Recent efforts to address the needs of mentally ill persons arrested for minor crimes have focused on providing treatment and controlling petty criminal behavior, most notably through diversion programs that shunt offenders from the criminal justice to the mental health and substance abuse treatment sys tems.1' 2Diversion programs have been partially suc cessful in bridging the gap between trea...

At present, the rules of professional conduct applied in federal judicial proceedings vary from district to district. In reaction to this problem, the Judicial Conference of the United States is studying the question of whether a uniform set of rules of professional conduct should apply in federal judicial proceedings and, if so, what the nature of the rules should be and how they should be dev...

There is a high degree of continuity from childhood conduct problems to delinquency and later criminal behavior (Loeber and LeBlanc, 1990). The best predictor of any individual’s future deviant or antisocial behavior is the amount and severity of similar behaviors in the past (Farrington, 1994). Age of onset and severity of juvenile record are two of the best predictors of adult criminality (Gr...

Until a few decades ago, the police were mainly a reactive bureaucratic organization that moved from one criminal event to the next, according to the degree to which the outside world required its services. Since then the police have abandoned the emphasis on law enforcement with regards to petty crime and public order. More recently the police have developed community policing as an important ...

Cost-effectiveness and benefit-cost analyses are tools that have been used by public policy analysts for years. Programs as diverse as environmental and land use regulations, welfare benefits, job training programs, and immunization policies have all been analyzed in this manner. Since the early 1980s, Federal regulatory agencies have been required to conduct benefit-cost analyses on major regu...

Fatigue is an increasingly recognised risk factor for transportation accidents. In light of this, there is the question of whether driving whilst fatigued should be a criminal offence. This paper discusses the current legal position, including the problems of voluntary conduct and self awareness. Three models for reform are proposed. The manner in which scientific research can inform legal cons...

In April of 2005, a group of scientists, scholars, policymakers, and legal professionals gathered at Duke Law School to discuss the implications of attempts to introduce behavioral biology evidence into the criminal justice system. The conference, entitled “The Impact of Behavioral Genetics on the Criminal Law,” was sponsored by Law and Contemporary Problems; the Institute for Genome Science an...