POLICE EMPLOYMENT AND SUBURBAN CRIME

Although politicians, police, and others have often advocated the expansion of police employment in the effort to control crime, the empirical relationship between police employment and crime rates has seldom been systematically explored. This study incorporates variables which are causally related both to crime and police employment roles for the 252 northern and northeastern suburbs for which police employment and crime data are available for 1970–1972. Separate analyses of violent and property crime are undertaken, incorporating data on police employment as a causally related variable along with several other determinants of crime identified in earlier studies. The analysis suggests that police employment and crime rates are reciprocally related, and that these relationships offer more support for a “labeling” than a “deterrence” perspective.     

Decision-Making Involvement and Socioeconomic Resources in Norway: A Normative-Empirical Analysis*

The relationship between socioeconomic resources and political participation has been the subject of considerable normative-empirical debate. The present article addresses the problem on the basis of Norwegian survey data (N = 1,170) with the intent of testing both the resource-involvement relationship and the possible consequences of value over-representation among the most active citizens. The analysis of resource-involvement dependency in relation to Robert Dahl's norm-set for ‘non-cumulative resource distributions' shows only two resources to be of potential difficulty for pluralist expectations: education and gender. Other expectations as to resource-involvement inequality prove to be nonfounded for Norway. A further test of the consequences of pedagarchal and patriarchal over-representation shows the former to imply a general ‘progressive’ bias in political values, while the latter has no clear-cut ideological implications.     

Is child saving dead? Attitudes toward juvenile rehabilitation in Illinois

In recent times, juvenile rehabilitation has been attacked both by liberals seeking to insert greater due process rights and protections into the juvenile justice system and by conservatives calling for more stringent handling of serious youthful offenders. The apparent pervasiveness of this attack raises the question, Is the philosophy of child saving dead? Data drawn from a survey conducted in Illinois suggest, however, that juvenile rehabilitation continues to receive support both from the public and from various groups associated with criminal justice practice and policy making. At the same time, there is also support for the notion that young criminals are responsible for their actions and are currently being treated too leniently by our courts. Finally, child saving is embraced most firmly by judges, lawyers, correctional administrators, and prison inmates and least strongly by legislators, prison guards, and the general public.