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From page 291... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 291 7 Expanding the Limits of Understanding and Control We begin this section by considering the effectiveness of one response to violent crime -- incarceration of convicted violent offenders. We then present a framework for broadening perspectives on approaches to prevention. Read the entire page →
From page 292... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 292 those incarcerated? These effects cannot be observed directly, because they are measured in terms of potential crimes that did not occur. Read the entire page →
From page 293... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 293 sentences, especially for offenses involving violence or firearms. An increase in average prison time served per crime may prevent crimes either through incapacitation or deterrence. Read the entire page →
From page 294... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 294 occur according to official statistics. (These conclusions are explained in more detail in Cohen and Canela-Cacho, Volume 4.) Read the entire page →
From page 295... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 295 A Broader Perspective We have noted an important finding: recent trends in crime and criminal justice policy responses have resulted in the near-tripling of prison populations between 1975 and 1989 -- with no apparent decrease in levels of violent crime. This strongly suggests that other factors that tend to increase violent crime levels -- some of which can be changed by governments or individuals -- are at work. Read the entire page →
From page 296... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 296 Predisposing factors for violence vary in terms of their proximity to the violent event. The development of some relevant individual characteristics, such as a temperamental disposition that favors high thresholds for anxiety or fear, begins before birth or in early childhood. Read the entire page →
From page 298... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 298 cluster of risk factors at a time -- police agencies rarely offer professional psychological counseling; juvenile courts rarely offer preventive interventions in early childhood. Although some specialization is essential, it creates a fundamental difficulty for understanding and controlling violence. Read the entire page →
From page 299... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 299 where large numbers of unsupervised teenagers reside. It may be the scene of recent aggravating events such as police brutality, or of frequent brawls between members of different ethnic groups. Read the entire page →
From page 300... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 300 American legal system, elements of the triggering event determine which authorities, if any, are empowered to intervene in the event or punish those involved. Analyses of events may also suggest useful clues to how high-risk events might be prevented in the future. Read the entire page →
From page 301... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 301 weaker/stronger, armed/unarmed, shielded/vulnerable) , or a culturally defined relationship (e.g., membership in rival gangs, or in different ethnic groups, or in a "hate group" and the category against which it is prejudiced) Read the entire page →
From page 302... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 302 first the psychological and biological processes that interact to determine an individual's potentials for different violent behaviors, and second the social processes that make some environments more likely than others to become locations of violence. Biological and Psychosocial Processes Modern perspectives see some violent behavior in part as the result of complex, long-term developmental processes that shape the personality and character of the violent actor. Read the entire page →
From page 303... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 303 in any of the following terms: learning, the macrosocial environment, or a biologically determined temperament. Yet each is relevant. Read the entire page →
From page 304... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 304 within a subculture (e.g., trading insults, termed "jonin'" or "playing the dozens" by black teen-age males) sometimes create encounters that culminate in violence. Read the entire page →
From page 305... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 305 emerge from social structures that generate frequent occasions for violence as well as from high individual potentials toward violent behavior. Moreover, it is likely that their experiences -- through the media, within the family, in the community -- with violence and its rewards and punishments will be incorporated in their development and will influence their future likelihoods of violence. Read the entire page →
From page 306... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 306 movement, and economic decline, it illustrates the point that social-level processes are more than the sum of individuals' actions. In the aggregate, the distributions of individuals' potentials for violence and of occasions for violence damage communities' stocks of social capital -- the families, markets, churches, social networks, and other organizations and social institutions that individuals build, maintain, or destroy. Read the entire page →
From page 307... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 307 Learning from Interventions Three categories of interventions can yield basic lessons concerning the causes and control of violence. The first category includes all those interventions for which violence is the central concern -- examples could include legal restrictions on carrying guns in public, school curricula intended to teach conflict resolution skills, incarceration, shelters for battered women, and restrictions on the sale of violent pornography. Read the entire page →
From page 308... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 308 to consider the possibility of amending the criminal sentencing code to institute enhanced sentencing provisions for gun use in violent crime. One important consideration is whether such enhanced sentences would reduce the murder rate in robberies and other felonies. Read the entire page →
From page 309... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 309 (Manski, 1990) Read the entire page →
From page 310... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 310 makers to commit to some action quickly in response to public concern and to protect past actions from criticism. In the course of innovation, implementers are usually more exposed than evaluators to external pressures to conform to ideological agendas and to minimize exposure to risks of public failure. Read the entire page →
From page 311... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 311 of an intervention intended to reduce violence. Table 7-2 summarizes key aspects of these cases. Read the entire page →
From page 312... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 312 TABLE 7-2 Summary of Four Case Studies Sanctions for Mandatory Violence Two-Clerk Domestic Sentences for Prevention Requirement Violence Gun Crimes Curriculum Intervention Alternative Law 10-hour Law police mandating curriculum to mandating responses to longer teach youths two clerks in misdemeanor sentences if about violence stores at domestic felony night assaults involving a gun Violence Specific General Enhance skills Reduce reduction deterrence deterrence in avoiding criminal mechanism and violent opportunity incapacitation encounters Implementing Police Courts Schools Convenience agency stores Evaluation Randomized Quasi Controlled Quasi method controlled experiment field experiment field (multiple experiment experiment sites) (multiple sites) Read the entire page →
From page 313... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 313 police actions (Dunford et al., 1990; Hirschel et al., 1990; Sherman and Smith, 1991) Read the entire page →
From page 314... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 314 The strength of the experimental design was in the internal validity of the results -- yet there are important questions that could not be addressed within this approach. Police departments that increase the use of arrest in domestic violence cases may produce a general deterrent effect, whether or not there is any effect on recidivism rates. Read the entire page →
From page 315... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 315 evidence for its effectiveness is that the monthly gun homicide counts tend to be lower following the intervention than would be expected based on an extrapolation (using the ARIMA technique) of the monthly series before the intervention. Read the entire page →
From page 316... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 316 based on interviews with robbers and other types of information, concluded that having two clerks on the premises was a substantial deterrent to robbers.9 In the six months following implementation of the rule, the number of convenience store robberies was less than half the number in the corresponding period of the previous year ((Wilson, 1990) Read the entire page →
From page 317... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 317 of Convenience Stores. First, he demonstrated that there had been a sharp spurt in the convenience store robbery rate during fall 1986; this spurt ended in December with the arrest of three men suspected of being responsible for a great many robberies. Read the entire page →
From page 318... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 318 use in community settings outside the school and launched a comprehensive Violence Prevention Project that involved community-based organizations and mass media campaigns (Prothrow-Stith, 1987) Read the entire page →
From page 319... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 319 The results of this evaluation are not persuasive that this approach is helpful in reducing aggressive behavior by high school students. As discussed in Chapter 3, accumulated evidence on the stability of aggressive behavior after middle childhood leaves open the possibility that with suitable changes, a program that applied these principles in the early grades might have shown more success. Read the entire page →
From page 320... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 320 evaluation. Systematic testing and evaluation are essential to progress in reducing violent behavior. Read the entire page →
From page 321... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 321 Such findings should suggest further analyses of the available data, changes in the intervention, or both. The results of reanalyses, while not as conclusive as are the basic results of a randomized experiment, may still provide valuable suggestions for revising the intervention or its implementation, for applying it to a different target population, or for adapting it to some specific subcultural or community context. Read the entire page →
From page 322... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 322 by a clearinghouse in which information could be easily accessed and shared about the current state of the art, disputes, and gaps in knowledge in the many fields concerned with a particular problem in violence research. Building Science Through Evaluation Evaluation research has two overlapping but distinct purposes. Read the entire page →
From page 323... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 323 3 Analyzing the criminal careers of a sample of Denver convicts, Petersilia and Greenwood (1978) reported that, if all members of the sample had received one-year terms (i.e., a policy of relatively high certainty of a short sentence) Read the entire page →
From page 324... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 324 11 This account is based to some extent on a narrative provided at the panel's request by the Education Development Center. 12 School and police records provide incomplete counts of fights, because many fights occur off school grounds and most fights do not lead to arrest. Read the entire page →
From page 325... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 325 Farrington, David P., Lloyd E Ohlin, and James Q Read the entire page →
From page 326... ... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 326 Paternoster, R 1987 The deterrent effect of the perceived certainty and severity of punishment: A review of the evidence and issues. Read the entire page →

From page 291...

... EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROL 291 7 Expanding the Limits of Understanding and Control We begin this section by considering the effectiveness of one response to violent crime -- incarceration of convicted violent offenders. We then present a framework for broadening perspectives on approaches to prevention.