Recent Work on Punishment and Criminogenic Disadvantage

In the 1970s and 1980s, a handful of legal theorists addressed the problem of criminal justice for offenders who faced criminogenic social disadvantages. Their discussions were provocative but alternatively unpersuasive and underdeveloped. More recently, in the wake of mass incarceration in America, philosophers have put forth new analyses that make important headway but remain scattered, partial, and in need of a systematic and integrated review. In this article, I reconstruct and critique the most prominent and well-developed explanations yet offered of the distinctive moral problems that offenders’ criminogenic social disadvantages may pose for criminal justice. I conclude that some views are misguided, others are unduly limited, and one – based on the ideals of fair opportunity to avoid crime and punishment – is particularly promising but as yet underdeveloped.     

Adding Security,but Subtracting Safety? Exploring Schools’ use of Multiple Visible Security Measures

In response to continued concerns over crime and violence, schools are increasingly employing visible security measures such as cameras, metal detectors, and security personnel. These security measures are not mutually exclusive, but few studies have considered the relationship between the use of multiple forms of security and youth’s exposure to drugs, fighting, property crime, and firearms at school. To address this issue, we analyzed nationally representative school administrator-reported data from the School Survey on Crime & Safety, using a quasi-experimental design with propensity scores to adjust for potential confounding factors. The results indicated that utilization of multiple security measures reduced the likelihood of exposure to property crime in high schools, but most other security utilization patterns were associated with poorer school safety outcomes. Our findings provide guidance to policymakers in considering whether to use – or expand – visible school security measures in schools.     

Students’ Feelings of Safety,Exposure to Violence and Victimization,and Authoritative School Climate

Although many students feel unsafe at school, few malleable factors have been identified to increase students’ feelings of safety. Drawing on criminological behavior control theories, this study posits authoritative school climate as one such factor. With data from two nationally representative datasets, this study uses path analysis to examine the relationship between authoritative school climate and feelings of safety, as well as the extent to which this relation is explained by exposure to violence and victimization. Across both datasets, a more authoritative school climate was associated with increased feelings of safety at school. Both models also indicated that this relationship was explained in part by reduced exposure to violence and victimization, although the strength of this indirect effect varied across models. These findings suggest that strengthening students’ relationships with adults and increasing the fairness and consistency of rules in the school may both reduce exposure to violence and victimization and help students feel safer at school.     

Do they Aggress Earlier? Investigating the Effects of Ego Depletion on Police Officers’ Use of Force Behavior

Endowed with the state monopoly on the legitimate use of even potentially lethal force, it is intolerable for police officers to act outside the governing legal and ethical framework. At the same time, officers are expected to exert self-control and refrain from excessive use of force when they deal with provocative and perilous situations. This study sought to investigate corresponding self-control and self-control failures through the role of ego depletion in the decision to use force by police officers. Two experiments were conducted using officers from a German State Police force, requiring the participants to use force against a provocative role player. Experiment 1 found that the ego depletion measure failed and there were no differences between the groups. Using a different ego depletion method, experiment 2 found that ego-depleted participants aggressed earlier than controls. These results indicate that circumstances that produce ego depletion could lead to the inappropriate use of force through reducing self-control. This has major implications for the police use of force and how we understand police officers’ decision-making in response to provocation.     

Introducing the 1993 Terrorism and Political Violence Dataset

The introduction of the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) nearly a decade ago sparked a revolution in terrorism studies. However, one major flaw in the database continues to plague GTD users. Data lost prior to digitalization, along with unsuccessful data recollection efforts, have left GTD without data on events that took place during the year 1993. The missing data prevents researchers from using the entirety of GTD's annual range (1970–2014) to conduct reliable time-series analyses. Additionally, it has likely contributed to the formation of theories and claims on faulty empirical ground. To remedy the problem, we have collected data on 4,206 unique terror-attack incidents, with the aim of documenting the universe of 1993 terrorism events. This article showcases our 1993 dataset and illustrates the importance of terrorism events in 1993 for the development of conflicts in Israel, Afghanistan, Colombia, and India.     

Litigation in the Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement

The fossil fuel divestment movement has been described as the fastest‐growing disinvestment movement in history, and in recent years it has continued to expand. Despite its growth, however, the movement has made little use of legal action, instead utilizing tactics of public pressure and persuasion, and the future role of litigation in the movement is unclear. To consider litigation's potential role in the movement and the challenges it may face, I examine the first and only case of litigation in the fossil fuel divestment movement thus far: Harvard Climate Justice Coalition et al. v President and Fellows of Harvard College et al. (2015), in which seven Harvard students (including the author) filed suit to compel the university to divest its endowment from fossil fuel companies. I examine motivations for filing the suit in the context of the broader fossil fuel divestment movement, the case's history, and the challenges faced by the suit, including arguments surrounding causation, particularization, representation of future generations, limiting principles, and framing. I then discuss potential opportunities for fossil fuel divestment litigation in the future. As the field of climate change law develops further, litigation over fossil fuel investments could grow in frequency and importance.     

How much does it cost to be a scientist?

We examine the academe–industry wage gap. Once self-selection and different personal characteristics of academic and industrial scientists have been taken into account the wage gap narrows from 28 to 13 %. The counterfactual wage faced by an academic scientist increases with time spent on development and decreases with time spent on research. This finding challenges the idea of a solely negative relationship between science and wages. We further find that preferences for science augment the relationship between research orientation and wages. Overall, the results have implications for policy makers that aim to increase development oriented research activities at universities, individual scientists thinking about whether to pursue a career in industry or academe, and managers trying to hire academic scientists.     

Ideological hybrids: the contrary case of Tory anarchism

This article provides an account of ideological hybridity. It describes and categorizes four main types of ideological hybrid in order to examine a range of sub-ideologies and cross-breeds but concentrates on identifying and assessing the particular phenomena described as conservative (or ‘Tory’) anarchisms. The article demonstrates how an ideological hybrid’s morphological relationship to its parent ideologies can alter in different geographical or historical contexts. Using this model, it argues that some differences between conservatism and anarchism are overstressed (such as those over the role of the state and individual rights), whilst some important similarities are often overlooked, namely those surrounding their political epistemologies. However, because apparently shared concepts are structured next to radically different core principles (defence/rejection of hierarchies and prioritizing/negation of dominant economic institutions), these shared principles are interpreted in radically different ways. As a result, conservative anarchism is a deeply unstable hybrid rather than an innovative new ideological form. It is one which, in most contexts, stabilizes into a form of conservatism rather than a form of anarchism.