The prison in economics: private and public incarceration in Ancient Greece

Recent histories of Ancient Greece describe a transition from customary law to public criminal justice between 800 and 400 B.C. This narrative contains three pieces of evidence against the presumption that prisons are a public good and government must provide incarcerations. First, before the rise of a formal government, Ancient Greece had a functioning system of criminal law enforcement. Second, the timeline surrounding the rise of government institutions in Ancient Greece originated with Solon’s penal reforms. Lastly, the rise of a government system was more the result of private rather than public interest.     

On restorative justice practiced in China

The victim-offender reconciliation (VOR), practiced by the basic public security, procuratorates and courts since the advent of 21^st century, is a new mode different from the mediation or conciliation in the procedure of civil litigation or of that accessory to the public prosecution in criminal proceeding. This mode connects the criminal justice with the mediation or private reconciliation by themselves. Thus, non-official settlement can influence the criminal justice and the decisions of authoritative agencies. It is beneficial to restore the victim’s interests, urge the offender to repent for his wrongdoings, compensate for the victim’s loss and restore the damaged social relationship. The VOR in China is the same in essence as the Western restorative justice, so it could be regarded as a Chinese mode of global restorative justice movement. Though the VOR mechanism works well, it still brings some matter in further consideration: (a) the legitimacy of VOR; (b) the conflict against the basic concept of crime; (c) the effect to the social reality.     

Problem Drinking, Jealousy, and Anger Control: Variables Predicting Physical Aggression Against a Partner

Alcohol use and intimate partner violence (IPV) are significantly related, but only a subset of individuals who drink are aggressive and relatively little is known about what moderates this relationship in community samples. Two risk factors, anger control and jealousy, were hypothesized to moderate the relationship between IPV and problem drinking in a sample of 453 community couples. A significant three-way interaction indicated that men with jealousy problems, but not anger control problems, were most likely to show the strongest association between problem drinking and IPV. In accord with the multiple threshold model of IPV, specific combinations of risk factors appeared to represent different thresholds in which problem drinking influenced the likelihood of IPV.