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Abstract:
Both legal scholars and social scientists have leveraged new research evidence on the deterrent effects of the death penalty into calls for more executions that they claim will save lives and new rules to remove procedural roadblocks and hasten executions. However, the use of total intentional homicides to estimate deterrence is a recurring aggregation error in the death penalty debate in the U.S.: by studying whether executions and death sentences affect all homicides, these studies fail to identify a more plausible target of deterrence - namely, those homicides that are punishable by death. By broadening the targets of deterrence, these studies overestimate the number of murders that are averted by the threat of execution. We address this error by focusing on the subset of homicides that have been defined statutorily as capital-eligible to provide a more sensitive indicator of the deterrent effects of the death penalty. We use a public-use data archive based on police descriptions of homicides from 1976-2003 to construct rates of potentially death-eligible killings. We estimate that less than 25% of total criminal homicides are eligible for the capital sanction under the range of current state statutes. We find no changes over time in the rate of these capital-eligible homicides in death penalty states, despite fluctuations in capital punishment over time. Nor are there differences capital-eligible homicides between death penalty and non-death penalty states. We find similar flat trends in Texas, and also in Harris County, the county that supplies the most death cases in Texas. Using hierarchical regression models to fit growth curve trajectories over time and with a rich set of covariates that account for competing influences on homicide rates, we find no deterrent effects either from the presence of the death penalty or from variation over time in the dosage of any of its components in the states. Similar models for Texas counties produced identical results. The results show that none of the distinctive patterns one might expect from marginal death penalty deterrence can be found in the three decades since Gregg. Where the risk of execution goes up in a death penalty state, the death-eligible cases where that risk should make a difference decline no more than the non-death-eligible cases, nor is the proportion of all homicides that risk a capital sanction in death states any smaller in those states than it is in states without any death penalty. The rate of capital-eligible homicides is insensitive over time to variations in the incidence of executions or to the large swings from one decade to the next in the number or rate of non-death-eligible killings. Our search for death penalty deterrence where it should be a strong influence on homicide rates has produced consistent results: the marginal deterrent effect of the threat or example of execution on those cases at risk for such punishment is invisible.

Abstract:
This essay identifies corruption as a priority target for comparative study and provides a definition of corruption as the illegal use of power. We locate this theory of corruption within the framework of other types of property criminality, and speculate on some of the determinants of rates of corruption cross-sectionally and over time. Finally, we argue that the emphasis on misuse of power in our analysis might help to explain the high intensity of interest in white-collar crime.

This article argues for comparative studies in criminology and uses corruption as an illustration of their value. We define corruption as the unlawful use of power and show haw that fits with the unlawful uses of force, stealth and fraud in other criminal law categories. We discuss some of the determinants of levels of corruption cross-sectionally and over time. We compare our treatment of corruption with issues in the social construction of white-collar crime.

Corruption

Abstract:
My paper traces the debates about firearms control over the three decades since I became involved in gun research in the late 1960s. The circumstances of public discourse about guns in the late 1960s were rich in sentiment and almost completely lacking in empirical data. Questions of firearms control were only episodically important at the national level, and the administration of federal gun laws was of minuscule importance prior to 1968.

Abstract:
A central objective of those who created the juvenile court was to protect young delinquents from the destructive punishments of the criminal justice system. This promotion of juvenile court as a diversion from criminal justice is distinct from more ambitious programs of "child saving" intervention because avoiding harm can be achieved even if no effective crime prevention treatments are available. This essay shows diversion has been an important motive in juvenile justice from the beginning, and the dominant purpose of a separate juvenile court since In Re Gault in 1967. The past thirty years have been the juvenile court's finest hour as a diversion project; the rate of juvenile incarceration has been stable, while incarceration of young adults has soared.

Abstract:
The American Law Institute has launched a revision of its Model Penal Code provisions on sentencing and punishment that will be comprehensive in almost all respects. Conspicuously missing from the new sentencing project, however, is any examination of the Model Penal Code's provisions on capital punishment.

This essay argues that a reexamination of capital punishment is both necessary and practical as part of the larger sentencing reform project. Avoiding the death penalty is unprincipled and would leave the Model Code's single weakest section standing while every other sentencing provision would be subject to scrutiny. Failure to consider capital punishment would also ignore forty years of radical change in both the penal policy of developed nations and the vocabulary of concern that had redefined the death penalty as an issue of human rights and limits of government power. Ignoring the death penalty would launch a reform effort that will ignore the punishment for murder while rethinking everything else.

Nothing short of terror at the political cost can explain this retreat from the natural boundaries of sentencing reform. Yet fears of a principled reexamination of Section 210.6 are not well founded. The Institute could both take a principled position on the death penalty itself and also recommend minimum standards for capital cases where the penalty remains. To ignore the most visible and troubling aspect of American criminal justice is a much greater threat to the legitimacy of the Model Penal Code revision project than to confront it.

capital punishment

Abstract:
We compare homicide rates in two quite similar cities with vastly different execution risks. Singapore had an execution rate close to 1 per million per year until an explosive twentyfold increase in 1994-95 and 1996-97 to a level that we show was probably the highest in the world. Then over the next 11 years, Singapore executions dropped by about 95%. Hong Kong, by contrast,has no executions all during the last generation and abolished capital punishment in 1993. Homicide levels and trends are remarkably similar in these two cities over the 35 years after 1973, with neither the surge in Singapore executions nor the more recent steep drop producing any differential impact. By comparing two closely matched places with huge contrasts in actual execution but no differences in homicide trends, we have generated a unique test of the exuberant claims of deterrence that have been produced over the past decade in the U.S.

Capital punishment, deterrence, homicide

Abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to derive lessons about high-lethality adolescent violence from study of the extraordinary increase, and then decrease, in youth homicide arrests over the period 1985-2001 in the United States. This effort continues a long tradition of exploring the possible causes of shifts in homicide rates by examining patterns of violence to see whether there are important changes in types of violence. The first section of the paper discusses two dimensions of criminal youth violence over the whole range of reported offenses. The second section shows that one subset of attacks - firearms cases - accounts for the major changes in youth homicide when it increased from 1985-1993 and during the years of decrease, 1994-2001. A third section explores the linkage between rates of adolescent homicide in various cultures and the relative rate of homicide among all ages. My central conclusion is that high-lethality violence among youth is not representative of the fighting and group assaults that are relatively frequent among adolescents. Instead, the attacks that often lead to death differ with respect to the use of weapons and, to some extent, geography. But there is usually a strong relationship between homicide rates for all ages and youth homicide rates in a particular location.

youth violence, homicide rates