Crime and Punishment
Better that ten guilty persons escape: Punishment costs explain the standard of evidence
Matteo Rizzolli & Margherita Saraceno
Public Choice, forthcoming
Abstract:
It is generally agreed that the conviction of an innocent person (type-I error) should be avoided even at the cost of allowing a certain number of acquittals of criminals (type-II error). The high standard of evidence that is usually required in criminal procedure reflects this principle. Conversely, the established model of optimal deterrence that follows the seminal work of Becker (1968) shows that the two types of error are equally detrimental in terms of deterrence and thus it prescribes the minimization of the sum of errors with no primacy given to type-I errors over type-II errors. This paper explains that when the costs of punishment are positive, and guilty individuals are, on average, more likely to be found guilty than innocent ones, wrongful convictions are more socially costly than wrongful acquittals. This justifies the bias against wrongful convictions without resorting to any ad hoc assumption about the relative weight of the two errors.
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Simulating murder: The aversion to harmful action
Fiery Cushman et al.
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Diverse lines of evidence point to a basic human aversion to physically harming others. First, we demonstrate that unwillingness to endorse harm in a moral dilemma is predicted by individual differences in aversive reactivity, as indexed by peripheral vasoconstriction. Next, we tested the specific factors that elicit the aversive response to harm. Participants performed actions such as discharging a fake gun into the face of the experimenter, fully informed that the actions were pretend and harmless. These simulated harmful actions increased peripheral vasoconstriction significantly more than did witnessing pretend harmful actions or to performing metabolically matched nonharmful actions. This suggests that the aversion to harmful actions extends beyond empathic concern for victim harm. Together, these studies demonstrate a link between the body and moral decision-making processes.
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Intoxicated Eyewitnesses: Better than Their Reputation?
Nadja Schreiber Compo et al.
Law and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
According to law enforcement, many witnesses are intoxicated either at the time of the crime, the interview, or both (Evans et al., Public Policy Law 15(3):194-221, 2009). However, no study to date has examined whether intoxicated witnesses' recall is different from sober witnesses' and whether they are more vulnerable to misinformation using an ecologically valid experimental design. Intoxicated, placebo, and sober witnesses observed a live, staged theft, overheard subsequent misinformation about the theft, and took part in an investigative interview. Participants generally believed they witnessed a real crime and experienced a real interview. Intoxicated witnesses were not different from placebo or sober witnesses in the number of accurate details, inaccurate details, or "don't know" answers reported. All the participants demonstrated a misinformation effect, but there were no differences between intoxication levels: Intoxicated participants were not more susceptible to misinformation than sober or placebo participants. Results are discussed in the light of their theoretical and applied relevance.
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Subjectivity and bias in forensic DNA mixture interpretation
Itiel Dror & Greg Hampikian
Science & Justice, forthcoming
Abstract:
The objectivity of forensic science decision making has received increased attention and scrutiny. However, there are only a few published studies experimentally addressing the potential for contextual bias. Because of the esteem of DNA evidence, it is important to study and assess the impact of subjectivity and bias on DNA mixture interpretation. The study reported here presents empirical data suggesting that DNA mixture interpretation is subjective. When 17 North American expert DNA examiners were asked for their interpretation of data from an adjudicated criminal case in that jurisdiction, they produced inconsistent interpretations. Furthermore, the majority of 'context free' experts disagreed with the laboratory's pre-trial conclusions, suggesting that the extraneous context of the criminal case may have influenced the interpretation of the DNA evidence, thereby showing a biasing effect of contextual information in DNA mixture interpretation.
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Crime, police, and truth-in-sentencing: The impact of state sentencing policy on local communities
Amanda Ross
Regional Science and Urban Economics, January 2012, Pages 144-152
Abstract:
This paper considers two related questions: the impact of spatial variation in crime prevention policies on the migration of criminal activity into nearby locations and the tendency for higher-level government anti-crime policies to be offset by a scaling back of local crime deterrent efforts. A key source of identification is to draw upon variation in the timing of adoption of state-wide Truth-in-Sentencing (TIS) legislation during the 1990s. To estimate the effect of the policy, I compare activity in adjacent counties on opposite sides of state boundaries in the 59 urban areas that cross state lines. There are three key results. First, adoption of TIS lowers the level of criminal activity in the adopting state. Second, adoption of the stiffer sentencing policy prompts migration of criminal activity into adjacent counties in the neighboring state, especially in the most populated urban areas. Finally, after the imposition of TIS by the state government, local governments reduce the level of police protection. This suggests that some of the deterrent effect of higher-level government anti-crime policy is offset by a scaling back on anti-crime efforts at the local level.
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Richard Tewksbury, Wesley Jennings & Kristen Zgoba
Behavioral Sciences & the Law, forthcoming
Abstract:
The goals of the present study were to examine the recidivism rates of two matched samples of sexual offenders, those released prior to and after sex offender registration and notification (SORN) in New Jersey. The pre-SORN group (1990-1994) included 247 offenders, while the post-SORN group (1996-2000) included 248 offenders. The longitudinal analysis demonstrated that for sex offenders released from prison both prior to and after implementation of SORN, there are clearly two distinguishable groups of sex offenders in relation to patterns of recidivism. More than three-quarters of sex offenders were identified as at low risk of recidivism, with low rates of repeat criminal offenses. By contrast, the high-risk group of offenders was not only more likely to commit future criminal offenses, including sex offenses, but they were also more likely to commit significantly more offenses and to do so fairly quickly following release. Analyses also include an examination of the influence of demographics, substance abuse and mental health issues, treatment history, sex offense incident characteristics, and criminal history on recidivism. Finally, SORN status was not a significant predictor of sex or general recidivism. The study limitations and policy implications are discussed.
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John Pfaff
American Law and Economics Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The forces driving U.S. prison growth are poorly understood. This article examines one factor that has received insufficient attention: changes in time served. It demonstrates that time served has not risen dramatically in recent years, even declining in some jurisdictions. It also shows that time served is fairly short: median release times are approximately one to two years. Thus, admissions practices, not longer sentences, appear to drive prison growth. This article also examines whether time served varies across different types of inmates. Young, Hispanic, and violent offenders appear to serve longer sentences; race and sex appear to be of minor importance.
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Torture in counterterrorism: Agency incentives and slippery slopes
Hugo Mialon, Sue Mialon & Maxwell Stinchcombe
Journal of Public Economics, February 2012, Pages 33-41
Abstract:
We develop a counterterrorism model to analyze the effects of allowing a government agency to torture suspects when evidence of terrorist involvement is strong. We find that legalizing torture in strong-evidence cases has offsetting effects on agency incentives to counter terrorism by means other than torture. It lowers these incentives because the agency may come to rely on torture to avert attacks. However, it also increases these incentives because other efforts may increase the probability of having strong enough evidence to warrant the use of torture. Parametric analysis indicates that it is more likely to reduce non-torture efforts if these efforts are more effective at stopping attacks and less effective at turning up strong evidence when the suspect is guilty. In general, if it reduces non-torture efforts, it can reduce security and is more likely to do so if the attack threat is higher. Moreover, if torture is used in strong-evidence cases even if torture is banned, legalizing torture in strong-evidence cases necessarily reduces security if it reduces non-torture efforts. Lastly, it can increase incentives to torture even in weak-evidence cases - a slippery slope.
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Vanessa Edkins
Law and Human Behavior, October 2011, Pages 413-425
Abstract:
Research on racism in the criminal justice system generally focuses on the role of the jury; yet, the vast majority of convictions are obtained through plea bargains. This research addresses the role of the defense attorney and proposes that disparities in sentence length and incarceration rates between African Americans and Caucasian Americans are in part due to the plea bargains that defense attorneys recommend these clients accept. Using practicing defense attorneys from around the country, findings indicate that the pleas attorneys felt they could obtain with a minority client contained higher sentences (adjusted M = 2.88) than those they felt they could obtain with a Caucasian client (adjusted M = 2.22) and were significantly more likely to include some jail time. Reasons for the disparate recommendations were not due to increased perceptions of guilt with the minority client nor to perceptions that the minority client would fare worse at trial. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed as well as possible future directions.
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Gun carrying by high school students in Boston, MA: Does overestimation of peer gun carrying matter?
David Hemenway et al.
Journal of Adolescence, October 2011, Pages 997-1003
Abstract:
This paper investigates: (1) whether high school students overestimate gun carrying by their peers, and (2) whether those students who overestimate peer gun carrying are more likely to carry firearms. Data come from a randomly sampled survey conducted in 2008 of over 1700 high school students in Boston, MA. Over 5% of students reported carrying a gun, 9% of boys and 2% of girls. Students substantially overestimated the percentage of their peers who carried guns; the likelihood that a respondent carried a gun was strongly associated with their perception of the level of peer gun carrying. Most respondents believed it was easier for other youth to obtain guns than it was for them. Social marketing campaigns designed to lower young people's perceptions about the prevalence of peer gun carrying may be a promising strategy for reducing actual gun carrying among youth.
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A Test of Evolutionary Policing Theory with Data from Human Societies
Rolf Kümmerli
PLoS ONE, September 2011, e24350
Abstract:
In social groups where relatedness among interacting individuals is low, cooperation can often only be maintained through mechanisms that repress competition among group members. Repression-of-competition mechanisms, such as policing and punishment, seem to be of particular importance in human societies, where cooperative interactions often occur among unrelated individuals. In line with this view, economic games have shown that the ability to punish defectors enforces cooperation among humans. Here, I examine a real-world example of a repression-of-competition system, the police institutions common to modern human societies. Specifically, I test evolutionary policing theory by comparing data on policing effort, per capita crime rate, and similarity (used as a proxy for genetic relatedness) among citizens across the 26 cantons of Switzerland. This comparison revealed full support for all three predictions of evolutionary policing theory. First, when controlling for policing efforts, crime rate correlated negatively with the similarity among citizens. This is in line with the prediction that high similarity results in higher levels of cooperative self-restraint (i.e. lower crime rates) because it aligns the interests of individuals. Second, policing effort correlated negatively with the similarity among citizens, supporting the prediction that more policing is required to enforce cooperation in low-similarity societies, where individuals' interests diverge most. Third, increased policing efforts were associated with reductions in crime rates, indicating that policing indeed enforces cooperation. These analyses strongly indicate that humans respond to cues of their social environment and adjust cheating and policing behaviour as predicted by evolutionary policing theory.
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The reversal effect of prohibition signs
Kees Keizer, Siegwart Lindenberg & Linda Steg
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, September 2011, Pages 681-688
Abstract:
In public places one encounters many prohibition signs, as well as traces of the norm-violating behavior these signs are trying to reduce, like graffiti or litter. Based on goal framing theory and previous research, we argue that signs of (dis)respect of others for norms serve as norm-support cues which can weaken or strengthen the influence of norms. This norm-support mechanism implies that (traces of) norm violating behavior by others (i.e. negative norm-support cues) inhibit the influence of norms in general. We also hypothesize that making a known norm salient by means of a prohibition sign will not only focus people on this norm, but also on the corresponding (negative) norm-support cues in that particular situation, thereby enhancing the influence of these norm-support cues. Therefore, we expected that a prohibition sign placed in a setting with corresponding negative norm-support cues induces rather than reduces violations of the very same norm (i.e. same-norm reversal effect) and other norms (cross-norm reversal effect). We report results of two (quasi) field experiments that support the negative norm-support mechanism as well as the reversal effect of prohibition signs when cues show noncompliance. These findings are not only intriguing but they have important and clear practical implications.
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Jeffrey Ward et al.
Police Quarterly, September 2011, Pages 251-276
Abstract:
Empirical work examining the effects of police legitimacy has primarily focused on traffic stop procedures with less attention given to traffic enforcement policies. The current study takes advantage of a natural experiment in which a rural town with a strict speed enforcement policy was labeled a "speed trap" through the introduction of a billboard advertisement funded by the American Automobile Association. Drawing on theories of police legitimacy, we hypothesize the label will result in an abrupt-permanent increase in speeding citation contestation rates, despite the fact that the billboard actually increases predictability of citation issuance. Results of an interrupted time-series analysis indicate statistically significant abrupt-permanent increases in the speeding citation contestation rates for the intervention city. Further analyses reveal that significant intervention effects are confined to drivers with higher opportunity to contest tickets (in-state drivers) and to majority subgroups (Whites and men). The implications of these findings for policy and police-citizen relationships are discussed.
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Holding parents responsible: Is vicarious responsibility the public's answer to juvenile crime?
Eve Brank, Edie Greene & Katherine Hochevar
Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, forthcoming
Abstract:
Parental responsibility laws hold parents accountable for the delinquent behaviors of their children even when parents' actions are not the direct cause of an offense. Despite the prevalence of these laws, we know little about their perceived fairness. Is it reasonable to make parents vicariously responsible for outcomes they could not have foreseen and if so, under what circumstances? Our series of three studies addressed those questions by systematically examining the impact of various situational and dispositional factors on public opinions regarding parental responsibility. Respondents attributed most of the responsibility for a crime to the child, and attributions of responsibility to the parents varied as a function of the child's age. Case characteristics including the type of crime committed and the described parents' actions versus inactions did not consistently influence responsibility attributions. We conclude that people feel rather lukewarm about the notion of vicarious parental responsibility and this indifference may be related to issues surrounding the laws' enforcement.
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Angela Eke, Michael Seto & Jennette Williams
Law and Human Behavior, December 2011, Pages 466-478
Abstract:
We examined police occurrence and criminal records data for a sample of 201 registered male child pornography offenders originally reported by Seto and Eke (Sex Abus J Res Treat 17:201-210, 2005), extending the average follow-up time for this sample to 5.9 years. In addition, we obtained the same data for another 340 offenders, increasing our full sample to 541 men, with a total average follow-up of 4.1 years. In the extended follow-up of the original sample, 34% of offenders had new charges for any type of reoffense, with 6% charged with a contact sexual offense against a child and an additional 3% charged with historical contact sex offenses (i.e., previously undetected offenses). For the full sample, there was a 32% any recidivism rate; 4% of offenders were charged with new contact sex offences, an additional 2% of offenders were charged with historical contact sex offenses and 7% of offenders were charged with a new child pornography offense. Predictors of new violent (including sexual contact) offending were prior offense history, including violent history, and younger offender age. Approximately a quarter of the sample was sanctioned for a failure on conditional release; in half of these failures, the offenders were in contact with children or used the internet, often to access pornography again.
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Crime and property values: Evidence from the 1990's crime drop
Devin Pope & Jaren Pope
Regional Science and Urban Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Does a dramatic drop in crime lead to an increase in property values? To date, the literature on how crime influences property values has focused solely within a single metropolitan area and has been limited primarily to cross-sectional analysis. In this study we exploit the dramatic, nationwide decrease in crime that occurred in the 1990s to examine the relationship between changes in crime rates and property values. To do this, we compile information on changes in property values and crime during the 1990s in nearly 3,000 urban zip codes throughout the U.S. Using a fixed-effects framework as well as an instrumental variables strategy, our analysis implies a large and statistically significant association between crime and property values. The estimated elasticities of property values with respect to crime range from - 0.15 to - 0.35. Furthermore, zip codes in the top decile in terms of crime reduction saw property value increases of 7-19% during the 1990s. Both the empirical analysis and a graphical analysis are suggestive that decreasing crime leads to increasing property values.
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Kevin Buckler et al.
Criminal Justice Review, September 2011, Pages 269-290
Abstract:
The study tests the explicit and implicit racial/ethnic divide, gradient, and justice system contact propositions of comparative conflict theory and explores whether prior incarceration experience (personal and vicarious) alters the observed relationship between race/ethnicity and perceptions of injustice. The study uses data from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, the Washington Post, and Harvard University 2006 survey concerning issues relating to African American males. The study found support for the racial/ethnic divide, gradient, and justice system contact hypotheses. The study also found support for the notion that prior incarceration experience intensifies the relationship between race/ethnicity and perceptions of injustice. The gap between African Americans and Whites in perceptions of injustice is more pronounced among persons with prior incarceration experience. The gap in perception of injustice between Whites and Hispanics was also stronger among those with prior incarceration experiences. The gap between African Americans and Hispanics was not impacted by prior incarceration experience. Future research should continue to explore the potential for prior incarceration experience to impact the relationship between race/ethnicity and perceptions of injustice.