Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Criminal Justice Response To Policy Interventions: Evidence From Immigration Reform, Sarah Bohn, Matthew Freedman, Emily Owens

Matthew Freedman

Autonomía Del Ministerio Público Y La Procuración De Justicia En México, Max Garcia

Max Garcia Sanchez

No abstract provided.

Hidden In Plain Sight: What Cost-Of-Crime Research Can Tell Us About Investing In Police, Paul Heaton

Paul Heaton

Many state and local governments are facing significant fiscal challenges, forcing policymakers to confront difficult trade-offs as they consider how to allocate scarce resources across numerous worthy initiatives. To achieve their policy priorities, it will become increasingly important for policymakers to concentrate resources on programs that can clearly demonstrate that they improve their constituents' quality of life. To identify such programs, cost/benefit analysis can be a powerful tool for objectively adjudicating the merits of particular programs. On the surface, all such programs aim to improve quality of life, but whether they actually achieve — or will achieve — what they …

Do Police Discriminate? Evidence From Multiple-Offender Crimes, Paul Heaton, Charles Loeffler

Paul Heaton

A large body of prior research examines whether differential arrest rates of minorities reflect disproportionate minority involvement in crime or institutional bias that targets enforcement towards minorities. This research has been limited by difficulties in measuring the extent to which minority offending differs from offending in general. In this paper we exploit the fact that some crimes are committed by groups of both Black and White offenders to estimate the extent to which minority offenders face differential probabilities of arrest. Our research design permits us to control for all observable and unobservable circumstances associated with each offense for this subpopulation. …

A Synthesis Of Literature On The Effectiveness Of Community Orders, Paul Heaton

Paul Heaton

The U.K. National Audit Office (NAO) commissioned RAND Europe to conduct this review to identify and synthesize international research about the effectiveness of community orders in reducing re-offending. In this report, we review research on ten of the common requirements contained in community orders. Through examining reviews, systematic reviews and meta-analyses we draw conclusions about the state of research in the areas of unpaid work, mental health treatment, education/skills training, drug treatment, anger management, alcohol treatment, programmes for perpetrators of domestic abuse, regular probation, intensive probation and cognitive/behavioural programming. We also assess the strength of the evidence on whether each …

Does Religion Really Reduce Crime?, Paul Heaton

Paul Heaton

Considerable research in sociology, criminology, and economics aims to understand the effect of religiosity on crime. Many sociological theories positing a deterrent effect of religion on crime are empirically examined using ordinary least-squares (OLS) regressions of crime measures on measures of religiosity. Most previous studies have found a negative effect of religion on crime using OLS, a result I am able to replicate using county-level data on religious membership and crime rates. If crime affects religious participation, however, OLS coefficients in this context suffer from endogeneity bias. Using historic religiosity as an instrument for current religious participation, I find a …