In the treatment of status offenders, the espousal of a medical therapeutic model has led to the development of diversion programs designed to offset a progressive career escalation from petty to serious delinquent acts. Using the offense histories of 1200 juveniles, transition probabilities were created to test for offense specialization and offense escalation. Controlling for age, sex, and race or ethnicity, the career transition configurations were reflective of homogeneous, number‐independent Markov processes. The implications of these findings run counter to many popular assumptions of delinquency causation and treatment and challenge the basic tenets of many status offender programs.
Problems related to homeless/runaway youths have received increased attention in recent years. Homeless/runaway youths manifest many problems in addition to being absent from home and without supervision of a parent or guardian. The purpose of the study was to determine drug use and abuse patterns of homeless/runaway youths and to compare those patterns, along with attitudes toward selected illicit behaviors, with similar data collected from adolescents in school. Data were collected from persons (n = 253) in homeless/runaway shelters in the southeast United States. Comparisons made with data from other studies of runaways and of youths in school indicate that drug use and abuse is two-three times more prevalent for runaways than with the school youths. Runaways' attitudes toward selected illicit behaviors are more tolerant than those of school youths. Intervention programs for runaway/homeless youths should reflect an understanding of the complexity of the psycho-social and behavioral history of the clients which is much different than that of those who are in school.
Victim Impact Panels (VIPs) were introduced by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) in 1982 and have since spread throughout the United States in an attempt to reduce drunk driving. The objective of a VIP is to expose DUI offenders to the pain and suffering caused by drunk driving without necessarily condemning the DUI offender. The few scientific evaluations of the effectiveness of VIPs have produced mixed results. The present investigation draws on evidence from a quasi‐experimental design and a five‐year follow‐up to probe further the effects of VIPs on DUI recidivism. Results show that 33.5% of the comparison group, but only 15.8% of the VIP group, were rearrested over the five‐year period. Discrete‐time event history analyses suggest that VIPs are associated with a 55.7% overall decrease in the hazard of rearrest; the VIP effect is strong in the first two years but then wanes dramatically. Methodological threats stemming from the study's design are considered. The implications of the differing styles of VIP and the resultant outcomes are also discussed.
The American and Chinese approaches to social control offer two fundamentally different philosophical and experiential perspectives. While the rights of the individual are of paramount importance in the United States, and an exceedingly active formalized legal system is responding to these needs, the Chinese have adopted a vastly different approach. The hallmark of Chinese social control is the preeminent position of society, or the social collective, and there is a marked aversion to formal law or any judicial system. The core of Chinese social control is based on Confucian social ethics which stress self-discipline and subordination to the family and to the State. Under Chairman Mao, Confucian principles were wedded to Marxist-Leninist ideology, but China resisted the bureaucratized model of the Soviet Union. Current social control practices include a strong reliance on mediation, massive legal education, and rigorous neighborhood organization strategies. In those instances where formalized court processes are employed, the Chinese have adopted a strategy that coincides with the perceived needs of their socialist system. Recent events in China indicate clearly that, while their informal style of social control is relatively effective, by no means has it eradicated all forms of deviance. The consequences of the Chinese style of socialism and its concomitant mandate of social responsibility infer a denigration of individual rights.
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