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.     

Clinical Considerations for the Treatment of Latency Age Children in Residential Care

Children in the United States are exposed to alarmingly high rates of violence and trauma. Notable are the rates of maltreatment among children and the heightened risk for both out of home placement and an array of developmental, behavioral, and psychosocial sequelae. Despite these risks, little information is available on effective interventions and services designed to address the complex needs of youth in residential treatment settings. To effectively respond to their unique developmental, behavioral, and emotional needs, trauma-informed interventions and services must be provided to support optimal outcomes. To this end, this paper delineates the prevalence of children in residential care secondary to chronic maltreatment and other trauma exposures, identifies behavioral and emotional issues through the theoretical framework of complex trauma, highlights the importance of organizational capacity to deliver trauma-informed services, and describes effective clinical interventions that are often used in residential treatment. Clinical considerations and recommendations are also provided.     

Does electoral fraud spread? The expansion of electoral manipulation in Russia

In this paper, we argue that the occurrence of electoral manipulation in Russia has been driven, in part, by diffusion across neighboring raions through emulation, incentives, and networks. Presumably, in Putin’s Russia all local authorities have some incentives to deliver a high number of votes to United Russia, the “party of power”. However, the perceived pressure to deliver ever higher levels of support for Putin’s party arguably increases considerably if one’s raion is located in a region marked by extraordinarily high turnout and high vote share for United Russia. Conversely, the absence of perceived competition to curry executive favor through delivering votes and networks of uncorrupted local authorities, as well as local opposition organizations working to combat electoral fraud, may help explain the absence of fraud among raions located in regions marked by clean elections. Our quantitative analyses suggest that a “neighborhood effect” – the existence of manipulated raions within a region – strongly influences the likelihood that raions are manipulated. Moreover, although results are more mixed, spatial autocorrelation analysis suggests that turnout levels in raions are influenced by the turnout in proximate raions.     

Implementing Developmental Screening Programs for Infants and Toddlers in the Child Welfare System

In 2003, revisions to the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act required states to develop plans to refer children younger than 3 years of age with a substantiated case of abuse and neglect for developmental screening. A decade after legislation was passed, its implementation varies considerably across states. This article explains how research informs the need for careful developmental monitoring of young children, especially those experiencing trauma or living under stressful conditions. Finally, this article presents how one community used colocation to increase developmental screenings for young abused and neglected children.     

Good Governance Means Performance and Results

If the object of developing and developed world leaders is to uplift their peoples continually, then it is essential to measure approximations of actual service deliveries (what we ought to mean by “governance”), not to rate nations impressionistically according to the perceived quality of their operations, their perceived impartiality (as per Rothstein), the extent of their bureaucratic autonomy (as per Fukuyama and others), or their capacity to coax or coerce citizens. Only in that positive manner can we distinguish the governments that are producing abundant political goods (i.e., good governance) from those that no longer are, or never did.     

Sustainable citizenship for a technological world: negotiating deliberative dialectics

Incorporating the notion of sustainability is the biggest challenge for citizenship in a technological era. Existing conceptions of citizenship have not been able to grapple with compounded ecological, economic, cultural, and moral threats facing modern technology-infused societies. Nor has increased public participation, engagement, and dialogue resolved polarized positions on issues such as what constitutes quality of life or what is meant by the integrity of nature. This paper draws on the scholarship of both sustainability and citizenship to propose a framework of sustainable citizenship that seeks to emphasize shared values through a deliberated clash of ideas. Such a framework involves a negotiation of the dialectics of rights and responsibilities, state and non-state, public and private, human and non-human nature, universal and particular, and democracy and capitalism. The paper illustrates how sustainable citizenship can be applied to deal with contentious political and policy issues of new and emerging technologies.