Index Crime II Flashcards
Lesson 3 (20 cards)
what is the cost of reducing crime?
taxpayer cost, cost of people who are stopped and frisked, cost on victims
Name the 4 policies on crime
-correctional supervision, death penalty, police, education and other special programs
What are the reasons for correctional supervision?
-incapacitation (criminology, the personality view)
-deterrence (economics, the incentive view)
-rehabilitation (modified personality view)
-retribution (moralist view)
What are the 4 components of correctional supervision
-prisons (long stay confinement for felonies)
-jails (shorter stay confinements for misdemeanors or awaiting trial)
-parole (community supervision for people leaving prison)
-probation (community supervision as substitute for incarceration)
Is incarceration independent?
No it is dependent variable
what is incarceration a product of?
-entry rates (crime/conviction rates)
-exit rates (depend on sentence length, seriousness crime, parole conditions, and history)
-parole success rates (how strictly parole supervised and ex-offender behavior)
Name the 2 reasons that prison populations rose btw. 1980-2003
-increase in parole failure rate
-increase in crime-specific sentence rates
-drug crimes are NOT directly responsible for even large share of imprisonment
Are prisons effective?
-Studies show no effect on crime, others show a small magnitude meaning increasing incarceration has weak deterrent
What are the costs of correctional supervision?
-high taxpayer cost
-prisoners lose freedom and wages
-family problems (increase in and severity of behavioral issues in children, major financial implications of imprisonment)
Describe death penalty as a deterrent
-execution carries little net incapacitation benefit
-alternate to a long prison sentence
Effectiveness of death penalty
-existing studies too weak to be relied on (National Academy of Sciences)
why were studies on effectiveness of death penalty too weak
-controlled experiments highly unlikely, issues in collecting data (punishment of murderers not executed, how to measure intensity of state’s death penalty, etc)
Do police reduce index crimes?
-hard because police forces get bigger when crime goes up
-police don’t reduce index crime, but what they do might
-a lot of studies show no effect on index crime
What are some practices that police might follow that are effective at reducing crime
-patrol, gun oriented policing, hot spots
Is zero-tolerance policing effective?
No
What is another name for zero-tolerance policing?
“Broken windows”
What about education and other special programs
-lead abatement, abortion, and psychotherapeutics reduce the VOLUME of crime
what is the issue with abortion and lead abatement as options?
no feasible policies that could be implemented
What successfully incapacitates people?
Activities like high quality preschool
What do programs at work on an individual level focus on
on psychotherapeutics and high quality preschool/other intervention working at individual level, the question is about targeting
