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Full-Text Articles in Law
How To Use, Abuse—And Fight Back With—Crime Statistics, Yale Kamisar
How To Use, Abuse—And Fight Back With—Crime Statistics, Yale Kamisar
Articles
Statistics have an almost magical appeal in a "fact"-minded culture such as ours, among a people conditioned and accustomed to watch for-and attach great significance to-even the smallest fluctuations in say, the unemployment rate. Hence, as Darrell Huff graphically demonstrated in his famous little book, How to Lie with Statistics (1954), they can be-and have been-manipulated to terrorize or calm, inflate or depreciate, and above all, to sensationalize and over simplify. As Harvard criminologist Lloyd Ohlin noted recently, statistics are especially potent when "they give a sense of solid reality (usually false) to something people vaguely apprehend and when they …
Sentencing: The Use Of Psychiatric Information And Presentence Reports, Rutheford B. Campbell Jr.
Sentencing: The Use Of Psychiatric Information And Presentence Reports, Rutheford B. Campbell Jr.
Law Faculty Scholarly Articles
It has become apparent that the two disciplines of law and psychiatry have a common "interface" in the field of criminal justice. Commentators generally agree that the administration of criminal justice is greatly aided by psychiatrists and psychiatric data. That is not to say, however, that the meeting of the disciplines has been without incident or misunderstanding. Problems have arisen because of divergent attitudes and goals of the professions. Some commentators say that the concerns of the two disciplines are not the same; others claim that much of the problem lies in the over-estimation of the certainty and reliability of …