Measurement Properties of the Communities That Care<Superscript>®</Superscript> Youth Survey Across Demographic Groups

Prevention science has produced information about risk and protective factors that predict adolescent drug use and related problem behaviors. This paper investigates the Communities That Care Youth Survey that measures multiple risk and protective factors. Using a sample of 172,628 students who participated in surveys administered in seven states in 1998, analyses were conducted to test the factor structure of these risk and protective factors and to test the equivalence of the factor models across five racial/ethnic groups (African Americans, Asians or Pacific Islanders, Caucasians, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans), four grade levels (6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th) and both gender groups. Results support the construct validity of the surveys risk and protective factor scales and indicate that the measures are equally reliable across males and females and five racial/ethnic groups. Implications of these findings for science-based prevention planning are discussed.     

When Public Protection Becomes Punishment? The UK Use of Civil Measures to Contain the Sex Offender

In keeping with many countries the UK has moved the problem of sexual offending up the political agenda. On the criminal justice side sentences have been increased and supervision periods extended. On the civil side a raft of new measures have been put in place to regulate the behaviour of sex offenders in the interest of community safety and child protection; this paper examines these measures and, in particular takes the sex offender ‘register’ as a case study to show how political imperatives have been brought to bear with little reference to the research or professional views of practitioners in this area. It is contended that under these political pressures, what starts life as a preventive, regulatory measure can easily become a more punitive measure in its own right; as such it may be liable to challenge by those subject to it for failing to fulfil its primary purpose and for straying across a line between the civil and criminal aspects of intervention.     

Digital Realism and the Governance of Spam as Cybercrime

Spamming is a major threat to the formation of public trust in the Internet and discourages broader civil participation in the emerging information society. To the individual, spams are usually little more than a nuisance, but collectively they expose Internet users to a panoply of new risks while threatening the communications and commercial infrastructure. Spamming also raises important questions of criminological interest. On the one hand it is an example of a pure cybercrime – a harmful behaviour mediated by the Internet that is the subject of criminal law, while on the other hand, it is a behaviour that has in practice been most effectively contained technologically by the manipulation of ‘code’ – but at what cost? Because there is not an agreed meaning as to what constitutes ‘online order’ that renders it simply and uncritically reducible to a set of formulae and algorithms that can be subsequently imposed (surreptitiously) by technological processes. The imposition of order online, as it is offline, needs to be subject to critical discussion and also checks and balances that have their origins in the authority of law. This article deconstructs and analyses spamming behaviour, before exploring the boundaries between law and code (technology) as governance in order to inform and stimulate the debate over the embedding of cybercrime prevention policy within the code itself.     

Deconstructing “Force and Fraud”: An Empirical Assessment of the Generality of Crime

Gottfredson and Hirschi (A General Theory of Crime, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1990) have proposed a general theory of crime to explain a set of behaviors they refer to as acts of force and fraud. Central to their theory is the claim that force and fraud are both manifestations of the individual's unrestrained pursuit of short-term gratification. At the same time, research from numerous disciplines suggests that the correlates of violence differ somewhat from those of property crime. The present study therefore uses data from the National Youth Survey to explore whether force and fraud can legitimately be viewed as manifestations of a single underlying construct among American adolescents. Overall, findings from confirmatory factor analyses suggest that they cannot. Rather, they suggest that multi-factor models of force and fraud improve significantly upon the fit of single-factor models and that force and fraud may therefore reflect overlapping, but empirically distinct, constructs.     

金融诈骗罪的两个误区及立法构想

以非法占有为目的应是金融诈骗罪的必备要件,但它一般不会从案件事实中直接反映出来,实践中常难于把握。故建议增设与金融诈骗罪相对应、但不要求“非法占有的目的”且刑罚较轻的新罪名。     

新形势下治安管理社会化的新探索

组织和发动群众参与治安工作,是我国公安工作的特色和优势所在,是适应治安形势变化、改变群防群治弱化状态、缓解治安管理任务繁重与警力不足的需要.可采取聘用"联防钟点工",吸引群众直接参与治安工作;将现有的专职联防队逐步过渡到理顺体制的保安队,改善群防群治队伍的成员结构,提高治安管理辅助力量的个体素质等措施,以提高整个治安主体的战斗力.     

Belgium's Anti-Sect War

Since the suicide—homicide of 53 members of the Order of the Solar Temple in 1994 and the gas attempt by Aum Shinrikyo in Tokyo's subway in 1995, a number of European states have decided to fight against sects. France and Belgium are in the forefront of this battle. Both countries have set up official observatories of sects and state agencies involving various ministries to combat them. Preventive policies targeting sects are being carried out. In Belgium, the Anthroposophic Society, a philosophical movement listed as 1 of 189 sects suspected of being dangerous, has sued one federal entity that printed unfounded accusations against their movement in a widely distributed brochure against sects. The same Anthoposophic Society has also petitioned the Court of Arbitration to have the law establishing an observatory of sects annuled. This report deals with both legal actions.     

Questioning Appeals to Community within Crime Prevention and Control

This article casts a critical eye over some of the (often ignored) assumptions which underlie recent appeals to community in crime prevention and control. The article considers the philosophical origins, ambiguities and tensions within such appeals. In so doing, it draws explicitly upon the growth of community safety and to a lesser extent restorative justice in Britain and considers some of the implications to which this shift may give rise. In particular, it focuses upon the manner in which appeals to community converge and collide with changing social relations which may undermine their progressive potential. Specific attention is given to the implications of: increasing social and spatial dislocation; the commodification of security; and policy debates about a growing underclass. It is argued that there is much confusion as to how, and to what extent, communities can contribute to the construction of social order. Within the dynamics of community safety and crime control practices there are dangers that security differentials may become increasingly significant characteristics of wealth and status with implications for social exclusion. This questions the extent to which crime is an appropriate vehicle around which to (re)construct open and tolerant communities.     

Overview of: “Crime Place and Pollution: Expanding Crime Reduction Options Through a Regulatory Approach”

Research Summary Crime reduction policy has focused almost exclusively on offenders. Recent studies and evaluations show that expanding our policy portfolio to include places may be highly productive. We show that there is considerable research showing that crime is concentrated at a relatively few locations, that high-crime places are stable, that changing places can reduce crime, that displacement is not only far from inevitable but also less likely than the diffusion of crime prevention benefits, and that owners of high-crime places can be held accountable for the criminogenic conditions of their locations. We link these findings to environmental policy, where environmental scientists, economists, and regulators have developed a broad set of regulatory options. The core of this article describes a portfolio of environmental policy instruments directly applicable to crime places. We also discuss major decisions local governments will need to make to implement various forms of regulation, and we list challenges that governments must anticipate in planning for such implementation. We argue that a regulatory approach to crime places has the potential to lower the cost to taxpayers of reducing crime by shifting costs from governments to the relatively few place owners whose actions create crime-facilitating conditions. Policy Implications Taking a regulatory approach to crime places substantially expands the crime policy options under consideration. Regulatory options may increase local governments’ effectiveness at reducing crime while reducing governments’ costs. This is because regulatory approaches have the potential to shift some portion of the financial burden for crime fighting to owners of criminogenic locations. Policy makers can select between means-based anticrime regulations that focus on how place owners manage their locations and ends-based regulations that focus on the number of crimes allowed at places. Both of these approaches contain several alternative regulatory instruments, each with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Experimenting with various regulatory instruments could lead to the development of a range of new crime reduction policies. In addition, a regulatory approach has implications for the funding of policy research. Means-based regulatory instruments require governments to develop evidence that the means they regulate have the desired impact on crime. Ends-based regulatory instruments shift this burden to the regulated places.     

沉默诈欺构成论

沉默在特定情形下可以构成诈欺已成各国共识.对于沉默诈欺的构成,大陆法系国家在审判实践中形成了构成要件主义,规定了沉默构成诈欺的三个要件;英美法系则规定沉默只有在四类具体的合同中才能构成诈欺.尽管如此,两大法系均将告知义务的存在作为沉默构成诈欺的首要前提.我国的沉默诈欺制度既未明确告知义务这一前提,对诈欺故意的认定亦过于严苛,须借鉴大陆法系的一些做法对之予以修正.