4 research outputs found
Empirical Legal Studies Before 1940: A Bibliographic Essay
The modern empirical legal studies movement has well-known antecedents in the law and society and law and economics traditions of the latter half of the 20th century. Less well known is the body of empirical research on legal phenomena from the period prior to World War II. This paper is an extensive bibliographic essay that surveys the English language empirical legal research from approximately 1940 and earlier. The essay is arranged around the themes in the research: criminal justice, civil justice (general studies of civil litigation, auto accident litigation and compensation, divorce, small claims, jurisdiction and procedure, civil juries), debt and bankruptcy, banking, appellate courts, legal needs, legal profession (including legal education), and judicial staffing and selection. Accompanying the essay is an extensive bibliography of research articles, books, and reports
The effects of custodial vs. non-custodial sentences on re-offending: A systematic review of the state of knowledge
As part of a broad initiative of systematic reviews of experimental or quasiexperimental
evaluations of interventions in the field of crime prevention and the
treatment of offenders, our work consisted in searching through all available databases
for evidence concerning the effects of custodial and non-custodial sanctions on reoffending.
For this purpose, we examined more than 3,000 abstracts, and finally 23
studies that met the minimal conditions of the Campbell Review, with only 5 studies
based on a controlled or a natural experimental design. These studies allowed, all in all,
27 comparisons. Relatively few studies compare recidivism rates for offenders
sentenced to jail or prison with those of offenders given some alternative to
incarceration (typically probation).
According to the findings, the rate of re-offending after a non-custodial sanction is
lower than after a custodial sanction in 11 out of 13 significant comparisons. However,
in 14 out of 27 comparisons, no significant difference on re-offending between both
sanctions is noted. Two out of 27 comparisons are in favour of custodial sanctions.
Finally, experimental evaluations and natural experiments yield results that are less
favourable to non-custodial sanctions, than are quasi-experimental studies using softer
designs. This is confirmed by the meta-analysis including four controlled and one
natural experiment. According to the results, non-custodial sanctions are not beneficial
in terms of lower rates of re-offending beyond random effects. Contradictory results
reported in the literature are likely due to insufficient control of pre-intervention
differences between prisoners and those serving “alternative” sanctions