Obesity, courts, and the new politics of public health

Health care politics are changing. They increasingly focus not on avowedly public projects (such as building the health care infrastructure) but on regulating private behavior. Examples include tobacco, obesity, abortion, drug abuse, the right to die, and even a patient's relationship with his or her managed care organization. Regulating private behavior introduces a distinctive policy process; it alters the way we introduce (or frame) political issues and shifts many important decisions from the legislatures to the courts. In this article, we illustrate the politics of private regulation by following a dramatic case, obesity, through the political process. We describe how obesity evolved from a private matter to a political issue. We then assess how different political institutions have responded and conclude that courts will continue to take the leading role.     

STATEWIDE INITIATIVES TO ENCOURAGE ALTERNATIVE DISPUTE RESOLUTION AND ENHANCE COLLABORATIVE APPROACHES TO RESOLVING FAMILY ISSUES

Over the past 27 years, since the concept of the multidoor courthouse was first introduced, methods for resolving family issues have increasingly focused on less adversarial and more collaborative approaches. Infrastructures have developed in a variety of ways in different states to initiate, support, and promote these approaches, and pilot projects have provided an invaluable avenue for testing and implementing changes. This article will describe some of the current statewide initiatives to develop infrastructure and implement change through creative pilot projects and will propose strategies to sustain these changes.     

Historicising Criminalisation: Conceptual and Empirical Issues

This paper charts a renaissance in scholarly analysis of criminalisation, and suggests that we do not have the conceptual tools or empirical knowledge to make the claims about 'overcriminalisation' which motivate much of this scholarship. My argument gives further shape to projects under the umbrella of criminalisation, setting out some of the conceptual issues to be resolved before we can work towards an adequate interpretive, and normative, vision of how criminal law has been and might be used. The paper elaborates a number of projects in 'criminalisation scholarship', and suggests there is a failure adequately to distinguish the different senses of 'criminalisation' in the literature, or the varying methods which might be applied within historical, interpretive, analytic and normative studies of criminalisation. In conclusion, the paper argues for a certain genre of criminalisation scholarship, and for a multi-disciplinary criminalisation research agenda informed by history, sociology and political science as much as by law, criminology and philosophy.     

Governing Cocaine Supply and Organized Crime from Latin America and the Caribbean: The Changing Security Logics in European Union External Policy

The logics of the European Union’s policy and practices against narcotic drugs in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have undergone a substantial shift the past decade: from development to security. Based on an empirical mapping of the EU’s drug-related projects in LAC, this article argues that an ‘integrated and balanced’ approach to drugs policy is being replaced by a bifurcation between the broader domains of development policy and security policy. Questions are raised as to how the EU’s projects on development and security might counteract one another, and how the Union’s programme aimed at dismantling transnational organized crime along the cocaine trafficking routes to Europe might have unintended consequences. While keeping in mind the shifting tectonics of the international drug prohibition consensus, the article goes on to analyze the increasingly salient security rationale in EU external drugs policy against the backdrop of the EU’s emerging role as a global security actor. In doing so, it touches upon the intrinsic tensions between human rights and (supra) national security.     

Current Criminal Justice Projects Here and Abroad

The present survey is based mainly, as far as the United States is concerned, on the files of the Smithsonian Science Information Exchange (SSIE), from whom we received—with the financial support of the University of Central Florida—the most recent five hundred or so project reports in the field of criminal and juvenile justice and related areas, including crime-related drug and alcohol abuse projects. As to foreign projects, only a few are listed with SSIE; most of the following information is the result of an admittedly incomplete inquiry among organizations, research institutes, and universities abroad. May we say here that we received excellent cooperation from them which we greatly appreciated. Space being limited, we can describe in the following article only a few of the some one-thousand projects we examined.     

Videoconferencing in Criminal Proceedings: Legal and Empirical Issues and Directions for Research

State and federal courts are increasingly using videoconferencing to hold proceedings in criminal cases, including first appearances and arraignments. However, little systematic information is available about the extent of its use, the proceedings for which it is used, how it is implemented, and, most importantly, whether videoconferencing affects the behavior or perceptions of participants in a way that violates a defendant's fundamental rights. In this article we review the legal and empirical issues raised by the use of videoconferencing in criminal cases and describe empirical research that could and, we argue, should, inform policy decisions concerning its use.     

The Neglect of Quantitative Research in Green Criminology and Its Consequences

While interest in green criminology has rapidly expanded over the past twenty-five years, much of this growth has occurred on the periphery of orthodox criminology. This article suggests that green criminology’s marginalization is partially a result of its non-quantitative methodology. We hypothesize that non-quantitative tendencies within green criminology distance it from orthodox criminology because orthodox criminology values quantitative methods (Tewksbury et al. in J Crim Justice Educ 16(2):265–279, 2005). Here, we examine how neglecting quantitative research methods may contribute to inattention to green criminology within orthodox criminology, and we consider what can be done to change that situation. We suggest that employing quantitative approaches within green criminology is one way to increase its appeal to mainstream criminology, and that quantitative studies, in conjunction with other research methodologies, can also enhance generalizability of findings, influence policy, and advance theory construction and hypothesis testing.     

Multicriteria Decision Aid to support Multilateral Environmental Agreements in assessing international forestry projects

The three Rio Conventions—the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification—face the challenge to create synergies at different levels. The objective of this article is to describe how we have assessed synergies between the Rio Conventions at the project level in the forest sector. Since the complexity of the decision problem is high, we adopted the Multicriteria Decision Aid approach, which can provide a broad insight into the decision problem and find a compromise solution to a problem with multidimensional and conflicting criteria including social, economic and environmental features. The ELECTRE TRI model was used for assessing synergies at the project level, and has been a useful tool to quantify the performance of afforestation and reforestation projects into three categories (synergistic, reasonably synergistic, and not synergistic). For the first time, afforestation and reforestation projects have been assessed in a comprehensive way through decision criteria that reflect global and local interests using a non-compensatory multicriteria method.     

Partner Violence in Women's Prison: The Social Consequences of Girlfriend Fights

In this article, we use qualitative interviews with female inmates to examine how these women describe the consequences of girlfriend fights in prison. We find that they describe these fights as both social and pervasive. We also find that those who were counseled by staff members describe being empowered by the event. We argue that prison officials must use better methods of identifying and addressing partner violence in prison. We also recommend the use of widespread programs aimed at reducing partner violence.     

Optimizing Ballistic Imaging Operations

Ballistic imaging systems can help solve crimes by comparing images of cartridge cases, which are recovered from a crime scene or test‐fired from a gun, to a database of images obtained from past crime scenes. Many U.S. municipalities lack the resources to process all of their cartridge cases. Using data from Stockton, CA, we analyze two problems: how to allocate limited capacity to maximize the number of cartridge cases that generate at least one hit, and how to prioritize the cartridge cases that are processed to maximize the usefulness (i.e., obtained before the corresponding criminal case is closed) of hits. The number of hits can be significantly increased by prioritizing crime scene evidence over test‐fires, and by ranking calibers by their hit probability and processing only the higher ranking calibers. We also estimate that last‐come first‐served increases the proportion of hits that are useful by only 0.05 relative to first‐come first‐served.     

Bound to One's Own Words? Early Defenses and Their Binding Effects in Different Criminal Cases

This article explores the binding forces that emerge in criminal cases. Using ethnographic data, we explore how defendants are bound to their initial defenses. In addition, we ask whether the binding effect works similarly or differently in three distinct procedures. Our research is rooted in the analytical concepts of "procedural history" and "discourse formation" as presented by Niklas Luhmann and Michel Foucault. Both theories describe past statements as "virulent" in present stages: participants have to take their own histories into account when engaging in current dealings; current statements must confront past statements, generating inconsistency and contradiction. Empirically, the three authors explore variations of binding in the light of eight microhistorical case narratives collected during fieldwork in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. These microhistories trace the binding effects of early defenses through pretrial and trial. Our observations lead us to conclude that the binding mechanism appears less determinative in practice than in the claims of theory. Alongside the several effects of binding, we identify a variety of protections, interruptions, and even unbinding effects.     

A Survey Analysis of University-Technology Transfer in Israel: Evaluation of Projects and Determinants of Success

The purpose of this study is to examine how technology transfer organizations (TTOs) at Israeli universities evaluate projects and how they perceive the success or failure of these projects once they are selected. We also analyze whether the criteria they use are similar to those employed by venture capitalists and MIT. We find that the decision criteria used by Israeli universities are similar to those employed by venture capitalists and by the relatively entrepreneurially-focused TTO at MIT. The perceived success of a technology transfer project is strongly related to the quality and motivation of the project team. Dimotech, an Israeli TTO that is focused on entrepreneurial startups, appears to place a stronger emphasis on the characteristics of the individuals involved in launching a new venture than the other Israeli TTOs, which are focused on licensing.     

The utilization of forensic science and criminal profiling for capturing serial killers

Movies and nightly television shows appear to emphasize highly efficient regimens in forensic science and criminal investigative analysis (profiling) that result in capturing serial killers and other perpetrators of homicide. Although some of the shows are apocryphal and unrealistic, they reflect major advancements that have been made in the fields of forensic science and criminal psychology during the past two decades that have helped police capture serial killers. Some of the advancements are outlined in this paper. In a study of 200 serial killers, we examined the variables that led to police focusing their attention on specific suspects. We developed 12 categories that describe how serial killers come to the attention of the police. The results of the present study indicate that most serial killers are captured as a result of citizens and surviving victims contributing information that resulted in police investigations that led to an arrest. The role of forensic science appears to be important in convicting the perpetrator, but not necessarily in identifying the perpetrator.     

Corporate environmental responsibility and criminology

This article addresses corporate environmental responsibility (CER) and aims to present a criminological analysis of it. We studied the opinion of a number of principle actors involved in CER in Europe in order to determine how they perceive it in terms of its definition, aetiology and approaches. For each of these dimensions we relate back to a criminological framework to ascertain how it is positioned in the green criminological debate. We start out by providing information on what corporate environmental responsibility is and how it relates to corporate social responsibility and sustainable development. Then we outline the theoretical framework in accordance with the three central themes for the criminological analysis of CER: definition, aetiology and approaches. We also explain the method that was used (semi-structured interviews). Next, we present the results according to the same threefold structure. Finally we discuss these results in a last part, which is divided in two. First, we look at the challenges that the criminological perspective poses for CER in terms of definition, aetiology and approaches. The second part of the discussion turns the question around and wonders how CER could contribute to greening criminology.     

Personal networks and crime victimization among Swedish youth

We combine routine activity theory, lifestyle-victimization theory, and a social network perspective to examine crime victimization. In particular, we study to what extent crime victimization is associated with having close contacts who have been victimized and/or who engage in risky lifestyles. We use the data (collected in 2014) of 1,051 native Swedes and 1,108 Iranian and Yugoslavian first- or second-generation immigrants in Sweden who were all born in 1990. They were asked to describe their personal characteristics, various behaviours, and past personal experiences with crime victimization, as well as those of the five persons with whom they most often spend their leisure time. Our findings support the network perspective: crime victimization is negatively associated with the number of close contacts an individual mentions but is substantially more likely for those who have many close contacts who have themselves been victimized. In terms of a risky lifestyle that may enhance the likelihood of being victimized, we found only that individuals who get drunk frequently were at somewhat higher risk of being victimized. To guard young individuals against crime victimization, it might thus be worthwhile to focus more on with whom they associate than on their potentially risky lifestyles or attitudes.     

Power to the people? Restoring citizen participation

This article investigates a lost ideal--citizen participation in health policy. We begin by mapping the different types of participation. We then suggest what direct citizen action has achieved in the past, why it ought to be restored today, and how we might go about reviving it. A changing social environment--marked by globalization, immigration, a culture war, and managed care--could be addressed by robust, local, democratic health reforms. Finally, we contrast the top-down health sector with education and crime policies that take communities far more seriously.     

Research Note: Randomized field experiments published in the British Journal of Criminology, 1960–2004

Randomized controlled trials have become an important component of evidence-based policy in criminal justice. Because searches of electronic bibliographic databases often miss relevant trials, handsearch – or the visual inspection of the contents of an article – is recommended as an additional search strategy. In this paper, we conducted an electronic handsearch of every available issue of the British Journal of Criminology (1960–2004) to determine how many randomized field experiments were published. We compare these results to earlier manual handsearch efforts to augment the Campbell Collaboration Social, Psychological, Educational and Criminological Trials Register (C2-SPECTR). We find only nine trials (although two used quasi-random allocation such as alternation), and just one published in the past 20 years. We discuss some possible reasons for this, and conclude with a modest agenda for improving the reporting of evidence in the age of evidence-based policy.     

The Effect of the Size of Voting Blocs on Incumbents' Roll‐Call Voting and the Asymmetric Polarization of Congress

Candidates face a trade‐off in the general election between taking a more‐moderate position that appeals to swing voters and a more‐extreme position that appeals to voters in the party's base. The threat of abstention by voters in the party's base if their candidate takes a position too moderate for them moves candidates to take more‐extreme positions. I discuss hypotheses regarding how this trade‐off affects candidate positioning and describe my tests of those hypotheses using data on House members in the 107th Congress and Senate members for the period 1982–2004. I then present data on how the distribution of voters in the electorate has changed over the past three decades and discuss how, in light of my empirical findings, these changes might explain the observed pattern of asymmetric polarization in Congress in recent decades.     

Putting Ourselves in Another’s Skin: Using the Plasticity of Self-Perception to Enhance Empathy and Decrease Prejudice

The self is one the most important concepts in social cognition and plays a crucial role in determining questions such as which social groups we view ourselves as belonging to and how we relate to others. In the past decade, the self has also become an important topic within cognitive neuroscience with an explosion in the number of studies seeking to understand how different aspects of the self are represented within the brain. In this paper, we first outline the recent research on the neurocognitive basis of the self and highlight a key distinction between two forms of self-representation. The first is the “bodily” self, which is thought to be the basis of subjective experience and is grounded in the processing of sensorimotor signals. The second is the “conceptual” self, which develops through our interactions of other and is formed of a rich network of associative and semantic information. We then investigate how both the bodily and conceptual self are related to social cognition with an emphasis on how self-representations are involved in the processing and creation of prejudice. We then highlight new research demonstrating that the bodily and conceptual self are both malleable and that this malleability can be harnessed in order to achieve a reduction in social prejudice. In particular, we will outline strong evidence that modulating people’s perceptions of the bodily self can lead to changes in attitudes at the conceptual level. We will highlight a series of studies demonstrating that social attitudes towards various social out-groups (e.g. racial groups) can lead to a reduction in prejudice towards that group. Finally, we seek to place these findings in a broader social context by considering how innovations in virtual reality technology can allow experiences of taking on another’s identity are likely to become both more commonplace and more convincing in the future and the various opportunities and risks associated with using such technology to reduce prejudice.