Survival analysis: A survey

This paper is a survey of statistical methods used to analyze the length of time until a specified event occurs. These models have often been used to analyze the survival times (i.e., time until death) of medical patients, and so the term survival analysis is natural. In criminology, the main application of these models has been to analyze the time until recidivism, but many other applications are possible. The paper summarizes the statistical literature on survival analysis, and describes its applications in criminology. The methods are illustrated by an application to the prediction of time until recidivism for a sample of North Carolina prison releasees.     

Self‐Determination in the Constitutional Future of the EU

This article analyses three prominent proposals for the functional and political transformation of the EU from a constitutional perspective. It argues that existing EU reform proposals, to varying degrees, entrench rather than reverse the challenges to individual and political self‐determination brought about by the EU's response to its Euro crisis. As the article will conclude, challenging ‘authoritarian liberalism' in an EU context may require the development of a constitutional structure for the Union able to contest, rather than set in stone, the EU's existing economic and political goals.     

From Balance to Conflict: A New Constitution for the EU

As the crisis (and the Union's response to it) further develops, one thing appears clear: the European Union post‐crisis will be a very different animal from the pre‐crisis EU. This article offers an alternative model for the EU's constitutional future. Its objective is to invert the Union's current path‐dependency: changes to the way in which the Union works should serve to question, rather than entrench, its future objectives and trajectory. The paper argues that the post‐crisis EU requires a quite different normative, institutional and juridical framework. Such a framework must focus on reproducing the social and political cleavages that underlie authority on the national level and that allow divisive political choices to be legitimised. This reform project implies reshaping the prerogatives of the European institutions. Rather than seeking to prevent or bracket political conflict, the division of institutional competences and tasks should be rethought in order to allow the EU institutions to internalise within their decision‐making process the conflicts reproduced by social and political cleavages. Finally, a reformed legal order must play an active role as a facilitator and container of conflict over the ends of the integration project.     

A classic debate revisited: The policy/administration dichotomy in tax polittcs

One of the oldest debates in political science is over the separation of policymaking from administration. The primary purpose of this paper is to resurrect the distinction as both a guide to empirical theory describing the political process and as an element in the normative debate over how that political process should ideally work. I first discuss the classic dichotomy and arguments for and against it. I then argue that tax politics can best be described as a trichotomy, in which there resides a “middle” set of actors, labelled professional policy managers, who have very important policymaking roles, but who also have many characteristics of administrators. In making these distinctions, I also outline a distinctive form of accountability that resides with each set of actors. Based on these forms of accountability, I reiterate the importance of separating and distancing “pure” administration from policymaking and political pressures. I also argue that effective policy is best insured by balancing the roles of policymakers, policy managers and administrators.     

In-migration and the labor market in Tijuana,Baja California

This interpretative essay on the status of migrant workers in the Tijuana labor market sets up a theoretical framework and specifies the data sources used, including a survey of 672 families in Tijuana in 1982. To define the sphere of analysis, the author discusses demographic behavior and the evolution of the labor market in Tijuana. Within this context, an examination of the work status of migrants is conducted by comparing it to that of the native population, taking into account the characteristics of their regions of origin and factors related to that work status. It is shown that 1) migrants come from areas which are relatively more developed; 2) their work experience is directly related to the nature of the relative degree of development of their regions of origin; 3) there is no difference between the migrants and the native population with regard to the sectors and positions in which they are inserted; and 4) the type of migration tends to be similar to migration taking place in industrialized countries, rather than that characterizing developing countries.     

Treatment of Gang Members Can Reduce Recidivism and Institutional Misconduct

Gang violence creates serious safety and security concerns in the community and prisons. Treated gang and nongang members recidivated significantly less in a 24-month follow-up than their untreated matched controls. Treatment consisted of high intensity cognitive-behavioral programs that follow the risk, need, and responsivity principles (Andrews & Bonta, 2003). The treated gang members who recidivated violently after treatment received significantly shorter sentences (i.e. they committed less serious offences) than their untreated matched controls. Untreated gang members had significantly higher rates of major (but not minor) institutional offences than the other three groups. Correctional treatment that follows the risk, need and responsivity principles appears able to reduce recidivism and major institutional misconduct. Effective correctional treatment should be considered as one of the approaches in the management and rehabilitation of incarcerated gang members.     

Tax compliance: An investigation using individual taxpayer compliance measurement program (TCMP) data

In this paper, we analyze the tax compliance behavior of U.S. taxpayers by using a 1979 data set that combines information from a random sample of individual tax returns, each of which has been thoroughly audited, IRS administrative records, and sociodemographic data from the Census. We find evidence that both audits and tax code provisions affect compliance. However, the effects are significant for only low-and high-income groups. Interestingly, work on the underground economy also suggests that it is these two groups that are least compliant. Our results for audits suggest that the ripple or general deterrent effect of audits may be substantially larger than the direct revenue yield of audits for high-income taxpayers. Our results for allowable subtractions from income imply that the 1986 Tax Reform Act changes that lowered allowable subtractions may have procompliance effects.     

Crime, Prison, and Female Labor Supply

This paper introduces the vector autoregressive (VAR) methodology into themainstream of applied criminological research as an alternative to theestimation of structural models of crime. The paper presents cointegrationtest statistics for a second-order VAR of crime, prison population, femalelabor force participation, and durable consumption. Our results for theimpact of imprisonment on the crime rate are similar to Levitt's (1996)and substantially larger than previous estimates (e.g., Marvell and Moody,1994). We find that the short-run response of the crime rate to increasedlabor force participation of women is larger than the long-run effect. Theimplication is that major social changes, like the increased labor supply ofwomen, may have surprising impacts and that social institutions may takesome substantial period of time to adjust to such major changes.