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In this chapter, the author analyzes sentencing and incarceration practices in South Africa during the last 20 years, a period which saw the country transforming into a fully flexed democracy.

The concepts of sentencing, mandatory minimum sentencing, sentencing of children and incarceration are discussed. The past 20 years of democracy serve as a point of departure for this discussion. The retrospective nature of the adopted approach necessitates a heavy reliance on existing literature, but a statistical analysis is also relied upon. The author also reflects on research conducted during the last 20 years.

While it is almost impossible to duly consider all sentencing-related developments in democratic South Africa, important advances have been made but they were not always systematically followed through. Well-intended policies have at times been poorly executed. Specially, the correctional system destroyed all types of staff motivation through poor human resource practices.

Few scholars have considered the influence of sentencing practices on the South African inmate population, more particularly during the period of democracy that has been running for 20 years. This influence in the South African criminal justice system will be highlighted. The contribution of sentencing in the democratization of the country may be drawn from this discussion. The study may contribute to policy implementation for decades to come and through that, strengthen the South African democracy. At the same time, lessons from South Africa may serve as a roadmap for other young and established democracies.

The aim of this chapter is twofold: (i) to perform a synthesis of the academic research regarding the changes of tourist consumer behavior brought about by social media; and (ii) to suggest a set of strategies for tourism businesses to address resulting challenges.

Extensive literature reviews have been executed on the motivating factors and the effects of online reviews.

This analysis of the related research identified three main topics, namely: (1) the antecedents, the factors motivating tourists to write online reviews; (2) the impact of eWOM on providers of tourism services (business perspective); and (3) the influence of online reviews on consumers’ behavior (demand perspective). This chapter focuses on the impact of online reviews on tourism businesses and suggests suitable strategies.

This study is based on a literature review and implications indicated by previous studies; hence the suggestions are indicative rather than conclusive. A need exists for empirical studies to fully validate the chapter’s suggestions.

This chapter outlines a series of adequate strategies formulated for business practitioners divided into two fields, namely managerial and marketing activities.

This study provides practical recommendations/suggestions for tourism businesses in addressing the challenges and opportunities raised within the online context.

Some countries prohibit the imposition of life imprisonment on women but allow it for men for the same offence (e.g. Albania, Azerbaijan, Russia and Belarus). In Khamtokhu and Aksenchik v. Russia (2017) the European Court of Human Rights rejected the claim that it was discriminatory to punish two Russian men convicted of murder to life imprisonment. Other than a handful of legal commentaries there have been no in-depth analyses of the case, in particular on the dangers of using gender stereotyping to limit life imprisonment. To address this gap, this chapter draws on criminological works on the gendered experience of life imprisonment, legal analyses of perpetual incarceration under human rights law and ECHR case law on gender stereotyping and on life imprisonment. This study critically discusses the Court’s assessment of gender stereotypes in the context of life imprisonment and considers whether its approach constitutes any improvement for women. In so doing, it illuminates how well-intended efforts to curtail some extreme forms of penal practices such as perpetual incarceration may have unintended and perverse consequences for women specifically and the landscape of punishment more generally.

In recent decades, the use of capital punishment has declined, but in its place, a ‘new death penalty’ has arisen: life without parole (LWOP), which is being used far more frequently and for more crimes than capital punishment ever was. Yet, LWOP has received far less scholarly attention than the death penalty. Because of its greater scale, assessing the effects of LWOP on crime has important policy implications and is a better test of extreme penalties. Existing studies of LWOP focus on humanitarian issues and ignore its potentially reciprocal relationship with crime. Therefore, we use available LWOP data to fill these gaps in the literature, using models specifically designed to control for potential reciprocal effects. The results indicate there is no reciprocal causation between LWOP and violent crime and, at best, LWOP’s impact on crime is small, temporary, and, most importantly, no greater than the impact of life with parole.

There are growing concerns about the environmental activities of firms and their accountability towards reporting on such activities against the background of the voluntary reporting regimes. As a result, the motivation for this study is to investigate the role of NGOs' (nongovernmental organisations) engagement in influencing firms' environmental accounting disclosures using data of listed firms in Ghana. Environmental disclosure scores were constructed through content analyses from 422 annual reports of the listed firms with NGO engagements surrogated with dummy variables, capturing firms' acknowledgement of their engagements with NGOs and the data analysed using the two-step generalised method of moments. The results provided evidence to show that NGOs' engagement is positive and significantly influence firms' environmental reporting practices. Further analyses confirming profitability, leverage and market share prices among others are significant for explaining environmental disclosures. This is regarded as the first study to investigate the relationship between NGOs as stakeholders and the quality of environmental accounting disclosures. The findings provided comprehensive implications for policies that could further strengthen pressure groups to deal with environmental degradation through firms' activities.

Interest in the Electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM) in connection with tourism is constantly growing not only among consumers but also among theoreticians. Therefore, the objective of this chapter is to provide an overview of studies that focus on eWOM in the tourism sector using the snowball method. The article is based on a review of the literature of 60 studies that focus not only on consumer behavior in tourism and the impact of eWOM on tourism supply but also on the impact of hotel managers' responses to other consumer behavior and tourism companies. The results of the studies show that eWOM has a significant impact not only on consumer behavior but also on tourism supply. Manager responses can also strongly affect other consumer behavior in decision-making. When eWOM is distributed, consumers are influenced by their emotions, motives, and also by the websites to which they have decided to contribute. The chapter proposes further research areas for different authors.