International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology

This study evaluated a community-based correctional program in California, in which parolees tested positive on illicit drugs were given the option of going into a treatment program or having their parole revoked and returned to prison in California. Two comparison groups were constructed to assess the treatment effect—a propensity-based comparison group extracted from the general parolee population and program dropouts. Although implicitly coercive, some parolees who finished the program were less likely to be reincarcerated 12 months following release than both comparison groups. However, the observed treatment advantage quickly eroded in the second observation year. Savings realized from the incarcerations avoided were more than enough to pay for the program. Findings from this study suggest that boosting participation in reentry services through coercive measures may yield currently unrealized individual and societal benefits. However, systemic efforts are needed to extend the short-term treatment effects. Design and data limitations in the study weaken the persuasiveness of these findings. Methodological implications and policy issues about coerced treatment are discussed.

Severe punishments have historically been the bedrock of criminal deterrence, but criminologists have long documented that such threats are often ineffective. Instead, it has been the certainty of sanctions that has been most emphasized and that has garnered empirical support. In a departure from prior research, the question motivating this study is whether increases in the threatened severity of sanction threats alter the perceived certainty of detection irrespective of any objective changes in detection certainty, and then how such perceptions relate to offending. To the authors’ knowledge, scant attention has been paid to examining the possibility of this “boundary-crossing,” or the extent to which two core dimensions of deterrence, objective and perceptual certainty, cross, intersect, or interact with one another. Using data from a sample of young adults, the authors find mixed support for “boundary-crossing”: Although combinations of objective certainty and severity did not necessarily result in substantive differences in perceptions of certainty and severity, an individual’s own perceived certainty and severity related to offending differently depending on the information provided to them about the objective certainty and severity of punishment.

This study evaluated the effectiveness of the InnerChange Freedom Initiative (InnerChange), a faith-based prisoner reentry program, by examining recidivism outcomes among 732 offenders released from Minnesota prisons between 2003 and 2009. Results from the Cox regression analyses revealed that participating in InnerChange significantly reduced reoffending (rearrest, reconviction, and new offense reincarceration), although it did not have a significant impact on reincarceration for a technical violation revocation. The findings further suggest that the beneficial recidivism outcomes for InnerChange participants may have been due, in part, to the continuum of mentoring support some offenders received in the institution and the community. The results imply that faith-based correctional programs can reduce recidivism, but only if they apply evidence-based practices that focus on providing a behavioral intervention within a therapeutic community, addressing the criminogenic needs of participants and delivering a continuum of care from the institution to the community. Given that InnerChange relies heavily on volunteers and program costs are privately funded, the program exacts no additional costs to the State of Minnesota. Yet, because InnerChange lowers recidivism, which includes reduced reincarceration and victimization costs, the program may be especially advantageous from a cost-benefit perspective.

This article is concerned with the macro-level propositions of Nisbett and Cohen’s culture of honor thesis. The results suggest that the culture of honor proxy has a strong positive influence on homicide across nations. In fact, culture of honor exhibited larger effect sizes than all of the important social-structural controls. These results suggest that consideration of cultural processes is important for understanding macro-level variation in violence.

The objective of this study is to examine the part played by sociolegal characteristics such as ethnic background, family status, or criminal past in the rate of infractions among ex-prisoners in Electronic Monitoring (EM) Programs. In addition, it focuses on the nature of the formal decisions made by community supervision agents regarding such infractions and their correlation with the sociolegal characteristics of the participants. The research population included all prisoners on license (i.e., prisoners who have been granted conditional early release) who took part in the EM project from mid-2007 until mid-2009 (24 months), altogether 155 participants. The data show no significant correlation between the number of infractions and the participant’s sociolegal background. In spite of the fact that the EM coordinators have extensive discretionary power, which is likely to lead to discrimination attributable to variables such as ethnicity, this research shows that the most efficacious variable for explaining formal responses is an objective one—the number of infractions.

A sample of 348 high-risk sexual offenders was divided into two groups based on the level of preselection (detained, n = 211, and nondetained, n = 137) and the groups were compared on a number of measures which were related to dynamic risk. The hypothesis was that the detained group would score as being higher need on these instruments than the nondetained group. This hypothesis was supported with the detained group reporting greater levels of hostility, cognitive distortions supportive of offending, sexual obsessions, and sexually deviant behaviours. They also scored as being less assertive and as having a more extensive psychiatric history. These findings were interpreted as being supportive of the assertion that the new Static-99R normative groups are related to preselection based on the differences on dynamic factors.