Volume 42, No. 2
April 2000
Bad,
sad, and rejected: The lives of aggressive children
Jane B. Sprott and Anthony N. Doob
Aggregation
bias in ecological research: How social disorganization and criminal
opportunities shape the spatial distribution of juvenile delinquency
in Montreal
Marc Ouimet
The
Parole Attitudes Scale (PAS): Development of a 15-item scale to assess
attitudes toward conditional release
Joti Samra-Grewal and Ronald Roesch
Community-based
sexual offender management: Combining parole supervision and treatment
to reduce recidivism
Robin J. Wilson, Lynn
Stewart, Tania Stirpe, Marianne Barrett, and Janice E. Cripps
The
incarceration of female young offenders: Protection for whom?
Raymond R. Corrado, Candice Odgers, and Irwin M. Cohen
Interrogating
justice: A critical analysis of the police interrogation and its role
in the criminal justice process
James W. Williams
Book
Reviews
MAIR: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Community Penalties
Guy Lemire
ROUILLARD
et GOULET: Solidarité et détermination/Histoire de la
Fraternité des policiers et des policières de la Communauté
urbaine de Montréal
André Normandeau
Coming
Events
CCJA CANADIAN
JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
Abstracts/Résumés
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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.
BAD,
SAD, AND REJECTED: THE LIVES OF AGGRESSIVE CHILDREN
Jane B. Sprott
The National Center on Addiction and
Subtance Abuse at Columbia University
New York, NY, USA
and
Anthony N. Doob
Centre of Criminology,
University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario
Concern about
how to respond to violent acts by young children is not new. Although
on a broad level there appears to be widespread public support for
dealing with very young violent children in the youth justice system,
that support diminishes substantially when people are given a choice
of how to deal with violent children. Most people in fact prefer very
young violent children to be dealt with in the mental health or child
welfare system as opposed to the youth justice system. Nonetheless,
concern over the minimum age of criminal responsibility, in particular
for violent acts, will not disappear. Thus, it would useful to know
something about the lives of the children that cause society so much
concern. Using a representative sample of 3,434, 10 and 11 year old
Canadian children, we found that aggressive children were more likely
than other children to feel unhappy and rejected. There are, therefore,
two reasons to reject proposals for criminalizing the behaviour of
20 and 11 year old: the public does not want it and an additional
punitive response from the state would only add to the misery of the
children's lives.
AGGREGATION
BIAS IN ECOLOGICAL RESEARCH: HOW SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION AND CRIMINAL
OPPORTUNITIES SHAPE THE SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION OF JUVENILE DELINQUENCY
IN MONTREAL
Marc Ouimet
École de criminologie,
Université de Montréal, Montréal, Québec
In intraurban
ecological research, the choice of the level of aggregation constitutes
the first major decision for the researcher. Yet, there are very few
empirical studies on the impact of this decision on expected results.
In this study, two competing conceptual models (social disorganization
vs. opportunity theory) are compared to two dependent variables (offender
rate and juvenile crime rate) for two distinct aggregation levels
(495 census tracts and 84 neighbourhoods). Our results show that social
disorganization variables predict fairly well areas' offender rates
(where delinquents live) while the opportunity variables do help explain
areas' juvenile crime rate (where crimes are committed). As analysis
go from the census tract level to the neighborhood level, the explanatory
power of the predictors also increases, which is counterbalanced by
a loss in the degrees of freedom. Census tracts would be the ideal
level of aggregation for opportunity theory testing and the census
tract aggregation level ideal for social disorganization research.
THE
PAROLE ATTITUDES SCALE (PAS): DEVELOPMENT OF A 15-ITEM SCALE TO ASSESS
ATTITUDES TOWARD CONDITIONAL RELEASE
Joti Samra-Grewal
and
Ronald Roesch
Mental Health, Law, and Policy Institute,
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia
Although there
does exist research examining attitudes toward various aspects of
the judicial system (e.g., sentencing, capital punishment), there
is a paucity of research that focuses specifically upon attitudes
toward conditional release (CR; e.g., parole). This neglect in the
literature is problematic as there are both theoretical an empirical
reasons to expect that such attitudes may have important implications.
Specifically, correctional personnel's CR attitudes may have an impact
on subsequent legal decision-making (e.g., recommendations for releasing
offenders), and public attitudes toward CR may influence CR-related
social policy reforms. Despite the importance of CR attitudes, no
standardized set of questions exists to assess these attitudes; additionally,
limitations with the attitude indices that do exist render conclusive
interpretations of findings impossible. The purpose of the present
study was thus twofold: first, to develop a reliable instrument to
assess attitudes toward CR, as one does not currently exist; and second,
to determine whether the provision of accurate information on CR statistics
depolarizes the positive/negative nature of attitudes. Results demonstrated
the emergence of a 15-item reliable scale; surprisingly, provision
of information was found not to depolarize CR attitudes. Findings
on the overall degree of support for CR and variables that predict
CR attitudes are also presented.
COMMUNITY-BASED
SEXUAL OFFENDER MANAGEMENT: COMBINING PAROLE SUPERVISION AND TREATMENT
TO REDUCE RECIDIVISM
Robin J. Wilson, Lynn Stewart, Tania Stirpe,
Marianne Barrett, and Janice E. Cripps
Correctional Service of Canada, Central Ontario District
Toronto, Ontario
This article
describes a community-based sexual offender management protocol combining
parole supervision and relapse prevention treatment. Outcome data
are presented regarding the community-based maintenance of 107 sexual
offenders released to the Central Ontario District (Toronto) over
an eight year period. Overall rates of 21.0% for general reoffending,
10.3% for violent reoffending and 3.7% for sexual re-offending were
observed, with the mean time of follow-up being 3 years, 7months.
These results are discussed in comparison to results recently reported
by other treatment sites. The outcome in this study suggests that
valid risk assessment, in combination with a well-defined supervision
strategy (i.e., collaboration of community-based relapse prevention
treatment and knowledgeable parole supervision) is an effective method
for the management of sexual recidivism in the community.
THE
INCARCERATION OF FEMALE YOUNG OFFENDERS: PROTECTION FOR WHOM?
Raymond R. Corrado,
Candice Odgers,
and
Irwin M. Cohen
School of Criminology,
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia
Female young
offenders have recently come to the forefront of both media and policy
attention. This article explores (1) the offending patterns, (2) social
histories, and (3) the criminal justice system's response to a group
of the allegedly most serious young female offenders in British Columbia,
Canada. As this article will demonstrate, despite isolated incidents
of violence, the majority of offending by female youth in custody
is relatively minor. Results indicate that most of the offences that
young women are serving time for are administrative. Moreover, it
appears as though the primary rationale for sentencing these females
to custody is protective in nature. That is, based on the testimony
of both the young women and key criminal justice decision makers,
the primary concern in "breaching" female offenders is most
often directly tied to the safety of the young women. It is the authors'
contention that it is not only the paucity of non-custodial treatment
alternatives that results in administrative-based incarceration, but
also the resistance that many young women have towards any attempt
to prevent them from returning to their street lives. In effect, the
pull of addiction, pimps/boyfriends, and peers is often so intense
that many of the multi-problem young women refuse to remain in non-custodial
treatment sites and programs.
INTERROGATING
JUSTICE: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE POLICE INTERROGATION AND ITS ROLE
IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE PROCESS
James W. Williams
Department of Sociology,
York University, Toronto, Ontario
In recent years
the Canadian criminal justice system has been plagued by a number
of high profile wrongful convictions. While each of these cases has
raised serious questions concerning the justice process as a whole,
particular attention has been directed towards the police and their
ability to satisfy their dual mandate of investigating crime while
protecting the interests, rights, and freedoms of the accused. One
notable aspect of police operations that has come under increasing
scrutiny in this regard is the police interrogation, a practice which
is both upheld by police officers as a crucial means of gathering
information and disposing of cases, and denounced by civil rights
advocates as a serious threat to the standards of fairness and due
process. In adopting the police interrogation as its object of study,
this paper will argue that each of these characterizations are severely
limited, and ultimately, misrepresentative of the more subtle functions
of interrogative practices. Specifically, drawing upon the research
literature in Britain, the United States, and Canada, the police interrogation
will be conceptualized as an interactional medium in which commitments
are fashioned to particular criminal identities and renditions of
events in a manner that seeks to confirm and legitimate official police
narratives. The implications of this constitutive, rather than merely
coercive, function of the interrogation will be examined with particular
attention to the issues of police accountability, and the limits of
legislative reform.
