Plan and counterplan: Notes on moving beyond the crisis in planning theory

Conclusions In developing a working class perspective of planning theory, I have suggested that neither bourgeois nor Marxist planning theories can incorporate the dissensus tactics that are at the heart of working-class movements. Neither can they deal with the class nature of planning nor the class composition of planners. As the current social, political and economic crisis was forced on capital by the struggles (plans) of the working class, it follows that working-class counter-plans should deepen the crisis so that benefits will accrue to our side. The development of our successful counter-plans will throw their planning theory deeper into crisis. Ultimately, crisis resolution must be on the terms of the (ex-)working class.     

The Cost of the Game: A Taxonomy of Social Interactions

This paper considers the role of reciprocity rules in various strategic settings. After distinguishing four typical categories of social interaction, the paper examines three forms of reciprocity constraints. An ideal rule of perfect incentive alignment (structural reciprocity) serves as a benchmark for the analysis of a golden rule of reciprocity, characterized by a mechanical linking of one player's strategy to that of the other player; and a silver rule of stochastic reciprocity, characterized by a probabilistic symmetry in the relationship between the players.     

Enemies Everywhere: Terrorism, Moral Panic, and US Civil Society

Since the attacks of September 11th, 2001, terrorism has experienced a prominence in discourse across the U.S. The representations of terrorists and terrorism by the news media and politi have contributed to the edifice of terrorism as a moral panic. This treatise examines the social effects that have or may occur due to the social construction of a moral panic of terrorism. The thematic frame is situated within Cohens stages of a moral panic. We offer an analysis of the medias depiction and coverage of acts of terrorism, and legislative, political and legal responses in the form of social and cultural changes occurring from the creation of a moral panic. In addition, we offer an analysis of the states vested interest in the social construction of this panic, leading to increased levels of fear, targeted at the general publics consciousness. This article concludes that the presentation of terrorism and terrorists by the media and politi have contributed to unnecessary levels of panic and fear, misguided public consciousness, and the development of legislation creating negative social ramifications yet be seen.     

Was ist das „Bauland“ i.S des § 19 Abs. 3 BauNVO?

Der Beitrag geht der Frage nach, was unter dem für die Ermittlung der zulässigen Grund- und Geschossfläche maßgeblichen Begriff Bauland i.S. des § 19 Abs. 3 Baunutzungsverordnung (BauNVO) zu verstehen ist. Obwohl diese Vorschrift seit dem Inkrafttreten der BauNVO im Jahr 1962 unverändert gilt, werden hierzu in Literatur und Rechtsprechung sehr unterschiedliche Auffassungen vertreten, allerdings ohne dass diese Kontroverse bislang ausdrücklich thematisiert worden wäre. Da das Bauland bei Festsetzung einer Grund- und Geschossflächenzahl der bestimmende Faktor für die Ermittlung der zulässigen Grund- und Geschossfläche ist, liegt auf der Hand, dass sein Verständnis sowohl aus wirtschaftlicher Sicht als auch aus der Sicht des Natur- und Bodenschutzes von zentraler Bedeutung ist, weil sich danach entscheidet, in welchem Maße ein Grundstück bebaut und damit versiegelt werden darf. Wie zu zeigen ist, führen Festsetzungen zum Schutz der Natur, sei es über öffentliche oder private Grünflächen, sei es über Flächen zum Ausgleich von Eingriffen in Natur und Landschaft, zu besonderen Schwierigkeiten im Umgang mit dem Bauland. In diesem Aufsatz wird vor diesem Hintergrund der Versuch unternommen, eine allgemeine, für alle Fallkonstellationen gültige Definition des Baulandes zu entwickeln. * Der Verfasser ist Partner der internationalen Sozietät Clifford Chance in München.     

Comparing the Social Service Utilization, Exposure to Violence, and Trauma Symptomology of Domestic Violence Female “Victims” and Female “Batterers”

Although some authors have suggested that women batterers may really be self-defending victims, to date, no research has been initiated to empirically support this assertion. This paper describes the design and outcomes of a research project that investigated the similarities and differences between women adjudicated as domestic violence batterers and women identified as domestic violence victims. Findings indicated group similarities in the areas of exposure to violence and social service utilization. Although both groups reported high levels of trauma symptomology, victim scores were significantly higher.     

The state,public policy,and AIDS discourse

The paper probes the deep structure of perceptions of AIDS and the ensuing public policy trends. AIDS has become the latest symbol indexing 20th century conflicts over the family and sexuality and recapitulates some features of early debates over contraception and the control of sexually transmitted diseases. From 1981 to 1983, public talk about AIDS was virtually taboo. Since 1983, the massive proliferation of AIDS discourse has led to the development of an official story common in the press and clear in the presumptions underlying recent state policies in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. These policies have favored state control of sexual speech and education, as well as control of people blamed for HIV infection, while community-based groups have sought to empower people to affirm their sexuality while avoiding viral transmission.     

Psychology,law, and the black community

Summary The present paper presented key applications of psychology and the law to the black community, embracing both civil and criminal law and legislation. The breadth of its focus preluded a more in-depth treatment of other areas relevant to black people which include issues related to psychiatric emergencies and involuntary hospitalization, child custody, and right-to-treatment litigation in prison and mental health facilities. In focusing attention on these applications and areas for activity, hopefully, I have not presented an unrealistic depiction of a responsive, socially sensitive, legal system capable and willing to exercise its powerful tools in the interest of the black community. To the contrary, there is considerable literature that identifies the historic role of the legal system in the enactments of laws to institutionalize and cement slavery, its failure to aggressively protect constitutional and civil rights of blacks, in imposing penalties differentially to blacks and whites in the criminal justice system, and more recently, conspiracies of law enforcement officials to deprive blacks of basic civil rights (Bell, 1975; Burns, 1973; Higgenbotham, 1973). The legal system, rather than being an effective instrument for justice and positive social changes, has often been a major source of racism. Thus, any meaningful attempts by lawyers or behavioral scientists in the interest of black people cannot ignore the racism that is embedded in the fabric of the legal profession and the behavioral sciences. Particular aspects of the law with significant social-psychological dimensions are: the cultural inertia, the archaicness of the law due to its roots in English common-law, historic and contemporary racism, conservatism associated with the principle of stare decisis, judicial elitism, and the substitution of administrative and judicial discretion for overt racism. Thus, in order for the legal system, or the field of psychology, to be reponsive to the needs of blacks and other oppressed groups, they must eradicate racism and injustice in their own ranks.Traditionally law has functioned as the hand maiden of the propertied class in our society. So it was to be expected that lawyers in the legislative halls, lawyers on the bench and lawyers in the executive branch of government would combine their talents to perpetuate by law this peculiarly American doctrine of racism predicated upon a claimed color inferiority.     

Holy Mountains and Anti-Cult Ecology: The Campaign Against the Aumist Religion in France

After the homicides and suicides of the Solar Temple (1994–1995), anti-cult movements received an unprecedented degree of public support in France, and a moral panic against cults was generated, eventually producing two parliamentary reports and the establishment of a governmental Mission to Fight Cults. The Aumist Religion, headquartered at the Holy City of the Mandarom, in the French Alps, although comparatively small, became one of the most visible targets and was perceived by anti-cultists, the media, and the government as the epitome of the dangerous cult. The paper examines the history of the Madaron controversies, especially the involvement of government-financed anti-cult organizations and representatives of the ecology movement, and argues that the Aumists' greatest sin is their very visibility.     

Expanding coupled shock fronts of urban decay and criminal behavior: How U.S. cities are becoming “hollowed out”

This work attempts to formalize an emerging paradigm in criminology, examining the structural consequences of feedback between community physical decay and behavioral pathologies caused by the social disintegration resulting from that decay. Adaptation of a standard reaction/diffusion approach produces a model of radially expanding coupled traveling-wave shock fronts of interrelated contagious physical decay and criminal activity. The standard threshold theorem associated with the model equations suggests that currently advocated triage policies, which recommend the virtual abandonment of bad communities behind the expanding front, will fail spectacularly. The model suggests that, just as the hollowing-out process has a complex, synergistic and dynamic structure, so, too, must interventions be interactive and mutually reinforcing, adaptively, targeted at communities in all stages of the phenomenon.     

The language of deceit: An investigation of the verbal clues to deception in the interrogation context

We examined the hypothesis that reliable verbal indicators of deception exist in the interrogation context. Participants were recruited for a study addressing security effectiveness and either committed a theft to test the effectiveness of a new security guard or carried out a similar but innocuous task. They then provided either (1) a truthful alibi, (2) a partially deceptive account, (3) a completely false alibi, or (4) a truthful confession regarding the theft to an interrogator hired for the purpose of investigating thefts with a monetary incentive for convincing the interrogator of their truthfulness. Results indicated that only 3 out of the 18 (16.7%) clues tested significantly differentiated the truthful and deceptive accounts. All 3 clues were derived from the Statement Validity Analysis (SVA) technique (amount of detail reported, coherence, and admissions of lack of memory). Implications for credibility assessment in forensic interrogations are discussed.     

How Large Should the Strike Zone Be in “Three Strikes and You're Out” Sentencing Laws?

So-called three strikes and you're out sentencing laws for criminal offenders have proliferated in the United States. The laws vary considerably in their definitions of what constitutes a strike. This paper adapts the classic Poisson process model of criminal offending to investigate how varying sentence lengths and definitions of what constitutes a strike affect the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of these sentencing laws. In particular, it asks whether, by using different definitions for the first, second, and third strikes or different sentence lengths, one can make the resulting incarceration more efficient in the sense of incapacitating more crimes per cell-year served.     

Precedent Externality, Network Effect, and the Possible Inefficiency of the Evolution of Laws

Using the traditional scenario of tort conflict as an example, I argue that the marginal precautionary costs of injurers and victims are not constant, as was assumed by most previous researchers. The precedent of a liability rule has some natural externality on the precaution technology, and hence marginal cost, faced by future agents involved in torts. The adoption of legal rules therefore has a network effect, meaning that the present prevalent adoption of one rule increases the probability of its future adoption. Treating the dynamic evolution of legal rules as a random process, we are able to apply an established result in the literature of network economies to conclude the path-dependence, non-predictability, and potential inefficiency concerning the final legal rule to which the dynamics converge.     

The statistical prediction of violent behavior

Considerable attention in the popular and professional literature has focused on the relative costs and benefits of using public protectionist versus civil libertarian models of social control. In this article, we develop statistical analogs of these models to predict violent behavior among samples of defendants found incompetent to stand trial in New York State. The societal and personal costs (errors of prediction) of each model are compared and their implications for clinical practice and social policy are discussed.This research was supported in part by PHS Grant MH 20367 from the NIMH Center for Studies of Crime and Delinquency. The assistance of Thomas Arvanites in data analysis and the comments of Monroe Lefkowitz and Mary Evans Melick on earlier drafts of this paper are gratefully acknowledged.     

Selective Incapacitation Revisited

The term incapacitation is an important criminological concept that implies that the offender's capacity to commit new crimes is to be concretely obstructed or reduced through confinement. The purpose of selective incapacitation is to select those particularly prone to violence and to incapacitate them. The paper presents a critical analysis of the risk prediction enterprise. The paper addresses the accuracy of prediction, the ethics of prediction, and in particular the research culture within which research on prediction occurs.     

Forfeiture and money laundering laws in the United States

Today Europe is faced increasingly with the phenomenon of organized crime, creating problems similar to those the United States faced as early as a decade ago. American forfeiture and money laundering laws provide the state with sweeping powers for use in its efforts to combat organized crime. Although study of these instruments might inspire European lawmakers to adopt similar ones, the instruments themselves carry a societal price tag that cannot be ignored. Classical principles limiting the reach of the criminal law (and the powers of its enforcement apparatus) and in a broader sense the liberal concept of the fragmentary nature of the criminal law have largely been abandoned by lawmakers in the area of organized crime. Thus, modern American forfeiture and money laundering laws have lowered the standards of protection against state intrusion into citizens' basic rights despite the lack of sufficient empirical proof that their investigative and punitive powers are efficient in skimming profits and deterring further crime.     

Terrorism and the law: Historical contexts, contemporary dilemmas, and the end(s) of democracy

Recent proposals by the G7 (and Russia) to clamp down on terrorists and terrorism do not define that which is prohibited. Instead, a threat is communicated which in turn allows, among other things, greater attention to be paid officially to camouflage charities and terrorist use of the Internet. Nevertheless, it is somewhat of a truism to note that terrorist violence is ultimately defined or characterized, for purposes of legal prohibition, within a highly politicized atmosphere. Starting with a short summary of anti-terrorist codification efforts made this century, this article examines some of the security interests cited by governments today in their respective struggles against terrorism. More specifically, it is argued that individual perceptions of personal and societal threat are heightened unnecessarily not only by a constant stream of governmental anti-terrorist rhetoric, but further, by an awareness of official and unofficial methods of anti-terrorist surveillance, and the use to which the information so obtained can be put.     

Narcotics trafficking and the American mafia: The myth of internal prohibition

Numerous books assert that the Mafia long had a prohibition against engaging in narcotics trafficking, either for reasons of morality, or else because of the public stigma attached to drugs. In reality, there are many problems with the belief in voluntary abstention. The mythical nature of internal prohibition, and the far different reality, will be illustrated from the case of Philadelphia, supposedly the base for one of the most powerful and traditional-minded of all the American Mafia groups, the family headed from 1959 to 1980 by don Angelo Bruno. We will attempt to explain the roots of the prohibition myth, both for writers and for the wider public that appears so endlessly enthusiastic about sagas of organized crime. Finally, the paper examines the implications of this myth for policy makers in successive wars on crime.     

Trade Secrets, Firm-Specific Human Capital, and Optimal Contracting

Trade secrets are innovations jointly produced by firms and employees that are generally not protected by patents. They are commonly protected within the framework of labor contracts, where an obligation of confidentiality is imposed upon the employee. Specifically this obligation applies to the employee even after he has left the employer for a period of time determined in the contract, known as a cooling off period. Often employees are prohibited not only from revealing trade secrets, but also from utilizing their specific human capital developed at the original place of employment in competitor firms during this period. Their specific human capital is in effect inseparable from the trade secret. Failure to protect the trade secret will result in its revelation and its becoming public and hence worthless for the innovator. The inability of an employee to reveal trade secrets and utilize his specific human capital after leaving his place of employment imposes costs and losses upon him. Some form of compensation will be paid for these contingent losses within the employment contract. Employers know that the longer the cooling off period imposed upon employees, the greater employees must be compensated for this in the contract. Longer cooling off periods thus cost the employer more, but also enable him to earn greater rents from the innovation itself. In this paper profit-maximizing periods of trade secret protection are derived, based on these two countervailing factors, and comparative statics exercises are performed. How the selection of profit-maximizing periods of trade secret protection when the incidence of resignation is itself affected by contract parameters and incentives is explored.     

Juror decision making in the capital penalty trial

Two factors thought to influence jurors' penalty decisions in capital trials—the nature of the crime committed and the defense's portrayal of the convicted offender's character—were examined. Mock jurors were death-qualified and exposed to one of twelve simulated penalty trials. Each trial was comprised of one of three capital crimes and one of four defense strategies. Jurors were least punitive in robbery-murder conditions and most punitive in multiple murder conditions. A conceptual argument against capital punishment was the most effective defense; a mental illness defense was the least effective. Penalty decisions were mediated by three attributional variables: (a) juror perceptions of the defendant's volition, (b) juror perceptions of the defendant's future dangerousness, and (c) juror perceptions of the relative competency of the opposing attorneys.This article is based on the author's dissertation which received an Honorable Mention in the 1985 SPSSI Dissertation Prize competition. The research was made possible by grants from the University of California, Santa Cruz and Division 41 of the American Psychological Association. The author is indebted to Craig Haney, Elliot Aronson, and Dane Archer for their valuable suggestions and support.     

Measuring the Convergence/Divergence of “Serious Crime” Arrest Rates for Males and Females: 1960–1995

It is now almost a quarter of a century since Adler (1975) and Simon (1975)stimulated a debate about the convergence of crime rates for men andwomen. The ensuing debate generated literally dozens of papers. Given theexistence of a series that now extends from 1960 to 1995, this papersuggests an appropriate way to examine the convergence hypothesis usingtime series techniques. These techniques take into consideration the effectsof the following factors: (a) random shocks orinnovations, (b) the potentially lasting effects of suchinnovations, and (c) the autocorrelation that time series oftenexhibit. Using time series techniques on annual data, we examine trends inthe arrest rates for males and females for six Part I crimes (homicide,robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft)for the years 1960 through 1995. We test for convergence, divergence, notrend, and a special condition of equilibrium between series calledcointegration.