The Police and CMHCs: The Transition from Penal to Therapeutic Control

The deinstitutionalization of chronic mental patients and the establishment of Community Mental Health Centers creates a new role for the police—i.e. agents of therapeutic control. In this new role, police must move beyond their traditional behaviors as agents of penal control, and play an active part in initiating patients to psychiatric treatment. Social scientists and mental health professionals recognize the need for police training in this area. Yet, little research has been devoted to the penal-therapeutic transition per se. This paper examines the social structural factors necessary for such a transition, and it illustrates the methods by which CMHC professionals can manipulate their social control environments so as to fulfill these social structural "requirements". We also discuss some non-structural barriers to police acting as agents of therapeutic control and the prospects for overcoming them.     

Barriers Natural and Unnatural: Islamiento as a Central Metaphor in Kuna Ecotourism

This article considers ecotourism among the Kuna of the San Blas Archipelago in Panama, using the term I use the concept of islamiento to describe both ‘isolation’ and ‘island‐isation’ as central metaphors to understand Kuna strategies in demarcating tourist and community spaces. The local autonomy exemplified by the Kuna in tourism is just one transformation of the way in which they utilise island configurations as a source of physical and ideological independence. While competition for resources between tourists, non‐Kuna ‘outsiders’ and Kuna ‘insiders’ is common, pressures on local inhabitants, resources and the need for privacy and community life are exacerbated in island tourism. Through various mechanisms that turn the physical properties of the archipelago to their advantage, the Kuna limit the impacts of tourism on daily life and strengthen their autonomy.     

PUTTING VIOLENCE IN ITS PLACE: THE INFLUENCE OF RACE,ETHNICITY, GENDER,AND PLACE ON THE RISK FOR VIOLENCE*

Research Summary: This research shows that non-Latino black, non-Latino white, and Latino males and females in the U.S. experience significantly different levels of stranger and non-stranger violence, and that these forms of non-lethal violence are especially pronounced in areas with high levels of socioeconomic disadvantage. Many of the differences between these groups are eliminated once community and other individual characteristics are taken into account. Policy Implications: The results suggest that victimization resources should be geographically targeted at places with high levels of poverty and single-parent families, and that the most stable institutions within these communities be drawn upon to deliver information about victimization prevention and services.     

WHEN MISSING DATA ARE NOT MISSING: A NEW APPROACH TO EVALUATING SUPPLEMENTAL HOMICIDE REPORT IMPUTATION STRATEGIES*

The Supplemental Homicide Reports (SHR) are widely used in criminological research and inform a broad range of research topics and subsequent policy applications. A serious issue with the SHR is missing information about the offender and incident in many recorded homicides. Although it is convenient to discard cases with missing data before analysis, such discarding is not theoretically justified and can lead to incorrect substantive conclusions. Recently, several techniques for imputing missing SHR data have been proposed, but it is difficult to evaluate their effectiveness. This research presents a new approach to testing and evaluating SHR imputation techniques. Offender data that are missing in the SHR are often found in police records available for individual cities. We examine similarities and differences among cases with known offender characteristics in the SHR, cases with such information missing in the SHR but available in police records, and cases with such information missing in both sources. We then use these data sets to evaluate four different imputation techniques suggested in the literature (Fox, 2004; Messner, Deane, and Beaulieu, 2002; Pampel and Williams, 2000; Regoeczi and Riedel, 2003). We apply each imputation technique to the SHR, and for cases with information missing in the SHR but known in the police records, we see how well the imputed values correspond both with the individual known values and with the overall distributions in the police records. We discuss the outcome of our assessment of these strategies, and we outline important implications this assessment has for research using SHR data.     

REPORTING CRIME TO THE POLICE, 1973–2005: A MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS OF LONG-TERM TRENDS IN THE NATIONAL CRIME SURVEY (NCS) AND NATIONAL CRIME VICTIMIZATION SURVEY (NCVS)*

Although many efforts have been made during the past several decades to increase the reporting of crime to the police, we know little about the nature of long-term crime-reporting trends. Most research in this area has been limited to specific crime types (e.g., sexual assault), or it has not taken into account possible changes in the characteristics of incidents associated with police notification. In this article, we advance knowledge about long-term trends in the reporting of crime to the police by using data from the National Crime Survey (NCS) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and methods that take into account possible changes in the factors that affect reporting at the individual and incident level as well as changes in survey methodology. Using data from 1973 to 2005, our findings show that significant increases have occurred in the likelihood of police notification for sexual assault crimes as well as for other forms of assault and that these increases were observed for violence against women and violence against men, stranger and nonstranger violence, as well as crimes experienced by members of different racial and ethnic groups. The reporting of property victimization (i.e., motor vehicle theft, burglary, and larceny) also increased across time. Overall, observed increases in crime reporting account for about half of the divergence between the NCVS and the Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) in the estimated magnitude of the 1990s crime decline—a result that highlights the need to corroborate findings about crime trends from multiple data sources.