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Throughout the 1980s sex offender treatment programs proliferated in state prisons in the wake of repealed sexual psychopath legislation, driven by much favorable publicity over novel cognitive and behavioral treatment methods. This article examines the scope and likely impact of the new generation of sex offender treatment programs and concludes that heightened optimism may be premature. The new programs embody the same defects that the repeal of psychopath legislation was intended to correct. The enterprise of sex offender treatment would benefit from participation of social scientists outside of the treatment field in research on sex offenders.

This paper applies the concept of choice structuring properties to the study of why certain models of automobile are at higher risk of theft than others. Official and automobile industry data from the USA were used to produce three indices ranking 121 models according to (1) risk of theft for stripping of parts; (2) theft for temporary use; and (3) theft for permanent retention, resale or chopping. Important differences were found among the top‐ranking models in each index: those in (1) were predominantly German‐made cars with good audio equipment; in (2) were sporty, American‐made vehicles; and in (3) were a mix of very expensive high‐performance and less expensive foreign sports cars. These differences were explicable in terms of each model's choice structuring properties relating to the three broad categories of security, availability and attractiveness for theft. While the results underline the need to take account of specific theft motives when designing prevention strategies, it was concluded that further research to elucidate the relationship between motive and target choice is needed.

Despite the intent of juvenile sentence reforms to create sanctions that approximate punishments imposed by the criminal court, evaluations of the new laws indicate what appears to be the continued lenient treatment of juveniles. One explanation for this phenomenon is that within similar charges, juvenile offenses are far less serious than adult offenses. In order to explore this idea, prosecutors of one New Jersey county were asked to rate the seriousness of the behaviors of 500 adults and 500 juveniles charged with assault or robbery. With respect to both offenses, the behaviors of juveniles were regarded as substantially less serious than the behaviors of adults. These results highlight a need for the use of more precise measures of offense seriousness in juvenile justice research.