NCJ Number
198375
Editor(s)
Michael Tonry
Date Published
2002
Length
360 pages
Annotation
This volume is intended for scholars, policymakers, and criminal justice practitioners needing authoritative information on current developments on crime, its causes, and its consequences.
Abstract
This book contains state-of-the-art reviews of knowledge on topics relating to crime and the criminal justice system. Its authors are from Australia, Canada, England, Wales, France, Germany, Holland, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. The disciplines covered include anthropology, biology, criminology, developmental psychology, economics, history, law, neuropsychology, operations research, philosophy, political science, social psychology, sociology, and statistics, from the 13th century to the present. Recent trends in youth violence and victimization in the United States are analyzed. It is noted that the dramatic decrease in youth violence since its peak in the early 1990's has been narrowly confined with respect to race, sex, and age, but not geography, thus making forecasting very difficult. A policy history of 25 years of sentencing innovation in North Carolina is provided along with a discussion of the results of legislation in North Carolina designed to match sentencing by judges to prison-use priorities. It is reported that judges reverted to earlier practices within 5 years. Three common criminological theories are applied to the question of why adolescent women offend much less often than men: the application of male offender theory to women, the focus on gender differences to explain deviant behavioral differences between males and females, and the emphasis on male-dominated theory construction. The history and implications of the 25 years of the Miranda Rule are reviewed including the effect of Miranda v. Arizona on the rates of confession, costs to the American criminal justice system, ability of the police to elicit confessions, and ability of prosecutors to win convictions. An examination of policy and knowledge obtained since the 1990's on the subject of stalking, and a variety of strategies to curb and prevent stalking and relieve the victim's distress are reviewed. The sources and courses of guns used in crime are examined more thoroughly than ever before by means of recently available data on gun traces. It is noted that systematic experimentation with different tactics used to reduce the use of guns in violence is recommended.