Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 12 of 12

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Imprisoning Rationalities, Eileen Baldry, David Brown, Mark Brown, Chris Cunneen, Melanie Schwartz, Alex Steel Dec 2015

Imprisoning Rationalities, Eileen Baldry, David Brown, Mark Brown, Chris Cunneen, Melanie Schwartz, Alex Steel

David C. Brown

Imprisonment is a growth industry in Australia. Over the past 30-40 years all state and territory jurisdictions have registered massive rises in both the absolute numbers of those imprisoned and the per capita use of imprisonment as a tool of punishment and control. Yet over this period there has been surprisingly little criminological attention to the national picture of imprisonment in Australia and to understanding jurisdictional variation, change and continuity in broader theoretical terms. This article reports initial findings from the Australian Prisons Project, a multi-investigator Australian Research Council funded project intended to trace penal developments in Australia since about …


Criminal Laws: Materials And Commentary On Criminal Law And Process In Nsw, Alex Steel, David Brown, David Farrier, Sandra Egger, Luke Mcnamara, Michael Grewcock, Donna Spears Dec 2015

Criminal Laws: Materials And Commentary On Criminal Law And Process In Nsw, Alex Steel, David Brown, David Farrier, Sandra Egger, Luke Mcnamara, Michael Grewcock, Donna Spears

David C. Brown

The success of Criminal Laws lies both in its distinctive features and in its appeal to a range of readerships. As one review put it, it is simultaneously a “textbook, casebook, handbook and reference work”. As such it is ideal for criminal law and criminal justice courses as a teaching text, combining as it does primary sources with extensive critical commentary and a contextual perspective. It is likewise indispensable to practitioners for its detailed coverage of substantive law and its extensive references and inter-disciplinary approach make it a first point of call for researchers from all disciplines. This fifth edition …


Reflections And Perspectives On Reentry And Collateral Consequences, Michael Pinard Oct 2011

Reflections And Perspectives On Reentry And Collateral Consequences, Michael Pinard

Michael Pinard

This essay addresses the continued and dramatic increase in the numbers of individuals released from correctional institutions and returning to communities across the United States. It provides a brief history of the collateral consequences of criminal convictions, and the ways in which these consequences impede productive reentry. It then highlights national and state efforts to address to persistent reentry obstacles and to better understand the range and scope of collateral consequences. It concludes by offering suggestions for reform.


25. Maltreated Children’S Ability To Estimate Temporal Location And Numerosity Of Placement Changes And Court Visits., Lindsay Wandrey, Thomas D. Lyon, Jodi A. Quas, William J. Friedman Sep 2011

25. Maltreated Children’S Ability To Estimate Temporal Location And Numerosity Of Placement Changes And Court Visits., Lindsay Wandrey, Thomas D. Lyon, Jodi A. Quas, William J. Friedman

Thomas D. Lyon

Research examining children’s temporal knowledge has tended to utilize brief temporal intervals and singular, neutral events, and is not readily generalizable to legal settings in which maltreated children are asked temporal questions about salient, repeated abuse that often occurred in the distant past. To understand how well maltreated children can describe temporal location and numerosity of documented, personal experiences, we assessed 167 6- to 10-year-old maltreated children’s temporal memory for changes in their living arrangements and prior visits to court. Small percentages of children were capable of providing exact temporal location information (age, month, or season) regarding their first or …


24. Interviewing Children Versus Tossing Coins: Accurately Assessing The Diagnosticity Of Children’S Disclosures Of Abuse., Thomas D. Lyon, Elizabeth C. Ahern, Nicholas Scurich Jul 2011

24. Interviewing Children Versus Tossing Coins: Accurately Assessing The Diagnosticity Of Children’S Disclosures Of Abuse., Thomas D. Lyon, Elizabeth C. Ahern, Nicholas Scurich

Thomas D. Lyon

We describe a Bayesian approach to evaluating children’s abuse disclosures and review research demonstrating that children’s disclosure of genital touch can be highly probative of sexual abuse, with the probative value depending on disclosure spontaneity and children’s age. We discuss how some commentators understate the probative value of children’s disclosures by: confusing the probability of abuse given disclosure with the probability of disclosure given abuse, assuming that children formally questioned about sexual abuse have a low prior probability of sexual abuse, misstating the probative value of abuse disclosure, and confusing the distinction between disclosure and nondisclosure with the dstinction between …


15. Assessing The Competency Of Child Witnesses: Best Practice Informed By Psychology And Law., Thomas D. Lyon Jun 2011

15. Assessing The Competency Of Child Witnesses: Best Practice Informed By Psychology And Law., Thomas D. Lyon

Thomas D. Lyon

Truth-lie competency, which concerns the child's understanding of the difference between truth and lies and the importance of telling the truth, can be demonstrated by asking the child whether simple statements are the truth, and by asking the child to promise to tell the truth. Tests of children's truth-lie competency do not predict honesty, but eliciting a child's promise to tell the truth does increase honesty.


Pvip Transitional Peer Mentors, Douglas J. Henderson Mar 2011

Pvip Transitional Peer Mentors, Douglas J. Henderson

DOUGLAS J HENDERSON

Project VETS Intervention Program (PVIP) – Hamilton County, Ohio In early 2010 Hamilton County, Ohio was chosen as the pilot site for a federally funded jail diversion intervention program – the project was named Project VETS Intervention Program (PVIP). The SAMHSA National Gains Center awarded the State of Ohio grant money as part of its second round of funding, which was aimed at helping the existing and increasing veteran criminally justice involved population, and their families, with a priority given to Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom veterans who have suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)/Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). The …


Researching Trafficked Women: On Institutional Ressistance And The Limits Of Feminist Reflexivity, Michelle Dempsey, Mary Bosworth, Carolyn Hoyle Dec 2010

Researching Trafficked Women: On Institutional Ressistance And The Limits Of Feminist Reflexivity, Michelle Dempsey, Mary Bosworth, Carolyn Hoyle

Michelle Madden Dempsey

This article exposes methodological barriers we encountered in a small research project on women trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation and our attempts, drawing on feminist and emergent methods, to resolve them. It critically assesses the role of institutional gatekeepers and the practical challenges faced in obtaining data directly from trafficking victims. Such difficulties, it suggests, spring at least in part from lingering disagreements within the feminist academic, legal, and advocacy communities regarding the nature, extent and definition of trafficking. They also reveal concerns from policy makers and practitioners over the relevance and utility of academic research. While feminist …


Labeling The Victim Of Sex Trafficking: Exploring The Borderland Between Rhetoric And Reality, Michelle Dempsey, Mary Bosworth, Carolyn Hoyle Dec 2010

Labeling The Victim Of Sex Trafficking: Exploring The Borderland Between Rhetoric And Reality, Michelle Dempsey, Mary Bosworth, Carolyn Hoyle

Michelle Madden Dempsey

In this article we discuss findings from a small scoping study into the experiences of victims of trafficking and those who work with them. We use testimonies from our interviews to examine issues of choice, slavery and escape. We challenge some of the current language and terminology in the literature on trafficking and call for a more nuanced appreciation of the relationship between agency and victimization.


Dangerous Psychopaths: Criminally Responsible But Not Morally Responsible, Subject To Criminal Punishment And To Preventive Detention, Ken Levy Dec 2010

Dangerous Psychopaths: Criminally Responsible But Not Morally Responsible, Subject To Criminal Punishment And To Preventive Detention, Ken Levy

Ken Levy

How should we judge psychopaths, both morally and in the criminal justice system? This Article will argue that psychopaths are generally not morally responsible for their bad acts simply because they cannot understand, and therefore be guided by, moral reasons.

Scholars and lawyers who endorse the same conclusion automatically tend to infer from this premise that psychopaths should not be held criminally punishable for their criminal acts. These scholars and lawyers are making this assumption (that just criminal punishment requires moral responsibility) on the basis of one of two deeper assumptions: that either criminal punishment directly requires moral responsibility or …


Do “Tough On Crime” Politicians Win More Elections? An Empirical Analysis Of California State Legislators From 1992 To 2000, Steven A. Krieger Dec 2010

Do “Tough On Crime” Politicians Win More Elections? An Empirical Analysis Of California State Legislators From 1992 To 2000, Steven A. Krieger

Steven A. Krieger

Do “tough on crime” politicians win more elections? Conventional wisdom suggests that they do. After all, who was the last public official to win an election based on a “soft on crime” platform? Correspondingly, this unjustified and widespread belief among legislators (and their strategists) makes it extremely difficult for progressive criminal justice bills to become law. There is no empirical literature, however, to support or deny this conventional political wisdom.

A regression analysis was used to answer (1) whether legislators’ election results were impacted by their voting records (based on an assigned crime score) or constituent support for a ballot …


23. Assessing Children’S Competency To Take The Oath In Court: The Influence Of Question Type On Children’S Accuracy., Angela D. Evans, Thomas D. Lyon Dec 2010

23. Assessing Children’S Competency To Take The Oath In Court: The Influence Of Question Type On Children’S Accuracy., Angela D. Evans, Thomas D. Lyon

Thomas D. Lyon

This study examined children’s accuracy in response to truth–lie competency questions asked in court.The participants included 164 child witnesses in criminal child sexual abuse cases tried in Los AngelesCounty over a 5-year period (1997–2001) and 154 child witnesses quoted in the U.S. state and federalappellate cases over a 35-year period (1974 –2008). The results revealed that judges virtually never foundchildren incompetent to testify, but children exhibited substantial variability in their performance based on question-type. Definition questions, about the meaning of the truth and lies, were the most difficultlargely due to errors in response to “Do you know” questions. Questions about …