Halfe the world knowes not how the other halfe lies: Investigation of verbal and non‐verbal signs of deception exhibited by criminal offenders and non‐offenders

Purpose. This study examined the verbal and non‐verbal behaviours exhibited by criminal offender and non‐offender participants while they related planned truthful and deceptive accounts about emotional autobiographical events. Methods. In a 2 × 2 (participant group × veracity) quasi‐experimental design, offenders (N = 27) and university students (N = 38) provided videotaped accounts of four autobiographical emotional events: two honest and two fabricated (counterbalanced). Patterns of behaviour exhibited during the truthful and the deceptive accounts were then compared. Results. In general, offenders and non‐offenders showed similar patterns of deceptive behaviour. Deceptive accounts by both groups contained fewer details than honest accounts. Deception was associated with an increase in illustrator usage and self‐manipulations; however, univariate analyses indicated only that offenders exhibited significantly more self‐manipulations when lying. A significant interaction emerged in which offenders showed a reduction in smiles when lying about the emotional events, while students showed no difference. Conclusions. Offenders and students showed similar patterns of lying on most cues. However, unlike non‐offenders, offenders smiled less and showed an increase in self‐manipulations when lying. We theorize that offenders may have been aware that smiling and laughing are negatively related to perceived credibility in the speaker and used self‐manipulations to distract listeners from the content of their lies.     

Speed Kills

Over the past two decades, a misguided, militaristic war on drugs has been waged through a variety of means, including drug interdiction programs on the streets and highways of the United States, and high-profile campaigns in the United States media designed to construct drug use as a dangerous social problem. Yet during this same period, a far more deadly social problem - the death of some 40,000 people a year in automobile accidents along these same streets and highways — has largely been excluded from public consciousness and public debate. Recently, a convergence of circumstances in New Mexico made visible this imbalance in public awareness and public policy, and perhaps even began to remedy it. The roadside shrines that decorate the highways of New Mexico and other states likewise serve this purpose, encoding the collective tragedy of automotive death in the cultural landscape. In their tragic beauty and ongoing accumulation, these shrines challenge critical criminologists to find a new focus, a new everyday criminology of the automobile that can expand the existing criminology of automotive corporate crime. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE IN SURVEY AND ADMINISTRATIVE DATA

Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits were a central part of the social safety net during the COVID-19 recession. UI benefits, however, are severely understated in surveys. Using administrative tax data, we find that over half of UI benefits were missed in major survey data, with a greater understatement among low-income workers. As a result, 2020 official poverty rates were overstated by about 2 percentage points, and corrected poverty reached a six-decade low. We provide data to correct underreporting in surveys and show that, compared to UI benefits, the UI exclusion tax expenditure was less targeted at low incomes.     

The Parade of Sovereignties: Establishing the Vocabulary of the New Russian Federalism

On the basis of extensive on-site interviews and documentary sources, the author interprets the dynamics of the collapse of the Soviet Union by analyzing the cascade of sovereignty declarations issued by republics of the USSR as well as by autonomous republics and other subunits of the Russian republic, in 1990-1991. Interrelationships among the declarations, and other putative causes of their content and timing, are explored. A case study of Tatarstan is provided. The study also analyzes the impact of the process on subsequent Russian approaches to federalism.     

Selling the Public on Sustainable Watershed Conservation

Abstract:  The city of Quito, Ecuador, began working in 2000 to protect the ecologically fragile watershed area for its drinking water. In order to protect the Papallacta watershed, the independent Fund for the Conservation of Watersheds (FONAG) was launched to finance and manage economically sound sustainability projects in the area. FONAG is funded in part through start up grants from several organisations and a 1 per cent fee on all Quito water bills, but it has been unable to build an endowment sizeable enough to begin implementing conservation projects. We measure perceptions of the fund among Quito's university–based residents in two settings and evaluate the quality of the fund's proposed communication campaign based on existing communication theory. Further, we propose an adapted environmental education model based on a synthesis of existing theory and the empirical findings from our examination of the FONAG example. The Papallacta case study illuminates the potential strengths and weaknesses of the cultural ecology and political will of this type of collaborative sustainability project for addressing water problems in a developing country in a mountainous setting, centred around the themes of water conservation and sustainable development.     

Shame, Guilt and Remorse: Implications for Offender Populations

The emotions shame and guilt may represent a critical stepping stone in the rehabilitation process. Often referred to as "moral" emotions owing to their presumed role in promoting altruistic behavior and inhibiting antisocial behaviors, shame and guilt provide potentially exciting points of intervention with offenders. In this article, we describe current psychological theory and research that underscores important differences between shame and guilt. We note parallels between psychologists' conceptions of guilt and shame, and criminologists' conceptions of reintegrative and disintegrative shaming. We summarize recent research investigating the implications of these moral emotions for criminal and risky behavior, with special emphasis on the handful of studies conducted with actual offenders. We conclude with a discussion of implications for treatment in criminal justice settings.