There are constant calls for reform in the criminal justice system, but obs­ ervers have often reported that criminal justice reform is an exceptionally challenging task. As with any organizational change, resistance to new policies, procedures, and practices comes from a variety of sources. The relatively broad discretionary authority vested in line­level personnel often contributes to the dif...

OBJECTIVE To examine the psychosocial and clinical characteristics of male perpetrators of elderly and nonelderly homicides in the Canadian Prairies. METHOD We examined data drawn from a study of 901 adult homicide offenders who were incarcerated or on parole between 1988 and 1992 in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. RESULTS Of those studied, 67 men were convicted of homicide involving 7...

The assertion of fourth amendment rights by a probationer' or parolee2 suspected of renewed criminal activity creates a potential confrontation between a fundamental constitutional guarantee3 and society's legitimate interest in correctional programs which rehabilitate released offenders and prevent them from lapsing back into crime.4 Because courts refuse to apply the exclusionary rule5 to pro...

When anticipating the imposition of the death penalty, jurors may be less inclined to convict defendants. On the other hand, minority defendants have been shown to be treated more punitively, particularly in capital cases. Given that the influence of anticipated sentence severity on verdicts may vary as a function of defendant race, the goal of this study was to test the independent and interac...

As individuals with mental illness were moved to community–based treatment in the late s and s, they were often shuttled into housing or treatment programs that were ill– equipped to meet their mental health needs. Lacking alternatives, they were often at higher risk of arrest for vagrancy, minor infractions, and drug offenses, and they became increasingly common on court dockets, jail ...

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...

From 1990 to 1999 the criminal justice system experienced a fifty percent increase in the inmate population, which included recidivated parolees. Critics claimed the parole process was not working and lobbied legislature to take action. The system responded by decreasing parole agency budgets, increasing prison sentences, and reducing rehabilitation services for paroled inmates. Research pertai...

Speech production variations due to perceptually induced stress contribute significantly to reduced speech processing performance. One approach for assessment of production variations due to stress is to formulate an objective classification of speaker stress based upon the acoustic speech signal. This study proposes an algorithm for estimation of the probability of perceptually induced stress....