CONTEXTUALIZING COMMUNITY CRIME CONTROL: RACE,GEOGRAPHY, AND CONFIGURATIONS OF CONTROL IN FOUR COMMUNITIES*

Criminology and urban sociology have long‐standing interests in how neighborhoods and communities respond to and control crime. We build on the literature on social disorganization, collective efficacy, and new parochialism to develop a framework that explains how and why communities respond differently to crime. We draw on more than 2 years of comparative ethnographic data and 56 resident and stakeholder interviews on responses to crime in four communities in two states. We find that the intersections of racial composition, geography, and crime narratives in each place contributed to distinct community responses to crime. By analyzing these dynamics across the four sites, we propose three types of public–parochial partnerships that communities use to respond to crime: public alliances that rely primarily on public forms of control, tentative public–parochial partnerships that rely on tenuous connections with public institutions, and grassroots engagement with public institutions. We explain the emergence of these three approaches as patterned responses rooted in characteristics of local contexts, including racial composition and geographic isolation.     

The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea? A Critique of the Ability of Community Mediation to Suppress and Facilitate Participation in Civil Life

This article revisits debate between academics and practitioners about the potential of community mediation. While mediation evangelicals make bold claims about the possibility of mediation helping to rebuild communities, academic critics have been suspicious of such contentions and claimed instead that mediation has provided just another route through which the state can interfere in the life of its citizens. It is argued here that debate on the topic has been clouded by unduly high expectations of disputes as agents of social change. Their importance has been understood by reference to their ability to rebuild communities or their potential to become test cases. It is argued here that mediated disputes make much more modest challenges to state authority but that they can be aided in this by the intervention of mediators prepared to take a pragmatic approach to the unachievable ideal of neutrality. The article does not conceive of community mediation as an alternative of the state or its agent. Rather, it suggests that mediators can be embedded within both worlds and act as message-bearers between them.     

Polygraph admissibility

Polygraph tests are psychological tests that are widely applied in the criminal justice system, but they are rarely administered or studied by psychologists. Two recent federal appeals court decisions may have opened the door to the admissibility of polygraph tests by displacing the long controllingFrye standard. However, these courts have also raised a number of challenges that must be overcome before polygraph tests will be regularly admitted into evidence. We examined the logic of these two recent decisions and the challenges they raise, and we found those challenges to be significant and perhaps daunting. Many of the challenges facing polygraph arise from poor training and a lack of standardization in the polygraph profession. We consider some potential, solutions, but the outlook for change in the polygraph community is dim unless it is forced by the courts or by legislation. Polygraph tests are also challenged by potentially effective countermeasures, and there presently are no easy solutions to those problems. Increased activity and interest are needed from the scientific community if the general situation is to improve.     

Paying for the Past: Redressing the Legacy of Land Dispossession in South Africa

The constitution of South Africa mandates equitable redress for individuals and communities evicted from their properties during colonialism and apartheid. The Commission on Restitution of Land Rights' institution‐wide assumption is that the financial awards given as equitable redress had no long‐term economic impact on recipients because the money is gone and they are still in poverty, whereas if people had received land, the economic impact would have been lasting. Consequently, in recent years, the commission has adopted a policy of using its soft power to force claimants to choose land restitution instead of financial awards. However, the interviews I conducted with financial award recipients show that in 30 percent of the cases, the award did produce a long‐term economic benefit because respondents invested in their homes. This empirical evidence suggests that the commission should rethink its recent shift in policy and not totally discount the potential of financial awards to produce a lasting economic benefit.     

Reclaiming Futures: A Model for Judicial Leadership in Community Responses to Juvenile Substance Abuse

Juvenile courts across the country have become the leading service delivery system for youths with substance abuse problems, not by choice, but by necessity. At 10 communities around the nation, judges and project staff are in their fifth year of pioneering changes to the way the juvenile justice system helps teens in trouble with drugs, alcohol, and crime. These judges are part of Reclaiming Futures, an initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and they are working with local leaders to re‐invent the way law enforcement, courts, probation, detention facilities, treatment providers, families, schools, and the community work together to help troubled youths succeed. Together, they have written a guide for judges, court administrators, government entities, community leaders, and interested citizens to share the knowledge and experience they have gained from the nationwide Reclaiming Futures initiative. Their goal is to encourage and motivate others to launch similar projects in their communities, and to provide a blueprint for judges and others striving to undertake this level of collaboration.     

Juvenile Court Context and Detention Decisions: Reconsidering the Role of Race,Ethnicity, and Community Characteristics in Juvenile Court Processes

The relationship between race/ethnicity, community dynamics, and juvenile court processes has long been established. Prior research has relied on city‐ or county‐level measures of community characteristics (e.g., racial composition, poverty) to examine how racial groups are processed within juvenile courts. To date, no study has utilized finer scale measures of geographic areas to examine how characteristics of juveniles’ communities impact court decisions. By utilizing official juvenile court data from a city in the southwest, this study draws upon attribution theory to examine how economic and crime community‐level measures directly and indirectly influence detention outcomes. Findings reveal that the effect of race and ethnicity in detention outcomes varies across communities, and the effect of ethnicity in detention decisions is mediated by economic community‐level measures. The theoretical and policy implications of the study findings are discussed.     

Sex Offender Community Notification and Community Stratification

Community notification laws have been passed by the federal government and legislature of every state. At the very least, these laws require local law enforcement officials to publicize the personal and residential information of known sex offenders. Although researchers and other social commentators have begun to assess the effects of community notification on targeted sex offenders and on criminal justice practices and practitioners, the potential consequences of the policy for different types of communities have received only scant attention. Using sex offender registry and US Census data for two states (Nebraska and Oklahoma), we examine the relationship between community characteristics and the residential patterns of sex offenders. Findings from mapping and regression analyses suggest a greater concentration of sex offenders in disadvantaged communities than in more affluent communities. To the extent that community notification allows residents of more affluent communities to mobilize resources in order to remove identified sex offenders, it may increase the geographical clustering of these offenders in areas already facing a greater risk and having fewer resources to manage the problem. Implications of findings in terms of “concentrated disadvantage” are discussed.     

对新技术时代的知识产权行政管理机构的探讨

20世纪90年代以来的技术革新给知识产权行政管理机构带来了深刻的影响。知识产权行政管理机构的性质从法人机构逐渐转变为执行或特殊机构;从较多关注于知识产权登记、审核的机构向承担更多的政治、经济发展职责的机构转变。技术进步也带来了知识产权行政管理机构传播以及保护作用的巨大变化。我国的知识产权行政管理机构必须认识到技术进步带给知识产权行政管理的挑战并作出相应的变革。     

Supreme Court Elections: How Much They Have Changed,Why They Changed,and What Difference It Makes

This essay draws on four recent studies of elections to state supreme courts in the United States to probe widely perceived changes in the scale and content of electoral campaigns for seats on state supreme courts. 1 Evidence from these studies and other sources indicates that changes have indeed occurred, though they are more limited than most commentaries suggest. These changes stem most directly from trends in state supreme court policy that have attracted interest‐group activity, especially from the business community. Like their extent, the effects of change in supreme court campaigns have been meaningful although exaggerated by many observers. What we have learned about changes in supreme court elections has implications for choices among selection systems, but those implications are mixed and complex.     

Confinement as a two‐stage turning point: Do changes in identity or social structure predict subsequent changes in criminal activity?*

Scholars frequently characterize incarceration as a possible turning point in criminal activity. This implies a two‐stage process: 1) change in life‐course mechanisms around confinement and reentry result in 2) subsequent change in criminal activity relative to preconfinement. Following this model, we examine change in criminal activity, criminal identity, and social/structural challenges using data from the Prison Project, a cohort of adult males with short‐term confinement in the Netherlands in 2010–2011. Results of a novel test for within‐individual change in arrests from preconfinement to post‐reentry show that most individuals are stable—yet there is a substantial group who go down meaningfully and a much smaller group who go up. Even though changes in criminal identity from the intervening period do not predict these change groups, increases in social/structural challenges predict those who go up in criminal activity. We build from prior work on desistance and reentry, contrasting our findings and highlighting the unique insight gained from, as well as challenges of, measuring individual change within our two‐stage turning point model. Although life‐course mechanisms often correspond with changes in criminal activity concurrently, identifying individual changes that are predictors of subsequent shifts in criminal offending remains elusive.     

Community Participation and the Function of Rules: The Case of Urban Zoning Boards

Data from a case study of piecemeal zoning change suggest that the decisions of citizen zoning boards of appeal are neither lawless nor ineffective – the majority of requests that come before them are for bulk and dimension variances which typically do not threaten the land use status quo and are usually granted unless there is local opposition. When substantial changes of land use are involved two factors are influential in determining the outcome of zoning cases – the consistency or clash between the proposed land use and that of the neighborhood surrounding the site, particularly in single-family residential areas; and the expression of opinion (positive or negative) by the residents of the community.
Despite criticism of zoning boards as defective and illegitimate legal institutions and calls for their abolition, they remain popular and extremely resistant to change because they have come to play important dispute settling and community maintenance functions in the urban environment in addition to their explicit rule enforcement functions. These broader community functions of zoning can only be understood in terms of a participatory model of legal process where legal rules are understood as functioning to identify situations as much as they are norms to be enforced.     

Theorizing continuity and change in socialist regulation

How does regulation change in authoritarian polities that tightly control public discourse and social mobilization? Socio-legal theories assume that regulation changes through intersubjective dialogical exchanges that persuade regulators to alter how they perceive social problems and the appropriate regulatory responses. Although this framework captures regulatory change in transparent dialogical spaces, it misses much of the regulatory story in the opaque discursive processes that order authoritarian polities. This article turns to sociological institutional theory—a non-dialogical theory to understand regulatory change in Vietnam's authoritarian polity. It investigates how commercial regulation in Vietnam has responded to an emerging mixed-market economy, at the same time the state has suppressed public dialogical challenges to socialist ideology. It concludes that regulatory change occurs when regulators respond to economic and social crises and layer new ideational components onto old programmatic ideas, converting them to new uses.     

社区为老服务的法律保障

人口老龄化对老年社会工作提出了严峻的挑战,老年社会工作主要涉及老年人的经济保障和服务保障。老年社会服务作为老年社会保障的重要组成部分,是解决老年人特殊需求、维护老年人权益的关键环节。为老服务要适应社会主义市场经济体制的发展,应由家庭服务向社区服务过渡。社区为老服务要植根于对现实发展趋势的正确估计和现有法律政策的不断完善。实行服务保障就需将社区为老服务纳入法律调整范围,逐步实现社区为老服务保障的法制化。     

Potential Use of Bacterial Community Succession in Decaying Human Bone for Estimating Postmortem Interval,,

Bacteria are taphonomic agents of human decomposition, potentially useful for estimating postmortem interval (PMI) in late‐stage decomposition. Bone samples from 12 individuals and three soil samples were analyzed to assess the effects of decomposition and advancing time on bacterial communities. Results indicated that partially skeletonized remains maintained a presence of bacteria associated with the human gut, whereas bacterial composition of dry skeletal remains maintained a community profile similar to soil communities. Variation in the UniFrac distances was significantly greater between groups than within groups (p < 0.001) for the unweighted metric and not the weighted metric. The members of the bacterial communities were more similar within than between decomposition stages. The oligotrophic environment of bone relative to soft tissue and the physical protection of organic substrates may preclude bacterial blooms during the first years of skeletonization. Therefore, community membership (unweighted) may be better for estimating PMI from skeletonized remains than community structure (weighted).     

Community control and pricing patterns of nonprofit hospitals: An antitrust analysis

Traditional control of nonprofit hospitals by the communities they serve has been offered as justification for restraining antitrust enforcement of mergers that involve nonprofit hospitals. The community is arguably a constraint on a nonprofit's inclination to exercise market power in the form of higher prices; however, community control is likely to be attenuated for hospitals that through merger or acquisition become members of hospital systems--particularly those that operate on a regional or multiregional basis. We report findings from a study in which we examined empirically the relationship between market concentration and pricing patterns for three types of nonprofit hospitals that are distinguishable based on degree of community control: an independent hospital, a member of a local hospital system, and a member of a nonlocal hospital system. Study results indicated that when conditions existed to create a more concentrated market, (1) all three types of nonprofit hospitals exercised market power in the form of higher prices, and (2) hospitals that were members of nonlocal systems were more aggressive in exercising market power than were either independent or local system hospitals. The results have important implications for antitrust enforcement policy.     

互构关系中社区矫正对象与性质定位研究

社区矫正对象和性质是社区矫正制度中的两个基础问题。当今学界有关这两个基础问题的争议呈现的几近陷入僵局和死结状态,是因为他们或者仅在各自范畴内进行独立地研究,或者没有厘清研究的逻辑顺序造成的。社区矫正对象和性质具有互构关系,应从对象入手进行整体的系统研究。当今社区矫正在对象上面临的主要问题是所依附的法律相关规定不尽合理,对象仅限制在四类罪犯上,对于从理论和现实角度出发可以纳入矫正对象的剥夺政治权利罪犯及附条件不起诉人未予规定。因此,应以发展的眼光和从刑事一体化的角度出发,将社区矫正性质定位为更具有开放性的非监禁性的刑事处遇方法。     

NO COMMUNITY IS AN ISLAND: THE EFFECTS OF RESOURCE DEPRIVATION ON URBAN VIOLENCE IN SPATIALLY AND SOCIALLY PROXIMATE COMMUNITIES*

The link between resource deprivation and urban violence has long been explored in criminological research. Studies, however, have largely ignored the potential for resource deprivation in particular communities to affect rates of violence in others. The relative inattention is notable because of the strong theoretical grounds to anticipate influences that extend both to geographically contiguous areas and to those that, though not contiguous, share similar social characteristics. We argue that such influences—what we term spatial and social proximity effects, respectively—constitute a central feature of community dynamics. To support this argument, we develop and test theoretically derived hypotheses about spatial and social proximity effects of resource deprivation on aggregated and disaggregated homicide counts. Our analyses indicate that local area resource deprivation contributes to violence in socially proximate communities, an effect that, in the case of instrumental homicides, is stronger when such communities are spatially proximate. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories focused on community‐level social processes and violence, and for policies aimed at reducing crime in disadvantaged areas.     

Neglect of mining areas in Ghana: the case for equitable distribution of resource revenue

The article portrays the standard of living and the deplorable conditions that exist in mining areas. The government of Ghana set up the Mineral Development Fund to aid development in mining areas but has not been successful in ensuring that mining communities benefit sufficiently from mining revenues since development still does not take place. Mining has gone on for over a 100 years in Ghana, but the developmental challenges facing the mining communities remain with agitations from the towns. Meanwhile, Ghana’s Constitution vest all natural resources in the President on behalf of and in trust for the people of Ghana. The confidence the Constitution puts in the President must see to the development of the mining communities. Progress has eluded mining communities in Ghana since the exploitation of minerals. This article argues that part of the revenue that accrues to the nation from its minerals must be reserved for a national fund that is managed by a body that is not related to the state for the development of the mining areas. In the alternative, mining lease should specify part of the revenue for the development of the mining communities.     

论国际强行法之酷刑禁止

禁止酷刑从日内瓦公约的最初萌芽到<禁止酷刑和其他残忍、不人道或有辱人格的待遇或处罚公约>的确立,走过了一段漫长的路程.二战后,随着国际社会对人权问题的关注,国际社会整体接受并不许损抑的国际强行法出台,酷刑禁止也上升到了一个更高的层次.现今,酷刑禁止已成为国际强行法律规范,酷刑成为任何国家均有权管辖的行为,因为"尊重人的尊严的价值在重要性上要远远超出对酷刑所做的任何辩解".