Gordon Hawkins

Capital Punishment and the American Agenda

Foreword Preface Acknowledgments Part I. The Road to 1987: 1. The rest of the Western world 2. The long-term trend that failed 3. The death penalty and the Eighth Amendment 4. A punishment in search of a crime Part II. Futures and Consequences: 5. A game of chicken 6. Only in America: some notes on lethal injection 7. Life in a country that kills 8. The path to abolition Appendix: deterrence and the death penalty Index.

The New Mathematics of Imprisonment

This article examines recently published claims that increased use of imprisonment will produce dramatic economic savings. Part I shows that applying the estimates generated in “Making Confinement Decisions” to trends in the United States produces anomalous results. If the study estimates were correct, criminal justice expenditures would have decreased recently and crime rates would have dropped toward zero as the U.S. prison population has doubled. Part II of the article discusses some of the factors that produced wild overestimates of the incapacitative potential of expanding imprisonment.

Armed and Disarmed Police: Police Firearms Policy and Levels of Violence

This article describes an attempt to determine whether arming the police does or does not tend to increase the level of violence in a community. The study was carried out in Australia where states which are relatively homogeneous in respect of population composition, cul ture, and general regulations regarding the ownership and carrying of firearms, pursue quite different policies in regard to police armament. It was found that rates of killing and wounding by and of the police appear to be highest in those states which follow the American policy in relation to arming the police and lowest in those states which main tain the English tradition of a disarmed police force. Moreover, al though there is a direct correlation between the rate of killing police and the general homicide rate, the risk of being killed for policemen, which is always higher than for ordinary citizens, is relatively much higher in states which have adopted the American police firearms policy.

Book Reviews : Crime, Criminology and Public Policy: Essays in Honour of Sir Leon Rad zinowicz, Roger Hood (ed.). Pp. xxii, 650 New York, N.Y., The Free Press, 1975.

Radzinowicz, ensuring conformity with that rubric presents little difficulty for the editor. The reviewer, however, faced with the final product is in a less comfortable situation. Unless he happens to be a polymath, confrontation with a 650-page volume containing 29 original essays by acknowledged authorities, on topics as diverse as Criminality and Concordance among Danish Twins, Early Factory Legislation, Police Manpower Studies, The Mafia in Sicily, Sex Law Reform, The Right to Silence, Punishment in South Africa, The American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code, and Soviet Criminology 1928-1963, is an intimidating experience. Nevertheless, while it is impossible to detect any specific unitary theme