Studying the reach of deterrence: Can deterrence theory help explain police misconduct?

This article reports the first perceptual deterrence study of a sample of police officers. The study investigated the influence of traditional deterrence considerations, extralegal sanctions, and impulsivity on the intention to commit several hypothesized acts of police misconduct. The results were largely consistent with perceptual deterrence findings from samples of college students, experienced offenders, and corporate managers. In particular, this study found that both legal and extralegal sanction threats potentially deter police misconduct. Further, it found that impulsivity diminished the deterrent influence of both sanction forms. The study also found that some of the effects of the explanatory variables depended on whether officers had prior punishment experience. The article discusses the implications of its findings for combating police misconduct and for deterrence research generally.     

Doing Politics: Collaborative Research and the Members of Parliament Project

This article gives an account of the `Members of Parliament Project' based at Nottingham Trent and Sheffield universities, which reveals something of the team's working practices and intellectual strategy and concludes with reflections on the benefits and costs of collaboration. It also covers the research undertaken: the creation of a database on Conservative Parliamentarians in order to undertake research on a range of socio-economic, ideological and political variables; the use of cohort analysis to study the socio-economic profile of the Conservative elite; the development of a typology of British Conservatism; and the use of attitude surveys to empirically investigate a novel `ideological mapping' technique.     

Long-term effects of parental divorce on young adult male crime

The purpose of this study was to explore the long-term effects of parental divorce on young adult male crime from a longitudinal perspective. Four hundred and twenty-three males were randomly selected from a Danish birth cohort. Results of analyses of variance showed an initial significant relationship between divorce and young adult crime. However, the effects of divorce disappeared when further path analysis controlled for the effects of social class and father's criminality. In addition, time of divorce did not have an effect on later criminal behavior.Received her Ph.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1975. Current interests are interactions between biological and social variables.Received her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 1986. Current interests are social intervention and delivery of human services.Received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1974. Current interests are measurement, causal modeling, and individual differences.Received his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska (Lincoln) in 1955. Current interests are learning, instructional development, and the development of human potential.     

Escape from Domination: the Concept of Disengagement in Third World Studies

All political systems have their quota of dissidents, cynics and the apathetic who, rather than trying to change the structures of oppression, opt to withdraw from them. The phenomena associated with such withdrawal include political migration, secession, second economy activity, counterculture movements and departicipation from political activity and voting. 'Disengagement' boldly claims to provide a single unifying concept to embrace them all. Following an assessment of its use within different paradigms, common problems of defining the boundaries of disengagement are considered. Finally a tentative typology is offered.