NCJ Number
206450
Editor(s)
Gerben Bruinsma,
Henk Elffers,
Jan de Keijser
Date Published
2004
Length
327 pages
Annotation
Following an introduction that contains papers on challenges for criminological and criminal justice research as well as criminology and criminal justice in Europe, this book presents papers on punishment and criminal justice, crime location and offender mobility, and criminal careers.
Abstract
Seven papers address issues related to the use of punishment as a tool of criminal justice policy. Two papers discuss the use of "actuarial justice" (probability calculations in predicting the likelihood of reoffending) in determining sentences. The purpose of actuarial justice is to imprison or severely restrict the actions of those offenders who have a high probability of reoffending based on testing. The papers presented examine the problems and promise of incorporating actuarial justice into sentencing decisions, pretrial decisions, and corrections case management. Other papers in this section discuss and critique the goals and rationales for various sentencing philosophies, the implications of human rights for punishing offenders under modern democratic governments, European trends in juvenile crime and juvenile justice, and the activities of transnational policing in relation to transnational organized crime. Four papers on crime location and offender mobility trace the history of research on the effectiveness of policing "hot spots" of crime, models for studying criminals' geographic "journeys" to their crime sites, and the methodology and findings of transnational organized crime groups investigated in the Netherlands. Five papers on criminal careers review research methods for examining criminal careers, with some of the papers focusing on the causes and trajectories of physical aggression and the influence and dynamics of interaction with delinquent peers. 31 figures, 5 tables, chapter references, and a subject index