AIMS To examine the effects on violence of a policy change that ended prohibition of off-sale alcohol outlets in Lubbock, Texas. METHODS Time-series analysis of violent crime data from police records comparing the periods before and after the policy change. RESULTS The effect of the policy change on both total violent crime and aggregated assault was small and did not approach statistical s...

Illicit drug abuse continues to be a growing problem worldwide and a serious hazard to humanity. The crimes associated with drug abuse include sale or possession of drugs; property crimes or prostitution to support drug habits; and violent crimes reflecting out-of-control behavior. In fact, an offender drug use is involved in more than half of all violent crimes and in 60 to 80 percent of child...

The United States in the 1990s has experienced the greatest sustained decline in violent crime rates since World War II—even though rates thus far have not fallen as rapidly as they increased during the crime boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. I review a set of exogenous and policy-related explanations for the earlier crime boom and for the crime bust of the 1990s. I argue that our understandin...

BACKGROUND Ecologic studies have shown a relationship between alcohol outlet densities, illicit drug use and violence. The present study examined this relationship in the City of Houston, Texas, using a sample of 439 census tracts. Neighborhood sociostructural covariates, alcohol outlet density, drug crime density and violent crime data were collected for the year 2000, and analyzed using hiera...

Gun control legislation is essentially a law enforcement matter and a political device to reduce violent crime; only secondarily a psychiatric concern. It is a volatile issue among citizens and legislators alike. The position of forensic psychiatry toward violent crime has been largely peripheral, since only a minute number of homicides where insanity is pled (about I percent) involves psychiat...

Although research has found high rates of child maltreatment, widespread victimization, and other negative outcomes among homeless youth and young adults, resiliency among this population has largely been understudied. Specifically, a gap remains in terms of how protective factors such as self-efficacy, low deviant beliefs, and religiosity operate among homeless youth and young adults. The purp...

Social scientists who dismiss evolutionary psychology seem unaware that a revolution in neuroscience and other areas of biology has taken place over the last half-century. The estimate of 83 million Americans taking drugs like Prozac for depression and 11 million children on Ritalin for hyperactivity indicate it is time to reconsider the role of brain chemistry in social behavior and violent be...

This article presents rates of criminal offending in the life history of male and female students at universities in 32 nations who participated in the International Dating Violence Study. The measure of criminal behavior has acceptable coefficients of reliability in most of the national settings, and there is evidence indicating construct validity. National differences in the percent of male s...

Specialization--the predisposition to violent behavior persisting over an extended period of time--is considered in relation to congenital factors, to determine whether such factors are contributory to this predisposition. Congenital factors include inherited characteristics and perinatal experiences. Evidence for inherited characteristics in criminal behavior is approached through family studi...