Few issues are as contentious as immigration and crime. Concern over the effects of immigration on crime is longstanding, and bans against criminal aliens constituted some of the earliest restrictions on immigration to the United States (Kanstroom, 2007). More recently, policies adopted in the mid-1990s greatly expanded the scope of acts for which noncitizens may be expelled from the United Sta...

California’s Three Strikes Law has been in effect since 1994. Advocates of this policy claim it acts as a deterrent for violent crime; yet critics allege it acts solely as an incapacitant–a device used to segregate a population of “undesirables” from the total population in an attempt to lower criminal susceptibility. To determine the true relationship between these two intimately connected phe...

American prison populations have soared. In 1970, fewer than 200 000 people were incarcerated in state and federal prisons in the United States. By 1996, more than a million people were incarcerated.2 The move toward increasingly punitive sanctions and the resulting increase of people in prisons was a conscious policy move in response to ambiguous evidence of the effectiveness of rehabilitation...

Juvenile delinquency is linked to psychiatric morbidity. w1-w9 We were interested in temporal changes in psychiatric morbidity in offenders. Criminal policy in many Western countries emphasises the need for alternative methods of punishment for adolescent prisoners. In Finland, successful policy to diminish the number of adolescents in prisons has been internationally recognised. We studied the...

Firearm violence remains an important problem, and a large body of evidence shows that guns used in crime follow generally predictable paths from manufacturer to criminal end user. Policy initiatives based on that evidence have been shown to be effective. A recently published study conducted by a leading policy organization presents new evidence and makes specific recommendations for action by ...

West Africa has recently emerged as a major focus for international drug policy, mainly in response to largescale cocaine seizures in West Africa, from where drugs are transhipped to European and American consumer markets [1]. International policy responses have concentrated on strengthening the criminal justice system, particularly the interdiction of drugs at West African airand seaports. How...

Indigenous over-representation in the criminal justice system is recognised as an important social policy issue and ‘closing the gap’ is a key priority for the sector, promoted through the National Indigenous Law and Justice Framework (SCAG 2009) and in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander justice agreements and plans that exist in every jurisdiction (ie NSW Aboriginal Justice Advisory Council...

In this paper we use a di erential game analysis to study the dynamic strategic interaction between a criminal gang extorting money from local shop-owners and the local police force. In particular, we are interested in characterizing which factors are important in determining whether the capital stock of local shop-owners keeps growing in spite of extortion or the criminal activity leads to a p...

Criminological theorists and criminal justice policy makers place a great deal of importance on the idea of desistance. in general terms, criminal desistance refers to a cessation of offending activity among those who have offended in the past. Some significant challenges await those who would estimate the relative size of the desisting population or attempt to identify factors that predict mem...

A quasi-experimental design was used to test the effects of viewing the movie “Freeway” on theory assessment scores for selected groups of undergraduate Criminal Justice students. The quasi-experimental group viewed the video and participated in an out-of-class study session to apply criminological theories to the events in the movie whereas the control group received only regular classroom ins...