Section 2 of the 1957 Homicide Act is indefensible: the concept of 'mental responsibility' is a hybrid which turns the psychiatrist witness either into a thirteenth juryman or a spare barrister. But reform does not lie along the lines suggested by the Butler Committee or the Criminal Law Revision Committee. The latter leaves the jury with insufficient guidance; the former returns to the bad eig...

The problem of mentally disordered remand prisoners is well recognised and has recently received much publicity. It is currently government policy to divert such offenders from the criminal justice system.' Possible solutions include cautioning by the police or psychiatric treatment either on a voluntary basis or as a civilly detained patient. Joseph and Potter described how mentally disordered...

Policy makers have several complementary approaches at their disposal with which to address crime and violence. Sector-specific approaches—such as criminal justice, public health, and conflict transformation/human rights—have a role to play, as do cross-sectoral approaches, such as crime prevention through environmental design and citizen security. The criminal justice approach is the most wide...

The current study recruited participants from among the prison inmates in Nigeria to determine the relative impacts of availability and use of weapons in their respective communities prior to incarceration as risk factors for criminal offending. Eight hundred and twenty one participants made up of those awaiting trial and convicts, ranging in age from 16 to 65 years (M= 30.4, SD= 7.6) were recr...

Racial profiling – the use of race, ethnicity, or national origin by law enforcement officials to make judgments of criminal suspicion – is assessed in terms of its effect on targeted populations and law enforcement efficiency. A mathematical model, comparing multiple profiling and nonprofiling simulated scenarios, is employed. This analysis indicates that racial profiling exacerbates incarcera...

Recent work has implicated negative attitudes toward blacks in support for toughened criminal-justice measures. This suggests that the issue of crime may be implicitly “racialized,” despite a lack of overt racial content. The present study examines the hypothesis that education may weaken the relationship between negative racial perceptions and crimerelated policy attitudes. In contrast to trad...