SELECTIVE INCAPACITATION AND THE PROBLEM OF PREDICTION*

Recent innovations in sentencing policy across the United States reveal a renewed interest in the idea of selective incapacitation of criminal offenders. This is perhaps most evident in the proliferation of “Three Strikes and You're Out” habitual-offender statutes across the nation. Although the term was first introduced by David Greenberg in 1975, Peter Greenwood and Allan Abrahamse's eponymous 1982 Rand report represents the most fully articulated plan for implementing such a strategy. The report's release stimulated much discussion, because of the AUTHOR'S claims that selective incapacitation could simultaneously reduce crime rates and prison populations. Ethical problems inherent in such proposals as well as methodological inconsistencies in the original research warrant a reexamination of the proposal and of the empirical basis for the conclusions offered therein. Greenwood and Abrahamse's original research is replicated with a representative sample of California state prison inmates (N = 2, 188) in light of these limitations, with specific focus on the methodological issues concerning the construction of the predictive scale. The selective incapacitation scheme advocated by Greenwood and Abrahamse performs extremely poorly in terms of both reliability and validity, thus precluding the implementation of such schemes. The article contains a discussion of other, more ethically acceptable uses of an instrument that identifies “high-rate” or “dangerous” offenders. In conclusion, some observations on the limitations of incarceration-based strategies of crime control are offered.     

我国少年司法制度建设的重大突破

1月23日,最高人民法院在总结司法界审理未成年人刑事案件的成功经验和做法,吸收法学理论界有关未成年人刑事案件审理的丰硕研究成果的基础上,出台了“关于审理未成年人刑事案件具体应用法律若干问题的解释”,对未成年人刑事案件审理中经常遇到的一些疑难问题予以了规范。该司法解释重申了在司法审判中对于审理未成年人刑事案件应当贯彻“教育、感化、挽救”的方针和“教育为主,惩罚为辅”的原则,明确了对于未成年人行为的定罪和犯罪后从轻处理的细化标准,作出了对于未成年人犯罪适用刑罚种类的特别规定。新的司法解释的问世,能够使案件的审…