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bate is complex and confused, partly because support for the death penalty reflects no single theory but, instead, a conglomeration of several different theories. These include retribution, avoidance of economic costs associated with protracted imprisonment, a disbelief in rehabilitation, and, finally, a conception that has come to be called "deterrence theory." While each argument for the death penalty has its supporters, it is deterrence theory that has captured public imagination and scientific attention.

Wars are related to subsequent violence in complex and at times contradictory ways. The relationships between war and postwar violence, recognized throughout history, have attracted the att...

Research in the area of illicit substance use remains preoccupied with describing and analyzing the risks of people who use drugs (PWUD), however more recently there has been a drive to use a strengths-based or resilience approach as an alternative to investigating drug use. This leads us to ask: what can be known about PWUD from the point of view of resilience? The objective of this scoping review is to analyze how the concept of resilience is defined, operationalized, and applied in substance use research. Popular health, social science, psychology, and inter-disciplinary databases namely: SCOPUS, PUBMED, PsycINFO, and Sociological Abstracts were searched. Studies were selected if they used the concept of resilience and if substance use was a key variable under investigation. A total of 77 studies were identified which provided a definition of resilience, or attempted to operationalize (e.g., via scales) the concept of resilience in some manner. Data were charted and sorted using key terms and fundamental aspects of resilience. The majority of studies focus on youth and their resistance to, or engagement in, substance use. There is also a small but growing area of research that examines recovery from substance addiction as a form of resilience. Very few studies were found that thoroughly investigated resilience among PWUD. Consistently throughout the literature drug use is presented as a ‘risk factor’ jeopardizing one’s ability to be resilient, or drug use is seen as a ‘maladaptive coping strategy’, purporting one’s lack of resilience. Currently, substance use research provides a substantial amount of information about the internal strengths that can assist in resisting future drug use; however there is less information about the external resources that play a role, especially for adults. Though popular, outcome-based conceptualizations of resilience are often static, concealing the potential for developing resilience over time or as conditions change. Studies of resilience among PWUD predominantly concentrate on health-related behaviours, recovery-related factors or predefined harm reduction strategies. Indeed, overall, current conceptualizations of resilience are too narrow to recognize all the potential manifestations of resilience practices in the daily lives of individuals who actively use drugs.

Violence between social equals differs in character from violence between persons in asymmetrical relationships. Specifically, issues of contention motivating violence vary by the relative status of opponents, such that violence over symbolic issues is more common between symmetrical than asymmetrical opponents. Recent studies have substantiated these predictions in nonpartner relationships. Using data from interviews of incarcerated women, this study explores how intimate partner violence compares with violence between nonpartner opponents. We find that intimate partner violence is more likely to involve symbolic issues compared with violence between all kinds of nonpartner opponents. Consequently, intimate partnerships might be viewed as hypersymmetrical.

The paucity of studies that examine women’s criminal careers, particularly beyond the period of young adulthood, has made it difficult for scholars to determine whether developmental pathways—especially precursors of adult-onset offending—vary. This paper examines the onset of offending among women, from childhood to adulthood. We draw from a retrospective life event calendar administered to women prisoners across three data collection sites. Sorting the women into different onset groups based on self-reports of first time offending, we ask whether there are unique predictors of early, adolescent, and adult-onset status and whether our results are sensitive to the age at which adulthood is measured (18–20 versus 21 and older). In contrast with some criminal career research, this study reveals a sizeable percentage of female offenders who initiate offending in adulthood (43 %). Compared with adult onset, early initiation is associated with childhood sexual abuse, sexual precocity, and low supervision and lack of childhood bonds. Adolescent onset is also associated with some of these same characteristics (compared to adult initiation), but a lack of childhood bonds is unassociated with young adult onset compared to adult initiation. Adult offenders are differentiated by the absence of these risks. Post-offending, young adult starters tend to have, on average, a more extensive criminal history and association with criminal friends, somewhat higher drug involvement (use and drug dealing), and more offense variety than do offenders who initiate after age 21. Early initiation, and to some extent adolescent onset, tends to reveal more post-offending disadvantages especially when compared with adults. Our findings suggest distinct groups among the adult offenders—one consistent with Thornberry and Krohn’s idea of “late bloomers” and another older initiator group for whom the mechanisms of onset remain unidentified.

Anthony Doob's career as a criminologist has been distinguished by his commitment to evidence-based policy development and to making criminological research relevant not just to other scholars but, perhaps more importantly, to policy makers, criminal justice practitioners, and the public. This paper provides an overview of the underdeveloped state of evaluation research on crime prevention and policy in Canada and discusses some of the obstacles to conducting rigorous evaluations. Fortunately, these obstacles – which include a tendency to rely on ideology and intuition as opposed to empirical evidence and a lack of sufficient resources for evaluation studies – have not discouraged Doob in his efforts to improve our criminal laws and justice system so that they reflect the fundamental Canadian values of justice, fairness, and humanity. Through his own research and his promotion of others' research – through, for example, Criminological Highlights – he has worked tirelessly to promote interventions by the criminal justice system that are informed by these values as well as by sound empirical evidence as to their effectiveness.

Why do some authoritarian rulers, such as Saddam Hussein, kill or torture other people personally, whereas others, like Joseph Stalin, delegate such violence to subordinates? Such politically motivated interpersonal violence committed by authoritarian leaders has never before been theorized. Through a comparison of Hussein and Stalin, we explain why some dictators engage in this behavior and others do not. We propose a model based on three components: the individual's prior habituation or non-habituation to violence; regime characteristics that ‘select for’ a personally violent or non-violent ruler; and, once a ruler takes power, the interaction of the first two variables. We also suggest that most communist regimes featured organizational characteristics that discouraged such violence by the leader.

Objectives: To examine the social ecology of homicide in Toronto, Canada. Method: Using both ordinary least squares regression and negative binomial models, we analyze the structural correlates of 965 homicides occurring in 140 neighborhoods in Toronto between 1988 and 2003. Results: Similar to research in U.S. cities, Toronto neighborhoods with higher levels of economic disadvantage, higher proportions of young and Black residents, and greater residential instability have higher homicide rates. In contrast to U.S. studies, Toronto neighborhoods with higher proportions of residents who are recent immigrants also have higher homicide rates. In multivariate models, only two of these characteristics—economic disadvantage and the proportion of residents aged 15 to 24—are significantly associated with homicide in Toronto’s neighborhoods. Despite low levels of both lethal violence and spatial inequality in Toronto, the correlates of homicide in its neighborhoods are similar in some respects to those in U.S. cities. Conclusion: Our findings lend support to the notion of invariance in some ecological covariates of homicide but also highlight the need to be cautious about generalizing from U.S.-based research on the relationship between immigration and homicide.

One of the most notable aspects of American state prison imprisonment rates is that, as Newburn (2010) recently reminded us, they have for some time varied dramatically both over time and across states. For example, in the early 1970s,1 state prison incarceration rates2 varied from a low of 25 prisoners per 100,000 residents in North Dakota to a high of 166 in North Carolina.3 By 2007–2009, rates had increased so dramatically that the lowest state imprisonment rate was 150 prisoners per 100,000 residents (in Maine) and the highest was 861 (in Louisiana). In absolute terms, Maine’s increase of 105 prisoners per 100,000 residents (from 45 prisoners per 100,000 in 1971–1973 to 150 prisoners per 100,000 in 2007–2009) was the smallest increase and Louisiana’s increase of 756 (from 105 to 861) was the largest.4 For Gottschalk (2006), what is most interesting about this growth in imprisonment in the United States is not, however, its size but the fact that it occurred in the prison systems of all 50 states. With each state in control

In 1968, California Governor Ronald Reagan's second year in office, the imprisonment rate in the state's institutions was 146 per 100,000 residents. In 1972, California's state prisons incarcerated 96 prisoners per 100,000 residents - a decrease of 34% and the state's lowest level of imprisonment since at least 1950. This study examines how this reduction was accomplished during the tenure of a governor elected in part because of his tough approach to crime and disorder. We find that the decrease in the prison population resulted from a confluence of events, rather than a single dominant cause, and that this process extended over a period of years, rather than being limited to Reagan's first year or two in office. There are lessons of value in this history for California's and other states' current problems with high imprisonment rates. However, differences in law, in the scale of imprisonment, and in the politics of penality are likely to limit efforts to substantially educe prison populations in California and elsewhere. Policy Implications The growth of the level of imprisonment in the United States, coupled with financial and legal pressures to reduce those levels to something more sensible and financially viable, provides a strong impetus for understanding how imprisonment rates can be controlled. For jurisdictions facing court or financial pressures to reduce imprisonment, successful efforts to lower prison populations, whether in the United States or elsewhere, should be of particular relevance. However, although much has been written about the reasons for the enormous growth in imprisonment in the United States since the mid-1970s, the study of effective ways to limit this growth or reverse it has been described as 'virgin territory.' It is reasonably well established that the size of a jurisdiction's prison population is a function of imprisonment policies rather than crime or arrest rates. Thus, to understand trends in imprisonment rates one needs to examine criminal justice policies that determine who and how many go into prison, how long they stay there, and whether, after release, they are returned to prison if they violate release conditions. It is not, however, the case that reducing imprisonment can be accomplished by simply adjusting one of these levers or reversing one of the policies that led to an increase in imprisonment. California's brief but dramatic experience with decarceration in the late 1960s and early 1970s illustrates these points. The 34% reduction in the state's prison population between 1967 and 1971 - which Governor Reagan celebrated in his second inaugural address - resulted from a number of quite different changes occurring over more or less the same span of time. One factor that was not responsible, however, was crime: Reported crime rates and felony arrest rates were increasing at the same time imprisonment was decreasing. Instead, the reduction was due to (a) a decrease in the probability of a prison sentence (due to a program that subsidized counties for placing offenders on probation rather than sending them to state prison), (b) an increase in the rate of release from prison (due to a decrease in length of time served before parole release), and (c) a decrease in the rate of return to imprisonment as a consequence of parole failure (due to a change in practice by the Adult Authority, California's parole board). Recently, a few states - including New York, Michigan, Oregon, and Colorado - have experimented with policy changes to halt or reverse the growth in their prison populations. Among the reforms tried are elimination of some mandatory minimum sentences, revisions to sentencing laws that return discretion to judges, amendments to truth-in-sentencing laws, and changes in drug policies and laws. Indeed, early in 2010 the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation launched its own reforms to shrink its inmate numbers in response to both a federal court order and a budgetary crisis; among these was the creation of "nonrevocable parole" for low-risk parolees. Unfortunately, most of these efforts have had at best modest effects on prison growth and many have been or are being challenged by public interest groups and politicians. Does the Reagan-era reduction in imprisonment offer any insights into achieving nontrivial reductions in prison populations? In the 1960s and early 1970s, California produced a relatively low-visibility, multiyear program at the state level of government. Major legislative changes were not required, however, multiple changes were. Substantial levels of decarceration cannot be achieved by reducing commitments to prison or increasing parole release or decreasing prison return after parole failure. All three components must happen together to have important effects. That is the first lesson from the Reagan-era episode. The second is that the reduction in imprisonment was the result of a process that extended over a period of years rather than instantly, due to a single policy or procedural change. However, there are now impediments to reform in California (and elsewhere) that did not exist 40 years ago, including a series of changes in (a) the scale of imprisonment, (b) state finances, (c) state-level power to set prison terms, (d) the visibility of penal policy, (e) the relative influence of state administrators and the public on correctional policy, and (f) beliefs about the efficacy of imprisonment. These limit the capacity of a twenty-first century governor to act and alter the publicity and controversy that will accompany any major reduction in imprisonment. Large-scale decarceration is more difficult in 2010 than in the 1960s, although not impossible. Big changes will require visible policy shifts and legislative as well as executive branch participation. The decisions that are the targets for substantial decarceration have not changed since the Reagan years, but the mechanics of achieving shifts involve much more cooperation within and across levels of government. Language: en

Violent altercations can lead to serious injury and death, and yet some interpersonal disputes that prompt physical violence originate over what are seemingly trivial issues. This study evaluates the theoretical premise that violence stemming from what typically are defined as trivial altercations can be explained by what is at stake in these conflicts; trivial altercations, or fights about "nothing," actually represent symbolic contests of dominance and deference. These status contests are necessary primarily when the social relationship between opponents is symmetrical—when a dominance hierarchy is not clearly established. Data from interviews with incarcerated women in Ontario, Canada, show that relationship symmetry strongly predicts the issue of contention in their physically violent altercations. These findings suggest that, when violence erupts over trivial issues, both parties to the altercation essentially are locked in a battle for social rank.

Les opinions varient a savoir si le taux d’emprisonnement des femmes au Canada a tendance a augmenter depuis quelques annees, comme dans certains pays occidentaux. Dans l’article, on decrit en detail l’ampleur qu’a prise le phenomene de l’emprisonnement des femmes au Canada depuis le debut des annees 1980, afin de trancher cette question. Selon les differentes mesures de l’emprisonnement et les donnees sur les prisons federales et provinciales pour femmes, aucune preuve convaincante a l’echelle nationale ne revele une croissance particulierement forte du taux d’emprisonnement des femmes au pays au cours des dernieres decennies. Toutefois, a cause de grandes lacunes dans les donnees, on ne peut pas vraiment decrire l’ampleur du phenomene et, encore plus important, les tendances relatives a la taille de la population feminine en prison. Cependant, les donnees de la province de l’Ontario revelent un changement a la fois important et deconcertant de la nature de l’emprisonnement des femmes, un changement qui est presque passe inapercu aux yeux des erudits : une proportion considerable et croissante de la population feminine incarceree est composee de femmes qui ne purgent pas une peine. On conclut l’article en disant qu’il faudrait porter une plus grande attention a l’augmentation de la population en detention preventive et du lien entre cette augmentation et les theories de la punitivite. Abstract: There are conflicting claims about whether women’s imprisonment in Canada has followed the trend toward increasing punitiveness observed in a number of other western nations. This paper provides a detailed description of the scope of women’s imprisonment in Canada since the early 1980s to adjudicate between these claims. Using different measures of imprisonment and data from federal and provincial prisons for women, the paper shows that we do not have convincing national evidence that there has been substantial growth in women’s imprisonment Canada over the past few decades. There are however, some important gaps in the existing data that make it impossible to describe the full extent of the imprisonment of women and, more importantly, trends in the size of the population of women in prison. At the same time data from one province – Ontario – describe an important and disconcerting shift in the nature of women’s imprisonment that has gone largely unnoticed by scholars: a large and growing proportion of the imprisoned female population is made up of women who are not serving sentences. The paper concludes with a call for more attention to the increase in the remand population and to what it means for theories of punitiveness.

Data on homicides in Buffalo, New York, are analyzed to demonstrate the importance of “methods triangulation” for assessing the validity of quantitative measures. Defended community homicides are quantitatively operationalized as acts that occur in the offender's community against a nonlocal victim. Poisson models provide strong support for the existence of defended community homicide, which is significantly more common in residentially stable and racially homogenous neighborhoods. However, subsequent qualitative analyses of the victim and offender characteristics and motives of these homicides undermine the “defended community” concept. Qualitative analyses are necessary to assess the validity of quantitative measures in criminological research.

Nearly 40 years ago, in research conducted for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, Ward and his colleagues, asked ‘Are women more aggressive in committing violent crimes today than in the past?’ The reason they asked this question, and others have continued to, is the common fear that women, as the putative gatekeepers of social morality, are changing. Using data from the same prison Ward and his colleagues relied on to document the nature of women's violent offences, we examine whether and how the characteristics and crimes of incarcerated female offenders have changed. In so doing, we also seek to explain observed patterns of stability and change over the last third of the 20th century in women's crimes of violence and the moral panics that circumscribe violent criminality by women.

A recently published article by Langevin, Curnoe, Fedoroff, Bennett, Langevin, Peever, Pettica, and Sandhu (2004) reports a recidivism rate of 88.3% for sex offenders. A detailed analysis of the study demonstrates that this unusually high level is uninterpretable because the offenders whose criminal careers were followed are unlikely to be representative of sex offenders in general. Furthermore, the measure of recidivism used in the study not only distorts the normal meaning of recidivism but also artefactually creates an inflated - and consequently meaningless - recidivism rate.

Recent scholarship on penality describes profound changes in the ideology, discourses, and policies shaping criminal punishment in the late-twentieth-century United States. To assess the implications of these changes for those subject to criminal punishment, we examine the experiences of women in prison at two key points in the recent history of penality. We compare how imprisonment was practiced and responded to at the California Institution for Women in the early 1960s, when the rehabilitative model dominated official penal discourse, and in the mid-1990s, near the height of the "get tough" era. We find that the ways in which women related and responded to other prisoners, to staff, and to the prison regime, while in some ways specific to one or the other penal era, did not fundamentally change. Thus, penal regimes ostensibly informed by profoundly different rationalities nevertheless structured the daily lives of prisoners through a very similar set of deprivations, restrictions, and assumptions. Introduction Punishment changed in the United States in the last third of the twentieth century. The indicators of this change are welldocumented and widely agreed upon. Prison populations soared, correctional and rehabilitative goals were largely supplanted in official and popular discourse by concerns with public safety and victims' rights, penal policy became highly politicized, and public sentiment toward criminals hardened. As a consequence, criminal punishment touched the lives of more Americans than ever before in the 1990s, a decade characterized by "mass imprisonment" (Garland 2001), "hyper-incarceration" (Simon 2000), and a "macho penal economy" (Downes 2001). Commentators continue to debate the broader meanings and sources of these changes. For some they signal the rise of a postmodern or "new penology" rooted in neoliberalism and distinguished by "an abandonment of any pretext of benevolence" (Pratt 2000:133). Others see not an overarching, novel trend, but disparate efforts to recombine timeworn practices in the face of the disintegration of the welfare state (Garland 1995), or an incoherent and contradictory penality driven by New Right politics that favors both the innovative and the nostalgic (O'Malley 1999). Implicit in many of these analyses is the assumption that shifts in penal ideologies, discourses, and logics have consequences for prisoners' lives. Recently, Simon articulated this assumption when he asked, "[h]ow has inmate society changed under conditions where prisons' populations have experienced extraordinary growth and prison management has undergone a wholesale rearrangement of mission and ideology?" (2000:302). In this article, we address this question by examining the experiences of women in prison at two key points in the recent history of criminal punishment. We compare how imprisonment was practiced and responded to at the California Institution for Women (CIW) in the early 1960s, when the rehabilitative model dominated official penal discourse, and in the mid-1990s, near the height of the "get tough" era. The gendered maternal and therapeutic approaches that gave women's corrections a certain coherence and distinctiveness for much of the twentieth century contrast sharply with both the punitive, pessimistic penal ideologies of the 1990s and the move to standardize and systematize penal practices. Have the ways women manage their lives in prison changed as prisons have moved toward gender-equity and a "penality of cruelty" (Simon 2001)? Convicted offenders, as Garland has noted, "form the most immediate audience for the practical rhetoric of punishment, being directly implicated within its practices and being the ostensible target of its persuasive attempts" (1990:262). Our goal is to shed light on the extent to which changes in the official discourses, ideology, and practices of penality have altered how imprisonment was experienced by women offenders, one segment of this "most immediate audience. …

Incarceration of women in the United States is at a historic high, but understanding of women's experiences in prison, their responses to treatment, their lives after prison, and how changing prison regimes have affected these things remains limited. Individual attributes, preprison experiences, and prison conditions are associated with how women respond to incarceration, but assessments of their joint and conditional influences are lacking. Needs assessments abound, but systematic evaluations of interventions based on these assessments are rare, as are studies of the long-term consequences of imprisonment. Understanding of ways women negotiate power and construct their lives in prison is greater than in the past; new theoretical frameworks have provided important insights, but fundamental questions remain unanswered.

Research Summary In 1968, California Governor Ronald Reagan's second year in office, the imprisonment rate in the state's institutions was 146 per 100,000 residents. In 1972, California's state prisons incarcerated 96 prisoners per 100,000 residents – a decrease of 34% and the state's lowest level of imprisonment since at least 1950. This study examines how this reduction was accomplished during the tenure of a governor elected in part because of his tough approach to crime and disorder. We find that the decrease in the prison population resulted from a confluence of events, rather than a single dominant cause, and that this process extended over a period of years, rather than being limited to Reagan's first year or two in office. There are lessons of value in this history for California's and other states’ current problems with high imprisonment rates. However, differences in law, in the scale of imprisonment, and in the politics of penality are likely to limit efforts to substantially educe prison populations in California and elsewhere. Policy Implications The growth of the level of imprisonment in the United States, coupled with financial and legal pressures to reduce those levels to something more sensible and financially viable, provides a strong impetus for understanding how imprisonment rates can be controlled. For jurisdictions facing court or financial pressures to reduce imprisonment, successful efforts to lower prison populations, whether in the United States or elsewhere, should be of particular relevance. However, although much has been written about the reasons for the enormous growth in imprisonment in the United States since the mid-1970s, the study of effective ways to limit this growth or reverse it has been described as ‘virgin territory.’ It is reasonably well established that the size of a jurisdiction's prison population is a function of imprisonment policies rather than crime or arrest rates. Thus, to understand trends in imprisonment rates one needs to examine criminal justice policies that determine who and how many go into prison, how long they stay there, and whether, after release, they are returned to prison if they violate release conditions. It is not, however, the case that reducing imprisonment can be accomplished by simply adjusting one of these levers or reversing one of the policies that led to an increase in imprisonment. California's brief but dramatic experience with decarceration in the late 1960s and early 1970s illustrates these points. The 34% reduction in the state's prison population between 1967 and 1971 – which Governor Reagan celebrated in his second inaugural address – resulted from a number of quite different changes occurring over more or less the same span of time. One factor that was not responsible, however, was crime: Reported crime rates and felony arrest rates were increasing at the same time imprisonment was decreasing. Instead, the reduction was due to (a) a decrease in the probability of a prison sentence (due to a program that subsidized counties for placing offenders on probation rather than sending them to state prison), (b) an increase in the rate of release from prison (due to a decrease in length of time served before parole release), and (c) a decrease in the rate of return to imprisonment as a consequence of parole failure (due to a change in practice by the Adult Authority, California's parole board). Recently, a few states – including New York, Michigan, Oregon, and Colorado – have experimented with policy changes to halt or reverse the growth in their prison populations. Among the reforms tried are elimination of some mandatory minimum sentences, revisions to sentencing laws that return discretion to judges, amendments to truth-in-sentencing laws, and changes in drug policies and laws. Indeed, early in 2010 the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation launched its own reforms to shrink its inmate numbers in response to both a federal court order and a budgetary crisis; among these was the creation of “nonrevocable parole” for low-risk parolees. Unfortunately, most of these efforts have had at best modest effects on prison growth and many have been or are being challenged by public interest groups and politicians. Does the Reagan-era reduction in imprisonment offer any insights into achieving nontrivial reductions in prison populations? In the 1960s and early 1970s, California produced a relatively low-visibility, multiyear program at the state level of government. Major legislative changes were not required, however, multiple changes were. Substantial levels of decarceration cannot be achieved by reducing commitments to prison or increasing parole release or decreasing prison return after parole failure. All three components must happen together to have important effects. That is the first lesson from the Reagan-era episode. The second is that the reduction in imprisonment was the result of a process that extended over a period of years rather than instantly, due to a single policy or procedural change. However, there are now impediments to reform in California (and elsewhere) that did not exist 40 years ago, including a series of changes in (a) the scale of imprisonment, (b) state finances, (c) state-level power to set prison terms, (d) the visibility of penal policy, (e) the relative influence of state administrators and the public on correctional policy, and (f) beliefs about the efficacy of imprisonment. These limit the capacity of a twenty-first century governor to act and alter the publicity and controversy that will accompany any major reduction in imprisonment. Large-scale decarceration is more difficult in 2010 than in the 1960s, although not impossible. Big changes will require visible policy shifts and legislative as well as executive branch participation. The decisions that are the targets for substantial decarceration have not changed since the Reagan years, but the mechanics of achieving shifts involve much more cooperation within and across levels of government.