Jeffrey A. Roth - Böcker

Volume II takes an in-depth look at the various aspects of criminal careers, including the relationship of alcohol and drug abuse to criminal careers, co-offending influences on criminal careers, issues in the measurement of criminal careers, accuracy of prediction models, and ethical issues in the use of criminal career information in making decisions about offenders.

By focusing attention on individuals rather than on aggregates, this book takes a novel approach to studying criminal behavior. It develops a framework for collecting information about individual criminal careers and their parameters, reviews existing knowledge about criminal career dimensions, presents models of offending patterns, and describes how criminal career information can be used to develop and refine criminal justice policies. In addition, an agenda for future research on criminal careers is presented.

This volume contains commissioned reviews of research on biological influences on violent or aggressive behavior. The areas reviewed include genetic contributions to the probability of violent and related behaviors; brain structure and functioning as implicated in aggressive behavior; the roles of hormonal and neurological interactions in violent behavior; the neurochemistry of violence and aggression and its implications for the management of those behaviors; and dietary influences on violent behavior.

This book analyzes the consequences of violence and strategies for controlling them. Included are reviews of public perceptions and reactions to violence; estimates of the costs; the commonalities and complementarities of criminal justice and public health responses; efforts to reduce violence through the prediction and classification of violent offenders; and the relationships between trends in violence and prison population during a period of greatly increased use of incarceration.

This volume examines social influences on violent events and violent behavior, particularly concentrating on how the risks of violent criminal offending and victimization are influenced by communities, social situations, and individuals; the role of spouses and intimates; the differences in violence levels between males and females; and the roles of psychoactive substances in violent events.

By conservative estimates, more than 16,000 violent crimes are committed or attempted every day in the United States. Violence involves many factors and spurs many viewpoints, and this diversity impedes our efforts to make the nation safer. Now a landmark volume from the National Research Council presents the first comprehensive, readable synthesis of America's experience of violence--offering a fresh, interdisciplinary approach to understanding and preventing interpersonal violence and its consequences. Understanding and Preventing Violence provides the most complete, up-to-date responses available to these fundamental questions: * How much violence occurs in America? * How do different processes--biological, psychosocial, situational, and social--interact to determine violence levels? * What preventive strategies are suggested by our current knowledge of violence? * What are the most critical research needs? Understanding and Preventing Violence explores the complexity of violent behavior in our society and puts forth a new framework for analyzing risk factors for violent events.From this framework the authors identify a number of "triggering" events, situational elements, and predisposing factors to violence--as well as many promising approaches to intervention. Leading authorities explore such diverse but related topics as crime statistics; biological influences on violent behavior; the prison population explosion; developmental and public health perspectives on violence; violence in families; and the relationship between violence and race, ethnicity, poverty, guns, alcohol, and drugs. Using four case studies, the volume reports on the role of evaluation in violence prevention policy. It also assesses current federal support for violence research and offers specific science policy recommendations. This breakthrough book will be a key resource for policymakers in criminal and juvenile justice, law enforcement authorities, criminologists, psychologists, sociologists, public health professionals, researchers, faculty, students, and anyone interested in understanding and preventing violence.

Not everyone complies with the United States Internal Revenue Code. Many individuals and organizations fail to file timely tax returns, assess their tax liability correctly, or pay taxes when due. To improve compliance, tax administrators must choose among alternative strategies, such as increasing evaders' risks of punishment, motivating social norms, and making compliance easier.Concerned with these choices, the IRS asked the National Academy to assess previous research on the determinants of taxpayer compliance and to highlight the most promising areas for future research. The Academy's panel authored the two-volume Taxpayer Compliance. Volume 2 is a collection of eight background papers commissioned by the panel. They present novel theories and research ideas proposed by scholars from many social sciences to improve the understanding of taxpayer compliance. The varied topics addressed include: the political and institutional context of the American tax system; a typology of noncompliance; a study of the way the visibility of noncompliance affects patterns of taxpaying in the house-painting profession; and theories of ways tax practitioners may affect their clients' compliance. These papers not only illustrate for a general audience what various disciplines can add to knowledge but also suggest for specialized researchers the opportunities that taxpayer compliance offers for extending and testing the theories of their disciplines. Taxpayer Compliance will be a valuable reference for tax practitioners and others concerned with noncompliance problems, and for scholars and students of law and sociology, political science, social psychology, and economics.