Public Experiences of Police Violence and Corruption in Contemporary Russia: A Case of Predatory Policing?

“Predatory policing” occurs where police officers mainly use their authority to advance their own material interests rather than to fight crime or protect the interests of elites. These practices have the potential to seriously compromise the public's trust in the police and other legal institutions, such as courts. Using data from six surveys and nine focus groups conducted in Russia, we address four empirical questions: (1) How widespread are public encounters with police violence and police corruption in Russia? (2) To what extent does exposure to these two forms of police misconduct vary by social and economic characteristics? (3) How do Russians perceive the police, the courts, and the use of violent methods by the police? (4) How, if at all, do experiences of police misconduct affect these perceptions? Our results suggest that Russia conforms to a model of predatory policing. Despite substantial differences in its law enforcement institutions and cultural norms regarding the law, Russia resembles the United States in that direct experiences of police abuse reduce confidence in the police and in the legal system more generally. The prevalence of predatory policing in Russia has undermined Russia's democratic transition, which should call attention to the indispensable role of the police and other public institutions in the success of democratic reforms.     

‘Dutty Babylon’: policing Black communities and the politics of resistance

Justice, when it's swift, is most effective; it's about ensuring that they see the shock and awe of the criminal justice system. Because we represent society, we want to ensure that society is reflected in our courtrooms and we want them to experience what they made us experience. (Nazir Afzal, Chief Crown Prosecutor, Manchester; Channel 4 News, 11 August, 2011; emphasis added)     

我国未成年人司法制度存在的问题与构建设想

目前，未成年人犯罪问题十分严重，触目惊心。这无论是在今天还是未来，其危害之巨大可想而知。未成年人既是社会的希望，又是社会良性发展的根基。而我国现有的未成年人司法制度已经远远不能适应社会发展的需要．并存在着不少的问题。应当重新构建我国的未成年人司法制度，以预防和减少未成年人犯罪。     

CONCENTRATED DISADVANTAGE,TRADITIONAL MALE ROLE MODELS,AND AFRICAN‐AMERICAN JUVENILE VIOLENCE*

In a stagnating urban economy, Elijah Anderson's (1999) Code of the Street depicts a disadvantaged environment where residents face high levels of joblessness, poverty, racial residential isolation, and family disruption. Anderson argues that the loss of job opportunities for African‐American men deprived younger generations of traditional male role models. That is, in a disadvantaged urban setting with a lack of male role models participating in legitimate labor market activity, many young people may turn to violence. Drawing on insights from Anderson's ethnographic work, we assess the generality of Anderson's claims more broadly and explore the potential connection between his work and the macrolevel research on urban violence. Specifically, we explore the influence of male role models (older, employed black males) and the concentration of urban disadvantage on black juvenile arrests for violence across multiple cities in 2000. Overall, we find empirical support for Anderson's concerns over the removal of traditional male role models from urban areas as a result of concentrated disadvantage. Specifically, we find that the presence of traditional male role models reduces the rates of African‐American youth violence. Additionally, our measure of traditional male role models mediates the relationship between structural disadvantage and juvenile violence. We discuss the contributions of Anderson's work to the macrolevel study of urban violence.     

A GUIDE TO EFFECTIVE CHILD PROTECTION MEDIATION: LESSONS FROM 25 YEARS OF PRACTICE

What are the essential elements of a successful child protection mediation program? What outcomes are we seeking? How do we define success? How do these inform or direct program development so that it supports these outcomes? How do we know if it is working? And, how do we start out on the right foot? We are in the enviable position now, after 25 or so years, to benefit from lessons learned from the experiences of many programs. This article provides a 25‐year perspective on key elements that have contributed to the success of child protection mediation programs.     

Bucking the Party Line: Calavita's Invitation to Law & Society (In Which the Author Is Invited to a Party Where He Encounters Many Old and Familiar Faces,Becomes Argumentative,Stays Up Too Late,and Finally Departs in Search of New Adventures)

Intended as a short survey text, Kitty Calavita's Invitation to Law & Society expertly summarizes many of the central themes of law and society scholarship as they have developed over the past fifty years. It also clearly identifies the field's object of attention: “real” law. I use this commentary on the book as an opportunity to assess the field as it enters its sixth decade. How has the field changed? What are its defining characteristics? What is “real” law? Does law and society research have a future?     

Why Juvenile Courts Should Address Family Violence: Promising Practices to Improve Intervention Outcomes

The prevalence of domestic violence in juvenile court cases justifies modifying our interventions to reflect this unfortunate reality. This article focuses primarily on juvenile victimization of parents and the model programs emerging in juvenile courts to address it. Part I examines family violence's prevalence in the juvenile court caseloads, despite its lack of consideration in most dispositions. Part II begins with a comparative analysis of the drug court trend and discusses the trend's applicability for specialized family violence applications in the Juvenile Court. The King County (Wash.) Juvenile Court's Step‐Up Program is introduced, which directly addresses family violence with intervention programs for youth perpetrators and abused parents, followed by the Santa Clara County (Calif.) Juvenile Court's Family Violence program, shown as a model worthy of replication. Part III details the process by which the Travis County (Texas) Juvenile Court is implementing a program similar to these models. Part IV concludes that juvenile courts must address family violence as an overt or underlying issue in many cases and must identify and address the danger to our troubled youths, whether offender or victim. I argue that the domestic violence community's treatment expertise must inform our juvenile courts' interventions with violent, often insular, families. In Travis County, we are committed to learning as much as possible about youth resilience–to identify and treat battered and battering teens to prevent the inter‐generational cycle from repeating itself while making our homes, communities, and schools safe.     

Advancing Competency Development: A White Paper for Pennsylvania

One of the fundamental purposes of Pennsylvania's juvenile justice system is to develop “competencies” in delinquent youth. But what does that mean? Why is it important? How is it done? The White Paper. originally published in 2005, attempted to answer those questions, articulating basic principles and identifying research‐supported practices for competency development, the least understood of the three balanced and restorative justice goals. Practitioners and policy makers in other states who are interested in helping juvenile offenders acquire the knowledge and skills they need to become productive, connected, and law‐abiding community members will find it directly relevant.     

The Knowledge of Detained Juveniles About the Juvenile Justice System

This article examines the knowledge and perceptions of detained juveniles about the roles of juvenile justice officials and the nature of the juvenile justice system. Data were collected through interviews in a group setting. The small sample size limited the generalizability of the findings but provided specific information important for future research and policymaking on an under‐studied group. The study found that the experiences of the juveniles with the justice system provided only limited understanding of the system's processes and confusion about juvenile justice officials' roles. The juveniles did not have a clear understanding of how each official's role operated within a set of roles that constitutes the system. Further, they did not fully understand the cumulative effect of juvenile processing.     

Reflections on Mansfield, Technological Complexity, and the “Golden Age” of U.S. Corporate R&D

We focus on two themes, among those in Mansfield's work, particularly relevant to understanding the role of large corporations in the U.S. innovation system: (1) the development of science-based inventions into market-ready innovations, and (2) the imitation by one firm of another's technology. Both of these phenomena, we propose, depend critically on the extent of technological and organizational complexity characteristic of current products and potential innovations. Reporting on recent survey research of our own, we argue that the origins and potentially the future of U.S. leadership in technology-based economic growth lie in the complementarity of large corporations and entrepreneurial start-ups, each exploring and exploiting the market potential of different types of science-based innovations.     

The (Dis)Advantage of Certainty: The Importance of Certainty in Language

How can legal decision makers increase the likelihood of a favorable response from other legal and social actors? To answer this, we propose a novel theory based on the certainty expressed in language that is applicable to many different legal contexts. The theory is grounded in psychology and legal advocacy and suggests that expressing certainty enhances the persuasiveness of a message. We apply this theory to the principal–agent framework to examine the treatment of Supreme Court precedent by the Federal Courts of Appeal. We find that as the level of certainty in the Supreme Court's opinion increases, the lower courts are more likely to positively treat the Court's decision. We then discuss the implications of our findings for using certainty in a broader context.     

Centre-periphery dynamics, global transition and criminological transfers Introductory notes inspired by V.S. Naipaul

The essay at hand aims to introduce the main issues and topics involved in the questions that will be dealt with throughout in this thematic issue. Those questions include: How do criminal justice practitioners and academics, in conditions of political or cultural transition, construct critical and reflexive knowledge about experiences of crime and control and their meaning? To what extent can ``ThirdWorld'' (TW) experiences and meanings, as well as TW knowledge about them, be of any use in ``First World'' (FW) contexts? And vice versa? To what extent are the gaps between both contexts too wide and to what extent has this divide been reduced in and through current global developments and transitions? The essay begins by focussing on postcolonial literature for a while, on one novel in particular, a novel that explores the space in–between the(post–)colony and the imperial metropolis.The second part of the essay deals withtransfers of (critical) criminologies in more detail.     

Achieving Timely Permanency in Child Protection Courts: The Importance of Frontloading the Court Process

Timely permanency for foster children has been an unrealized goal in our nation's juvenile courts. The goal of timely permanency is a legal mandate, it serves the needs of families, it is consistent with evolving case management standards, it is required by the Canons of Judicial Ethics, and it serves the best interests of children. Judges must take a leadership role within their courts to reduce delays in child protection courts. Through a series of changes including legislation, court rules, case management techniques, and judicial control, timely permanency for foster children can be achieved.     

Friends You Can Trust: A Signaling Theory of Interest Group Litigation Before the U.S. Supreme Court

How do interest groups influence U.S. Supreme Court justices to vote in favor of their preferred outcomes? Following prior research on the influence of the Solicitor General, we develop and expand on the signaling theory of interest group influence via amicus curie briefs. We argue that an interest group's ideological reputation and the nature of the ideological signal it sends in its brief both function as powerful heuristics that convey information to the justices depending on the justices' own ideological preferences. When an organization files an amicus brief advocating for an outcome seemingly contrary to its traditional preferences (i.e., an unexpected signal), this signal should be more noticeable and credible than a signal in accordance with a group's conventional views (i.e., an expected signal). However, unexpected signals should have greater influence on justices who share the brief filer's preferences. We test our signaling theory on the terms from 1991 through 2002. We find that unexpected signals (but not expected signals) are associated with Supreme Court voting, and the influence of unexpected signals appears to be particularly strong among justices who share the ideological preferences of the brief filer.     

Other people's memory

Abstract

How optimistic are people's evaluations of their own memory as compared to that of most others? To find out, we asked 563 Sa. to compere their own memory for events, faces and names to that of others. The results show that many, and especially young respondents, tend to be illusory optimistic about the power of their memory for events and faces, but not for names. The implications of this result for evaluating eyewitness reports by tries of fact in legal cases are discussed.     

TREATMENT OF DELINQUENT YOUTH:

This article examines the relative influences of the juvenile probation officer's perceptions of self and work on his or her opinions of delinquency and decisions made about juveniles. Self-administered questionnaires were completed by 255 juvenile probation officers. Results indicate that the officer who is treatment-service oriented is less likely to label juvenile acts delinquent than the officer who responds to lawyer role models. Officers who make rehabilitative recommendations are less likely to label acts delinquent than those who do not. The independent variables accounted for a rural of 21.3% of the variance in the dependent variable, the officer's perception of treatment.     

民法法典化与习惯缺失之忧

立法的激情正在催生这中国的民法典 ,然而 ,习惯也正被漠视乃至排斥。对于民事立法来说 ,习惯是社会自生自发秩序的存在形式 ,是社会变革的主要路径 ,是立法得以贯彻实施的条件。习惯的缺失意味着国家通过立法剥夺了社会的抗干预能力 ,削弱了法律的创新能力和校正机制。     

A Mediator on the World Stage?—How the EU's Commitment in Foreign Affairs is Portrayed by New Zealand and Australian Media

Abstract: ‘European identity’ is as much a contested concept as is the role of the European Union in foreign affairs. This article combines the two concepts and introduces a third variable, ‘the Other’, in order to address the following questions: How do non‐Europeans perceive the EU on the world stage? Is a tentative identity as a mediator in foreign affairs conveyed in the EU's conduct of foreign policy? Analysing 10 newspapers, 4 television bulletins, and 830 public surveys from Australia and New Zealand in the first half of 2004, this article argues that the EU's efforts to further democracy and peace are often marginalised in Australian and New Zealand perceptions. Nevertheless, subtle traces of perceptions of the EU as a potent global actor promoting human rights and environmental sustainability and challenging unilateral US policy courses were detected.     

DISRUPTING THE PATHWAY FROM FOSTER CARE TO THE JUSTICE SYSTEM—A FORMER PROSECUTOR'S PERSPECTIVES ON REFORM

Nearly half a million children are victims of abuse and neglect and part of our foster care system. Over time, many of these youth cross into our juvenile and then adult justice systems; some will end up as federal offenders, immersed in a process where mandated penalties provide little room for flexibility or consideration of the characteristics and needs of the individual. This article will offer the perspectives of a former prosecutor and child welfare advocate on: (i) the current conditions and challenges within our foster care system—the feeder for many youth into gangs and criminal activity; (ii) the misaligned priorities and disheartening patterns we currently see in our justice system; and (iii) the ill‐advised practices, that set our nation apart from the rest of the world, allowing juvenile offenders to receive life without parole sentences. The article will then discuss a series of recommendations in all of these areas that would enable us to turn the corner and chart an improved and more hopeful path for our nation's vulnerable and at‐risk children and youth.