Incapacitation: Revisiting an Old Question with a New Method and New Data

We use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to obtain estimates of the number of crimes avoided through incapacitation of individual offenders. Incarcerated individuals are matched to comparable non-incarcerated counterparts using propensity score matching. Propensity scores for incarceration are calculated using a wide variety of time-stable and time-varying confounding variables. We separately analyze juvenile (age 16 or 17) and adult (age 18 or 19) incapacitation effects. Our best estimate is that between 6.2 and 14.1 offenses are prevented per year of juvenile incarceration, and 4.9 to 8.4 offenses are prevented per year of adult incarceration.

Seen but Not Heard: Committee Visibility and Institutional Change in the Senate National Security Committees, 1947–2006

Scholars have neglected the effect of the press on political institutions in favor of media influences on campaigns or on voters' trust and information about government. This article examines senators' committee preferences in response to declining media coverage of Congress, focusing on the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees from 1947 to 2006. The research relies on new, continuous measures of committee desirability and a unique dataset of congressional press coverage. Although both committees' visibility and attractiveness have declined dramatically over 60 years, statistical analyses indicate that change in internal rules and external events are the most important influences on senators' investment in committee careers.     

Cultural Sovereignty, Relativism, and International Human Rights: New Excuses for Old Strategies

Abstract. Although the Charter of the United Nations embodied an unresolved tension between state sovereignty and the inviolability of human rights, the fall of the Berlin Wall seemed to herald universal acceptance of the legitimacy of international concern for the protection of human rights. Since that time, however, the sovereignty of states has been pushed with renewed vigour under the guise of cultural sovereignty. Three examples of the role of cultural sovereignty in the international human rights sphere are proposed to demonstrate that the real interest of states is not the protection of cultural identity, but non-interference, supremacy and control. The paper identifies cultural sovereignty with cultural relativism and argues that the ideology of relativism, combined with the inadequacies of legal positivism, have significantly harmed the efficacy and character of the international human rights regime.     

The New Wine and the Old Cask. Tolerance, Religion and the Law in Contemporary Europe

The author argues that a correct approach to the question of tolerance cannot ignore the increasing importance of the religious factor on the political, cultural and social scene of the last few years. The common European model of the relationship between the State and religious faiths that may be called the Law possesses some margins of elasticity. These margins of elasticity may be defined as tolerance. A mechanism of selection allows the law to welcome those new requests for liberty that do not undermine the fundamental features of the model.     

Second-chance Punitivism and the Contractual Governance of Crime and Incivility: New Labour, Old Hobbes

The growing application of mechanisms of contractual governance to behaviour that breaches social norms, rather than the criminal law, appears to represent an ethopolitical concern with delinquent self-reform through the activation of technologies of the self. In fact, there is little empirical evidence that the contractual governance of incivility leads to such self-reform. Beneath the ideology of contractual agreement to observe social norms lies what this paper calls a 'second-chance punitivism' which operates to crystallize behavioural elements of the Hobbesian social contract, after breach, into a more specific form. The responsibilizing and individualizing properties of this form of contractual governance set the moral-ideological platform for a retributive punitivism, when the rational agents it creates fail to live up to their image, and are taken to have wasted their 'second chance'.     

Up and Down,Old and New: Values and Value Systems of MPs and Voters in France

MPs are often criticised as being homogeneous. This is well known in terms of social background or gender, but the criticism also holds for values and norms. MPs are said to share normative agreements on the essential points and demonstrate differences on second-order issues. This criticism is even more widespread regarding the new politics based on the cultural divide, notably vis-à-vis politicians from the extreme right as far as immigration, European integration or globalisation are concerned. In this contribution, these criticisms are addressed by investigating the degree of normative agreements and disagreements of French MPs. Furthermore, the differences both in old and new politics between MPs on the one hand and the electorate as a whole and their supporters on the other hand are evaluated. It is concluded that MPs are definitely not all the same and the degrees of difference among MPs or with the electorate are far from being those expected.     

Community Support and Diversionary Measures for Juvenile Offenders in Hong Kong: Old Legacy, New Age

This paper begins by examining the arguments that led to the change of emphasis from residential training and detention to community-based measures in Hong Kong. Police cautioning and community support services are introduced. An evaluation of the services provided found that the majority of respondents reported high levels of satisfaction with them. It is likely that the services exerted positive influences on the respondents’ deviant behaviour, family values and sense of social responsibility, but one-fifth of them continued to commit deviant acts. Parents’ participation was not high. Young offenders rarely took responsibility for the offence they committed or understood the harm they had done to victims, and victims were not involved in deciding the intervention plan. The conclusions raise issues about the future for Hong Kong. They consider new diversionary strategies for responding to young people and debate the values that should underpin them.

New Frontiers,Old Problems: The War on Terror and the Notion of Anticipating the Enemy

Netherlands International Law Review -