Punishment Process Research Articles

On the status of knowledge for using punishment implications for treating behavior disorders.

In this paper, we review basic and applied findings on punishment and discuss the importance of conducting further research in this area. The characteristics of responding during punishment and numerous factors that interact with basic processes are delineated in conjunction with implications for the treatment of behavior disorders in clinical populations. We conclude that further understanding of punishment processes is needed to develop a highly systematic, effective technology of behavior change, including strategies for improving the efficacy of less intrusive procedures and for successfully fading treatment.

Caring to Death

The aim of this article is to describe the role of health care professionals in the capital punishment process. The relationship between the protocol of capital punishment in the United States and the use of health care professionals to carry out that task has been overlooked in the literature on punishment. Yet for some time, the operation of the medical sciences in prison have been `part of a disciplinary strategy' `intrinsic to the development of power relationships'. Many capital punishment statutes require medical personnel to be present at, if not actively involved in, executions. Through analyses of these statutes, show the degree to which these professionals have become part of the state's executive apparatus.

Comment on Umbreit and Vos

Should states be encouraged to develop programs that bring together families of homicide victims with killers of their loved ones who have been sentenced to death? After all, Professors M.S. Umbreit and B. Vos have presented data from two such encounters that indicate the participants, both killer and family member alike, derive benefits from such meetings. The data presented by Umbreit and Vos conversations before an execution do not fit the model of restorative justice in at least three important ways. First, restorative justice requires from both offender and victim not only a willingness or desire to communicate and perhaps meet, but also a willingness and ability to change attitudes and understandings as a result of their communication. Capital punishment and restorative justice are contradictory on this point; nothing can be restored after meetings in the last days of a prisoner's life, as the inmate is soon dead, and dead because of a retributive punishment that is increasingly administered hi the name of the victim's relatives. Second, restorative justice emphasizes recompense by the offender, actively taking steps to atone for the harm and injury he or she has caused. Success is measured partially in terms of the amount of harm repaired or prevented. Hence, any punishment process that does not help to repair injuries but simply creates new ones is incompatible with the restorative justice model. Third, restorative justice seeks to reduce the state's role in the justice process and to revitalize the ancient model in which victims, offenders, and communities all were actively involved in responding to crime and restoring peaceful relationships. Rather than minimizing the role of the state, the death penalty maximizes it.

Prosecutorial discretion in seeking death: An analysis of racial disparity in the pretrial stages of case processing in a midwestern county

In the 1987 case of McCleskey v. Kemp, the U.S. Supreme Court appeared to foreclose the possibility of challenging racial bias in capital sentencing by using statistically based claims of discrimination. McCleskey, however, does not prevent a challenge to decisions made by particular individuals during the capital punishment process. In this study we examined pretrial decisions made by, or under the direction of, one prosecutor to determine whether those decisions had been influenced by race. We found that homicide cases involving black defendants and white victims fared worse than other racial combinations in all of the pretrial decisions made: They were more likely to result in first-degree murder charges, to be served notice of aggravating circumstances, and to proceed to capital trial.

Applying learning theory to the management of the horse: the difference between getting it right and getting it wrong.

Horses constantly modify their behaviour as a result of experience. This involves the creation of an association between events or stimuli. The influence of people on the modification and generation of certain behaviour patterns extends beyond the intentional training of the horse. The impact of any action depends on how it is perceived by the horse, rather than the motive of the handler. Negative and positive reinforcement increase the probability of specific behaviours recurring i.e. strengthen the association between events, whereas punishment reduces the probable recurrence of a behaviour without providing specific information about the desired alternative. In this paper the term 'punishers' is used to refer to the physical aids, such as a whip or crop, which may be used to bring about the process of punishment. However, if their application ceases when a specific behaviour occurs they may negatively reinforce that action. Intended 'punishers' may also be rewarding (e.g. for attention seeking behaviour). Therefore, contingency factors (which define the relationship between stimuli, such as the level of reinforcement), contiguity factors (which describe the proximity of events in space or time) and choice of reinforcing stimuli are critical in determining the rate of learning. The many problems associated with the application of punishment in practice lead to confusion by both horse and handler and, possibly, abuse of the former. Most behaviour problems relate to handling and management of the horse and can be avoided or treated with a proper analysis of the factors influencing the behaviour.

Capital punishment in Missouri: Examining the issue of racial disparity

AbstractGuided discretion statutes were designed to control arbitrariness and discrimination in capital sentencing. Using data from Supplemental Homicide Reports and Trial Judge Reports, this article examines the issue of racial disparity in Missouri's capital punishment process from 1977 through 1991. Findings from the three decision points examined suggest racial bias against the killers of whites, particularly if the offender is black, and a concomitant devaluation of black victims. The strongest effects noted are in the prosecutor's decision to charge homicide offenders with capital murder and to proceed to penalty trial in convicted capital murder cases. While the effects are not necessarily limited to the least aggravated categories, the effects of race are strongest when prosecutors and jurors are freed from the seriousness of the cases to consider other factors. The racial disparities are also apparent in mid‐range cases up until the sentencing stage. However, disparities occurring earlier in the process are not rectified during sentencing. In fact, in the least aggravated cases, racial disparities are magnified at the sentencing stage.

Old World News: Is Capital Punishment Ever Ethical?

Earlier this year the British media were much concerned--and much more concerned than American media--with the electrocution in Georgia of Nick Ingram. He was the first British-born man to be executed for many years. The link was tenuous--he had moved to the United States when only one year old--but it gave the British media a chance to display their universal disquiet at the process of capital punishment in the United States. At the time I discussed the issue with some European bioethicists. Apart from a genuine perplexity in understanding how a civilized, supposedly enlightened, country could have returned to the use of capital punishment, there was concern that it seemed to play no part in bioethical discourse. We wondered whether perhaps we had missed important papers in the literature, or perhaps opposition to capital punishment was such an article of faith in the bioethics community that it needed no stating. Yet as the pace of capital punishment rises, surely any opposition would need public and regular statement. Nick Ingram committed murder while intoxicated and was sentenced to death in 1984. The sentence was carried out eleven years later. While we have not had capital punishment for three decades in the United Kingdom, our highest appellate court, the Privy Council, still hears final appeal cases from elsewhere in the British Commonwealth. Two years ago it ruled, in a case from Jamaica, that to hold a prisoner on death row for more than five years was a cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment. As a result, hundreds of prisoners around the world have had their death sentences commuted. Yet it appears to be rare for an execution to take place less than five years after sentence in the United States. This is not the place to rehearse the arguments against capital punishment, other than to recall that all methods in use, except lethal injection, are designed to cause pain as well as kill. Several electrocutions in recent years have taken more than fifteen minutes to kill the condemned man, and meanwhile the has been severely burnt. How can it serve the purposes of a modern society to condone such torture? What is relevant to the interests of bioethicists, however, is the issue of the involvement of physicians in capital punishment. While lethal injections may be the least inhumane form of execution, they are also the form most likely to need the assistance of health care personnel acting in direct contravention of their duty to preserve life. …

Doing Time: Dynamics of Imprisonment in the Reformist State

Most explanations of official social control point either toward reform movements or the imperatives of the social system as dominantly influencing imprisonment rates, with little attempt to integrate these distinct casual processes. This study aims to disentangle these effects by arguing that the strategic behavior of official state actors plays an intervening role in the punishment process that determines the relative salience of reform and systems effects. The empirical analysis focuses on the expansion of prisons and jails in the American states between 1880 and the early 1920s. Treating reform in terms of the adoption of probation, parole, and indeterminate sentencing legislation, and treating the social system as a store of resources likely to affect institutional expansion, the analysis pursues a series of dynamic additive and interactive models. The findings support the argument that reforms introduced discretion into the social control system and allowed official actors greater freedom to adjust their behavior to shifting bureaucratic and political constraints.

Assessing and restoring competency to be executed: Should psychiatrists participate?

AbstractFord v. Wainwright (1986) is one among several recent U. S. Supreme Court decisions granting psychiatrists a distinct but awkward role in the capital punishment process. Ford affirms the right of the condemned to be spared execution while mentally incompetent, and validates state laws requiring psychiatric evaluation and treatment of capital inmates who plead that they have become insane while awaiting execution. The ruling raises troublesome questions for psychiatry, including whether it is ethical for psychiatrists to assess or treat prisoners, thereby enabling their execution. This article argues that evaluation and treatment of capital inmates is in accordance with medical practice standards that emphasize respect for patients' autonomy and rationality.

The assessment of competency for execution: An overview

AbstractCompetency for execution is a legal competency that is an integral part of the capital punishment process in the United States. With the rapidly increasing population under death sentence, the issue of competency for execution is likely to be raised with increasing frequency in the coming years. This creates some compelling ethical issues for the mental health professions. The questions of whether mental health professionals should provide assessment of competency for execution and, if so, how the assessment should be performed, are issues of immediate urgency.

Multiple 5-HT systems and multiple punishment processes

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Overcorrection

Research on overcorrection was analyzed along a number of dimensions. Two types of overcorrection have been described — restitutional overcorrection and positive-practice overcorrection (Foxx & Azrin, 1972). In restitutional overcorrection an individual who disrupts the environment must restore, and then improve, the environment over its previous state. In positive-practice overcorrection, an offending individual must repeatedly perform an appropriate behavior. The literature indicates that overcorrection has been effective with a wide variety of behaviors, but that its effectiveness compared with alternative procedures is unclear. An adequate assessment of the side effects of overcorrection has been hampered by a lack of objective data and a failure to specify, in advance, which behaviors are of interest. Investigations of various parameters of overcorrection indicate that topographical similarity between an offense and the restitutional procedure is unnecessary, that the duration of time that the process must be administered is unclear, and that a more precise specification of the components of overcorrection is necessary. Finally, it is concluded that Foxx and Azrin have not been sufficiently explicit in relating overcorrection to the punishment process.

Correction: The Dynamics of Oscillatory Punishment Processes

Correction: The Dynamics of Oscillatory Punishment Processes

The Dynamics of Oscillatory Punishment Processes

In a recent paper, Blumstein, Cohen and Nagin present two homeostatic models of the imprisonment process inspired by Durkheim's conception of society as a normatively integrated self-regulating mechanism.1 Comparing the imprisonment rates predicted by their models with Canadian data for the period 19251960, the researchers found a good agreement for one of their models. It is the purpose of this paper to propose an alternative explanation of the observed imprisonment rates. In both the models discussed by Blumstein et al., the number of criminals at large in society is regulated by the imprisonment of criminal law violators. When the number of violators in

The Dynamics of a Homeostatic Punishment Process

The Dynamics of a Homeostatic Punishment Process

The Sources of Criminal Statistics

T HE need for reliable statistical information about crime and criminal administration in this country is recognized by everyone who makes even the slightest study of any of the many problems involved in this field. It is hardly possible to talk or even think about crime without resorting to statistics. In fact, seldom can a conclusion be stated that does not result from premises or assumptions which themselves rest on statistical information. Adequate criminal statistics are quite essential if there is to be an efficient and intelligent administration of criminal justice in this country. What are the sources of statistical data on crime and criminal law enforcement in the United States? The major sources are the records and reports of the public agencies engaged in the enforcement and administration of the criminal law. The problem of compiling criminal statistics is largely the problem of gathering from the multitude of agencies engaged in law enforcement the pertinent information that they have recorded concerning offenses committed, offenders arrested and charged with crime, and the processes of prosecution and punishment; of classifying this information, and of summarizing and analyzing it to present comprehensive, meaningful data for the Nation, for the states, and for local areas.