criminal

Would Victims Be Better Off if They Were Armed? People buy firearms for a number of reasons: to collect them, to use them for target practice and sport shooting, to hunt game, and for self- protection. Gun culture is deeply rooted in the American experience, beginning with the day the first settlers arrived to clear […]

TOWARD COUNTERING CRIMINAL VIOLENCE WITH FORCEFUL RESPONSES The Legitimate Use of Force in Self-Defense A sixth-grader is going door to door, selling chocolates for a school fundraiser. A man sitting on his porch agrees to buy some candy and invites the girl inside while he gets some money. But then he whips out a knife

Writing and Rewriting the Law So That Crime Does not Pay In 1977, the New York State legislature passed a forfeiture of assets bill to prevent a vicious serial killer (cited in the first example above) from being showered with lucrative offers for book contracts, movie rights, and paid appearances to tell his inside story.

CONFISCATING PROFITS FROM NOTORIOUS CRIMINALS Six people are shot dead in ambushes and many others are wounded by a lone gunman who describes himself in letters to a journalist and notes left at crime scenes as a monster who is being driven by demons communicating through dogs to kill young women . Dubbed the “Son

Monitoring and Evaluating Compensation Programs Many arguments about the rightness of compensa- tion hinge on judgments about the type of financial help victims require and on assumptions about the ability of programs to meet these needs. Because many states have operated programs for several dec- ades, a substantial body of data is available for anal-

How Programs Operate: Similarities and Differences In all states plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, the ques- tion of whether to compensate victims has been answered for the time being. But the programs vary in many ways, reflecting the diversity in the traditions, populations, crime rates, and resources

The Debate over Compensation in the United States In the late 1950s, the question of compensation sur- faced in American law journals. Initially, distin- guished scholars raised many objections to the idea of having the government provide financial assistance to innocent individuals wounded or slain by crim- inals. But support for the notion of compensation

The History of Victim Compensation by Governments The earliest reference to governmental compen- sation for crime victims can be found in the ancient Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, which is considered to be the oldest written body of criminal law (about 1775 BC). The code instructed territorial governors to replace the lost property of someone who

RECOVERING LOSSES THROUGH VICTIM COMPENSATION PROGRAMS Most street crime victims never receive criminal court-ordered restitution for one obvious reason: The offenders are not caught and convicted. For a parallel reason, most victims never collect court- ordered civil judgments: The perpetrators cannot be identified or located and then successfully sued. Furthermore, rarely can a third party

Federal Crime Insurance Insurance companies make profits in two ways: They adjust their rates continuously so that they take in more money in premiums than they pay out in claims, and they invest the money paid by policyholders in order to collect interest, divi- dends, and rents. To contain costs and limit pay- outs, companies