No description available.

The aim of my essay was to describe the connection and find similarities between criminal persons childhood and how they ended up in crime. The aim has also been to find out whether tougher punishments would help to reduce crime in society, based on the perspective of former criminals. To achieve my aim, I formulated two research questions that deal with excriminals’ experiences. I chose to do a semi-structured, qualitative investigation grounded on six deep interviews with former criminals. The theory I used was grounded theory, which involves empirical research with observations of real stories as a source of knowledge. The result of my essay showed that there are some risk factors that can cause a person to end up in crime. All interviewees have had one or a few of these risk factors. The results also showed that none of the interviewees believed that it would help to have tougher punishments as a measure to reduce crime in society.

In today's technologically sophisticated world, people have many electronic methods of exchanging information and communicating. Unfortunately, these methods are not always used in positive ways; they can also be used to convey aggression and bullying. Recently, such acts of aggression have been labeled many things from cyberbullying to online social cruelty, and have received much media attention due to their tragic consequences including victim suicide. This study explores the impact of victim and bully gender in relation to perception of bully likability, punishment, impact on victim, and victim responses. Participants reviewed a Cyberbullying scenario in which the gender of the victim and perpetrator were manipulated. All scenarios were identical except for the gender pairs of the victim and perpetrator: Male (bully)-Male (victim), Male (bully)-Female (victim), Female (bully)-Female (victim), and Female (bully)-Male (victim). Participants then completed the Likability of Bully, Punishment for Bully, Impact on Victim, and Victim Response scales. A main effect of gender on the Punishment Scale for the gender of bully indicated that participants desired lighter punishment for females independent of the gender of the victim. The results of this study suggest that increasing awareness of the seriousness of all cyberbullying regardless of gender of bully is important.

No description available.

Previous research has examined certainty and severity of punishment as serving a deterrent function. This research examines the effects of economic, cultural, and social capital, as well as the effects of certainty, severity, and prior punishment on likelihood of re-offending. Data collected at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility suggest that traditional deterrence indicators are insufficient for predicting likelihood of re-offending. This research finds that prior punishment increases likelihood of re-offending, a finding completely counter to that of traditional deterrence. Re-offending may be best understood by considering the effects of punishment on increasing prison capital and decreasing real world capital. The argument is that inmates consider their potential in the real world as compared to that in a prison when reporting likelihood of re-offending. Such considerations should better explain likelihood of re-offending as compared to traditional deterrence indicators, such as certainty, severity, and prior punishment.

No description available.

The death penalty has been an area of focus in several academic disciplines, yet modest literature has been generated which examines the sanction from a sociological perspective. Most of the sociological interest in capital punishment is directed at examining and explaining racial disparities in sentencing, its effectiveness as a deterrent to violent crime, or its use as a mode of formal social control. Although execution methods have changed frequently over time in the United States, there is a paucity of research examining this phenomenon through a sociological lens. The extant literature identifies changing societal ideologies regarding the use of institutionalized violence as the impeti for legislative shifts in methods of execution. While these studies are useful in partially explaining method changes through time, there is a dearth of work which specifically addresses the dialectical process by which meanings attached to methods of punishment are socially constructed and negotiated, what social agents are engaged, and how this process occurs with respect to historical context. This dissertation examines the legislative changes in execution methods at two points in time in North Carolina's history, 1935 and 1983. Grounded in a hybrid theoretical foundation of functionalist and interactionist perspectives, this study is a qualitative analysis of historical primary and secondary data. One goal of this project is to identify how social context informed ideologies of state-sanctioned death. Furthermore, this study attempts to reveal some of the various social agents who engaged in the process of negotiating meaning, how this process manifested itself, and how historical context may have influenced differences in legislative motive during the two transition years. A comparative analysis of the data reveals that deference to the institutions of science, technology, and medicine was vital to the process of socially reconstructing and redefining methods of execution at both points in time. However, findings also indicate that public exposure to an existing method of execution as well as historically relative ideologies concerning state-sanctioned death greatly affect how the negotiation of meaning transpires. / Ph. D.

This thesis explores the nature of white-slave relations in the U.S. South during the thirty-year period that preceded the Civil War. It asks one central question: How did slaveowners, overseers, patrollers, and nonslaveowners attempt to physically and psychologically punish slaves and control their behavior? An analysis of the Virginia ex-slave narratives serves as a case study of the ways white agents of authority treated slaves, and state slave codes and state supreme court cases provide information on the legal aspects of slave treatment and limits on white behavior. Additional sources that shed light on antebellum race relations include fugitive slave accounts, slave autobiographies, articles in Southern agricultural journals by owners and overseers, and white travelers’ accounts. An examination of these sources shows that slave treatment was fundamentally coercive; that the threat of violence by whites against slaves was an inseparable element of all white-slave interactions; that slave punishment and abuse was frequent and ritualized; that white and slave perceptions of slave punishment differed significantly; and that slaves influenced white behavior, refused to legitimize white authority, and actively resisted abuse. / Master of Arts

Text in Afrikaans / Summaries in English and Afrikaans / Die Konstitusionele Hof het ir:i S v Makwanyane besluit dat die doodstraf nie versoenbaar is met die Grondwet nie en dit ongeldig verklaar. Die kritiek teenoor die regbank en die openbare mening oor die doodstraf was nog altyd s6 prominent dat die hof nie anders kon as om hieraan aandag te skenk nie. Die hof besluit dat die openbare mening nie 'n rol speel in die hersieningsproses nie. In hierdie verhandeling word die hof se standpunte en red es daarvoor ontleed. Ek kom tot die gevolgtrekking dat die hof korrek bes I is het. Die open bare mening is onseker. Daar is 'n verskil tussen die aard van die waardes in die Grondwet en die aard van die open bare mening. Die kritiek op die uitspraak is te wyte aan die gebrek aan insig en begrip onder lede van die gemeenskap oor die nuwe bestel en die rol van die regbank daarin. / The Constitutional Court in S v Makwanyane declared that the death penalty was inconsistent with the Constitution. The criticism on courts and the public opinion on the death penalty have been so severe that the court could not have but considered these issues. The court concluded that public opinion is not relevant in constitutional review. In this dissertation, I analyze the court's viewpoints and the reasons therefor. My conclusion is that the court made the correct decision. The public opinion is uncertain, and differs from values. The judgment is criticised due to a lack of understanding amongst the public as to the meaning of the new dispensation and the role of our courts therein. / Law / Thesis (LL.M.)--Universiteit van Suid-Afrika, 1996.

Education within South Africa has undergone significant change within a short period of time. This change has primarily been written in terms of human rights and the equitable distribution of educational resources. This has necessitated a paradigm shift for many teachers and the study explores some of the factors that have prevented teachers from experiencing a paradigm shift. The introduction of the South African Schools Act of 1996 heralded the start of the complete abolition of corporal punishment within all South African schools. The object of this investigation was to explore teachers' attitudes towards the abolition of corporal punishment and the factors that would contribute towards their attitude. The research explored whether the attitude of teachers, in relation to corporal punishment, had been influenced by the disruptive behaviour of pupils and their perceptions of the efficacy of alternate methods of behaviour management.