<Emphasis Type="Italic">Miranda</Emphasis> Comprehension in Adults with Mental Retardation and the Effects of Feedback Style on Suggestibility

Interrogations present several major challenges to persons with mental retardation (MR). Sixty adults with mild MR completed measures of Miranda comprehension and tendency to yield to leading questions. In addition, suggestibility was assessed based on whether participants revised answers to questions in response to unfriendly, friendly, or neutral feedback to original responses. Furthermore, we examined how expressed confidence in answers to repeated questions varied with the type of feedback received. Results revealed that participants demonstrated marked difficulties understanding their Miranda rights and greater likelihood of changing answers to questions for which they received friendly feedback than for questions for which they received unfriendly or neutral feedback. Most participants who received positive reinforcement for their answers on a second trial expressed confidence about improvement from trial 1 to trial 2, although accuracy did not improve. Implications of these results are reviewed.     

Planning democracy in Africa: A comparative perspective on Nigeria and Ghana

Ghana and Nigeria are in the midst of government-initiated democratization programs. This paper compares the different settings, reasons, strategies, procedures, and implementation of democratization efforts in these two countries. While Nigeria's comprehensive approach to democratic planning has enabled elite continuity, it has neither assured regime stability nor enhanced state capacities. In contrast, Ghana's plan for democratic transformation, pursued in a piecemeal fashion, has resulted in regime stability and some state consolidation, but not in democratization. In both countries, there is little doubt that the unintended consequences of each approach may prove more significant than the direct results of successful policy implementation. Thus, even if the specific design for democracy may fail, the democratic project in these West African states may nevertheless be progressing.     

The penology of racial innocence: the erasure of racism in the study and practice of punishment

In post–civil rights America, the ascendance of “law-and-order” politics and “postracial” ideology have given rise to what we call the penology of racial innocence. The penology of racial innocence is a framework for assessing the role of race in penal policies and institutions, one that begins with the presumption that criminal justice is innocent of racial power until proven otherwise. Countervailing sociolegal changes render this framework particularly problematic. On the one hand, the definition of racism has contracted in antidiscrimination law and in many social scientific studies of criminal justice, so that racism is defined narrowly as intentional and causally discrete harm. On the other hand, criminal justice institutions have expanded to affect historically unprecedented numbers of people of color, with penal policies broadening in ways that render the identification of racial intent and causation especially difficult. Analyses employing the penology of racial innocence examine the ever-expanding criminal justice system with limited definitions of racism, ultimately contributing to the erasure of racial power. Both racism and criminal justice operate in systemic and serpentine ways; our conceptual tools and methods, therefore, need to be equally systemic and capacious.     

Techniques of black male re/dress: corporeal drag and kinesthetic politics in the rebirth of Waacking/Punkin’

The improvisation-based dance Waacking/Punking developed in gay underground disco clubs of 1970s Los Angeles and circulated transnationally via television's landmark black music/dance show Soul Train. With almost all male progenitors passing during the early AIDS crisis, the culture was reborn in the 2000s to the transnational hip-hop/street dance arena, now a competition style dominated by nonblack cisgender females. While seeming to promote hetero-normative gender performance, learning the dance practice potentially queers movement norms through corporeal drag – techniques for trying on and refashioning movement that transform kinesthetic consciousness. At the same time, the obscure structural positioning of the black male figure associated with Waacking/Punking's historical context complicates and disorients gendered notions of power and racialized sexuality in its rebirth. This trans-methodological study centers experiences of black practitioners, drawing from first-person stories of pioneer and new generation dancers, as well as native ethnography and archival research. In subtle ways, Waacking practices redress black masculinity and question performing social inclusion under terms of a white patriarchal order – terms that suture blackness-to-pathology-to-violence. The erotic practice of Waacking/Punking may be understood as an embodied re-negotiation of hegemonic demands on gender and sexuality, made possible through its transmission of a black kinesthetic politics.