This article examines why accused persons in pre-trial detention decide to plead guilty. Relying on the understanding of coercion proposed by Brunk, the article go beyond his analysis to show how pre-trial detention can exert pressure on an accused individual, who then feels coerced into pleading guilty. Interviews with 12 accused and 12 lawyers showed that in certain situations pre-trial detention can be a source of coercion, particularly if there are lengthy procedural delays and eventual sentences can be expected to be fairly short. However, there are other situations in which custodial remand acts as an inducement rather than as coercion or does not exert any pressure on the accused.

Research shows that co-offending has contradictory effects on rates of re-arrest. On the one hand, group offending may be riskier: for example, co-offenders might be targeted by police or might snitch to protect themselves. Criminal networks may also have indirect effects: offenders embedded in criminal networks commit more offenses and thus should have a higher risk of being arrested at some point. On the other hand, networks generate steady criminal opportunities with relatively low risk of arrest and high monetary benefits (e.g., drug trafficking). Few authors have empirically explored the relation between co-offending and re-arrest. This paper does so, using data from seven years of arrest records in the province of Quebec (Canada). The analysis is designed to explore why some offenders are re-arrested after an initial arrest while others are not. It focuses on the factors involved in re-arrest, considering two distinct levels of measures of co-offending. The first level of analysis takes into account a situational measure that indicates whether a given offense was committed by co-offenders (group offense). The second level is used to examine whether being part of a criminal network influences re-arrest. For offenders embedded in such networks, two network features (degree centrality and clustering coefficient) show that the global position of individuals within the Quebec arrest network are analyzed. Our results suggest that co-offending is a crucial factor that should be taken into account when looking at the odds of being caught again. The use of generalized linear mixed model brings interesting nuances about the impact of co-offending. The paper adds to the recently growing literature on the link between networks and criminal careers.

This article analyzes reported incidents of domestic violence according to the source of the complaint and whether the victim initially supported judicial action against the offender. Almost three quarters of incidents studied were reported by the victim (72%), and a little more than half of victims initially wanted to press charges (55%). Using multinomial logistic regression models, situational and individual factors are used to distinguish 4 incident profiles. Incidents in which the victim made the initial report to the police and wished to press charges are the most distinct and involve partners who were already separated at the time of the incident or had a history of domestic violence. The other profiles also show important differences.

This article focuses on penal severity judgements made by judicial actors (118 defence attorneys, 48 crown prosecutors, 36 probation officers, and 33 judges; N = 135) and the general public (N = 297), who were asked to estimate the severity of a range of penalties using the magnitude-scale technique, developed by Stevens (1975). A group-based approach developed by Nagin (2005) was applied to discover the diversity in penalty scales. Results reveal that while there is reasonable consensus about penal severity for prison sentences, neither members of the public nor judicial actors agree on the underlying metric of severity scales for custodial sentences. Penal equivalencies derived from each penalty scale are used to determine their relative quality. Results show that judicial actors are no better than inexperienced citizens at producing penal severity judgements that seem reasonable and feasible.