Do the experiential and deterrent effect operate differently across gender?

Deterrence research showed that successful criminal episodes tended to erode the effect of sanction risks. In particular, experience with offending—especially offending without punishment—was believed to cause individuals to lower their unrealistically high expectations of sanction risk. At the same time, other research showed that deterrence could work for some individuals such that high perceptions of sanction certainty tended to inhibit future episodes of criminal activity. One unanswered question was the extent to which these ‘experiential’ and ‘deterrent’ effects operated differently across gender. Self-reported survey information on over 2,000 adolescents was employed to examine whether the experiential and deterrent effects varied across gender. Results indicated more similarities than differences linking deterrent and experiential effects to self-reported delinquency. Future research directions are outlined.     

To Behave Like a Liar: Nonverbal Cues to Deception in an Asian Sample

The detection of deception is an essential yet challenging component of investigative interviewing. Behavioural cues to deception in particular, have long been used in investigative interviewing contexts to determine decisions of suspect veracity and deceit. Nevertheless, deception research amongst non-American or European populations has yet to fully explore the effectiveness of such non-verbal observations. This study may be the first to examine truth-lie behaviours involving South-East Asian participants. In this study conducted in Singapore, 68 participants completed either a mock criminal task or a non-criminal task, before encountering an investigative interviewing scenario in which they had to lie or tell the truth to the interviewer. The results showed that liars displayed significantly more head movements and less hand/finger movements, as well as reported more feelings of guilt, than truth-tellers. Implications for investigator training and criminal investigative procedures are discussed.     

Updating,subtyping, and perceptions of the police: Implications of police contact for youths’ perceptions of procedural justice

Individuals enter police encounters with expectations about how these interactions will unfold. These expectations are often rooted in racialized personal, vicarious, and collective experiences with the police. Bayesian updating posits that the way youth perceive treatment by the police during stops and arrests combines with prior expectations and perceptions to shape current views of the law, whereas subtyping suggests this process differs by race. This study examines intra- and interracial variability in these processes using longitudinal survey data from 3,085 Black and White youth. Regardless of race, youth who indicate they were treated with disrespect during police encounters had lower perceptions of procedural justice than did those with no contact, whereas contact perceived as respectful had no significant effects. For White but not Black youth, police encounters rated as “neutral” are associated with more negative views of the police. Other forms of legal socialization are also racialized, including messages conveyed in the media and by parents. Limited evidence exists that prior views of the police moderate the effect of police encounters on procedural justice or that these conditioning effects vary by race. Findings support updating, but race differences do not neatly align with findings expected with updating or subtyping theory.     

Correction to: A Two-Way Street? Reciprocal Associations Between Parental Warmth and Hostility with Substance Use Among Justice-Involved Adolescents

Journal of Youth and Adolescence -     

A Two-Way Street? Reciprocal Associations Between Parental Warmth and Hostility with Substance Use Among Justice-Involved Adolescents

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Transactional developmental theories propose that poor parenting behaviors contribute to youth substance use, and youth substance use contributes to poor...     

Think globally,buy locally: International agreements and government procurement

Do international treaties constrain national governments? The answer appears to be “yes” when it comes to the use of traditional barriers to trade, such as tariffs. Yet, while many governments have cut tariffs to comply with international agreements, they have often raised non-tariff barriers in their place. One increasingly prominent non-tariff barrier is discrimination in public procurement. Governments frequently discriminate against foreign suppliers in favor of domestic ones when buying goods and services. In an attempt to reduce procurement discrimination, international organizations, such as the World Trade Organization, have devoted ever more attention to members’ procurement practices. Additionally, a growing number of preferential trade agreements seek to regulate public procurement. It remains unclear, however, whether international rules are effective in changing governments’ purchasing behavior. Using original data, we find that neither multilateral nor preferential procurement agreements substantially reduce governments’ propensity to “buy national.” These results illustrate the difficulty of regulating non-transparent policy areas via international treaties.     

Frenemies: restorative justice and customary mechanisms of justice

More often than not, restorative justice is said to take roots in Indigenous practices. In fact, Indigenous and other traditional mechanisms of justice are often described as examples of restorative justice practices. In New Zealand, the government equates the Mãori approach to doing justice with family group conferences (FGC); a restorative justice mechanism which it claims embodies Mãori values and preferences. This article contends, however, that the type of ‘justice’ embodied in customary mechanisms, has often been taken out of context, and rendered universal and ahistorical through its representation as restorative justice mechanisms. Using fieldwork evidence, an analytical comparison between principles of restorative practices, New Zealand’s FGCs and the Mãori approach to justice was conducted. It concludes that this tendency to equate restorative justice with Indigenous approaches to law and justice is harmful and dangerous for it risks rendering the scholarship homogenizing and universalizing restorative justice, to the detriment of local preferences and practices.