Race,Neighborhood, and Drug Court Graduation

This research examines the possibility that racial disparities in drug court graduation are attributable to individual-level employment or education or to neighborhood-level disadvantage. Individual-level data on 455 drug court clients and neighborhood-level census and police incident data are joined geographically. Drug court graduation is modeled using multilevel logistic regression. In a model with no neighborhood-level indicators, client race, employment, and education all predicted drug court graduation. When neighborhood-level variables are introduced, client-level race drops from significance but employment and education remain significant predictors of graduation. Client race, then, appears to be an indirect indicator of neighborhood disadvantage, while client employment and education remain important individual-level predictors of drug court graduation. These results support further analysis of neighborhood-based barriers to drug court graduation and the development of drug court programming that can address neighborhood-based challenges.     

The Horizons of the Constitution: <Emphasis Type="Italic">Politeia</Emphasis>, the Political Regime and the Good

How do we think about the word politeia when this involves a reaching back to the past? The response, pursued in this paper, is that in the classical understanding of politeia there is a significant connection between the question of the ‘good’ and the constitution; a connection which has become occluded or obscured by modern constitutional thought. In support of this understanding of politeia it must be acknowledged that what is meant, in this paper, by ‘good’ is very different from that conventionally found in contemporary constitutional, legal or political theory. In an effort to disclose how politeia unravels this novel sense of ‘the good’ the paper will closely consider the philosophical work of Hans-Georg Gadamer on Plato. The paper claims that this largely neglected work is of importance to contemporary constitutional philosophy, particularly in so far as it focuses, as in this paper, on classical traditions or origins within constitutional thought.