Crime and punishment: psychology and book bans

Post excerpted from the Guardian by Dean Burnett:

Chris Grayling, UK justice minister, recently imposed a blanket ban on prisoners in England and Wales being sent books in the mail. Obviously the decision has been defended, being explained as part of a new regime of rewards and punishments (or is it to cut drug smuggling?) but many still see it as a needlessly harsh and unmotivated punishment for prisoners, so it has still backfired somewhat.

The suddenness of it does suggest that not a lot of thought has gone into this. Perhaps the policy is the result of some other factors? Is there a rumour going round that paper and ink are crucial ingredients in a type of moonshine? Has there been a dramatic rise in lethal paper-cuts in prisons? Maybe the policy was meant be the somewhat-obvious but well-meant “under no circumstances should prisoners receive bombs”, but an overzealous autocorrect caught the last word, and they decided to press ahead without proofreading?

Read more here.

'Dying Art?': Forensic Sketch Artists Face a Digital Future

From NBC News: 

The stranger wore scrubs when she plucked the 3-day-old newborn from a Texas hospital and hid her in a handbag. Lubbock police, with the aid of the infant’s family and surveillance, created a computer composite of the suspect for the public.

Then, a call came in. A witness who was there that early March morning in 2007 said the composite was wrong. Police summoned Suzanne Lowe Birdwell, a forensic sketch artist with the Texas Rangers, to help get it right.

“The woman said she was there in the maternity waiting room. She said the image they put on the television, the computer composite, looked like a white woman,” Birdwell recalled.

The suspect — later identified as Rayshaun Parson, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the kidnapping – was black. She had been caught within 24 hours of Birdwell’s sketch going out.

When digital devices fail to deliver, police still turn to the organic alternative of paper, pencil and a personal touch that a forensic sketch artist offers. It’s a skill that artists say has been drawn on less and less in a world where surveillance and cellphone cameras are ubiquitous, and computer programs can be cost-saving measures.

Read more here.

3 inventions that can catch you committing a crime

From Aljazeera's TechKnow Blog

To learn more about innovative crime scene investigation technology for this week’s “TechKnow,” contributor Crystal Dilworth visited John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Founded as the only liberal arts college in the U.S. with a criminal justice and forensics focus, students and professors at John Jay are developing and working with technological innovations that are the future of forensic investigation.

“This is the place to get educated in the field of criminology,” says “TechKnow” producer Mark Teague. “The college not only trains the crime fighters of the future, but their professors develop technologies and processes which law enforcement agencies will certainly use in the future.”
Here’s a look at some of the technology we got to see up close:

[1.] Panoramic 3D cameras
Panoramic 3D cameras are used to photograph the crime scene to capture every detail for further analyses.

...Find the rest here.

Study: Police see black children as less innocent and less young than white children

In a new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers asked college students and police officers to estimate the ages of young children who they were told had committed a crime (both misdemeanors and felonies). In both groups, respondents were far more likely to overestimate the ages of young black boys than young white boys; they were also less likely to view black children as innocent.

“Children in most societies are considered to be in a distinct group with characteristics such as innocence and the need for protection,” study author and professor of psychology at UCLA Phillip Atiba Goff said of the study. “Our research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent.”

Read the rest of the article for Salon Magazine here.


Full study available here.

Climate change may mean more crime

(Story excerpted from the Boston Globe) 

As the global climate changes around us, the potential effects tend to be discussed in familiar environmental terms: warmer average temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, rising seas.

But it can be difficult to imagine how exactly this altered climate will affect day-to-day life—how it might change the social fabric of, say, a relatively prosperous American city like Boston.

Increasingly, researchers are trying to draw out those scenarios, including ones that could come from a rise of just a few degrees in temperature. And a new study by an economist in Cambridge suggests that, even without utterly upending the world as we know it, projected climate change could have very concrete social effects indeed.

 Read the rest here.