A NOTE ON AMERICA'S "CLOACAL" JAILS

A large literature points to the abominable condition of American jails. Comparison of national surveys of jail conditions conducted in 1972 and 1978 indicates that what little improvement has occurred is minimal compared to remaining problems. A number of factors have prevented state-set standards from achieving widespread improvement in local jail conditions: high costs, local autonomy and lack of credible threats for forcing compliance. The failure of New York State to implement adequate health standards illustrates the limitations of the standards approach. Other approaches, such as strategies for replacing local jails with regional facilities, deserve the attention of policy researchers.     

Information,apprehension, and deterrence: Exploring the limits of police productivity

The capacity of police departments to solve crimes and apprehend offenders is low for many types of crime, particularly crimes of profit. This article reviews a variety of studies of police apprehension and hypothesizes that an important determinant of the ability of the police to apprehend criminals is information. The complete absence of information for many types of crime places fairly clear upper bounds on the ability of the police to effect solutions.To discover whether these boundaries are high or low we analyzed data from the 1973 National Crime Panel about the types and amount of information potentially available to police through victim reports and patrol activities. The evidence suggests that if the police rely on information made readily available to them, they will never do much better than they are doing now. On the other hand, there appears to be more information available to bystanders and passing patrols than currently is being used, which suggests that surveillance strategies and improved police methods for eliciting, recording, and analyzing information supplied by victims and witnesses might increase the probability of solving crimes and making arrests. In light of this we review a few possibly helpful innovations suggested in the literature on police productivity and procedure.     

Negativistic delinquency revisited a behavioral analysis

A generalized revision of Albert Cohen's theory of negativistic delinquency is presented. The antecedent conditions of that theory have been broadened to include all contradictions between ideals and the practices that might, but do not, carry them out. Anger produced by distributive injustice has replaced reaction-formation as a causal mechanism. As revised, the theory appears to explain a wider range of “ornery” activities, some of which were negative cases for the original Cohen theory.     

One-or two-officer cars? A perspective from Kansas City

The relationship of police patrol-car staffing to response time is examined. The first systematic study of police patrol-car staffing, conducted in San Diego in 1977, found that two one-officer cars responded to the scene of an incident faster than one two-officer car. Given the study design, this finding was puzzling. When two one-officer cars are dispatched, at least one of the cars has farther to go, and the extra travel distance should require extra travel time. The present study replicated the previous empirical analysis with data from the Kansas City Response Time Analysis Study. Although it was expected that additional control variables would provide an explanation for the findings, the results were the same. Two one-officer cars are faster than one two-officer car. One explanation for this finding is that peer pressure among officers provides different incentives for rapid response in one- and two-officer cars. The policy implication is that the deployment of two-officer cars cannot be justified by minimized response time.