Community prosecution tenets and practices: The relative mix of “community” and “prosecution”

Community prosecution encourage prosecutors to collaborate with constituents to mutually determine solutions to community problems. However, the potential exists for prosecutors to continue seeking their traditional goals of maximizing convictions while nominally working within a community-prosecution framework. A random survey of 261 Georgia prosecutors helps to determine whether community-based prosecutors spend more time in community outreach and law enforcement coordination activities. The results show that attorney caseload measures correlate with time spent on community outreach and law enforcement. Being assigned to community prosecution or a specialized crime unit is not consistently related either of these activities. In short, consistent differences do not emerge between community-based and traditional prosecutors.     

The Time Path of Legislative Party Switching and the Dynamics of Political Competition: The Italian Case (1996–2011)

Political competition is more realistically described as a dynamic process rather than as a series of static stages in which parties compete over policy and government formation. This paper focuses on legislative party switching as the main manifestation of this endogenously evolving process, linking individual switching behaviour to policy and office incentives that are assumed to evolve throughout the life of the entire legislature. Using a new data set tracking the timing of MPs’ changes in party affiliations between 1996 and 2011 in Italy, it is found that switching is mainly motivated by policy reasons and that it is more likely during government formation periods and budget negotiations. These results are a consequence of the interplay between MPs’ ambition and the alternation of key phases in the legislative cycle.     

The politics of race and juvenile justice: The “due process revolution” and the conservative reaction

Through the prism of race, this article analyzes the social structural and political context of juvenile justice law reforms over the past half century. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Supreme Court imposed national legal and equality norms on recalcitrant southern states that still adhered to a segregated Jim Crow legal regime, and these norms provided the impetus for the Supreme Court's juvenile court “due process” decisions in the 1960s. The article then analyzes sociological, criminological, racial factors, media coverage, and political dynamics of the 1970s and 1980s that contributed to the “get tough” legislative reformulation of juvenile justice policies in the 1990s. During this period, conservative Republican politicians pursued a “southern strategy,” used crime as a code word for race for electoral advantage, and advocated “get tough” policies, which led to punitive changes in juvenile justice laws and practices and have had a disproportionate impact on racial minorities.     

“To develop and test:” The inventive difference between evaluation and experimentation

The National Research Council (NRC) Report on Improving Evaluation of Anticrime Programs raises a fundamental question about the mission of evaluation research. The implicit premise of the report is that the mission of evaluation is to answer questions about programs developed by others; in short, to test anti-crime programs. In contrast, the mission of experimental criminology has, historically, been to develop anti-crime programs as well as to test them. There are times when an arm’s-length relationship between program and evaluation may be appropriate. Yet, such a separation necessarily produces a courtroom-like adjudication role for evaluators, rather than the laboratory-like, participant–inventor role that has characterized the best of experimental criminology. The recent case of the Chicago police’s “evaluating” the use of sequential suspect identification methods developed by academic psychologists shows the many flaws of the “testing-only” model. This suggests that providing “effective guidance of criminal justice policy and practice,” as the NRC report defines its focus [Lipsey, M. ed (2005). http://newton.nap.edu/pdf/0309097061/pdf_image/R1.pdf] will not only require evaluation research (defined as arm’s-length testing) but the full toolbox of experimental criminology to develop and test anti-crime programs.

The Meaning and Protection of ‘Cultural Objects and Places of Worship’ Under the 1977 Additional Protocols

Netherlands International Law Review - This article addresses R. O’Keefe’s 1999 publication entitled ‘The Meaning of “Cultural Property” under the 1954 Hague...     

“Knowledge and Death Penalty Opinion: The Marshall Hypotheses Revisited.”

This study tests the three hypotheses derived from the written opinion of Justice Thurgood Marshall in Furman v Georgia in 1972. Subjects completed questionnaires at the beginning and the end of the fall a semester. Experimental group subjects were enrolled in a death penalty class, while control group subjects were enrolled in another criminal justice class. The death penalty class was the experimental stimulus. Findings provided strong support for the first and third hypotheses, i.e., subjects were generally lacking in death penalty knowledge before the experimental stimulus, and death penalty proponents who scored “high” on a retribution index did not change their death penalty opinions despite exposure to death penalty knowledge. Marshall’s second hypothesis--that death penalty knowledge and death penalty support were inversely related--was not supported by the data. Two unexpected findings were that death penalty proponents who scored “low” on a retribution index also did not change their death penalty opinions after becoming more informed about the subject, and that death penalty knowledge did not alter subjects’ initial retributive positions. Suggestions for future research are provided.     

Explaining “Pain and Suffering” Awards: The Role of Injury Characteristics and Fault Attributions

The present research explored factors thought to affect compensatory awards for non-economic ham (pain and suffering) in personal injury cases. Experiment 1 showed that the nature and severity of the plaintiffs injury had a strong effect on perceptions of the extent of harm suffered and on award amounts. The parties' relatively active or passive roles in causing the injury affected assessments of their degree of fault, but perceived fault had little influence on awards. Experiment 2 replicated with more varied cases the strong impact of injury severity on harm perception and on awards for pain and suffering. In both studies, the disability and the mental suffering associated with injuries were stronger predictors of awards than were pain and disfigurement.     

Impulsivity,Offending, and the Neighborhood: Investigating the Person–Context Nexus

The traditional trait-based approach to the study of crime has been challenged for its failure to acknowledge differences in the social environments to which individuals are exposed. Similarly, community-level explanations of crime have been criticized for failing to take into account important individual differences between criminals and non-criminals. Ultimately, a full understanding of crime requires the consideration of both individual and environmental differences, perhaps most importantly because they may interact to produce offending behavior. Yet little criminological research has examined if the effects of individual-level characteristics vary by the context in which they are embedded. The current study addresses this gap in the literature by using multivariate, multilevel item response models to examine if the influence of impulsivity on offending differs as a function of neighborhood context. Analyses using data from the Project of Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods reveals that the effects of impulsivity are amplified in neighborhoods with higher levels of socioeconomic status and collective efficacy, and lower levels of criminogenic behavior settings and moral/legal cynicism. Implications of these findings for research and policy are discussed.     

“Sealfie”, “Phoque you” and “Animism”: The Canadian Inuit Answer to the United-States Anti-sealing Activism

A corpus made by online Canadian newspaper articles, coming from the archives of CBC News, Vice Canada and Huffington Post Canada, and related multimedia contents such us audio interviews, videos and especially links to images and comments shared on Twitter, allows us to reconstruct the debate on the seal hunt that involved Canadian media in 2014. In specific, we propose an interpretation of the pro-sealing discourse by Canadian Inuit and Newfoundlanders as an ironic and incisive answer to the serious United States animal rights activists discourse, explaining how these two different points of view on animals come from a different experience of the environment and a different conception of nature. The image of the seal became the friction point between Western naturalism against Inuit animism: a multinaturalist (Descola in Beyond nature and culture, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2013) clash in the North America post-colonial situation. A clash solved by people as Tanya Tagaq and other Inuit artists that belong to these two different semiospheres (Lotman in Universe of the mind. A semiotic theory of culture. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1990) and thanks to their border placement can allow a dialog between Inuit and North American cultures traducing aesthetic forms, values and meanings. To study the structures of meaning at the base of this clash and iconoclash (Latour, in Weibel, Latour (eds) Iconoclash. Beyond the image-wars in science, religion and art, pp 14–37, ZKM and MIT Press, Boston, 2002) on the artic seal between opposite cultures, it has been necessary to use the socio-semiotic approach (Greimas and Courtés in Semiotics and language: an analytical dictionary, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1982, Marrone in Corpi sociali. Processi comunicativi e semiotica del testo, Einaudi, Torino, 2001) with the help of semiotics of culture tools (Lotman in Universe of the mind. A semiotic theory of culture. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990, Culture and explosion. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2009].     

Jails and Public Health Service Delivery and Empirical Knowledge: The Impact of Jail Population “Flow”

Time/flow is a decisive variable when proposing public health interventions in jail populations and settings. The present paper argues that jail flow affects the types of public health interventions achievable in ways not acknowledged generally by public health/medical researchers. The paper explores how public health interventions vary among jail populations in terms of “flow” and how they are affected by a “period” effect. Interventions that will be effective and reach a substantial portion of the jail population are dependent upon the point in the jail processing process. In turn, the variables that affect the speed of population flow through the jail setting also influence who will be served by public health interventions.     

“I'm calling my mom”: The meaning of family and kinship among homegirls

This paper explores the relationships and experiences of a group of young Latina women. The material is drawn from an ongoing comparative qualitative study of ethnic youth gangs in the San Francisco Bay area. The information collected highlights the female gang members' complex relationships with their families, with one another, and with male counterparts. By focusing on the elaborate networks of support and strong attachments that women form, we suggest a reexamination of the relationships between family and gang in the gang members' lives.     

“Slinging dope”: The role of gangs and gang members in drug sales

There are two competing views about the role of gangs and gang members in drug sales. The first argues that street gangs are well-organized purveyors of illegal drugs who reinvest the profits from drug sales into the gang. A second approach rejects this notion. Its proponents claim that drug sales by gangs are seldom well-organized and that gang members often act independently of the gang in selling drugs. We examine these two arguments in the context of findings from a three-year field study of street gangs in a large midwestern city. We find that gang members are involved extensively in the sale of drugs, but that sales are seldom well organized. These results are discussed in light of the organizational structure of the gang and the nature of the street drug market.     

“Broken Windows” and fractured history: The use and misuse of history in recent police patrol analysis

In a recent and provocative article entitled “Broken Windows,” James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling propose a new role orientation for the urban police in America. They argue that the police should replace their current preoccupation with crime control and concentrate instead on dealing with small order maintenance problems. Their argument is based upon a synthesis of recent police research and an analysis of police history.

This article critiques the analysis of police history offered by Wilson and Kelling. It disputes their argument that American police officers enjoyed a high degree of legitimacy in the eyes of urban neighborhood residents in the years before the advent of the patrol car. It also offers a different interpretation of the impact of technological innovation upon patterns of police-citizen contacts during the past fifty years.     

The power principle: “Inherent defects” reconsidered

George P. Fletcher, With Justice for Some: Victims’ Rights in Criminal Trials Reading, MA: Addison‐Wesley Publishing Co., 1995, xi + 304 pp.     

Thomas Craig’s Aetiology of Law and Society: Literary Dependence and Independence in the Jus Feudale

While Craig's relationship to, and emergence from, the French legal humanist tradition has always been widely recognized, this paper constitutes a deeper analysis of the specific threads connecting Craig to the humanist literature of the sixteenth century. It examines the first chapter to the Jus feudale and, by studying Craig's aetiology of law and society, assesses the literary and cultural influences on his historiographical product. It demonstrates that Craig's understanding of the earliest human society and of law's evolution was highly dependent on continental humanist literature and, above all, on the writings of Jean Bodin. Yet it also shows that Craig was capable of independent thought and rigorous critical analysis of sources. The article examines Craig's relationship to the writings of his fellow Scot and humanist, George Buchanan, whose De jure regni apud Scotos constitutes a vital intertextual frame for many aspects of Craig's thought, particularly as it relates to sovereignty, monarchy and the limits of royal power. Moreover, it will be seen that the first chapter, though seemingly an antiquarian digression, actually reflects Craig's thoughts on many significant political issues that were current in Scotland at the time he was writing.