Short-term effects of restorative justice conferences on post-traumatic stress symptoms among robbery and burglary victims: a randomized controlled trial

Objectives

To examine the impact of face-to-face restorative justice conference (RJC) meetings led by police officers between crime victims and their offenders on victims’ post-traumatic stress symptoms.

Methods

Two trials conducted in London randomly assigned burglary or robbery cases with consenting victims and offenders to either a face-to-face restorative justice conference (RJC) in addition to conventional justice treatment or conventional treatment without a RJC. Post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) were measured with the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) within 1 month of treatment for 192 victims. We assessed the prevalence and severity of PTSS scores following treatment, using independent sample t tests and chi square statistics. We further measured the magnitude of the differences between the groups, using effect size analyses.

Results

Analyses show that PTSS scores are significantly lower among victims assigned to RJC in addition to criminal justice processing through the courts than to customary criminal justice processing alone. There are overall 49 % fewer victims with clinical levels of PTSS, and possible PTSD (IES-R?≥?25). Main treatment effects are significant (t?=?2.069; p?Conclusions Findings suggest that restorative justice conferences reduce clinical levels of PTSS and possibly PTSD in a short-term follow-up assessment. Future research should include longer follow-up, larger and more stratified samples, and financial data to account for the cost benefit implications of RJ conferences compared to ordinary PTSS treatments.     

Fighting the Jihad of the Pen: Countering Revolutionary Islam's Ideology

Al Qaeda's ideology is not new; their critique of the existing political and social order and vision for how to redeem the Muslim world builds on preexisting arguments of several 20th century predecessors who called for an Islamic revolution that would create a new order based on Islam. The persistence of revolutionary Islam suggests that these ideas need to be countered in order to strike at the root of the problem driving Islamically motivated terrorism and insurgency. U.S. efforts to defeat Al Qaeda, however, continue to focus primarily on killing or capturing the leadership, interdicting operations, and defensively bolstering the homeland and U.S. assets against various types of attacks. In order to confront Al Qaeda's ideology, U.S. efforts should focus on indirectly fostering “a market place of ideas”—the space and culture of questioning and debating—in order to challenge the grievances and solutions proposed by revolutionary Islam.     

Cable television and telephony in the telecommunications act of 1996: Economics,law, regulation and politics

Though reasonable people may argue about whether cable television and local telephone services are natural monopolies in theory, historically they have developed with infrastructures that make them more likely to have important declining cost characteristics in reality. Additionally, common carriage issues, especially for telephones, may necessitate regulatory oversight. Though touted as deregulation, and certainly eliminating many cross‐industry barriers, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is better understood as reregulation. The act maintains a common carriage philosophy while attempting to promote competition. However, evidence indicates it is unlikely that the new regulatory regime will result in efficient prices or true competition. Instead, duopoly in cable and oligopoly in telephony are probably the best that can be achieved under the act.     

Social networks of sexual offenders

Abstract

Despite the extensive research attention directed toward criminal peer groups, there has been little attention to the peer groups of sexual offenders. Sexual offenders are often considered to be loners who offend in isolation, but cases of sex crimes involving peer support are not difficult to find, e.g., child sex rings, gang rapes. To examine the role of peers in sexual offending, sexual offenders and nonsexual offenders were asked whether they knew other people who have committed sexual crimes. In comparison to the nonoffender community comparison group, the sexual offenders reported considerably more association and identification with sexual offenders. The associations also tended to be offence specific, such that child molesters knew other child molesters and rapists knew other rapists. These findings have important implications for the assessment and treatment of sexual offenders.     

Book reviews

Cook P &; C Kirkpatrick (eds), Privatisation in Developing Countries. International Library of Critical Writings in Economics. Cheltenham: Elgar Reference Collection, 2000. 120pp. ISBN: 1–85898–358–4 (Two volume set).

Entman RM &; A Rojecki, The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.305pp. US$26.00. ISBN: 0–26–21075–8.

Jalilian H, Tribe M &; J Weiss (eds), Industrial Development and Policy in Africa. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2000. 292pp. ISBN: 1–84064–120–7

Jing J (ed.), Feeding China's Little Emperors: Food, Children and Social Change. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. 279pp. ISBN: 0–8047–3134–9. US$17.95. http: //www. sup. org

Kleinen J, Facing the Future Reviving the Past: A Study of Social Change in a Northern Vietnamese Village. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1999. 239pp. ISBN: 981–230–039–2. US$29.90. http: //www.iseas.edu.sg/pub.html

Kebede JA, The Changing Face of Rural Policy in Tanzania: From Collectivism to Capitalism. London: Minerva Press, 2000. 86pp. ISBN: 07–5410–828–7. £8.99

Lane RE, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. 465pp. ISBN: 0–300–07801–3. £22.50

Madsen W, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa : 1993–1999. Lampeter, Ceredigion, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999. 568pp. ISBN 0–7734–8002–1.

Mankekar P, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood and Nation in Postcolonial India. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 429pp. 1999. ISBN: 0–8223–2390–7.

Mathoma P, Mills G &; J Stremlau (eds), Putting People First: African Priorities for the UN Millennium Assembly. Johannesburg, SANA, 2000. 129pp. ISBN: 1–919819–14–5

Nurnberger K, Prosperity, Poverty and Pollution: Managing the Approaching Crisis. Cluster Publications, 1999.487pp. ISBN: 1–875053–15–8.

Harvey D, Limits to Capital , Verso, 1999. 478pp. ISBN: 1–85984–714–5

O'Conner JS, Orloff AS &; S Shaver, States, Markets, Families: Gender, Liberalism, and Social Policy in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 280pp. ISBN: 0–521–63881‐X. £15.95. h ttp: //www. cup. cam.ac.uk

Oi J &; A Walder (eds), Property Rights and Economic Reform in China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. 354pp. ISBN: 08047–3788–6. £13.95. http: //www.sup.org

Parenti C, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis. London: Verso, 1999. 244pp. ISBN: 1–85984–3034. £15.00

Townsend RF, Agricultural Incentives in Sub‐Saharan Africa: Policy Challenges , World Bank Technical Paper no.444. Washington DC: World Bank, August 1999. ISBN: 0–8213–4528–1. Available from World Bank offices and Oxford University Press.

Verdery K, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 185pp. ISBN: 0–231–11230–0. US$25.00. http: //www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup

Zouev A (ed.) Generation in Jeopardy: Children in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. New York: Unicef, 1999. 206pp. ISBN: 0–7656–0290–3. US$19.95. http: //www.unicef.org     

The relationship between injustice and crime: A general strain theory approach

Purpose

Connect General Strain Theory (GST) and the organizational justice literature by examining how different types and combinations of major forms of injustice (distributive, procedural, and interactional), and resultant anger, may increase the likelihood that individuals respond to strain with crime.

Method

Logit and OLS regressions are used to analyze survey data obtained from a vignette that was randomly assigned to a sample of undergraduates. The vignette presented a distributive injustice and manipulated the additional presence of procedural and interactional injustice. Respondents rated their likelihood of intending to engage in a violent act and a non-violent deviant act.

Results

As expected, multiple types of injustice foster the intention of responding to injustice with crime. In addition to a distributive injustice, the presence of procedural injustice predicts violence, while interactional injustice predicts excessive drinking. Moreover, anger mediates the injustice-crime relationship, although this effect is more substantial for the association between procedural injustice and violence.

Conclusions

The relationship between injustice and crime is complex. Different forms of injustice can affect the propensity for crime through anger. Further research is encouraged to identify the criminogenic potential of certain types of combinations of injustice on the experience of negative emotions and crime.     

When an Alibi Is Not Enough: Judgments of Evidence Needed to Lay Charges in a Burglary Case

Laypersons were asked to assume the role of investigators to explore judgments of what evidence is needed to make an arrest in a criminal investigation when an alibi witness is present. Participants were sensitive to the relationship between the alibi witness and the suspect and were more likely to believe an alibi provided by someone unrelated to the suspect, as evidenced by requests for more physical evidence against the suspect than when the alibi corroborator was a family member. In addition, when presented with contradictory evidence, the age of the alibi witness became an important consideration. Age alone did not impact perceptions of evidence adequacy; however, when an (adult) eyewitness provided testimony that contradicted a child alibi witness, participants demonstrated partiality towards believing the child as evidenced by (a) more requests for physical evidence to be convinced the child was wrong and to arrest the suspect and (b) higher ratings of alibi witness credibility. This effect was not seen when the eyewitness’s testimony contradicted an alibi provided by an adult. The results provide insight for investigators and legal counsel regarding the influence of varying types of alibi witness evidence.     

Communicating about child sexual abuse with the public: learning the lessons from public awareness campaigns

Despite numerous public awareness campaigns child sexual abuse (CSA) remains a significant global issue affecting millions of children. This suggests that such campaigns have had minimal impact, and the paucity of good quality empirical evaluation makes it difficult to establish what has worked and what has not. This article considers how different and evolving approaches to public awareness campaigning on CSA since the 1990s have influenced (or not) attitudinal and behavioural change. The article reviews a number of key initiatives from around the world and identifies common themes that can inform campaigning and prevention efforts. Recommendations for further research efforts, social problem framing, and targeting are offered. The article concludes by arguing that more recent multi-faceted campaigns which combine a range of messaging methods are more likely to turn public awareness campaigning into public action campaigning.     

The Effect of Lineup Member Similarity on Recognition Accuracy in Simultaneous and Sequential Lineups

Two experiments investigated whether remembering is affected by the similarity of the study face relative to the alternatives in a lineup. In simultaneous and sequential lineups, choice rates and false alarms were larger in low compared to high similarity lineups, indicating criterion placement was affected by lineup similarity structure (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, foil choices and similarity ranking data for target present lineups were compared to responses made when the target was removed from the lineup (only the 5 foils were presented). The results indicated that although foils were selected more often in target-removed lineups in the simultaneous compared to the sequential condition, responses shifted from the target to one of the foils at equal rates across lineup procedures.