Every American state has created new intermediate sanctions in recent years and nearly half have, have had, or are considering having sentencing guidelines. Guidelines can reduce sentencing disparities, including race, gender, and geographical disparities; effect changes in statewide sentencing patterns; and coordinate sentencing policies and corrections resources. Well-managed intermediate san...

In order to understand differences in suicide rates between the countries affiliated to the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP), the present paper investigates whether there is a relationship between the existence of religious sanctions and aggregate national suicide rates as reported to the World Health Organization. Through their participation in this study, 49 IASP nation...

Most American jurisdictions have recently established new intermediate sanctions programs. Few such programs have diverted large numbers of offenders from prison, saved public monies or prison beds, or reduced recidivism rates. These findings recur in evaluations of community service, intensive supervision, house arrest, day reporting centers, and boot camps. The principal problems have been hi...

This article explores the limits of social constructionism and criticizes the ‘demiurgic conception of society’ associated with it. It contemplates the possibility of sociological realism by investigating the intrinsic and objective properties of action, cognition and morality. The incorporation of intrinsic meanings and intentions in social actions, the objective information supporting cogniti...

Despite relevant insights from socio-economics, little research in multiagent systems has addressed the interconnections between trust and normative notions such as contracts and sanctions. Focusing our attention on scenarios of betrayal, in this paper we combine the use of trust and sanctions in a negotiation process. We describe a scenario of dyadic relationships between truster agents, which...

Low sanctions can initially appear to be a mitigating factor for unjust or inefficient laws, but this perception is likely wrong. This Article argues that low sanctions may have a pernicious effect on the democratic process and on legislative rule making because, as both public choice theory and historical precedent suggest, the laws accompanying these sanctions are more likely to perpetuate th...

This paper enquires into whether economic sanctions are effective in destabilizing authoritarian rulers. We argue that this effect is mediated by the type of authoritarian regime against which sanctions are imposed. Thus, personalist regimes and monarchies, which are more dependent on aid and resource rents to maintain their patronage networks, are more likely to be affected by sanctions. In co...

This contribution investigates the function of emotion in relation to social norms, both in natural and artificial societies. First, the authors briefly illustrate that norms as socially shared mental objects play a crucial role in the dynamics of social structures and social order, in natural societies as well as in artificial systems. Second, the authors address the question how norms are enf...

recently, a significant change has occurred in the lifting aspect of the security council sanctions, namely, the inclusion of a fixed term in sanctions regimes. we first examine the emergence of the idea of a fixed term for sanctions regimes. with the disappearance of the situation justifying the imposition of sanctions, there is no reason to maintain them. yet, each permanent member may oppose...

In today’s global economy, a noticeable trend is that the traditional state-law-centred legal framework is increasingly challenged by self-regulatory private orders. Commercial norms, commercial arbitration and social sanctions at the international level have become important alternatives to national laws, national courts and legal sanctions at the national level. Consisting of transnational co...