A PROACTIVE RESPONSE TO FAMILY VIOLENCE: THE RESULTS OF A RANDOMIZED EXPERIMENT

Recent British work has focused attention on preventing repeat victimization as part of an overall crime prevention strategy. Because domestic violence victims are among those most likely to suffer multiple victimizations, they are logical candidates for programs targeted at reducing repeat victimization.
This article reports on a joint law enforcement-social services approach to reduce the incidence of repeat domestic violence. The research design randomly assigned households reporting domestic incidents within two public housing police service areas in New York to receive or not receive a follow-up to the initial patrol response. (The follow-up visit was conducted by a police officer and a social worker.) In addition, housing projects in the same area were randomly assigned to receive or not receive public education about domestic violence.
Neither treatment produced a reduction in violence. However, households in projects that had received public education and households that received the follow-up visits were both more likely to report new violence to the police than households that did not receive the treatments. Moreover, the effect of the follow-up visit was most pronounced among households with more serious histories of violence. The results suggest that the interventions increased citizens' confidence in the ability of the police to handle domestic situations.     

The Birth and Rebirth of the Liberal Democrats

This article tells the story of the Liberal Democrats from the final days of the Liberal/SDP Alliance to the general election of 1992. Drawing on the author's roles as an MP and as chair of the party's communications operations, it examines the factors that contributed to the party's troubled birth in 1988, and gives an insider's view on how the party survived to grow in the years after 1990. Key issues include the branding of the party and the development of its policy of paying for improvements to education through increasing income tax. It also lays stress on the importance of the party's activist base and its central campaigns expertise in not only surviving in local elections, but also in securing key by-election victories.     

Cold,With a Side of Freezing

<正>As I stared up at the massive ice castle glistening in front of me, a light flurry of snow gently blowing all around as the sun began to set, the lashes on my right eye froze together. With this temporary impairment, I was only able to enjoy the castle’s changing lights—blue, red, pink, purple, blue—at 50 percent.     

CRIMINAL PROPENSITIES,DISCRETE GROUPS OF OFFENDERS,AND PERSISTENCE IN CRIME*

Criminal propensity theorists argue that the causes of variation in offending behavior can be traced to variation in one or more causal traits. Other theorists contend that there is actually more than one type of offender and that more than one causal mechanism operates to explain offending behavior. In this article, some of the implications of these two positions are considered. Then, their congruence with recidivism data from a cohort of post-age-16 North Carolina institutional releasees (N = 848) is assessed, The analysis focuses specifically on whether the correlates of offending persistence are similar across two categories of individuals: those who experienced their first adjudication at an early age and those who were first adjudicated at a later age. In support of both positions, some similarities and some differences in the correlates of persistence were discovered. The differences, however, were only evident when the threshold for late first adjudication was set to age 12. When this threshold was raised to higher ages, the differences disappeared.