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28 J. Res. Crime & Delinquency 3 (1991)

handle is hein.journals/jrcd28 and id is 1 raw text is: EDITOR'S COMMENTS The public's mood and official response to it in the past decade have resulted in many more people being incarcerated in America's prisons for much longer periods. At the same time, national and state legislators, gover- nors, and the president strain to curtail expenditures and minimize tax increases in the face of a never ending process of building costly prisons. Thus jurisdictions are searching for means, acceptable to the public, of rationing prison space as some are now considering rationing health services. The idea of selective incapacitation articulated most prominently by Peter Greenwood several years ago, has become increasingly appealing. In brief, the notion rests on the belief that we should incarcerate primarily the relatively small group of individuals - the career criminals - who commit most of our crimes and avoid imprisoning most other convicted persons, at least as much as we can feasibly, and instead develop community measures to deal with them. This proposal rests on two key assumptions: First, we can identify such career criminals with some precision, and second, we can design policies that will result in isolating those so identified with minimal additional expense - perhaps even less costly - than at present. The first article in this issue is by Smith, Visher, and Jarjoura, who examine the arguments of those who suggest that different explanatory models are needed to identify the defining characteristics of persons likely to pursue lengthy and frequent criminal careers as distinct from those who chose to commit crime in the first instance. Smith et al. also deal with the opposite argument that a unitary theory of crime propensity is sufficient to explain various levels of persistent and harmful criminal behavior. Examin- ing three prominent theories, they conclude that there may be a benefit to relate independent variables to specific dimensions of offending, such as persistence. The policy of selective incapacitation may not turn on this debate in the short term, but it probably will in the longer term. The research design employed by Smith et al. and their conclusions are important contributions to furthering our understanding of these issues. Bernard and Ritti, in the second article, move away from the theoretical to the policy level. Using the well-known 1972 Wolfgang et al. birth cohort data, they estimate what the results would have been if various incapacitat- from the SAGE Social Science Collections. All Rights Reserved.

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