我国未成年人犯罪刑罚执行制度研究——兼论社区矫正制度

未成年人犯罪刑罚执行制度的基本理念在于保护和教育,对此,我国目前的体制虽然取得了一定成效,但仍存在具体操作性不强、执行主体不清、责任主体不明等缺陷,缺乏系统化。而社区矫正恰是完善我国未成年人犯罪刑罚执行制度的优先选择,应对原有项目加以改进并进行整合,同时在立法上应进一步完善刑事法、构建特别法体系,完善慎逮制度、充分发挥暂缓起诉制度的保护和帮教作用,重构未成年人缓刑制度、取消对未成年人的劳动教养等。     

Drug testing sworn law enforcement officers: One agency's experience

The use of drug testing to detect drug use and to screen prospective employees has become commonplace in many occupations, both in the public and private sector. Due to the sensitive nature of their duties, drug testing in law enforcement agencies has become nearly universal, especially as a tool to screen applicants. Despite the fact that many large agencies routinely use drug testing, relatively little is known about the rate at which officers test positive for drug use, characteristics of officers who test positive, nor the drug of choice among currently employed sworn law enforcement personnel. The purpose of this article is to discuss various issues related to drug testing in the workplace and to explore one agency's experience with randomized drug testing of its sworn officers.     

Social support and homicide in transitional Russia

Like the United States, Russia is a large industrialized nation with high violence rates. Although its overall homicide rate is among the highest in the world, however, local rates of crime vary widely. Similarly, the level of social support provided by the state varies throughout Russia due to former Soviet policies, the differential pace of political and economic change, and the level of development. Relying upon recent criminological literature on social support theory, this study tested the hypotheses that areas with higher levels of social support will have lower homicide rates and that the effects of negative socioeconomic change on homicide rates will be moderated by levels of social support. Utilizing data from Russian regions (n = 78) and controlling for other structural covariates, negative binomial regression was employed to estimate the effects of social support on regional homicide rates. As expected, negative socioeconomic change was associated with higher homicide rates, but the results provided no support for direct or conditioning effects of social support on homicide. The findings are discussed in the context of Russia-specific conditions and of the meaning of these findings for recent research on social support and crime.     

Ex post ≠ ex ante

Participants in three conditions (foresight, hindsight, and a modified hindsight condition designed to ameliorate the hindsight effect) assessed whether a municipality should take, or have taken, precautions to protect a riparian property owner from flood damage. In the foresight condition, participants reviewed evidence in the context of an administrative hearing. Hindsight participants reviewed parallel materials in the context of a trial. Three quarters of the participants in foresight concluded that a flood was too unlikely to justify further precautions-a decision that a majority of the participants in hindsight found to be negligent. Participants in hindsight also gave higher estimates for the probability of the disaster occurring. The debiasing procedure failed to produce any significant differences from the regular hindsight condition. The results suggest that absent an effective debiasing technique, risk assessments made in foresight will be judged harshly in hindsight.     

绩效管理常见误区及其应对之策

企业绩效管理中常见的误区,包括考评内容的误区和考评目的误区。加强企业绩效管理,KPI考评是基础,核心工作是沟通。如何对员工的绩效进行考核,是企业管理者所面临的一个重大问题。     

Causality and causation in tort law

This paper considers alternative approaches to dealing with causal uncertainty in strict liability tort regimes. Beginning from the philosophical literature on causing, a distinction is made between the scientific idea of causality and the legal idea of causation. This distinction is generalized to a context of causal uncertainty and associated probabilities are constructed. It is shown that a rule of proportional liability whereby the tortfeasor pays damages in proportion to the probability in causation of them having caused the damage would be socially efficient. This contrasts with the implied use of the probability in causality by the courts and in the law and economics literature on causal uncertainty.     

A meta-analysis of the correlates of turnover intent in criminal justice organizations: Does agency type matter?

Purpose

The study synthesizes the literature on turnover intentions to assess what domains (e.g., personal characteristics, work environment, and job attitudes) account for the strongest association with turnover intent, what are the characteristics of these relationships, and how do these relationships differ by criminal justice practitioner type.

Methods

The current study utilizes a systematic review to obtain studies for conducting a meta-analysis. The researchers utilized the r family/correlation coefficient. Studies were weighted by sample size, correlations converted to Fisher’s z, analyses performed, and results converted back to r for interpretation.

Results

In terms of the individual predictors for law enforcement, the five strongest variables included alternative job search behavior, job satisfaction, psychological distress, emotional exhaustion, procedural and distributive justice. The five strongest predictors of turnover intent for institutional corrections were normative commitment, emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, affective commitment, and job satisfaction. The five strongest predictors for community corrections included experience, alternative job search behavior, perceptions of coworkers, growth need strength, and job satisfaction.

Conclusions

The results of the meta-analysis confirmed the domain of personal characteristics, overall, has the weakest association with turnover intent whereas work environment and job attitude domains consistently display moderate-to-large effects for both law enforcement and corrections.     

The Direct and Indirect Effects of Offender Drug Use on Federal Sentencing Outcomes

Objectives

The federal sentencing guidelines constrain decision makers’ discretion to consider offenders’ life histories and current circumstances, including their histories of drug use and drug use at the time of the crime. However, the situation is complicated by the fact that judges are required to take the offender’s drug use into account in making bail and pretrial detention decisions and the ambiguity inherent in decisions regarding substantial assistance departures allows consideration of this factor. In this paper we build upon and extend prior research examining the impact of an offender’s drug use on sentences imposed on drug trafficking offenders.

Methods

We used data from three U.S. District Courts and a methodologically sophisticated approach (i.e., path analysis) to test for the direct and indirect (i.e., through pretrial detention and receipt of a substantial assistance departure) effects of an offender’s drug use history and use of drug at the time of the crime, to determine if the effects of drug use varies by the type of drug, and to test for the moderating effect of type of crime.

Results

We found that although the offender’s history of drug use did not affect sentence length, offenders who were using drugs at the time of the crime received longer sentences both as a direct consequence of their drug use and because drug use at the time of the crime increased the odds of pretrial detention and increased the likelihood of receiving a substantial assistance departure. We also found that the effects of drug use varied depending on whether the offender was using crack cocaine or some other drug and that the type of offense for which the offender was convicted moderated these relationships.

Conclusions

Our findings illustrate that there is a complex array of relationships between drug use and key case processing decisions in federal courts.     

Attenuated Total Reflectance Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy Analysis of Red Seal Inks on Questioned Document

Seals are traditionally used in the Far East Asia to stamp an impression on a document in place of a signature. In this study, an accuser claimed that a personal contract regarding mining development rights acquired by a defendant was devolved to the accuser because the defendant stamped the devolvement contract in the presence of the accuser and a witness. The accuser further stated that the seal ink stamped on the devolvement contract was the same as that stamped on the development rights application document. To verify this, the seals used in two documents were analyzed using micro‐attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and infrared spectra. The findings revealed that the seals originated from different manufacturers. Thus, the accuser's claim on the existence of a devolvement contract was proved to be false.