This paper reviews three bodies of research which relate to the severity of societal response to crime: studies of social complexity, of punitive reaction to high rates of deviance, and of the ability of the justice system to control criminal activity. We present a model aimed at integrating these findings and accounting for some of the inconsistent results among them. We contend that while normative diversity, on the whole, tends to lessen the severity of response, this tendency may be counteracted by an increased rate of deviance and a decreased certainty of punishment—also products of social complexity.

The practice of plea bargaining has been a subject of controversy in much recent literature. At least one legal philosopher, Kenneth Kipnis, has argued that this practice ought to be abolished on the ground that negotiated pleas are entered involuntarily. Wertheimer and Brunk have challenged Kipnis' claim that negotiated pleas are involuntary. I argue that each party to this controversy has failed to distinguish between two important questions: (1) are negotiated pleas involuntary in a sense that renders them legally invalid; and (2) are negotiated pleas involuntary in a sense that warrants the abolition of that practice as a matter of social policy? I believe that their failure to distinguish between these questions is partly responsible for the fact that their analyses of voluntariness are inappropriate to either of them. In showing how the analyses of these thinkers go wrong, I provide at least a partial account of the meaning of “involuntary” appropriate to the questions they conflate. Finally, I argue that the uses of “involuntary” in these questions, though established by practice, are nonetheless misleading, and I suggest alternative formulations of these questions that clarify the issues they present.

This paper examines the discretionary judgments of the prosecutor during the screening of felony arrests. In particular, I emphasize the significance of the victim on the prosecutor's definition of serious crime and criminal activity. Descriptive accounts of felony screening illustrate how prosecutors rely on stereotyped characteristics to assess victim credibility.

Diversion has emerged as one of the most popular reform tactics in the juvenile justice system. An analysis of a two-year diversion program for status offenders revealed significant conceptual and operational ambiguity. The notion of a progression of a delinquent career from status to criminal offenses was not supported. The utilization of community-based programs in place of the juvenile court resulted in agency competition for clients and lengthy treatment programs for status offenders. Finally, the impact of specialized treatment for status offenders on behavioral and attitudinal measures was not significant. It was concluded that diversion programs developed exclusively for status offenders may be predicated on faulty assumptions.

It is important for both theoretical and policy reasons to partition aggregate crime rates into measures of prevalence (reflecting breadth of participation) and incidence (reflecting intensity of participation by those who do engage in crime). Prevalence is measured by accumulating over age the probability of first arrest as a function of age. Incidence is estimated by the probability of recidivism in a feedback model. The probability of a male in U.S. cities over 250,000 population ever being arrested for an index crime is estimated as 25 percent, and is quite different for black males (51 percent) and white males (14 percent). The probability of re-arrest for an index crime is estimated as 85 to 90 percent for both whites and blacks. These estimates highlight the breadth of involvement in index-crime arrests, and suggest that the large differences in race-specific arrest rates are predominantly attributable to difference in participation, and not to differences in recidivism for those who do get involved.

This article examines the business of three United States Courts of Appeals over the course of their history. The courts selected for study were the northeastern Second Circuit, the deep south Fifth Circuit, and the west coast Ninth Circuit. A random sample of 50 cases was drawn for each circuit for every fifth fiscal year beginning with 1895 and ending with 1975. The sample years were aggregated into four time periods: 1895-1910, 1915-1930, 1935-1955, and 1960-1975. The business of the three circuits was found to have changed substantially from the 1895-1910 time period to the modern period. In the earlier years the circuits had small proportions of criminal cases—with the exception of the Second Circuit—a significant portion of real property cases, substantial proportions of business cases, and significant proportions of tort cases. By the 1960-1975 period a sizable proportion of the business of all three circuits was devoted to criminal and other public-law type cases; there were negligible proportions of real property cases, relatively small proportions of business cases, and even smaller proportions of tort cases. Public disputes replaced private disputes as the major source of the courts' business, and over time there has been a convergence among the circuits in the mix of cases coming to them.

In 1969 Nathan Hakman published a report of his investigation of the role of interest groups in Supreme Court litigation. He found that interest groups filed amicus curiae briefs in only 18.6 percent of the 1,175 “noncommercial” cases decided by the Supreme Court between 1928 and 1966. Participation as amicus curiae illustrates only one aspect of litigation activity, and at that one of the most limited, but Hakman took this as a reliable indicator that interest group activity in the courts was less frequent than was commonly supposed. Based on these findings, Hakman attacked the view that amicus participation was a form of political action. Such a view, he argued, was mere “scholarly folklore” (Hakman, 1969: 199).

This research note summarizes some of our work on the allocation of maintenance (alimony payments) in Belgium, specifically the obligation of a husband to provide maintenance and the entitlement of his former wife to receive it following a divorce grounded in fault. The converse situation of a maintenance-obliged wife and a maintenance-entitled husband occurs only rarely, and it is excluded from our study. So too, we do not consider the obligations of either or both divorced parents to provide maintenance for their children.