Behavioral Sciences & the Law最新文献

Sexual recidivism rates based on arrests or convictions underestimate actual reoffending due to underreporting. A previous Monte Carlo simulation estimated actual recidivism rates under various reporting and conviction assumptions but did not account for desistance—the decreasing likelihood of reoffending over time. This study addresses that gap by incorporating a 12.3% annual desistance rate (from a well-known empirical study) and exploring its impact alongside varying charge rates (100%–5%). The results showed that reductions in charge rates lead to disproportionately large increases in recidivism. For instance, lowering the charge rate from 50% to 25% results in a much larger increase in actual recidivism than reducing it from 100% to 75%, despite both being 25% reductions. This indicates that as charge rates decrease, actual recidivism grows more sharply. A sensitivity analysis also examined desistance rates of 0%, 5%, 12.3%, and 20%. Higher desistance rates cause reoffending to occur earlier but have little impact on long-term totals. Over 25 years, reoffending rates remain similar across desistance rates, suggesting desistance affects the timing, but not the overall amount of reoffending.

The Pareto principle is based on the concept that roughly 80% of outcomes are generated by 20% of inputs, efforts, or contributors within a group. Using a national sample of U.S. prison inmates, we examined various percentile rankings of self-reported institutional misconduct to determine how much disorder is created behind bars by the most prolific offenders. Findings revealed that, regardless of sex, the top 20% of inmates were responsible for approximately 90% of all rule violations and write-ups received. These general patterns remained similar even after adjusting infractions for time served in prison. Further analyses indicated that membership within these high-rate groups was often significantly predicted by those who were younger, black, had more extensive criminal histories, committed violent crimes, resided in state facilities, anticipated being released, used drugs prior to their arrest, were diagnosed with a personality disorder or ADHD, and exhibited worse negative affect. Some sex-specific effects were also observed. The disproportionate impact these chronic offenders have on the prison environment is detrimental to all individuals who live and work around them. Future research should investigate specific types of misconduct, distinct time intervals of incarceration, and facility effects such as management style, security levels, or offender composition.

Having addressed the nature and complexity of intersexuality including commonalities with and differences from the transgender condition, we now address major legal challenges to the bisexual status quo through the legal advancement of rights for intersexual persons. Identified here are four domains in which the rights of intersex individuals are being advanced through litigation and legislation: (a) Sex assignment at birth and in early childhood, including the individual's right to consent and self-determination and to be spared from surgery that is not needed for medical reasons; (b) the right to change one's legal sex on legal documents such as birth certificates and passports, (c) the right of intersex persons to marry, and (d) the right not to be discriminated against. Within this legal framework, we identify commonalities with and differences from the struggle for rights within the transgender community.

Individuals housed in prisons or forensic hospitals experience significant restrictions on their sexual rights. There is a lack of data on how sexual behavior and sexual health of institutionalized persons are managed and to what extent they are based on shared guidelines or decisions of the individual staff. Using a standardized online questionnaire, the heads of 35 prisons and 32 forensic psychiatric hospitals across 14 German federal states were surveyed, reflecting the situation of 16,902 inmates and patients. The findings reveal an absence of shared guidelines as well as an institution-specific approach to sexual behavior and sexual health. Exploratory multiple linear regression identified four variables that predict differences in the regulation of individual's sexual behavior and sexual health: type of institution (prison or forensic hospital), percentage of institutionalized sex offenders, number of housed individuals, and an item concerning the sexuality-related attitudes of the respondent. Respondents, particularly in the field of forensic psychiatry, expressed a general desire for guidelines. Our study shows that possibilities for sexual expression and sexual health vary strongly, depending on the institution. Therefore, it appears useful and desirable to develop guidelines on how to regulate sexual behavior and sexual health of institutionalized individuals.

Best practice in violent extremist risk assessment and management recommends adopting a Structured Professional Judgement (SPJ) approach. The SPJ approach identifies relevant, evidence-based risk and protective factors and requires experts to articulate hypotheses about a) what the person might do (risk of what), and b) how they've come to engage in the concerning behaviour (and why) (Logan 2021) to inform who, needs to do what, and when. Whilst the field continues to move towards adopting an SPJ approach, there remains a gap between what is known empirically and what is needed in practice. We apply psychometric network modelling to a sample of 485 individuals entered into Channel, the UK's preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) program. We model the system of interactions from which susceptibility to violent extremism emerges, providing data driven evidence which speaks to risk of what and why. Our research highlights a way to generate evidence which captures the multifactorial nature of susceptibility to violent extremism, to support professional decision making in the context of an SPJ approach.

Research on sexual homicides has primarily focused on male offenders, and thus little is known about female offenders who perpetrated sexual homicides. This study aimed to develop the first statistical classification of female single-victim (SV) sexual homicide offenders (SHOs) using the U.S. FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports database that spanned over a 47-year period (1976–2022). A latent class analysis (LCA) was computed to detect subtypes of female SHOs in a sample of 158 offenders. Findings of the LCA identified two unique classes of female SHOs exist within the data: White intra-familial offenders and Black extra-familial offenders. The distinguishing features of these two classes were the offender's racial group, the victim's age and racial groups, the offender-victim relationship, the geographical urbanness level of crime location, and weapon use. This empirically-derived offender classification can be informative to law enforcement agents and security professionals in their investigative strategies.