Fight, flight, and free will: The effect of trauma informed psychoeducation on perceived culpability and punishment for juvenile and adult offenders.

Justifications for punishment are generally grounded in retribution or consequentialism. Retribution is rooted in and legitimized by common sense notions of free will, claiming that offenders freely and rationally choose to commit a criminal act, and are therefore deserving of punishment. Consequentialism does not necessitate a reliance on a belief in free will, and views punishment as means to a valuable end.

The misjudgment of criminal responsibility.

Generally, a criminal statute must consist of two essential elements: a description of the forbidden act (actus reus) and a designation of a guilty mental state (mens rea). For a crime to be committed, an individual must commit the forbidden act with the culpable mental state. For any criminal act, both criminal liability and the possible punishment turn largely on retrospective judgments by legal decision-makers about what a defendant was or was not thinking at the time of committing the forbidden act.

Rethinking the voluntary act requirement: Implications from neuroscience and behavioral science research.

Criminal responsibility in the American legal system requires the presence of an actus reus-a harmful act that was committed voluntarily-and a mens rea, or guilty mind. Courts frequently consider questions surrounding mens rea but rarely question whether an act was committed voluntarily. Thus, courts presume that acts have been committed voluntarily and with an ill will; retribution, which serves the primary basis for punishment in the USA, relies on this presumption.

Concepts of social justice in community psychology: toward a social ecological epistemology.

In this paper we address the pervasive tendency in community psychology to treat values like social justice only as general objectives rather than contested theoretical concepts possessing identifiable empirical content. First we discuss how distinctive concepts of social justice have figured in three major intellectual traditions within community psychology: (1) the prevention and health promotion tradition, (2) the empowerment tradition, and most recently, (3) the critical tradition. We point out the epistemological gains and limitations of these respective concepts and argue for greater sensitivity to the context dependency of normative concepts like social justice.

Life stressors and coping: A longitudinal analysis among depressed and nondepressed adults.

This article examines the interrelation between negative life events, ongoing life strains, and coping responses in a longitudinal study of clinically depressed and healthy adults. A two-wave, two-variable panel regression analysis revealed moderate stability of both life stressors and coping over a 1-year interval. The connections between life stressors and coping varied by group status and across specific types of stressors and modes of coping.