Locking up my generation: Cohort differences in prison spells over the life course

Crime rates have dropped substantially in the United States, but incarceration rates have remained high. The standard explanation for the lasting trend in incarceration is that the policy choices from the 1980s and 1990s were part of a secular increase in punitiveness that has kept rates of incarceration high. Our study highlights a heretofore overlooked perspective: that the crime–punishment wave in the 1980s and 1990s created cohort differences in incarceration over the life course that changed the level of incarceration even decades after the wave. With individual-level longitudinal sentencing data from 1972 to 2016 in North Carolina, we show that cohort effects—the lingering impacts of having reached young adulthood at particular times in the history of crime and punishment—are at least as large (and likely much larger) than annual variation in incarceration rates attributable to period-specific events and proclivities. The birth cohorts that reach prime age of crime during the 1980s and 1990s crime–punishment wave have elevated rates of incarceration throughout their observed life course. The key mechanism for their elevated incarceration rates decades after the crime–punishment wave is the accumulation of extended criminal history under a sentencing structure that systematically escalates punishment for those with priors.     

The Role of Law in Temporal Reasoning: An Interview with Annelise Riles

On 17 May 2016 Lucy Welsh interviewed Annelise Riles about her work on the relationship between law and time as part of Welsh’s involvement with the AHRC Regulating Time network. Annelise Riles is the Jack G. Clarke Professor of Law in Far East Legal Studies and Professor of Anthropology at Cornell, and is Director of the Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture. Her work examines the transnational dimensions of laws, markets and culture across the fields of comparative law, conflict of laws, the anthropology of law, public international law and international financial regulation. Most recently Professor Riles has been examining the nature and meaning of the settlement made on the so-called Comfort Women, and what impact that has for locating events in the past. The Comfort Women were Korean women who were essentially captured and forced to work as sexual slaves for the Japanese army during World War Two. In 2015, Japanese and South Korean ministers agreed a settlement (comprising an apology and financial payment to provide for the women) in what they regarded as an irreversible and final settlement of the issue. Welsh and Riles exchange over their mutual interests in time and routinisation in this interview as they discuss what the story of the Comfort Women has to tell us.     

Police Empathy and Victim PTSD as Potential Factors in Rape Case Attrition

This exploratory study investigated whether rape victims’ subjective perceptions of whether to proceed with legal action were associated with their experience of disclosing to the police during their initial interview. Specifically, the study investigated associations between symptoms of PTSD, shame and self-blame post-rape, subjective perceptions of police empathy and subjective perception of victims’ intentions to take the case to court. Participants (N = 22) were found to have elevated levels of PTSD severity, shame and self-blame. Police empathy was positively correlated with victims’ ratings of likelihood of taking the case to court, and negatively correlated with PTSD severity and shame. These preliminary findings suggest that training police officers how to respond more empathically to psychologically distressed rape victims may potentially help reduce victim attrition rates.     

Higher Education and the Referendum on Scottish Independence

During the course of the referendum campaign, the Scottish government argued that free tuition for Scottish and EU students symbolised Scotland's preference for universal services and was intrinsically fairer than the ‘marketised’ systems operating in the rest of the UK. Invoking principles of both social justice and pragmatism, three distinct critiques of the Scottish government's higher education policy were mounted and adopted by different policy actors for different political purposes. Following a discussion of these arguments, this article concludes that a more nuanced discussion of higher education policy in Scotland is required, focusing not just on the absence of tuition fees but also on the distribution of debt and allocation of funds across the entire education system. We also note that the focus on tuition fees policy suggests that higher education systems across the UK are set on a process of divergence, whereas there are strong pressures towards policy convergence in areas such as research policy and internationalisation.