LFB Scholarly Publishing, LLC

Domestic violence; legal sanctions and recidivism rates among male perpetrators.

Cosimo (PhD, U. of North Texas) presents a study that examines recidivism rates of men from one Texas county who are involved with the civil and criminal courts for domestic violence against their female intimate partners, with all of the men in the sample having been court ordered to attend a particular battering intervention program. In addition to assessing the impact of the battering intervention program, Cosimo assesses three factors she feels have been neglected in the literature: the impact of cumulative civil and criminal legal sanctions imposed in response to a single offense of domestic violence; the opportunity to recidivate; and the effects of legal sanctions on non-recidivism lengths of time. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Ethnic identification among urban Latinos; language and flexibility.

Negrón (anthropology, U. of Massachusetts) explores the phenomenon of ethnic flexibility, "the use of distinct ethnic categories or distinct levels of a category across social contexts," among Latinos of New York City. Her ethnographic study is guided by three main research issues: the factors that lead individuals to ethnic flexibility, the conditions under which individuals switch ethnic identification, and how ethnic flexibility is experienced in everyday contexts. Her analysis is based on "shadowing" observation of subjects' daily lives as informed by pre-observation contextual interviews on life histories and personal social networks and linguistic analysis of subjects' uses of language in the process of ethnic switching. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Increased surveillance of sex offenders; impacts on recidivism.

This study by Williams-Taylor (director of program planning, Children's Service Council of Palm Beach County, Florida) explores recidivism rates of individuals assigned to an intensive supervision and management program for high-risk sex offenders. The study reviews risk factors and various types of recidivism, compliance with "Megan's Law" sex-offender registration requirements, and models for differentiating between high-risk to low-risk to reoffend or abscond from registration. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Juvenile homicide; fatal assault or lethal intent?

Focusing on urban street killing, Warley (social work, California State U., Los Angeles) examines pathways to homicide for adolescent male offenders as a means to understand the process. She documents key situational factors, including intent to do harm, the type of weapon, motive, offenders' perception of victim-precipitation, social audience effects, and systemic drug-relatedness, as well as the severity of outcome and the relationship between structural-cultural variables like race/ethnicity. She also considers neighborhood violence and drug trafficking; availability of guns in the neighborhood; association with violent peers; gun ownership, carrying, and use; and involvement in drug trafficking. The study ends with a discussion of developing violence prevention and intervention strategies. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Prison rape; law, media, and meaning.

Smyth (sociology, Susquehanna U.) compares two types of public discourse in the United States about prison rape — in print news media and appellate court opinions — during the years 1969 and 2006. He conducts a frame analysis of each discourse, identifying and coding cultural "scripts" associated with different ways of framing prison rape in such a way as to allow quantitative analysis of how these cultural objects varied over time as well as interpretive content analysis. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Restorative justice; theories and practices of moral imagination.

Suggesting that the repeated failure of criminal and juvenile justice systems to live up to their purported goals over many decades is a product of a failed rehabilitative and retributive ideologies and practices of justice, Levad (moral theology, U. of St. Thomas) argues that the incorporation of restorative justice principles and practices (aiming to "repair the harm") can help to overcome some of the problems inherent in our justice system. She provides an assessment of restorative justice from her perspective as a Christian social ethicist, emphasizing the role of ethical discernment in the practices of restorative justice versus more common sentencing procedures. This emphasis on ethical discernment, she argues, allows for a greater realization of justice (defined in terms of equity) in response to particular cases of crime. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Student First Amendment speech and expression rights; armbands to bong hits.

Part of a series on the interactive relationships between law and society, this small volume explores issues of freedom of speech and expression relating to students in public schools. Bracketing the discussion between the Supreme Court's affirmation of student political expression rights in the Vietnam era Tinker vs. Des Moines Ind. Sch. Dist. and the recent decision that student in Alaska were not protected in waving a "Bong Hits For Jesus" sign at a school function, the work explores the limits on free speech imposed in the details of Tinker and recent development in the scope of student protected free speech. Ramey is a lawyer and educator working in Kansas City Missouri. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)