Joint criminal enterprise

The doctrine of joint criminal enterprise is in disarray. Despite repeated judicial scrutiny at the highest level, the doctrine's scope, proper doctrinal basis and function in relation to other modes of complicity remain uncertain. This article examines the doctrine's elements and underlying principles. It argues that while joint criminal enterprise is largely used to make individuals liable for offences committed by their associates in excess of the common criminal purpose, its proper function is to police the limits of associate liability and thus to exculpate rather than inculpate. The doctrine governs not only instances of accessorial liability; it also applies where the parties involved are joint principal offenders. As this puts into question the prevalent view that joint criminal enterprise is a form of secondary participation that results in accessorial liability, the article concludes that it is best seen as a doctrine sui generis.

Circles of support and accountability: criminal justice volunteers as the 'Deliberative public'

This paper provides a review of the role played by volunteers within one particular offender management and reintegration scheme in the United Kingdom. Circles of Support and Accountability (COSA) draw on the expertise of volunteer members of the public to create supportive monitoring frameworks around sex offenders following their release from prison. The paper presents evidence as to the motivations of these volunteers, and argues that they play a crucial role in the success of the scheme, as they provide an instrumentally-useful form of reintegrative social contact to a socially-excluded offender population, and perform a symbolically important role as representatives of the wider community in taking ownership of offender management practices on behalf of the wider society. This is particularly significant in grounding those processes in the communicative practices of the social sphere, providing powerful reasons for intervention that reinforce the work that COSA do.

Telefantasy tower blocks: space, place and social realism shake-ups in Misfits

This article considers the ways in which British youth telefantasy Misfits (E4, 2009–13) takes up and makes strange urban spaces familiar from social-realist narratives. Filmed on the sprawling East London estate, Thamesmead, the programme chronicles a group of young offenders who are given powers by a freak storm, turning them into ‘ASBO superheroes’. Misfits depends on its British urban landscapes for the assertion of its ‘authenticity’ within British youth television, using spaces and landscapes familiar from urban youth exploitation cinema and television's narratives of the underclass. After situating the series within existing cultural discourses and recent developments in social-realist representations, the article explores how Misfits disrupts what have become signifiers for the ‘real’ – the brutalism of housing estates, the grey of the concrete and sky – by making them strange, turning them into telefantasy. The series presents the estate as an uncanny place: the domestic, social-realist world shifted into a fantastical space by the storm. Through close analysis, this article explores how the familiar spaces become skewed and unsettling to match our protagonists' isolation, shifting bodies and scrambled sense of self.

Graceful remedies: understanding grace in the Catholic Church's treatment of clerical child sexual abuse

This article examines advocacy of Catholic restorative justice for clerical child sexual abuse from the standpoint of feminist criminological critiques of the use of restorative mediation in sexual offence cases. In particular, it questions the Catholic invocation of grace and forgiveness of survivors of abuse in light of critical feminist concerns about the exploitation of emotions in restorative practices, especially in regard to sexual and other gender-based offences. In the context of sexual abuse, the Catholic appeal to grace has the potential for turning into an extraordinary demand made of victims not only to rehabilitate offenders and the church in the eyes of the community, but also to work towards the spiritual absolution of the abuser. This unique feature of Catholic-oriented restorative justice raises important concerns in terms of feminist critiques of the risk of abuses of power within mediation, and is also incompatible with orthodox restorative justice theory, which, although it advocates a ‘spiritual’ response to crime, is concerned foremost with the rights, needs and experiences of victims.

A pontencialidade educativa da pena de prestação de serviços à comunidade

Este trabalho objetiva constatar se a pena de prestação de serviços à comunidade, quando aplicada, tem um papel educativo junto ao infrator beneficiário da medida, seja como substituta da pena privativa de liberdade, após a condenação, seja como medida alternativa, após transação penal em sede do Juizado Especial Criminal. Com base no conceito de educação apresentado pelo professor Paulo Freire, busca identificar, através de entrevistas com beneficiários, se existe um trabalho conscientizador ( mediante troca de experiências e atividades educativas) desenvolvido pelas instituições receptoras dos beneficiários da medida e, se a reinserção imediata do infrator na sociedade viabiliza essa conscientização sobre a sua conduta criminosa. Assim, pretende constatar se a referida medida tem apenas um caráter punitivo ou vem desenvolvendo uma função educativa durante a sua execução.

Essays in heterogeneous agent macroeconomics

This thesis is comprised of three chapters. The first article studies the determinants of the labor force participation of elderly American males and investigates the factors that may account for the changes in retirement between 1950 and 2000. We develop a life-cycle general equilibrium model with endogenous retirement that embeds Social Security legislation and Medicare. Individuals are ex ante heterogeneous with respect to their preferences for leisure and face uncertainty about labor productivity, health status and out-of-pocket medical expenses. The model is calibrated to the U.S. economy in 2000 and is able to reproduce very closely the retirement behavior of the American population. It reproduces the peaks in the distribution of Social Security applications at ages 62 and 65 and the observed facts that low earners and unhealthy individuals retire earlier. It also matches very closely the increase in retirement from 1950 to 2000. Changes in Social Security policy - which became much more generous - and the introduction of Medicare account for most of the expansion of retirement. In contrast, the isolated impact of the increase in longevity was a delaying of retirement. In the second article, I develop an overlapping generations model of criminal behavior, which extends prior research on crime by taking into account individuals' labor supply decisions and the stigma effect that affects convicted offenders, lowering their likelihood of employment. I use the model to guide a quantitative assessment of the determinants of crime and of a counterfactual experiment in which an income redistribution policy is thought as an alternative to greater law enforcement. The model economy considered in this paper is populated by heterogeneous agents who live for a realistic number of periods, have preferences over consumption and leisure, and differ in terms of their age, their skills as well as their employment shocks. In addition, savings may be precautionary and allow partial insurance against the labor income shocks. Because of the lack of full insurance, this model generates an endogenous distribution of wealth across consumers, enabling us to assess the welfare implications of the redistribution policy experiment. I calibrated the model using the US data for 1980 and then use the model to investigate the changes in criminality between 1980 and 1996. The main results that come out of this study are: 1) Law enforcement policy was the most important factor behind the fall in criminality in the period, while the increase in inequality was the most important single factor promoting crime; 2) Stigmatization is not a free-cost crime control policy; 3) Income redistribution can be a powerful alternative policy to fight crime. Finally, the third article studies the impact of HIV/AIDS on per capita income and education. It explores two channels from HIV/AIDS to income that have not been sufficiently stressed by the literature: the reduction of the incentives to study due to shorter expected longevity and the reduction of productivity of experienced workers. In the model individuals live for three periods, may get infected in the second period and with some probability die of Aids before reaching the third period of their life. Parents care for the welfare of the future generations so that they will maximize lifetime utility of their dynasty. The simulations predict that the most affected countries in Sub-Saharan Africa will be in the future, on average, thirty percent poorer than they would be without AIDS. Schooling will decline in some cases by forty percent. These figures are dramatically reduced with widespread medical treatment, as it increases the survival probability and productivity of infected individuals.

Conditional treatment and its effect on recidivism

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the effect of the 1985 ”Employment Services for Ex-Offenders��� (ESEO) program on recidivism. Initially, the sample has been split randomly in a control group and a treatment group. However, the actual treatment (mainly being job related counseling) only takes place conditional on finding a job, and not having been arrested, for those selected in the treatment group. We use a multiple proportional hazard model with unobserved heterogeneity for job seach and recidivism time which incorporates the conditional treatment effect. We find that the program helps to reduce criminal activity, contrary to the result of the previous analysis of this data set. This finding is important for crime prevention policy.

Essays on cartels and market distortions

This dissertation is a conjunction of three essays on the Industrial Organization field, this empirical work is applied to the Brazilian retail gasoline market. The first essay investigates the existence of spillover effects from cartel activity. The second essay relates the well-known economic puzzle of asymmetric cost pass through to prices with the existence of horizontal coordination - cartels - in the relevant market. Finally, the third essay investigates the effectiveness of antitrust interventions inside the offenders and the consequences of its disclosure in related markets.

Violência, mídia e juventude: análise sobre o discurso adotado pelo jornalismo impresso sobre a realidade violenta de jovens da periferia da cidade do Natal

The work that follows has as its main objective the analysis of the discourse of media, with emphasis on newspapers printed on acts and events involving young offenders. The speech adopted by columnists of newspapers, based on formulas and journalistic practices exist, allows the reader a view of what happened in detail. But this wealth of information, contradictorily, it seems not permit, much less to encourage reflection on the what is being read. All information contained in narrative journalism seem to point to the establishment of maintenance of speech reinante of violence and repression against young offenders, from, and generally in the vast majority of cases, from poor neighborhoods and suburbs of large cities. The whole range of such important issues directly related to violence committed by these young people does not appear, does not appear in the text journalism. Words such as "marginal", "square" reinforce prejudices, stigmas against the youth, putting the company on constant alert against such "criminals", "malandros." The result of the survey was partial, but can conclude about the importance of the media against those social phenomena that amedrontam the society at present

O adolescente em conflito com a lei e a escola: criminalização e inclusão perversa

This study aims to identify the relation between adolescents in conflict with the penal law, who were convicted to assisted freedom (a socio-educative measure applied by the Juvenile Justice system as a sanction to adolescent offenders), and the school. The research was developed in the Community-based Assisted Freedom Program of Pastoral do Menor , in Fortaleza (capital city of Ceará State, Brazil). The study has engaged 21 adolescents, eight program professionals, three members of the Center for Defense of Child Rights in Ceará, five teachers and eight school principals and education managers from the schools attended by the adolescents in the neighborhoods of Pirambu, Tancredo Neves, Jardim Iracema e Bom Jardim. It intends, based on dialectical and historical method, to define the investigated adolescents as persons with a very singular insertion into the social structures of neoliberal capitalism. Their adolescence is subject to consumerism appeals, to the limits imposed by these appeals and to perverse ways of insertion in the system, such as criminalization, segregation and marginalization. It reveals that the school attended by the adolescents reproduces such conditions of insertion. At the same time, these conditions are elements of identity, by which the adolescents are characterized.

Violência denunciada: ocorrências de maus tratos contra crianças e adolescentes registradas em uma unidade policial.

This study aimed to investigate the profile of the occurrence of abuse against children and adolescents. We analyzed the data recorded in police reports from the Department of Women's Defense, Araçatuba-SP, in 2008, relating to assault, victim-offender relationship, sociodemographic characteristics of offenders and victims, and victims' demand for health services. Among the accusations, there was a higher prevalence of physical abuse, being the residence the place of higher incidence of aggression. In most cases, the aggressor was the mother of the child, being the subject of aggression not reported, in most cases. Thus, we can define the profile of violent incidents against children, contributing to the visualization, knowledge and to deal with the problem.

Hydatidiform mole resulting from sexual violence

Background. Hydatidiform mole (HM) is characterized by abnormal proliferation of human trophoblast with producers functioning tissues of human chorionic gonadotropin. It can evolve with ovarian cysts tecaluteínicos, hypertension of pregnancy or hyperthyroidism. The incidence of HM is variable and its etiology poorly known, associated with nutritional factors, environmental, age, parity, history of HM, oral contraceptives, smoking, consanguinity or defects in germ cells. There is no reference in literature on HM resulting from sexual violence, objective of this report. Method. Description of two cases of HM among 1146 patients with pregnancy resulting from sexual violence treated at Hospital Pérola Byington, São Paulo, from July 1994 to August 2011. Results. The cases affected young, white, unmarried, low educated and low parity women. Sexual violence was perpetrated by known offenders unrelated to the victims, under death threat. Ultrasound and CT of the pelvis showed bulky uterus compatible with HM without myometrial invasion. One case was associated with theca lutein cysts. The two cases were diagnosed in the second trimester of pregnancy and evolved with hyperthyroidism. There was no hypertension, disease recurrence, metastasis or sexually transmitted infection. Conclusion. The incidence of HM was 1:573 pregnancies resulting from rape, within the range estimated for Latin American countries. Trophoblastic material can be preserved to identify the violence perpetrator, considering only the paternal HM chromosomes. History of sexual violence should be investigated in cases of HM in the first half of adolescence and women in a vulnerable condition. © 2012 Drezzet et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

Representação corporal de jovens em liberdade assistida na cidade de Araraquara-SP

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

O adolescente em liberdade assistida, genitores e avós: vinculação e práticas parentais

Pós-graduação em Psicologia do Desenvolvimento e Aprendizagem - FC

As condições institucionais de cumprimento das medidas socioeducativas aos adolescentes autores de infração

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)