Accountability Standards for Nonprofit Organizations: Do Organizations Benefit from Certification Programs?

Stakeholders are demanding nonprofit organizations (NPOs) continually improve and work effectively in an ever-changing environment. While there are many ways to approach this operational challenge, this paper examines the impact of acquiring an accountability certification, specifically the Standards for Excellence® Certification. Using a sample of 102 NPOs that have received the Standards for Excellence certification, we find that the certification is associated with increases in public support relative to a control group that did not receive the certification. These results suggest that some stakeholders favorably respond to the certification process, and NPOs can realize tangible benefits from becoming certified.     

Portraying Those We Condemn with Care: Extending the Ethics of Representation

The study of crime’s images is an increasingly important endeavour. In this paper I seek to understand the impact of an image of a criminal child (the outcomes and consequences that have stemmed from its display) by examining its affect (its capacity to engage its viewers). I demonstrate how the image’s meaning emerged from encounters with both the content and the format of the image, as well as from the context in which these encounters occurred. I will demonstrate that the impacts from this image went beyond what was necessary to punish, and propose that an ethics of representation is extended to include images of the condemned. For some population groups, this extension can mitigate the influence of fantasies about criminal ‘others’ that may come into play when pictures of them are viewed.     

Prosecutor Risk,Maturation, and Wrongful Conviction Practice

In this article we rethink the connection between prosecutorial experience and conviction psychology that undergirds much of the academic literature about wrongful convictions. The conviction psychology account of prosecutorial behavior asserts that prosecutorial susceptibility to cognitive biases deepens over time, thereby increasing the risk that prosecutors will become involved in wrongful convictions the longer they stay in the profession. Our interviews with more than 200 state prosecutors call into question the basis for this asserted correlation between prosecutorial experience and risk of misconduct. The prosecutors we met consistently reported that, all else equal, prosecutors tend to become more balanced, rather than more adversarial, over time. Hence, the prosecutors who present the greatest risk of producing a wrongful conviction are those who are either inexperienced or resistant to the normal maturation process. For this reason, we suggest that wrongful conviction researchers and database designers pay closer attention to the variables associated with prosecutorial experience and resistance that might affect the development of prosecutorial maturity and the consequent risk of wrongful convictions.     

Exile,Choice, and Loyalism: Taking and Restoring Dignity in the American Revolution

Taking a cue from Bernadette Atuahene's concept of “dignity takings” and her insight that government expropriation inflicts more than economic injury, this essay analyzes how American revolutionaries defined political membership, penalized and expropriated British loyalists, and then allowed some to join the American polity in the decade after the Revolution. Many recovered their property, professions, and legal privileges. However, because most loyalists could choose to remain loyal or join the Revolution, they did not lose human dignity as Atuahene defines it. Case studies of two reintegrating lawyers, Richard Harison and William Rawle, explore loyalism, the loss of dignities that loyalists suffered, and some paths toward reintegration. Their appointment as federal attorneys helped make the government conversant in the common law, British statutes, and the law of nations, which in turn supported the Federalist goal of reintegrating the United States into the Atlantic World: achieving, in other words, national dignity.     

British Peace Activism and ‘New’ Diplomacy: Revisiting the 1899 Hague Peace Conference

This analysis provides a re-appraisal of the 1899 Hague Conference by looking more closely at how citizen activists—notably in Britain but also transnationally—used it as a forum through which to press their agenda onto politicians and diplomatists. In so doing, this assembly existed as a stepping-stone between the ‘old’ diplomacy of the nineteenth century and the ‘new’ diplomacy of the twentieth. Peace activists identified and harnessed a growing body of progressive public opinion—on both a domestic and international scale—in the hope of compelling governments to take the necessary steps towards realising their ambitions of peace, disarmament, and international arbitration. Although the tangible outcomes of the 1899 Conference were limited, the precedents it established not only paved the way for further advances in international law, but also facilitated ever closer public and press scrutiny of international affairs into the twentieth century.