Are repeat offenders more culpable than first-time offenders? In the United States, the most important determinant of punishment for a crime, other than the seriousness of the crime itself, is the offender's criminal history. Despite the popularity of the view that repeat offenders deserve to be treated more harshly than first-time offenders, there is no satisfactory retributivist account of th...

BACKGROUND The objective of the study was to estimate the rate of borderline personality disorder (BPD) in male and female offenders newly committed to the Iowa Department of Corrections. We also compared clinical and demographic characteristics of offenders with and without BPD. METHODS A random sample of 220 offenders entering Iowa's prison system were evaluated by using a version of the Mi...

The cognitive view on deception holds that lying typically requires additional mental effort as compared to truth telling. Psychopathy, however, has been associated with swift and even compulsive lying, leading us to explore the ease and compulsive nature of lying in psychopathic offenders. We explored the costs of instructed lying versus truth telling through RTs and error rates in 52 violent ...

Does it Work? This question has been asked for many years about different corrections programs. In particular, the effectiveness of community supervision of offenders who are placed on parole, probation and community based orders has been questioned. Numerous studies in the seventies and eighties pointed to the ineffectiveness of supervision. Various researchers suggested that it does not matte...

Objective: To use cluster analysis to identify psychological profiles and related mental health symptoms among male and female juvenile offenders. Method: Juvenile offenders (N = 141) incarcerated in the California Youth Authority completed the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and the Massachusetts Youth Screening Instrument-Version 2 (MAYSI-2). Results: MMPI cluster analysis ...

People who sexually abuse children are diverse in terms of age, occupation, income level, marital status, and ethnic group. At one time it was believed that sex offenders could be easily categorized along three dimensions: offending against either adults or children; offending against either members of their families or against acquaintances and strangers; offending in noncontact ways (for exam...

Research Summary: This study analyzed data on 7,306 offenders placed in 1 of 53 community-based residential programs as part of their parole, postrelease control, or probation. Offenders who successfully completed residential programming were compared with a group of offenders (n = 5801) under parole/post-release control who were not placed in residential programming. Analyses of program effect...

As of March 2001, 29 U.S. states had provided enhanced sanctions for high-BAC impaired driving offenders. Minnesota’s high-BAC statute, implemented in 1998, resulted in more severe case dispositions for high-BAC offenders than for other offenders. Overall dispositions for first and repeat offenders were more severe after the law, and the rate of alcohol test refusals was stable. The effective i...