An integrative review of South Africa’s approach to victim support

This integrative review seeks to consider the evidence on how crime victims’ rights are served within South Africa’s criminal justice system. Victims view criminal proceeding as the means through which justice for the harms they suffered can be obtained. Such aspirations are often misplaced since criminal proceedings are a legal process between the state and accused with the sole purpose of determining guilt or innocence. As such, the concerns of victims are secondary. Victim’s rights in South Africa was only truly acknowledged during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1995. South Africa’s victim empowerment policy is underpinned by restorative justice principles. Contradictory to legal procedures, restorative justice is not offender-driven, but aims to elevate the role of crime victims in the criminal justice system.     

Homicide and property crime: The relationships to anomie

Sociological explanations of crime have given considerable attention to Merton's anomie theory without systematically testing it. This paper tests Merton's theory through operationalizing anomie in terms of the degree of inequality in the distribution of income in each of the 50 states. A multiple regression analysis determines that while income inequality is significantly related to the rate of homicide, it is not significantly related to the rate of property crime. A preliminary cross-national analysis of 20 nations replicates this same general finding. The results suggest that a relatively large gap between material success and the means to success is likely to result in crimes of violence rather than property crime once we control the influence of other variables.     

Born to kill? A critical evaluation of homicide adaptation theory

Given the enormous harm that results from the intentional killing of humans by other humans, the development of etiological theories of homicide is an important task. Homicide Adaptation Theory (HAT) is one such attempt to explain why homicide occurs. In short, the proponents of HAT propose that humans possess a number of specific, evolved adaptations for killing that have been selected for because they managed to successfully solve recurrent adaptive problems in our ancestral past. In this paper it is argued that, although evolutionary approaches can potentially advance our understanding of homicide in important ways, the available evidence does not support the existence of specific adaptations for killing in humans. Specifically, I argue that the proponents of HAT have not provided: (a) a thorough analysis of the evolutionary costs and benefits of killing; (b) evidence for ‘special design’ features of homicide; or (c) a systematic comparative appraisal of killing among different species. Given this lack of evidence, HAT suffers in terms of its explanatory worth, relative to alternative evolutionary hypotheses, such as the idea that homicide is a by-product of other evolved adaptations.     

Social Class and Attitudes toward Education

ABSTRACT

The current study was conducted on 60 Israeli female inmates. Our aim was to examine the differences among women convicted for drug, violence, and fraud offenses by socio-demographic variables and self-control and aggression levels. Results revealed that the drug group was characterized by measures attributed to chronic delinquency, and the fraud group was found to fit the pathway to low crime. At the same time, the violence group was not characterized by any of these patterns. The findings were discussed in relation to their theoretical contribution and applicability.