Socio-political change and crime

This article offers an epistimological approach to criminological inquiry that draws on political and economic perspectives to create a theoretical context for hate crimes and xenophobia in contemporary Germany. The paper concludes that criminology as a discipline may be inadequate to grasp the complexities of criminal interactions and that criminology must draw heavily on the perspectives of other disciplines. Ultimately, it may be more important to illicit ideas rather than attempt to know the truth. The author wishes to note that this paper draws on an earlier published work and was constructed post facto from his comments and presentation at the conference.     

Psychology and legal change

This article takes stock of one aspect of psychologically based empirical jurisprudence-its role in legal change over the last decade. It assesses the ways in which the increased involvement of psychology in the legal process has influenced and affected the nature and direction of legal change. While acknowledging very real and tangible successes, it also identifies several problem areas, ones whose significance may grow in light of an increasingly unsympathetic, conservative judiciary. The direction of psychology and law, as an applied academic discipline, and the future of empirically based legal change are also examined.This article is based on an Invited Address to Division 41, APA Annual Convention, New Orleans, August, 1989.     

Psychology and legal change

From its inception, research in “law and psychology” has had an explicitly applied focus. In large part, psychologists have studied legal issues and participated as experts in the legal process in order to improve law and enhance the quality of its justice. This article examines whether and how this can be done. A taxonomy of relationships between the two disciplines is presented which characterizes law and psychology research in terms of its potential for legal change. The use of psychology of effect legal change requires a bringing together of both psychological and legal paradigms. But important differences exist between the styles and methods of reasoning, proff, and justfication in psychology and law. The implications of those differences for the use of psychological data in legal change efforts are developed, as are other aspects of “legalism” that may hinder or impede the effectiveness of psychologically oriented law reform. Finally, limitations of a “factual jurisprudence” that derived from the nature of psychological data are examined.     

Organizational change in law enforcement

A major problem in identifying and understanding change in law enforcement organizations is in specifying the object of intended change and the process by which change is to be implemented. The study focuses on organizational-structural change in police organizations and examines factors which have influenced the implementation of saturation patrol units, covert surveillance units, and regionalized detective bureaus. The results indicate that factors such as domain consensus, dependence and influence relationships, and perceptions of threat affect both the acceptance and use of these organizational changes.     

Navigating the currents of change

The river twisted and shrank above the beaver ponds. It neared a mountain. It was small and quiet here, full of snake-bends, oxbows and small cutthroat trout. It entered a grove of virgin Sitka spruce, and the hoof cut-trail entered in beside it. … The grove was like a vast lodge, barked pillars rising to a high mosaic of green and black and sky. A watery light filtered down, as if through stained glass. In the center of the lodge was a hollow, bordered by sword ferns and fallen logs. In the bottom of the hollow was a broad, rocky bowl eerily paved with mosshaired, head-sized stones. Among the stones was a quiet spring. And from the spring brimmed the water, old and clean and untiring. I had reached the source of the Tamanawis.     

Techniques for evaluating regulatory change

This paper demonstrates the applicability of two empirical techniques—the Heckman two-stage switching regression and the event study methodology—for evaluating regulatory or legislative change relating to companies and in particular to the regulation of company reporting. These techniques measure the impact of regulatory changes once they have happened. They could be used in practice if regulatory changes were subject to a review procedure. The availability of these relatively sophisticated techniques should encourage the quantitative analysis of regulatory changes. Comparisons of effects across member states of the European Union would be interesting but would obviously need care.     

Utah legislation and systems change

Juvenile and family court judges know bureaucratic delays pose serious harm to child development and that extended stays in foster care can result in juvenile delinquency. Utah judges and legislators together searched successfully for new ways to improve court systems and to better serve the children and families of their state.     

Gang change and evolutionary theory

While most street gangs are temporary and disorganized, some have institutionalized, and a number of these show signs of evolving into more serious criminal enterprises, becoming more networked, technologically savvy and internationalized, less visible, more predatory and sometimes more violent. The boundaries that researchers have drawn between gangs and other types of criminal groups, particularly organized crime, are becoming blurred. Understanding why this is happening is crucial to planning effective responses. This article suggests that evolutionary theory, involving processes of variation, selection and replication, would constitute a valuable tool for this purpose. Using an evolutionary framework would enable the application of a longitudinal perspective to the microsocial level of analysis, the gang itself, which until now has not had as much attention as other levels of analysis in gang research. Taking inspiration from evolutionary theories in organizational sociology and economics, this article explores how evolutionary theory might be used to understand gang change and locate gangs within evolutionary sequences. It argues that adopting an evolutionary perspective will improve the capacity of law enforcement agencies to focus scarce resources where they are most needed and to plan and implement successful interventions.     

Measuring motivation to change in offenders

Abstract

Measuring motivation to change in offender populations is important both for selection into treatment programmes and for assessing progress in therapy. Two studies are reported in this paper, both looking at the psychometric properties of questionnaires designed to measure stage of change in therapy. The samples used were patients detained in special hospitals under the Mental Health Act (1983) classification of psychopathic disorder. The first study provides norms for this group on the stages of change in psychotherapy questionnaire, plus some additional information on its relationship with self-esteem and self-efficacy measures. The second study looked at a brief version of the stages of change questionnaire, concluding that its psychometric properties were such that further use was contra-indicated.     

Why did inheritance laws change?

The existence of restrictive inheritance laws poses a problem. Since such laws restrict parents' choices, they may cause conflict among children, and so, at first glance, appear to be costly for society. Then why did these laws survive for so long? Why were they not altered once their harm was perceived? This paper shows that restrictive laws have benefits, as well as costs, since they diminish inequality among heirs and thus enhance social stability. The advantages of these laws are evident when people live in relatively isolated communities where central authorities are weak. As population increases and central authorities become stronger, the stability of a society is enhanced if inheritance laws are changed and greater freedom of choice is given to parents. These views are examined by looking at inheritance laws in England and France during and after the Middle Ages. The reason for selecting these countries is to explain not only the existence but also the evolution of inheritance customs and their evolution is better documented in these countries than elsewhere.Say not you know another entirely, till you have divided an inheritance with him (J.K. Lavater).     

Crime change patterns in American cities

A longitudinal analysis of the changes in crime rates between the late 1950s and 1970 in the 155 largest U.S. cities indicates that (1) there is virtually no relationship between the four major crimes against persons although there is strong mutual association between the four major crimes against property; (2) changes in racial composition account for more variation in changes in crime than do changes in income, thereby suggesting the need for more detailed studies of the noneconomic ways in which a city's racial composition affects crime incidence; and (3) there is a modest relationship between changes in the number of male youth and changes in certain types of crime. Since these findings are based on highly aggregated data with both known and unknown measurement errors, they must be treated cautiously.     

Homicide-suicide in the change of time

Homicide-suicide is a rare event compared to suicide and homicide alone. A comparison of the statistical figures of two studies for Hamburg (1950-1961 and 1990-2005) shows a significant development within the last 40 years: the total number of homicide-suicides committed by women has decreased considerably, probably due to a better medical and psychiatric care and greater economic independence, whereas the number of male perpetrators has remained constant. However, these perpetrators are younger now. As far as the methods are concerned, shooting is now the most common means of killing instead of poisoning by coal gas in former days.     

Creating change in the legal system

Focuses on the potential contributions that community psychology models can make to theory, research, and practice in the area of psychology and law. The author, in his presidential address to the American Psychology-Law Society, looks specifically at the criminal and juvenile justice systems and the impact that these systems, and law and policy more broadly, have on individuals. He argues that community psychology perspectives would help shift the focus away from the disproportionate and often incorrect emphasis that our system of justice places on individual deficit models and individual level interventions, and concludes that a community psychology approach would also reinforce efforts to promote prevention programs that in the long term might prove more effective in dealing with the problem of crime in our society.This article is a revised version of the American Psychology-Law Society (Division 41 of the American Psychological Association) Presidential Address, read at the American Psychological Association Convention, Los Angeles, August, 1994. I want to thank Ray Corrado, Steve Hart, John Monahan, Jim Ogloff, Julian Rappaport, Dick Reppucci, Kathy Roesch, and Ed Seidman for their comments and feedback on earlier versions of this paper.Simon Fraser University.     

Policy change and health care research

Explaining policy change is one of the most central tasks of contemporary policy analysis. Reacting to overly rigid institutionalist frameworks that emphasize stability rather than change, a growing number of scholars have formulated new theoretical models to shed light on policy change. Focusing on health care reform but drawing on the broader social science literature on policy and politics, this article offers critical perspectives on the institutionalist and ideational literatures on policy change while assessing their relevance for analyzing change in contemporary health care systems. The last section sketches a research agenda for studying policy change in health care.     

Continuity and change over the generations

In the German-speaking scientific community, empirically oriented family sociologists are often interested exclusively in current family situations. Only rarely is there in-depth consideration of the continued influence of familial and socio-historical contexts on individual life histories. While giving due regard to the effect of cataclysmic events and disruptions along with long-term and gradually changing patterns, this article seeks to develop a historical context that permits distinct levels of time to be identified, supporting further empirical work in family research. The closely interwoven fabric of individual and family histories is examined through the analysis of family histories and dynamics from the perspective of biographical narrators over a time span that transcends a single lifetime. The life stories of three East German women—grandmother (age 77), mother (age 49), and daughter (age 28)—give profound insights into the realities of socialism, women's professional careers, the contradictions of daily life, the upheavals attendant on the collapse of communism, and the challenges involved in the transition from socialism to capitalism.     

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.     

论政府作风转变中的制度建设

政府作风影响政府运作,事关政府形象,政府作风是决定一个政府是“什么样”政府的一个根本问题。政府作风问题,除了受政府性质、公务员素质等这些决定性因素影响外,制度建设,至关重要;当前我国在政府作风上存在的问题有其深刻的制度方面原因。当前,转变政府作风,除了加强公务员的自身教育外,更应加强制度建设,完善相关制度,从源头上预防和治理不良政风,树立和弘扬良好政风。     

Africa in the global climate change negotiations

The African Group of Negotiators (AGN) has become a much more significant bargaining coalition in the global climate change negotiations. It has been participating more proactively and on a much more significant scale, and, as a result, it has had a greater impact on bargaining outcomes, notably in Nairobi, Copenhagen and Durban. Yet, at present, the group remains poorly understood by both scholars and policymakers. Compared to other groups in the climate negotiations, such as the Group of 77 and Alliance of Small Island States, it has received relatively little attention. This paper fills this gap by tracking the evolution of the AGN over the course of the climate change negotiations. In the early years after the Earth Summit, it shows that the AGN faced tremendous difficulties pursing regional objectives effectively, largely due to a number of “internal” barriers to participation, which compounded the structural barriers that the continent faced by making it difficult to use “low-power” negotiating strategies such as coalition building, agenda-setting and persuasion. However, in recent years, the group has become much more proactive as a result of greater access to material, ideational and institutional resources. These have relieved, somewhat, the internal barriers that the group faced, making it possible for the AGN to negotiate much more confidently and effectively than before.