DOES CORRECTIONAL TREATMENT WORK? A CLINICALLY RELEVANT AND PSYCHOLOGICALLY INFORMED META-ANALYSIS *

Careful reading of the literature on the psychology of criminal conduct and of prior reviews of studies of treatment effects suggests that neither criminal sanctioning without provision of rehabilitative service nor servicing without reference to clinical principles of rehabilitation will succeed in reducing recidivism. What works, in our view, is the delivery of appropriate correctional service, and appropriate service reflects three psychological principles: (1) delivery of service to higher risk cases, (2) targeting of criminogenic needs, and (3) use of styles and modes of treatment (e.g., cognitive and behavioral) that are matched with client need and learning styles. These principles were applied to studies of juvenile and adult correctional treatment, which yielded 154 phi coefficients that summarized the magnitude and direction of the impact of treatment on recidivism. The effect of appropriate correctional service (mean phi = .30) was significantly (p <.05) greater than that of unspecified correctional service (.13), and both were more effective than inappropriate service (?.06) and non-service criminal sanctioning (?.07). Service was effective within juvenile and adult corrections, in studies published before and after 1980, in randomized and nonrandomized designs, and in diversionary, community, and residential programs (albeit, attenuated in residential settings). Clinical sensitivity and a psychologically informed perspective on crime may assist in the renewed service, research, and conceptual efforts that are strongly indicated by our review.     

Higher Education in Transition to a Market Economy: Two Case Studies

THE IDEA FOR THIS ARTICLE came from a visit to Tomsk that took place in May 1997. The authors visited the State University of Tomsk, one of Russia's leading universities, with an enviable research record and very good library and computing facilities, and were fortunate enough to be able to interview senior staff of the university concerning their budgets and financial situation. Apparently the situation in Tomsk is not especially bad; indeed it may well be rather better than elsewhere in Russia. In order to have a little basis for comparison and to provide a second case study, we also investigated some aspects of the financial arrangements at the Economics Faculty of Moscow State University. What we learned from these two cases-admittedly far from a representative sample-not only revealed a great deal about the current state of higher education reforms in Russia but also provided a snapshot of the state of Russian economic reforms in general. Hence although this article is partly about Tomsk and Moscow, it is also about these wider issues. In significant respects, Russia remains quite distant from a well-functioning market-type economy, and some of these respects are important for the higher education sector. In a very fundamental sense, one could identify the main source of Russian shortcomings in reforms as a general problem of the state.1 However, this is not the place for a general review of such a major topic. Instead, in this article we focus on a few aspects of Russia's reforms in so far as they affect higher education, namely (1) ownership, property rights and governance issues; (2) funding issues and the state budget; (3) the tax regime and (4) non-functioning of the market economy. In what follows, therefore, we proceed as follows. First we outline some general issues relevant for the reform of a system of higher education moving away from former, Soviet-type structures, focusing on the Russian situation; then we present the case studies of Tomsk and Moscow. The following section examines issues concerning higher education in particular and the reform process more generally, as highlighted in the two case studies and in the light of the above four issues. We end with a short concluding section.     

TESTING CONTROL THEORY AND DIFFERENTIAL ASSOCIATION: A REANALYSIS OF THE RICHMOND YOUTH PROJECT DATA*

In what has become a classic work in the field, Matsueda (1982) tested control theory against differential association theory using Hirschi's (1969) Richmond Youth Project data. Matsueda found that measures of “definitions favorable to law violation” entirely mediated the effect of his social control measures and friends' delinquency, and concluded that differential association theory was supported over control theory. We note several problems with Matsueda's specification of control theory, and we reanalyze the Richmond data including measures of commitment to conventional goals and several attachment to parents variables that Matsueda excluded. We also propose and test a new method of measuring the social bond, conceptualizing the social bond as a second-order latent construct. In contrast with Matsueda's findings, we find that the social bond and friends' delinquency retain important direct effects on delinquency, and that these effects are greater than those of definitions. Thus, our results are more supportive of control theory than differential association theory.     

Predicting the Labour Vote in 1983: Social Backgrounds versus Subjective Evaluations

Labour's electoral performance in the 1983 General Election is examined in the light of a theoretical model of voting behaviour, originally developed to explain the 1979 election. In this model, voting behaviour is seen as a product of the individual's social attributes and his or her subjective evaluations of the Labour Party. The evidence indicates that subjective evaluations, particularly affective and retrospective evaluations, were far more important than social attributes in predicting the Labour vote in 1983. Moreover the latter were only weakly related to the former, which suggests that purely sociological accounts of electoral choice are becoming increasingly obsolescent in explaining and predicting electoral behaviour in Britain.