Empirical tests of the deterrence doctrine have suffered from two deficiencies: (1) they have rarely been conducted within the context of a more general theory of social control, and (2) they have confounded the effects of sanction threats on different kinds of offending decisions. In this paper, deterrence variables (perceived certainty and severity) were incorporated into a rational choice model of common (minor) delinquent offending. The rational choice perspective presumes that crime and delinquency are the products of imperfectly informed choice and that decisions to offend are made, assessed, and remade. It was assumed here that decisions to offend and cease offending would in part be affected by the contemplation of sanction threats in addition to material, affective, and moral considerations. The data in support of the inclusion of deterrence variables in a rational choice model were equivocal. Although perceptions of certain punishment had a significant effect on the decision to commit and desist from some offenses, the observed effects were marginal and far less consequential than were the effects of social costs and other considerations. The data did indicate that certainty of punishment (but not severity) affects some offending decisions.

Scholars of mass incarceration point to the 1970s as a pivotal turning point in U.S. penal history, marked by a shift toward more punitive policies and a consensus that “nothing works” in rehabilitating inmates. However, while there has been extensive research on changes in policy makers' rhetoric, sentencing policy, and incarceration rates, scholars know very little about changes in the actual practices of punishment and prisoner rehabilitation. Using nationally representative data for U.S. state prisons, this article demonstrates that there were no major changes in investments in specialized facilities, funding for inmate services–related staff, or program participation rates throughout the late 1970s and the 1980s. Not until the 1990s, more than a decade after the start of the punitive era, did patterns of inmate services change, as investments in programming switched from academic to reentry-related programs. These findings suggest that there is a large gap between rhetoric and reality in the case of inmate services and that since the 1990s, inmate “rehabilitation” has increasingly become equated with reentry-related life skills programs.

In the Maluku Islands of Eastern Indonesia, a center of global diversity in coral reef systems and the historic center of trade in cloves and other spices, tenure practices known as sasi have flourished for at least a century. This article analyzes changes in the ways Dutch colonial officials, Indonesian government officials, and environmental NGOs have interpreted Moluccan customary law and local institutions. Dutch colonial accounts of sasi, a generic name for a historic family of institutions, laws, and ritual practices that regulated access to fields, reefs, and rivers, suggest that sasi was a synthetic, highly variable body of practices linked to religious beliefs and local cultural ideas of nature. During the past two decades, as international and national conservation discourses have proliferated and a movement has developed to support indigenous Indonesian cultural communities, Indonesian NGOs and the Ministry of the Environment have promoted, and largely created, images of sasi as an environmental institution and body of customary law promoting sustainable development, conservation, and social equity. This article focuses on how sasi has been continuously reinterpreted by a variety of actors, following the trajectory of changing institutional interests and images.

The recent “discovery” of family violence, particularly violence between spouses, has elicited attention from social scientists and policy makers. Police intervention in domestic disputes is a primary focus. Critiques of police practice have often centered on police failure to arrest offenders in domestic violence incidents. Yet, the literature to date reveals little effort to examine systematically the discretionary role of police in domestic disputes. With data drawn from 262 official police reports concerning domestic disturbances, the propensity of police to make arrests is examined through a variety of exogenous variables. Police arrests, we find, reflect the immediate circumstances of police-citizen encounters.

The development of Gottfredson and Hirschi's general theory of crime (1990; see also Hirschi & Gottfredson 1987, 2000) has provoked lively debate about the merits of the theory as applied to organizational crime (Steffensmeier 1989; Reed & Yeager 1996; Herbert et al. 1998). While the debate is provocative, the empirical evidence brought to bear is an insufficient test of competing theoretical claims. Using data drawn from a factorial survey administered to a group of corporate managers and managers-in-training, we subject Gottfredson and Hirschi's theory of crime and an integrated organizational theory to a theoretical competition. The results show that corporate offending propensity and behavioral indicators of low self-control are unrelated, a result inconsistent with the general theory. Instead, variables consistent with an integrated materialistic and cultural organizational theory predict managers' offending intentions. For instance, offending is inhibited when a firm has a working compliance program and when managers perceive the illegal act as highly immoral. Conversely, managers are more apt to offend when ordered to do so by a supervisor, or to gain financial or market position vis-à-vis competitors. The implications for general and organizational theories of corporate offending are discussed.

COMPSTAT, the latest innovation in American policing, has been widely heralded as a management and technological system whose elements work together to transform police organizations radically. Skeptical observers suggest that COMPSTAT merely reinforces existing structures and practices. However, in trying to assess how much COMPSTAT has altered police organizations, research has failed to provide a broader theoretical basis for explaining how COMPSTAT operates and for understanding the implications of this reform. This article compares two different perspectives on organizations—technical/rational and institutional—to COMPSTAT's adoption and operation in three municipal police departments. Based on fieldwork, our analysis suggests that relative to technical considerations for changing each organization to improve its effectiveness, all three sites adopted COMPSTAT in response to strong institutional pressures to appear progressive and successful. Furthermore, institutional theory better explained the nature of the changes we observed under COMPSTAT than the technical/rational model. The greatest collective emphasis was on those COMPSTAT elements that were most likely to confer legitimacy, and on implementing them in ways that would minimize disruption to existing organizational routines. COMPSTAT was less successful when trying to provide a basis for rigorously assessing organizational performance, and when trying to change those structures and routines widely accepted as being “appropriate.” We posit that it will take profound changes in the technical and institutional environments of American police agencies for police departments to restructure in the ways anticipated by a technically efficient COMPSTAT.

What role do courts play in the establishment and maintenance of constitutional democracies? To address this question, we elaborate a model that draws on existing substantive literature and on theories that assume strategic behavior on the part of judges, executives, and legislatures. This model, in turn, leads to several behavioral predictions about the interactions among the relevant political actors. Although those predictions could be assessed in many distinct contexts, we focus on Russia. In particular, we provide a demonstration of how the model helps make sense of the behavior of the Constitutional Court (Konstitucjonnyj sud) in light of the difficult political situation it confronted. We conclude with some thoughts on the broader implications of our theory for the study of courts throughout Eastern Europe and how it may well illuminate constitutional politics in other parts of the world.

Research on procedural justice and legitimacy has expanded greatly across the social sciences in recent years. The process-based model of regulation, which links people's assessments of procedural justice and legitimacy to their compliance with the law and legal authorities, has become particularly influential in criminology and sociolegal studies. A review of the previous research on perceived legitimacy highlights two important features. First, legitimacy has been conceptualized and measured in many different ways. Second, most of the research on legitimacy has focused on only a handful of developed nations. Using survey data from Trinidad and Tobago, this article examines the conceptualization and measurement of the perceived legitimacy of the law and legal authorities. The findings indicate that some of the prominent conceptual and measurement models used in previous research are not empirically valid in the Trinidadian context. The implications of the results for conceptualization, theory, and future research are discussed.

Advocates of restorative justice (RJ) hypothesize that the diversion of criminal cases to RJ conferences should be more effective in lowering the rate of reoffending than traditional prosecution in court processing because the conferences more effectively engage the psychological mechanisms of reintegrative shaming and procedural justice. This study uses longitudinal data from the drinking-and-driving study in the Australian Reintegrative Shaming Experiments (RISE) to evaluate the long-term impact of reintegrative shaming and procedural justice on support for the law and on later recidivism as assessed through the use of police records and by self-report. Analysis first suggests that there is no direct effect of experimental condition on later recidivism. However, it further suggests that both traditional court-based prosecution and RJ conferences increase support for the law and lower the rate of future reoffending when they engage the social psychological mechanisms of reintegrative shaming and procedural justice and thereby increase the legitimacy of the law. Hence, the results argue for the potential value of procedures such as the RJ conference but indicate that those procedures will only achieve their objectives if they are effectively designed and implemented.

A key concern within democracies is effectively regulating the behavior of societies' agents of social control, who have coercive power and considerable discretion over their use of that power. This can result in failures to adhere to the rules, policies, and laws dictating appropriate and lawful behavior. This article explores the effectiveness of motivating rule adherence among law enforcement officers and soldiers by focusing upon whether they believe that organizational authorities are legitimate or that rules and policies are morally right or wrong. The results suggest that both values have an important influence upon rule adherence. Further, aspects of organizational culture that encourage such values are identified and shown to be influential in this setting. Results show that the procedural justice of the organization is central to rule adherence. These findings support the argument that encouraging self-regulation via appeals to the values of law enforcement officers and soldiers is a viable strategy for minimizing misconduct, and they suggest how to effectively implement such approaches.

European and American scholars of law and society apparently have problems in communicating with each other. To invoke Lewis Carroll's authority on a piece of legal theory indicates how serious the problems are. After all, traced to its true origins, “Jabberwocky,” the famous “Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry” (Carroll, 1855; 1871: 191), means “weeks of woe” in its original German version (Scott alias Chatterton, 1872). And inextricably involved in the interpretation of the poetry is a certain Hermann von Schwindel . . .

During the first half of this century, most research on deterrence suggested that punishment had little effect on behavior. These findings tended to confirm the ideological position of most sociologists, who generally assumed that criminal behavior was not and probably could not be controlled by legal sanctions. However, recent developments indicate that this assumption is in error. First, laboratory research (e.g., Banduara, 1969:292-353; Bandua and Walters, 1963) has demonstrated that under certain conditions, punishment can effectively and efficiently control behavior, and that such control can be obtained through vicarious reinforcement. Second, and more important, research since 1960 by both economists and sociologists, generally more sophisticated than earlier work, suggests that legal sanctions often play a significant role in preventing criminal behavior. (See, for example, Chambliss, 1966; Gibbs, 1968; Tittle, 1969; Logan, 1972; Chiricos and Waldo, 1970; Tittle and Rowe, 1974; 1973; Jensen, 1969; Waldo and Chiricos, 1972; Phillips and Votey, 1972; Phillips, 1973). Thus the issue for future research is no longer whether legal sanctions ever deter criminal behavior, but the specification of the conditions under which they have such an effect. This paper seeks to develop some hypotheses to guide future research on these conditions.

Public recourse to vigilante self-help has often been attributed to a lack of effective state intervention; less attention has been given to the character of this intervention. Using the Tylerian procedural justice perspective, I argue in this article that perceived procedural injustice contributes to increased public support for violent self-help mechanisms such as vigilante violence. The current study tests this theoretical argument using survey data of 374 residents of Accra, Ghana. The results show that age, education, and police trustworthiness were the most significant predictors of support for vigilante self-help. The impacts of procedural fairness were found to be embraced within police trustworthiness, but perceptions of police effectiveness and experience of police corruption were not statistically significant predictors of vigilante support.

The results of a survey of public attitudes about appropriate length of prison sentences for convicted offenders are reported. Two main questions are addressed: 1) degree of consensus within the population about appropriate sentences for different offenses and 2) the relationship between the desired sentences expressed by the public and the actual time served by offenders in prison. The analysis suggests considerable agreement across various demographic groups on the relative severity of sentences to be imposed for different offenses, but disagreement over the absolute magnitude of these sentences. These results suggest the feasibility of generating consensus on a proportional, just deserts sentencing schedule, but difficulty in establishing the “constant of proportionality.” The sentences desired by the public are found to be consistently more severe than sentences actually imposed, suggesting the need for greater public awareness of current imprisonment practices so that expectations of the determinate sentencing schedules will be realistic and consistent with limited prison capacity.

This article reports on the first quantitative perceptual deterrence study of corporate (rather than individual) deterrence. The study is based on interviews with 410 chief executives of small organizations and their officially recorded compliance with regulatory standards. We find partial support for the certainty of detection as a predictor of both self-reported and officially recorded compliance but no support for the certainty or severity of sanctioning. The narrow range of sanctions available in the particular regulatory domain studied (regulation of nursing home quality) has enabled a fuller specification than was possible in previous studies of an expected utility model for all available sanctions. Managers' expected corporate disutility from all sanctions fails to explain compliance. Deterrence does not work significantly more effectively for chief executives (a) of for-profit versus nonprofit organizations, (b) who are owners compared with those who are not owners, (c) who say they think about sanctions more (sanction salience), (d) who may better fit the rational choice model in that they are low on emotionality, (e) who have a weaker belief in the law. Nor is deterrence more effective when compliance costs are low.

The research reported tests the influence of judgments about the fairness of government lawmaking procedures on evaluations of the legitimacy of a national-level governmental authority through studies—two experiments and a survey—examining judgments about Congress. The influence of procedural justice on legitimacy is contrasted with the effects of self-interested judgments indexing agreement with congressional decisions. Although a sizable empirical literature already suggests the importance of procedural justice in shaping reactions to personal experiences with legal, political, and managerial authorities, recent studies have been inconsistent about the degree to which procedural justice findings generalize to national-level institutions. The findings of the studies reported here strongly support the argument that procedural justice judgments influence evaluations of the legitimacy of a national-level political institution. A further exploration seeking to find an influence of ethnicity, gender, education, age, income and/or ideology on the psychology of legitimacy suggests that demographic differences do not influence the criteria respondents use to assess the fairness of decisionmaking procedures. The findings suggest that procedures provide a viable basis for maintaining public support in the face of differences in individuals' policy positions and background characteristics.

This paper develops a theoretical framework for investigating the socialpsychological dynamics of punishment reactions to criminal offenders. Two basic types of punishment motives are delineated: behavior control and retribution. The target, or focus, of these motives may be the offender or a broader social audience. Within each of the four cells defined by this classification, we review the literature describing how punishment responses are influenced by characteristics of the rule, the offense, and the offender, as well as by the attitude and personality of the reactor. A large number of empirically testable propositions are generated.

This case study of immigration law in Spain examines the contradiction between the rhetoric of immigration politics stressing immigrant integration and the reality of immigrant exclusion and marginalization. Drawing from a variety of secondary sources, government documents, and interviews, I show how Spanish policies regularly “irregularize” Third World immigrants. Further, I argue that this legal construction of illegality consigns these immigrants to the margins of the economy where they provide what policymakers appreciatively call “flexibility” to the post-Fordist Spanish economy. Finally, I discuss the ways in which racial “otherness,” exclusion, and economic function are mutually constituted, and the role of law in that process.

In “Sander County” Illinois, concerns about litigiousness in the local population tended to focus on personal injury suits, although such cases were very rarely brought. This article explores the roots of these concerns in the ideology of the rural community and in the reactions of many residents to social, cultural, and economic changes that created a pervasive sense of social disintegration and loss. Personal injury claims are contrasted with contract actions, which were far more numerous yet were generally viewed with approval and did not give rise to perceptions of litigiousness or greed. The distinction is explained in terms of changing conceptions of the community itself and in terms of the problematic relationships between “insiders” and “outsiders” in Sander County.

This article analyzes women's legal consciousness in responding to unwanted sexual attention in the workplace. By focusing on a particular social problem, this study is situated in the particular legal domain of sexual harassment laws and in a specific organizational context. Taking the perspective of the intended beneficiaries of sexual harassment policies and procedures—women with complaints about sexual conduct in the workplace—I show that the implementation of grievance procedures creates powerful obstacles to women's efforts to assert those rights. Moreover, the practices implementing the policies can alter the very definition of sexual harassment in that setting. Thus, in enacting grievance procedures, women and supervisors construct a legality in particular workplaces that offers only limited protection for women's rights.