scholarly journals The Effect of Mass Incarceration on Criminality in Colombia

Author(s):  
José Fernando Flórez

This study surveyed the literature on the expected and unexpected effects of incarceration before (deterrence), during (incapacitation), and after (after-effects) prison confinement occurs, through a selective search that favored the analysis of studies with an empirical focus in the national and comparative literature. Then, based on data provided by the National Penitentiary and Prison Institute (INPEC by its acronym in Spanish) and the National Police, the research evaluated the effect that mass incarceration for homicides, kidnappings, theft, and personal injuries had on Colombian criminality between 1994 and 2018 (a time in which the inmate population increased fourfold). The regression results suggested that incarceration decreased the number of homicides and kidnappings but increased theft and personal injuries. At the end, the article presents the theoretical developments that could explain those statistical results and makes recommendations for the strategic use of imprisonment and its deterrent potential in Colombia.

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Hagan ◽  
Gabriele Plickert ◽  
Alberto Palloni ◽  
Spencer Headworth

AbstractSociologists have neglected the politically channeled and racially connected role of leveraged debt in mass incarceration. We use qualitative and quantitative data from California, circa 1960–2000, to assess how Republican entrepreneurial leveraging of debt overcame contradictions between parochial preferences for punishment and resistance to paying taxes for building prisons. The leveraging of bond debt deferred and externalized the costs of building prisons, while repurposed lease revenue bonds massively enlarged and extended this debt and dispensed with the requirement for direct voter approval. A Republican-dominated punishment regime capitalized debt to build prisons in selected exurban Republican California counties with growing visible minority populations. We demonstrate that the innovative use of lease revenue bonds was the essential element that enlarged and extended funding of California prison construction by an order of magnitude that made this expansion a boom. With what Robert Merton called the consequences of imperious interest, this prison expansion enabled the imprisonment of an inordinately large and racially disproportionate inmate population.


This volume represents the first collection of essays devoted exclusively to Jacques Derrida's Death Penalty Seminars, conducted from 1999 to 2001. The volume includes essays from a range of scholars working in philosophy, law, Francophone studies, and comparative literature, including established Derridians, activist scholars, and emerging scholars. These essays attempt to elucidate and expand upon Derrida's deconstruction of the theologico-political logic of the death penalty in order to construct a new form of abolitionism, one not rooted in the problematic logics of sovereign power. These essays provide remarkable insight into Derrida’s ethical and political projects; this volume will not only explore the implications of Derrida’s thought on capital punishment and mass incarceration, but will also help to further elucidate the philosophical groundwork for his later deconstructions of sovereign power and the human/animal divide. Because Derrida is deconstructing the logic of the death penalty, rather than the death penalty itself, his seminars will prove useful to scholars and activists opposing all forms of state sanctioned killing. In compiling this volume, our goals were twofold: first, to make a case for Derrida's continuing importance in debates on capital punishment, mass incarceration, and police brutality, and second, to construct a new, versatile abolitionism, one capable of confronting all forms the death penalty might take.


1999 ◽  
Vol 173 ◽  
pp. 81-86
Author(s):  
S. Berinde

AbstractThe first part of this paper gives a recent overview (until July 1st, 1998) of the Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) database stored at Minor Planet Center. Some statistical interpretations point out strong observational biases in the population of discovered NEAs, due to the preferential discoveries, depending on the objects’ distances and sizes. It is known that many newly discovered NEAs have no accurately determinated orbits because of the lack of observations. Consequently, it is hard to speak about future encounters and collisions with the Earth in terms of mutual distances between bodies. Because the dynamical evolution of asteroids’ orbits is less sensitive to the improvement of their orbital elements, we introduced a new subclass of NEAs named Earth-encounter asteroids in order to describe more reliably the potentially dangerous bodies as impactors with the Earth. So, we pay attention at those asteroids having an encounter between their orbits and that of the Earth within 100 years, trying to classify these encounters.


1979 ◽  
Vol 40 (C2) ◽  
pp. C2-420-C2-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Endo ◽  
M. Harada ◽  
Y. Sakai ◽  
H. Sano
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