Beverly A. Smith

Does the American experience with alcohol prohibition generalize to marijuana

It is common to compare contemporary legal prohibitions against drugs with the prohibition against alcohol in the 1930s. Making this analogy presumes similarities between the two prohibitions which have policy implicatioas for the current legal response to drugs. This study focuses on one drug, marijuana. Moonshiners of the 1930s are compared with contemporary domestic marijuana cultivators, the effects of alcohol prohibition are compared with the effects of prohibiting marijuana, and issues relevant to current marijuana policies are examined.

Literature in criminal justice education

Abstract Although generally accepted as an interdisciplinary field, criminal justice has focused on the social sciences. Criminal justice education, if it is to remain vital and growing, has to experiment with courses involving material beyond the social sciences. Using examples found in many law schools, criminal justice instructors can employ the art or humanity of literature in their classes. Fiction, especially short stories and one-act dramas, can be inserted into core courses or used as the basis for a special course on criminal justice and literature. The new approach offered by literature encourages students to reexamine various aspects of the criminal justice system.

Homicides by Males and Females in India—the Domestic Context

Using extensive interviews with 32 males and 32 females serving life sentences in Indian prisons for domestic‐related homicides, this study examines the cultural context in which those homicides took place. Compared to their male counterparts, female offenders had lower literacy rates, lower family incomes, minimal if any education, and lower employment skills. Male offenders killed siblings, parents, spouses, and children, while female offenders killed spouses, children, and adult daughters‐in‐law. Both males and females used knives or agricultural implements. Females were the only ones to use poison or drowning. No offender used a gun. The subordinate status of Indian women, the social taboos against female alcohol use and work outside the home, specific cultural traditions about marriage, and property disputes figured most prominently in these homicides.

Homicide in a ninteenth‐century rural community: The Talbott/bell case of 1879∗

Most criminal justice histories have focused on crime in the context of relatively large cities undergoing the effects of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. Many of those studies on urban crime and its processing have been done on an aggregate basis. We know relatively little about the nature of crime in rural areas. This study explores the most famous nineteenth‐century murder case in a rural Illinois county. The case involves the effects of the Civil War on post‐war crime patterns, issues of self‐defense and the carrying of concealed weapons, and the escalation of disputes from civil into criminal courts. The case eventually involved some of the most prestigious legal talent in the state who displayed a legal sophistication beyond that which many historians have outlined. And three change of venue trials led to a newspaper war that stretched across county Unes and showed the social and moral context of serious violent crime in the rural, nineteenth‐century Midwest.