COERCIVE AND NONCOERCIVE ABORTION DETERRENCE POLICIES: A Comparative State Analysis

The Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade ( 1973) limited the authority of states to prohibit abortions during the first two trimesters of pregnancy. Although they can no longer prohibit abortions, state legislatures have adopted a variety of coercive and noncoercive policies that might operate to alter the utilities associated with having or providing abortions. This article analyzes the relative impacts of these policies on two measures of abortion behavior: (1) state abortion rates in 1976 and (2) trends in states' abortion rates from 1973 to 1976. Multiple regression analysis reveals that neither coercive nor noncoercive policies are strongly related to these aggregate measures of abortion behavior .     

Justifications of Violence

The classical and the former Catholic doctrines of tyrannicide remind us that in the Western tradition of citizenship and political thought, tyrannicide is worthy. Recent legislation against the glorification of terrorism is too wide and vague, and denies any link between tyrannicide and liberty. A good production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar should not make the act of tyrannicide per se problematic, but should seize the dilemma of whether or not Julius Caesar was becoming a tyrant rather than a consul with constitutional powers for war or emergency. Both Hannah Arendt and our contemporary Ted Honderich offer philosophical justifications of violence in defined and not uncommon circumstances. Terrorism is sometimes the only resort of the poor and oppressed.     

Neighborhood and the Police: The People's Republic of China

The neighborhood police station of the People's Republic of China is examined as a form of self-policing. It is an expression of the PRC ideology that is not to be extrapolated directly to the circumstances of Western policing, but the neighborhood police station does illustrate the tendency of law enforcement to emphasize the vertical axis of the community that advances the interests of external power over service to the needs of the neighborhood as conceived by the residents. This conclusion is given substance by analysis of the neighborhood police station's functions in household registration and relationships with public security committees.     

Incarceration in The People's Republic of China: Functions and Implications

This paper delineates the place and functions of incarceration in the People's Republic of China. The comparative research on the topic will be particularly promising because those functions are grounded in a unique macro-control system framed to promote concurrently, first, the mobilization of the Chinese people in building a strong socialist society and, second, the management of broadly defined deviance. Observation of three correctional institutions is used to lend substance to the analysis. Because of the great difficulties to be overcome before valid comparative research can be accomplished, the paper is limited to justifying advocacy of future research on the implications of incarceration patterns in the People's Republic.     

The Salvadoran Criminal Justice System

This research analyzes comparative data on offenders, offenses, sentences, and dispositions for El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and the United States. This paper is based upon a larger research project examining political death and homicide in El Salvador through 1984. The analysis examines the effectiveness of the Salvadoran criminal justice system before and after initiation of Its civil war.

The statistics showed that El Salvador's capacity to investigate homicides and detect murder suspects had improved over the last 10 years or so, whereas its ability and length of time to prosecute, try, sentence, and commit offenders had deteriorated over this same period. Substantial numbers of Salvadoran criminals were apprehended, arrested, tried, sentenced, and incarcerated for routine crimes of violence and property. On the other hand virtually none of the perpetrators of thousands of political murders were apprehended by the Salvadoran Government despite the increase in arrest and sentencing for routine homicides. This may be indicative of a lack of commitment by the Salvadoran Government to deal with political killings by death squads.     

Institutionalization of Criminology: A Prerequisite to Comparative Criminology

The increased prevalence and enrichment of comparative analysis would invigorate criminology generally as a scientific field because comparative criminology is a movement toward a “true science of criminology.” But, at least at its present stage, comparative criminology awaits the institutionalization of criminology at a level sufficient for the essential availability of criminologists capable of and competent for meeting the peculiar demands of transnational research.

“Comparative, coordinated and interdisciplinary research should be carried out to determine the relative effects of programs in different countries” and through cooperation between researchers from different countries…to develop a highly promising new field of comparative criminology”, in order to determine “uniformities and differences in causal influences, in predictive factors, and in results of preventive and treatment programs” and to develop “a true science of criminology.”     

FACIAL PROFILING: RACE,PHYSICAL APPEARANCE,AND PUNISHMENT*

We investigate the associations among physical appearance, threat perceptions, and criminal punishment. Psychological ideas about impression formation are integrated with criminological perspectives on sentencing to generate and test unique hypotheses about the associations among defendant facial characteristics, subjective evaluations of threatening appearance, and judicial imprisonment decisions. We analyze newly collected data that link booking photos, criminal histories, and sentencing information for more than 1,100 convicted felony defendants. Our findings indicate that Black defendants are perceived to be more threatening in appearance. Other facial characteristics, such as physical attractiveness, baby‐faced appearance, facial scars, and visible tattoos, also influence perceptions of threat, as do criminal history scores. Furthermore, some physical appearance characteristics are significantly related to imprisonment decisions, even after controlling for other relevant case characteristics. These and other findings are discussed as they relate to psychological research on impression formation, criminological theories of court actor decision‐making, and sociological work on race and punishment.