This volume examines issues related to decisionmaking in criminal justice. We began with the idea of producing a volume that would examine “changes in decisionmaking and discretion in the criminal justice system.” However, we quickly recognized that such a focus suggests a far too narrow, traditional view of decisionmaking, in which criminal justice officials make choices about processing indiv...

It has been assumed for many years that people who commit sadistic or other violent crime possess an unhealthy fascination with violence and death. Numerous studies have focused on levels of such sensational interests among criminal populations with a view to rehabilitation. What appears to be missing from current literature is an examination of sensational interests among those who work with, ...

Background For the last decade, diverting arrestees with mental illness from the criminal justice to the mental health systems has been a mainstay of US mental health policy. However, data allowing us to gauge the size and charge characteristics of arrestees with mental illness have been generally unavailable to planners and policymakers in this area. This paper represents an effort toward prov...

FOR AT LEAST the past 25 years, the victim role in criminal justice has been debated in theory and contested in practice. Of particular significance to proponents of restorative justice is Christie's (1977) assertion that conflict is the "property" of the victim. Normatively then, victims should assume a central role in justice responses to crime and anti-social behavior. But empirically, have ...

ANNALS, AAPSS, 634, March 2011 Lay or commonsense accounts of the origins of criminal behavior may play a key role in sustaining a strong public appetite for harsh criminal justice policies and undergird large black-white differences in opinion in this domain. Using data from the nationally representative Race, Crime, and Public Opinion project’s 2001 survey, the authors develop an explanatory ...

Eleanor Lyon has conducted research and evaluation related to domestic violence, violence against women, and criminal justice and social policy for twenty years. The views expressed in this paper, as in all papers disseminated through the Welfare and Domestic Violence Technical Assistance Initiative, are solely those of the author. The author expresses appreciation for the contributions of

The growing prominence of restorative justice interventions necessitates a reconceptualization of criminal justice in terms of a new paradigm. The most plausible candidate for this is an empowerment paradigm of justice. However, an overarching theory of criminal justice in these terms needs to be complemented by more fine-grained theoretical explanations of how and why conventional and alternat...

The prominence of risk in UK social and criminal justice policy creates opportunities, challenges and dangers for forensic psychiatry. The future standing of the specialty will depend not only on the practical utility of its responses to those opportunities and challenges, but also the ethical integrity of those responses.

BACKGROUND Individuals with schizophrenia may have a higher risk of encounters with the criminal justice system than the general population, but there are limited data on such encounters and their attendant costs. This study assessed the prevalence of encounters with the criminal justice system, encounter types, and the estimated cost attributable to these encounters in the one-year treatment o...