<p><p><p><p>The purpose of this study was to gain more knowledge of which discourses dominate the courts’ decisions concerning sentences for young sexual offenders. The issues touched upon were which circumstances the courts find important and which discourses reflect those circumstances when deciding on sentences for young sexual offenders as well as how children that commit crimes are constructed by the court. The study looked at cases of sexual offence where the offender was between 15 and 17 years old, and was based on judgements established at the Stockholm district courts in 2007 and 2008. The method used was content analysis, both manifesto and latent. By using content analysis the information was structured into a manageable basis for the following discourse analysis, which was implemented according to the theory for this study described in King and Piper’s (1995) book How the Law Thinks About Children. Discourse analysis gave an insight into which discourses are most prominent in verdicts against young sexual offenders. The results show that the social services’ recommendations are not given much importance in the courts’ decisions of suitable sentences for young sexual offenders. A majority of the youths were sentenced to criminal punishment such as a youth community order service and a youth detention order. Factors of particular importance in the verdicts are the specifics of the crime, whether or not the offenders understood or should have understood that they were committing a crime, responsibility, age, consent, suitable sentences as well as the credibility and reliability of given statements. The young defendants were constructed by the courts as criminals with regard to the criminal act and the youths’ responsibility for the action. The offenders’ personal and social situation was not given particular importance.</p></p></p></p>

This thesis assesses the mitigating impact of repentance upon the fixed punishments for brigandage (hiraba), theft, and the accusation of fornication (qadhf) under Islamic law, focusing on classical sources of Qur'anic exegesis (tafsir), law (fiqh), and legal theory (usul al-fiqh). It examines and compares the opinions of jurists and exegetes who are not affiliated with a school of law as well as jurists who belong to any of the eight legal schools--namely the Hanafis, Malikis, Shafi`is, Hanbalis, Zahiris, Zaydis, Imamis, and Ibadis. This thesis demonstrates that the mitigating impact of repentance upon the fixed punishments for brigandage, theft, and qadhf constitutes a case of casuistry as jurists do not assign legal significance to the concept of repentance in all of these three cases. Furthermore, the legal tradition on the mitigating impact of repentance upon fixed punishments shows a high degree of commonality that transcends school affiliation and theological orientation.

In the literature on contests, punishments have received much less attention than prizes. One possible reason is that punishing the bottom player(s) in a contest where all contestants are not allowed to quit, while effective in increasing contestants' total effort, often violates individual rationality constraints. But what will happen in an open contest where all potential contestants can choose whether or not to participate? In chapter 1, we study a model of this type and allow the contest designer to punish the bottom participant according to their performances. We conclude that punishment is often not desirable (optimal punishment is zero) when the contest designer wants to maximize the expected total effort, while punishment is often desirable (optimal punishment is strictly positive) when the contest designer wants to maximize the expected highest individual effort. In the literature on imperfectly discriminating contests, researchers normally assume that the contest designer has a certain level of accuracy in choosing the winner, which can be represented by the discriminatory power r in the Power Contest Success Function (the Power CSF, proposed by Tullock in 1980). With symmetric contestants, it is well known that increasing accuracy (r) always increases total effort when the pure-strategy equilibrium exists. In chapter 2, we look at the cases where the contestants are heterogeneous in ability. We construct an equilibrium set on r > 0, where a unique pure-strategy equilibrium exists for any r below a critical value and a mixed-strategy equilibrium exists for any r above this critical value. We find that if the contestants are sufficiently different in ability, there always exists an optimal accuracy level for the contest designer. Additionally, as we increase the difference in their abilities, the optimal accuracy level decreases. The above conclusions provide an explanation to many phenomena in the real world and may give guidance in some applications. In chapter 3, we propose the Power Contest Defeat Function (the Power CDF)which eliminates one player out at a time over successive rounds. We show that the Power CDF has the same good qualities as the Power Contest Success Function (the Power CSF) and is more realistic in some cases. We look at both the Power CSF mechanism (selecting winners in sequence) and the Power CDF mechanism (selecting losers in sequence) and show that punishments increase expected total e¤orts signi cantly. More interestingly, we also find that when the contestants' effort levels are different, the Power CDF mechanism is more accurate in finding the correct winner (the one who makes the greatest effort) and the Power CSF mechanism is more accurate in finding the correct loser (the one who makes the smallest effort).

Throughout his work, Kant regularly glosses ‘morality’ (and cognate expressions) as ‘worthiness to be happy’ (Würdigkeit glücklich zu sein). As a rule, Kant’s commentators do not find this remarkable. Correctly understood, however, Kant’s gloss on ‘morality’ is remarkable indeed. This thesis shows why. In it, I argue that whenever we encounter Kant’s gloss, we are faced with an implicit, durable cluster of unjustified commitments; that these commitments both antedate and survive his ‘critical period’; that they are fundamentally practical in nature (i.e., that they are unexamined commitments to particular practices); and that these commitments entail a number of problematic theological consequences. I argue, in particular, that Kant’s gloss is a habit that signals, obscurely and implicitly, his antecedent commitments to the practice of capital punishment, on the one hand, and to a particular set of practical attitudes towards the happiness and unhappiness of immoral agents, on the other. I show that this habit has key implications for Kant’s thinking about the agent that he calls ‘God.’ My point of departure is Kant’s claim, in his Religion, that the human being’s particular deeds are imputable to her ‘all the way down,’ only on condition that the underlying ‘disposition’ (Gesinnung) from which they arise (according to their kind, qua moral or immoral) is imputable to her as well—that is, only if her (im)moral character may be regarded as the upshot of, or in some sense identical to, an utterly unassisted, unmotivated, originary deed on her part. I argue that Kant evades the question whether we really are permitted, without further ado, to regard this disposition (and with it an agent’s deeds) as so imputable. He simply affirms his commitment to the practice of imputing particular deeds to particular agents and, with this affirmation, affirms that he takes the warrant that it requires (the imputability of ‘Gesinnung’) to be secure. I argue, then, that the theoretical significance of imputation, as expressed in this extraordinary, evasive leap, supervenes on the urgency of the commitments that are expressed in Kant’s habitual glossing of ‘morality’ as ‘worthiness to be happy.’ The practice for which we would lack a warrant if the human being’s character were not imputable to her is the imputation of her deeds under a description (of imputation) that has immediate reference to this same ‘one’s’ punishment—specifically and only, however, to the extent that Kant takes punishments to be justifiable in none but strictly retributivist terms. These stakes and the constraining role of Kant’s habitual gloss are clearest, I argue, in his thinking about the practice of putting murderers to death—a practice, I argue, that has both a political and an eschatological significance for him.

A functional analysis, conducted to assess the variables maintaining the chronic eye poking of a female diagnosed with profound mental retardation, indicated that the behavior persisted in the absence of social contingencies. A procedure was initiated in a training environment in which a punisher (mild reprimand) was delivered contingent on eye poking in the presence, but not in the absence, of a neutral stimulus (wristbands). Using a combination of multiple baseline and multielement experimental designs, it was determined that that eye poking was suppressed in the presence of the previously neutral stimulus, even in environments in which the reprimand contingency was inoperative.

The proportionality of punishment with regard to the wealth of an offender Master's Thesis Jakub Drápal Summary This thesis's main question is whether or not pecuniary punishments should be proportionate to the wealth of an offender. In the beginning the philosophical aspects and opinions of Law and Economics are examined. Jurisprudence of Czech Constitutional Court is discussed as administrative and penal law with their respective jurisdictions, Supreme Court, Supreme Administrative Court and Constitutional Court. Private and supranational law is also considered. The practical part of the thesis is composed of an analysis of the way how are pecuniary punishments in the form of day fines set at two Czech courts. The outcome is that the concept of day fines is not applied in the Czech Republic and is not accepted by the judges. Even though richer offenders get higher sentences than the poorer ones, in proportion to the punishment the richer receive much lesser sentence. To sum-up the findings, it is not possible today to give a unequivocal answer to the key question, whether pecuniary punishment should be proportionate to the wealth of an offender. It is possible in several areas of law, as it is possible to often choose, whether or not it is effective. General and abstract question however has to be left...

The primary goal of the thesis is to provide a comprehensive overview of legislation that concerns disciplinary offences. The thesis is mainly informative and descriptive. This structure seemed most suitable due to the complexity of the legislation regarding this topic. The thesis is divided into twelve sections. The introduction is followed by chapters on general theoretical description of the legislation. A particular attention is paid to an analysis of administrative offences and includes a salient passage that describes the distinction between administrative offences and criminal offences. The theoretical introduction also constitutes of a section focused on administrative punishment and the principles that may have an impact on it to the extent of judicial punishment. One part of the introduction also shows the deficiencies in administrative punishment which inevitably result from a rather complicated structure of this legislation. The fourth chapter is focused on administrative disciplinary offences in greater detail. Aside from a concise analysis of the superordinate term disciplinary offence, this part also addresses procedural adjustment of disciplinary proceedings and general features of disciplinary liability. The fifth chapter reflects the influence of European law on the legislation and...

Master of Arts / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / Spencer D. Wood / This thesis focuses on how citizens engage in the punishment of criminals in their everyday lives through means that seem neutral and largely invisible. It is at a distance that citizens are able to voyeuristically make sense of punishment, while using their position of privilege to engage in individualistic judgment. The consumption of punishment by everyday citizens is often experienced in a variety of forms, such as watching television, navigating the internet, playing video games, reading periodicals, and touring prisons. These experiences amount to a set of practices that tend to both exclude and punish. Each of these practices provide opportunities for the researcher interested in understanding penal spectatorship to observe the everyday consumption of punishment. The focus of this research project seeks to untangle the extent to which citizens engage in multiple forms of penal spectatorship in their everyday lives. One media form which encompasses aspects of the penal spectatorship theory is a mug shot newspaper called The Slammer. This project asks specific questions about The Slammer, in addition to more general questions about penal spectatorship. Specifically, I utilize content analysis to provide a descriptive context regarding the perceived gender and race among mug shots on the front cover of the magazine. Second, a survey was administered to 15,000 undergraduate students at Kansas State University for the purposes of measuring their exposure to mug shot newspapers, understanding of how citizens perceive the legitimacy of mug shot newspapers, their overall engagement in penal spectatorship avenues, whether the citizen feels punishment is justified and necessary for individuals who commit crimes, and finally citizen's opinions regarding the media portrayal of life in prisons and criminals and their crimes. In addition, the survey is comprised of three versions in order to conduct an experiment. Depending on the version of the survey, respondents were either given accurate, inaccurate, or no information pertaining to the mug shot individuals name and charged crime. The experiment seeks to measure respondents' perceptions of the individuals portrayed in The Slammer mug shots and the factors that may influence their perceptions. Furthermore, I work to develop composite indicators of key theoretical concepts developed among cultural criminologists. The results provide empirical evidence consistent with theorized overall growth in penal spectatorship.

Child maltreatment is a significant public health issue. Reducing prevalence of coercive parenting is one means to reducing risk of maltreatment and negative developmental outcomes for children. Parental use of physical punishment has been associated with adverse consequences in childhood and adulthood. Parent education programs, such as the Positive Parenting Program (Triple P), that promote alternatives to using physical punishment with children may reduce coercive parenting. In this study, parental use of physical punishment, non-physical forms of punishment, and non-punitive parenting responses were compared before and after parents attended Level 2 Triple P parent education seminars. International Parenting Survey-Canada (IPS-C) data were used to examine Belsky’s (1984) theoretical proposition that parental factors are the strongest predictor of parenting behaviour followed by contextual and child factors. Independent samples t-tests, Wilcoxon Signed Rank Tests, and a series of regression models were used to examine the study’s hypotheses. A total of 27 parents attended the Triple P sessions. Parental use of physical punishment decreased on only one of the four physical punishment items (shaking) post- intervention. Although there were no significant differences in overall use of non-physical forms of punishment and non-punitive parenting strategies pre and post-intervention, there were significant increases in frequency of use of individual scale items pre- to post-intervention. IPS-C sample of 2,340 Canadian parents was used to examine Belsky’s postulate. Results were mixed and provided partial support for the postulate. Child behaviour problems, participation in parent education programs, parent employment status, and parent age predicted coercive parenting. Findings highlight the need to further examine these hypotheses. / October 2016

This paper thoroughly examines the thesis film, Blood in the Grass. Each area of the film's production is carefully analyzed, including writing, directing, production design, cinematography, editing, sound, and technology and workflow. In addition to these areas, the background and ideology of the filmmaker provides a context for the choices made in production. This overall analysis discusses the effectiveness of the goals set by the filmmaker for the film to be an emotionally effective commentary on capital punishment, and to be conducive to the short film medium.