Criminology Commons^™

Preventive Detention And The Judicial Prediction Of Dangerousness For Juveniles: A Natural Experiment, Jeffery Fagan, Martin Guggenheim

Faculty Scholarship

Since 1970, legislatures have increasingly relied on preventive detention – detention before trial ordered solely to prevent an accused from committing crime during the pretrial period – as an instrument of social control. Prior to this period, detention before trial was usually ordered only to assure an accused's presence at trial or to ensure the integrity of the trial process by preventing an accused from tampering with witnesses. Today, the majority of states and the federal system have changed their laws to allow judges to detain arrestees who pose a risk to society if released during the pretrial period. Half …

Contributions Of Victimization To Delinquency In Inner Cities, Jeffery Fagan, Elizabeth S. Piper, Yu-Teh Cheng

Faculty Scholarship

The relationship between victimization and criminality has been widely cited in recent years. Early thinking and public perceptions about crime intuitively presumed that criminals were distinct from their victims. Crime control policies resulted which promoted the physical separation of victims from predatory offenders through "target hardening" and "defensible space." Such distinctions, however, ignored the empirical evidence on the considerable overlap between offender and victim profiles and distorted the reality of events in which persons are labelled as victims or victimizers based only on the consequences of the event. Given the homogeneous relation between victim and offender, theories of crime that …

Child Sexual Abuse, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past two decades awareness of child sexual abuse among academics and professionals has grown from several convergent trends: the "discovery" of child abuse in the 1960's, concern by feminists over sexual assault and rape, increasing reports to law enforcement and child protective service workers of sexually abused children, and the general "deprivatization" of the family. More recently, general public awareness of child sexual abuse has followed well-publicized cases of child molestation in day-care centers, nationwide concern over pornography and its subsequent links to teenage prostitution, and runaway youth, delinquency, and family violence among adults.

Punishment, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Although punishment has been a crucial feature of every legal system, widespread disagreement exists over the moral principles that can justify its imposition. One fundamental question is why (and whether) the social institution of punishment is warranted. A second question concerns the necessary conditions for punishment in particular cases. A third relates to the degree of severity that is appropriate for particular offenses and offenders. Debates about punishment are important in their own right, but they also raise more general problems about the proper standards for evaluating social practices.

The main part of this theoretical overview of the subject of …