Volume
40, No. 3
July 1998
Psychopathy
and Canadian criminal proceedings: The potential for human rights
abuses
Ivan Zinger and Adelle E. Forth.
Regulating
autonomy: Police discretion as a problem for training
Willem de Lint
Understanding
provincial variation in incarceration rates
Janes B. Sprott and Anthony N. Doob.
Research
note
Rethinking community resistance to prison sitting: Results from
a community impact assessment
Michael Young
Book
Reviews
Canadian books - Livres canadiens
André Normandeau
VAN NESS
and STRONG: Restoring Justice
Carol LaPrairie
Books Received
Coming
Events
Memo
to Authors
Abstracts/Résumés
Only abstracts of full articles are contained in these Web pages.
Research notes and commentaries are usually not summarized into abstracts.
Readers who need the complete texts should contact the CCJA and subscribe
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that are still in stock.
Psychopathy
and Canadian criminal proceedings: The potential for human rights
abuses
Ivan Zinger and Adelle E. Forth
Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario
Expert testimony
on the diagnosis of psychopathy is becoming increasingly common in
Canadian criminal courts, and may be used to justify more severe sanctions.
This article compares expert testimony by mental health professionals
with current research on the assessment, prediction, experimental
findings, and treatment of psychopathy. As this review will indicate,
substantial gaps exist between testimony given by some mental health
professionals and current empirical research. The authors argue that
substandard testimony has the potential of unduly influencing judges
and resulting in unjustifiably harsher judicial dispositions. The
authors further contend that such potential could result in abuses
of human rights
Regulating
autonomy: Police discretion as a problem for training
Willem de Lint
Sociology and Anthropology, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario
Two recent
examples of police training are analyzed as illustrations of a new
approach to the governance or regulation of police through their discretion.
While previous to the 1960's, training left police discretion under
the purview of the occupational culture and "common sense"
approaches, subsequently attention has been paid to structuring discretionary
decision-making through training. This training has taken two general
policy approaches. The first has been to try to require a more educated
police candidate, and thereby to compel decision-making towards liberal
values. The second has been to use technical training devices in the
aim of blending these values into practical training. The argument
is that, by and large, it is a technical training under the auspices
of new managerial regulatory agendas which is winning out. This technical
training tends to celebrate the police officer as a chooser, and is
in this way consistent with neo-liberal policy direction. Some implications
of the police officer as a chooser are discussed, and more research
into the nature of decision-making under the auspices of the chooser
is called for.
Understanding
provincial variation in incarceration rates
Jane B. Sprott and Anthony N. Doob
Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario
Using the rate
(per hundred thousand total population) of those actually in custody
serving sentences, the 1995 rates of imprisonment across the ten provinces
vary from a low of 76 per hundred thousand (for Ontario) to a rate
more than double that - 193 per hundred thousand - for Saskatchewan.
An additional complexity is that those provinces with fairly similar
overall incarceration rates (Quebec, Ontario and B.C.) ship a dramatically
different proportion of their imprisoned offenders to be housed in
federally supported penitentiaries. Quebec, for example, houses only
about 36% of its contribution to the prison population whereas Ontario
and B.C. house 55% and 63% (respectively) of their prisoners provincially.
The rate of those actually in custody (provincial and federal) on
any given day is not highly related to that province's (combined federal
and provincial) prison admission rate (Rho = .10). Instead, the number
of long term admissions to penitentiaries (i.e., sentences of over
two years) correlates quite highly with (combined federal and provincial)
prison counts (Rho = .78). Thus, an attack on long term sentences
is more likely to result in sizable reductions in the number of people
in custody than will the substitution of non-prison sanctions for
short prison sentences. The differences in imprisonment rates among
the provinces do not disappear when expressed in rates per thousand
reported crimes or people charged and, in fact, the relationships
between various measures of crime and prison counts are low and somewhat
inconsistent.
