaches and solutionsoffered by multicenter studies to overcome these. We then turn to anapplication of the multicenter clinical trial in a criminal justicesetting. Using the example of the HIDTA (High-Intensity Drug TraffickingAreas) evaluation of drug treatment programs currently being conducted atmultiple sites, we illustrate components of the multicenter approach aswell as potential drawbacks researchers are likely to face in itsapplication in crime and justice studies.     

Lifestyle changes and risks of criminal victimization

Routine activity/lifestyle theories have been used to explain temporal changes in crime rates, the social ecology of crime, and individuals' risks of criminal victimization. Using a panel of 33,773 individuals and 19,005 households at two points in time, the current study extends previous research by examining whether changes in lifestyles are associated with changes in individuals' risks of personal and property victimization. Changes in lifestyles which signal greater target visibility or exposure to motivated offenders (greater daytime and nighttime activity outside the home) and reduced guardianship (decreases in the number of household members) are generally associated with increased risks of both types of victimization. Persons who maintained high levels of nighttime activity outside the household were also more likely to remain victims at both time periods. However, active lifestyle changes (increased precautionary actions) did not have their expected impact on reducing victimization risks, and several other changes over time also were inconsistent with expectations. The paper concludes with a discussion of the role of passive and active lifestyle changes on victimization risks and the implications of our findings for developing sociological theories of criminal victimization.An early draft of this paper was presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Society of Criminology, November 11–14, 1987. The data for this study were originally collected by the Bureau of Census for the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration and were made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. Neither the collectors of the data nor the Consortium bears any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here.     

Forfeiture and money laundering laws in the United States

Today Europe is faced increasingly with the phenomenon of organized crime, creating problems similar to those the United States faced as early as a decade ago. American forfeiture and money laundering laws provide the state with sweeping powers for use in its efforts to combat organized crime. Although study of these instruments might inspire European lawmakers to adopt similar ones, the instruments themselves carry a societal price tag that cannot be ignored. Classical principles limiting the reach of the criminal law (and the powers of its enforcement apparatus) and in a broader sense the liberal concept of the fragmentary nature of the criminal law have largely been abandoned by lawmakers in the area of organized crime. Thus, modern American forfeiture and money laundering laws have lowered the standards of protection against state intrusion into citizens' basic rights despite the lack of sufficient empirical proof that their investigative and punitive powers are efficient in skimming profits and deterring further crime.     

Do trials have real winners?

Conclusion In this paper, narrative coherence has been looked at as an institutional strategy in anticipation of the verdict rather than in retrospect of the crime or charge. The analysis of binary notions has been instrumental in the reconstruction of the coherence between the narrative(s) and the theoretical outcomes of the criminal trial. As the abstraction and polarisation of narrative versions focus on the achievement of professional consensus, the verdict, which is almost always based on the selection of a binary option does injustice to any narrative which is unfolded in the court-room. Whether the defendant is acquitted or convicted, therefore, does not make him a winner or a loser, as his personal experience is abducted and institutionalised for the facilitation of smooth institutional decision-making.     

The statistical prediction of violent behavior

Considerable attention in the popular and professional literature has focused on the relative costs and benefits of using public protectionist versus civil libertarian models of social control. In this article, we develop statistical analogs of these models to predict violent behavior among samples of defendants found incompetent to stand trial in New York State. The societal and personal costs (errors of prediction) of each model are compared and their implications for clinical practice and social policy are discussed.This research was supported in part by PHS Grant MH 20367 from the NIMH Center for Studies of Crime and Delinquency. The assistance of Thomas Arvanites in data analysis and the comments of Monroe Lefkowitz and Mary Evans Melick on earlier drafts of this paper are gratefully acknowledged.     

Women on the edge of crime: Crack cocaine and the changing contexts of street-level sex work in New York City

In this paper, we attempt to examine, engender and contextualize the theses that (i) women's emancipation escalates [women's] crime and violence and (ii) women's drug use escalates [women's] crime and violence, by drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in relation to women crack smokers and the changing contexts of street-level sex work in New York City. The paper attempts to illustrate how the position of women crack smokers can only be understood by locating their lives, their illicit drug use and their income-generating activities within the context of a specific set of localized socio-economic and cultural developments. We suggest that observations from our research refute the theses that women are becoming more criminal and/or violent in the context of either their consumption of crack cocaine or their alleged emancipation.An earlier version of this paper was presented by the first author at the Joint Meetings, Law and Society Association and Research Committee on the Sociology of Law of the International Sociological Association, Amsterdam, 26–29 June 1991.     

From fiddle factors to networks of collusion: Charting the waters of small business crime

Small business crime has been largely ignored in American criminology; studies of nontraditional crime have focused mainly on corporate crime or on the misdeeds of employees pursuing personal gain. This paper calls for criminologists to redirect their efforts toward the systematic study of small business crime. In particular, it advocates in-depth qualitative studies that explore small business culture and opportunity structures, and that examine the networks of collusion that subvert the legitimate economy. The paper concludes with illustrations from an own story currently being shared with the author by a small businessman who participated for five years in an urban crime network that infiltrated the redistributive economy.     

Globalisation and Conceptualisation in the Sphere of International Criminal Law

Professor Wiener mentions that [w]hile an agreement has evolvedin the juris-prudence concerning the meaning of criminal law' and publicinternational law', the opinions regarding what international criminallaw is still diverge to a great extent.1 The task of this report isto clear up what we mean by international criminal law, because itis not an exact expression.     

How to Develop More Effective Policies Against Crime: Some Reflections on Drugs and Crime Research in an International Context

This paper offers some reflections on how to develop more effective policies against crime, drawing on more than 10 years of research experience on the international drug problem. The paper begins by trying to illustrate the so-called justice gap in the world, and explain why an institution such as the United Nations has a comparative advantage in closing that gap. It then details four lessons that the author has learnt from his own personal experience as head of research in the United Nations International Drug Control Programme, now called the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime: (i) measure, count, and keep counting; (ii) publish or perish, either in inter-governmental default, or in public hysteria; (iii) limit the dangers of committing the euphemistic fallacy; and (iv) divorce research and policy, because research is policy-dependent; make research policy-relevant, and re-marry it to policy. Finally, the paper tries to show how these lessons can be applied in related areas and used as good practice in research on crime.     

A Taxonomy of Normative and Empirically Oriented Theories of Distributive Justice

The study proposes a taxonomy that maps and organizes various normative (ought) and empirically oriented (is) theories of distributive justice, with the aim of examining possible relations between these two research traditions. The taxonomy distinguishes between theories according to two shared dimensions of content: (a) microjustice versus macrojustice principles and (b) the unidimensional versus multidimensional character of these principles. The combination of these dimensions yields four groups of theories of distributive justice: unidimensional macro (the utilitarian approach); multidimensional macro (Rawls' theory of justice); unidimensional micro (desert and equity theories); and multidimensional micro (Miller's theory and the multiprinciple approach). A fifth group of hybrid theories is identified (including Walzer's and Jasso's theory of justice), which is built upon the layers of the other taxonomy cells, combining elements of macro- and microjustice and emphasizing the multidimensional character of distributive justice. The analysis revealed that the empirical and normative traditions have much in common. In certain cases, as with the utilitarian approach and Rawls' theory, empirical research has sought correspondence between the ought and the is. In other cases, such as with equity theory and the multiprinciple approach, it has used some basic normative ideas and assumptions as its starting point. Nevertheless, these research traditions often develop in parallel ways without sufficient mutual recognition or interaction. The study concludes by considering possible exchanges that may develop between these two traditions, examining to what extent and how philosophical–normative and empirically oriented research can contribute to one another.