SILENCE AND MEMORY IN CRIMINOLOGY—THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CRIMINOLOGY 2009 SUTHERLAND ADDRESS*

Two recent American Society of Criminology presidential addresses have identified as a key problem the fact that criminology lacks a history. In this address, I ask why criminology (in contrast to closely related fields) has generated so few studies of its past; I also identify some results of this failure and discuss why intellectual fields need a sense of their origins and development. History molds individual and collective identities; it lays a foundation for sociologies of knowledge; it encourages reflexivity, teaches us where our ideas came from, and gives us a sense of where we are going. To encourage historical work, I propose an overall framework for understanding the evolution of criminology, reaching back to the late eighteenth century and continuing into the present. My overall framework is that of scientific modernism, within which I identify the following three primary phases: exploratory modernism, confident modernism, and agonistic modernism. In conclusion, I suggest ways to stimulate histories of science in the field of criminology.     

Bringing the Revolution to the Countryside: Rural Health Programmes as State‐Building in Post‐1952 Bolivia

Bolivia's Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, MNR) took power in April 1952 via a popular social revolution. After 1952, the party implemented state‐sponsored modernisation projects, including extending rural public health programmes. The MNR used health programmes to change rural practices, cultivate political loyalty, and expand the state's political power. Yet rural indigenous communities were hardly passive recipients of these programmes. These communities often requested government services, and they borrowed the MNR's own political rhetoric to position themselves as worthy of state attention. Public health programmes increased access to rural health care, but they also allowed state officials and rural communities to negotiate the MNR's authority.     

INTERORGANIZATIONAL UTILITY OF WELFARE STIGMA IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM*

The appropriation of “welfare stigma” or stereotypes about poor people's overreliance and abuse of public aid in two core criminal justice functions is examined: felony adjudication in a court system and space allocation in a jail. Through a comparative ethnographic study in which an abductive analysis of data (20 months of fieldwork) was used, we show that criminal justice gatekeepers utilize welfare stigma to create stricter eligibility criteria for due process in criminal courts and occupancy in jails. Specifically, the number of court appearances, motions, trials, jail beds, food, showers, and medical services is considered by professionals to be the benefits that individuals seek to access and abuse. Professionals view their role as preventing (rather than granting) access to these resources. The comparative nature of our data reveals that welfare stigma has interorganizational utility by serving two different organizational goals: It streamlines convictions in courts, which pulls defendants through adjudication, and conversely, it expands early release from jails, which pulls inmates out of the custody population. In the context of diminishing social safety nets, our findings have implications for understanding how discretion is exercised in an American criminal justice system increasingly tasked with the distribution of social services to the urban poor.     

The design and implementation of Family Foster Care Services for high risk delinquents Transitioning from Correctional Confinement

Specialized Family Care (SFC) provides planned, long term family foster care to youth who have been adjudicated as delinquent and who are at high risk of on-going delinquent behavior following their transition into the community from correctional confinement. The program is funded and operated through a collaborative arrangement among The Casey Family Program-Bismarck Division, the North Dakota Department of Human Services (DHS) and the North Dakota Division of Juvenile Services (DJS). Specially recruited, trained and supported foster families work closely with a dual case management system of services provided by SFC social workers and DJS case managers responsible for community-based aftercare. Individual case plans for youth involve a mix of intensive aftercare programming for delinquent behaviors, individually designed intervention strategies, intensive supervision, and intensive casework. This article discusses the program model, implementation challenges, costs and preliminary outcomes.     

The Woman in the Red Dress: Gender,Space, and Reading. Minrose C. Gwin. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2002.

An eclectic montage of literary analysis, autobiography, and reader response, taking the form of personal anecdotes and autonomous essays, The Woman in the Red Dress takes the reader on a journey in which Minrose C. Gwin analyzes both metaphoric and physical personal space. As Gwin defines it, space is "not an entity that contains something else but [is] the swirl of social relations and productions in particular locations, whether these locations be material, cultural, or even psychological" (6). The purpose of Gwin's work, as she says, perhaps too repetitively is: "to dramatize textual encounters in which narrative, space, and gender inscribe themselves on one another and their readers" (38). The title of this volume refers to the first work Gwin discusses in her introduction: Native American poet Joy Harjo's poem, "Deer Dancer," about a woman in a stained red dress who dances naked on a bar, changing not just the lives of those present, but also those who, like the narrator, merely hear the story (6-7).     

The Power of the Purse: Supranational Entrepreneurship,Financial Incentives,and European Higher Education Policy

This article shows how the European Commission cultivates policy shifts toward a particular idea of a common European Higher Education Area by using its considerable financial leverage. By making European Union (EU) funding dependent on grant recipients meeting certain strategically selected conditions, the Commission creates new incentive structures for domestic actors, in this case higher education institutions (HEIs), with two important consequences. First, the Commission turns universities into agents for its policies: Universities lobby governments to pass legislation, which would allow them to conform to Commission requirements. Second, HEIs try to comply with the Commission's requirements even in the absence of compatible national frameworks, thereby leapfrogging policy decisions on the national level. Describing this as a “soft” mechanism for achieving convergence, as Open Method of Coordination accounts posit, overlooks the fundamentally non‐negotiable nature of the process from the participants' perspective and considerably underestimates the Commission's real influence. We examine this argument through a case study of an EU‐funded higher education program, Erasmus Mundus.     

The Limits of Policy Diffusion: Introducing International Norms of Anti‐Money Laundering into China's Legal System

This article examines the contribution of policy diffusion to create a regulatory system against money laundering in China. A two‐level analysis of transnational interactions and domestic law making shows how Communist Party prerogatives shape the insertion of multilateral norms into the legal system. In a contentious process of local accommodation, transnationally engaged technocratic bodies, turf‐conscious bureaucracies, and powerful party organs struggle to reconcile the goals of promoting global economic expansion, gaining international recognition, and absorbing innovative regulatory tools while preserving tight domestic control. In effect, Chinese policymakers try to utilize policy diffusion as a mechanism for negotiating and promoting the nation's global rise. Yet, when it comes to implementation, global regulatory standards are weakened or even neutralized through discretionary enforcement. The depth and robustness of normative assimilation therefore remain uncertain.     

Decentralization in France

In France decentralization of the government was part of the socialist platform for the 1981 presidential election. The issue was immediately put on the agenda by the minister in charge of “interior and decentralization.” The law was published on March 2nd 1982. Ten years later, decentralization is considered a decisive reform toward the modernization of the state. Local governments are engaged in the process of learning the politics of autonomy. But the law maintained the prefet. Therefore the institutional pattern establishes two authorities in charge of the same territory at the level of “département” and “région.” It could be said that the goal of the 1982 reform was to authorize the expression of a local demand while the equality and qualify of public services would be preserved, thanks to deconcentration of the national apparatus. This scheme implies dramatic changes both in the local political system and in the national bureaucracy. The latest is reluctant to assess the evolution. In 1994 public administration in France is in transition. Its centralized structure and rationale has offen led to strategies directed toward the conservation of the old habits and privileges. The role of the prefect is still unsettled. Perhaps more important, serious institutional limits have been imposed on the process of change.     

CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE UNITED STATES*

Criminologists continue to debate fundamental issues about the nature of their work. Some of the issues were built into the field by the criminal anthropologists who founded it a century ago. By examining the work of major American criminal anthropologists—a nearly forgotten group—one can identify the origins of three enduring problems: criminology's difficulties in (1) establishing its disciplinary boundaries; (2) defining its methods: and (3) deciding whether its primary goal is crime control or the production of knowledge with no immediate use-value. The study of criminology's roots in criminal anthropology cannot settle these debates, but it can put them in historical perspective and clarify their substance.     

The survival and termination of party mergers in Europe

Why do constituent parties that participated in a party merger that was intended to be permanent decide to leave the merger to re‐enter party competition separately? To address this question, merger termination is conceptualised in this article as an instance of new party formation, coalition termination and institutionalisation failure. Building on this conceptualisation, three sets of factors are presented that account for which mergers are likely to be terminated by constituent parties and which are not. To test these three sets of hypotheses, a mixed‐methods design is used. First, survival analysis is applied to a new dataset on the performance of mergers in 21 European democracies during the postwar period. The findings support hypotheses derived from a conception of merger termination as new party formation: pre‐ and post‐merger legislative performance significantly affect the probability of merger termination. Furthermore, the institutionalisation of constituent parties helps to sustain mergers if the latter already built trust in pre‐merger cooperation, in line with the conception of merger termination as institutionalisation failure. Two theory‐confirming case studies are then analysed: one case of merger survival and the other of termination. These case studies substantiate the working of the significant variables identified in the large‐N analysis that drove the selection of case studies. They also reveal how mediating factors difficult to capture in large‐N designs help to account for why factors that – theoretically – should have complicated the working of the ‘survival case’, and should have been beneficial to the ‘termination case’, did not generate the expected effects.