Adversarial Forum: Issues Concerning the Assessment of Juvenile Psychopathy

Law and Human Behavior -     

Introduction: Lifetime Contribution to Law and Psychology Award Presentation

Law and Human Behavior -     

Crime Reduction and the Length of Prison Sentences

The issue discussed is whether policies of imposing increasingly lengthy prison sentences on serious criminal offenders reduce crime. The empirical evidence for the deterrence and incapacitation effects of incarceration is first examined and found to be of limited help in answering the question whether lengthy prison sentences reduce crime. Conceptual and normative analysis of deterrence and incapacitation suggest that we have little reason to believe that the general use of lengthy prison terms produces more good than harm for society, especially if the burdens of and alternatives to such prison terms are taken into account.     

The accuracy of blood alcohol analysis using headspace gas chromatography when performed on clotted samples

Subjects consumed alcoholic beverages and attained blood ethyl alcohol concentrations ranging from 0.02 to 0.15 g/dL. Sets of blood samples were drawn from these subjects, including some samples that were allowed to clot and some in which anticoagulent was added. A quantitative analysis for ethyl alcohol was performed on these samples using headspace gas chromatography. The mean deviation of the concentration of ethyl alcohol in the clotted samples from the ethyl alcohol concentration in the corresponding control samples was 0.001 g/dL. The 99% confidence interval for this mean was +/- 0.0005 g/dL.