PROBATION AND PAROLE: PUBLIC RISK AND THE FUTURE OF INCARCERATION ALTERNATIVES*

Jail and prison populations in the United States have continued to grow unabated during the past two decades but crime rates have not declined. Partly in response to the pressures caused by burgeoning correctional populations, the use of alternatives to incarceration has expanded. An ongoing debate centers on the effectiveness of these alternatives. Many criminal justice professionals and some researchers question whether such alternatives seriously restrict the criminal justice system 's ability to incapacitate the active offender. This study deals specifically with two alternatives to incarceration: probation and parole. We examine offender recidivism for a sample of probationers and parolees active in New Orleans, Louisiana, and offer a new approach to addressing the effectiveness issue. Past research has evaluated the effectiveness of alternatives by examining failure rates of diverted offenders. High failure rates, we argue, do not necessarily imply a significant loss of the incapacitative effects of imprisonment. We suggest that a more appropriate measure of the loss of incapacitative effect is the proportion of all offenses committed by persons on probation or parole. Our results suggest that such losses are surprisingly low. The policy implications of our findings are discussed.     

Case Processing Times in Three Courts

The time it takes a court to process its cases, a critical aspect of court performance, varies widely from case to case, from court to court, and within a given court as the court and its environment change over time. The sources of this variation, however, have remained largely obscure.
This paper examines the structural and case-level influences on processing times in three criminal courts experiencing structural changes, including a number of administrative reforms designed to reduce processing times. We find both similarities and differences between courts, but in general both many structural arrangements and many case characteristics affect processing times, with some case characteristics having different effects under different structural arrangements, and some structural arrangements affecting different sorts of cases differently. We conclude with a discussion of implications for court management.     

Rebuilding the Social Life of the Kikuyu

The following address was given by Dr. Shannon at a joint meetingof the Royal Empire Society on July 4, 1957. Lord Hailey, Chairmanof the Royal African Society, presided.     

Banking on Folk Art: Banamex‐Citigroup and Transnational Cultural Citizenship

This article offers two readings of The Great Masters of Mexican Folk Art, a travelling exhibition of the Fomento Cultural Banamex, AC's folk art collection that coincided with Citigroup's buyout of Banamex, Mexico's second largest bank. The first, a political economic critique, situates the exhibition within the neoliberal economic reform of the Mexican banking system and the designs of US‐based transnational banks on migrant remittances. The second, a material culture approach, focuses on the exhibitionary strategies employed to incentivise folk art consumption as a mode of cosmopolitan citizenship.