‘Mr Peel’s Amendments’ in New South Wales: Imperial Criminal Reform in a Distant Penal Colony

This article investigates the difficult interface between metropolitan legal reform and empire in the late 1820s. In 1828, the Supreme Court of New South Wales sentenced dozens of men to death under legislation that had been repealed in Britain. It then insisted that every one of them be set free. This mess raised a fundamental question agitated in different ways around the empire in that decade: to what degree should colonial subjects enjoy the benefits of modernized metropolitan criminal law? Even as successive local and metropolitan Acts imposed new constraints on the civil rights of convicts in New South Wales, the Supreme Court insisted that even the most notorious recidivists in the colony should be protected against the Bloody Code from the moment it was reformed at home. In doing so, the court ignored the terms of section 1 of the Criminal Statutes Repeal Act passed at the request of a former East India Company officer to preserve the operation of the Code in India. Thus the peculiar reception controversy in New South Wales shows not only how disruptive metropolitan reform could be for colonies, it performed a growing racial gap in the imagination of legal subjecthood in different corners of empire.     

Measuring Client Satisfaction and Engagement: The Role of a Mentor Parent Program in Family Drug Treatment Court

Parent engagement is an important intermediate outcome in Family Drug Treatment Court (FDTC) and child welfare services. This study explored the utility and reliability of a client satisfaction and engagement survey designed to measure interim outcomes of a Mentor Parent Program, operating in conjunction with a FDTC. Findings suggest the survey is a useful, parsimonious and reliable tool for measuring key dimensions of parent mentor services including client engagement; client‐centered support and empowerment; and help with systems navigation and accessing resources. The survey may be adapted for use in other FDTC or parent mentor contexts.     

Who Files Suit? Legal Mobilization and Torture Violations in Europe

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is the most active international court. After decades with few allegations of human rights abuses, the ECHR docket expanded in the 1990s. Paradoxically, long‐standing democracies can have standardized violation rates of the prohibition against torture that compare to transitional democracies that struggle to protect rights. Yet it is implausible that human rights abuses increased or that established democracies engage in more torture than new democracies. Instead variations in legal mobilization generate the surge and puzzling distribution of European judgments. I argue that discrepancies between the incidence of torture and litigation reflect variations in support structures, where declared violations can reflect the level of support that individuals receive in pursuing claims rather than the incidence of torture. This dynamic is most pronounced for foreign nationals, who typically possess fewer resources than citizens to access legal institutions and encounter popular and official hostility. As a result, much European litigation concerning torture in long‐standing democracies is transnational in character.     

Officer work orientations, perceptions of readiness and anticipated effectiveness of an agency-wide community policing effort within a county Sheriff’s office

Across occupations of every form, including those in criminal justice, administrators, managers, and supervisors frequently introduce changes to the structure and/or processes of the work environment. These changes may be seen as necessary to enhance worker productivity, but may be viewed by some workers as an unwanted disruption to their routines. Should employees interpret changes in such a manner, they can, and often do, negate these reforms. Employee work orientations (i.e., philosophical approaches toward work) undoubtedly play a role in such an interchange because they influence both how employees behave on the job and how they perceive their job. The move toward community-oriented policing constitutes a major paradigm shift to the practice of law enforcement. This structural and procedural change to the routines of policing could be perceived as threatening to those law enforcement officers whose work orientations are inconsistent with the philosophical foundation of community-based policing. The presence of a sufficient number of such officers could doom this movement to failure. This study uses survey data collected from a sample of sheriff’s deputies involved in an agency-wide community policing effort. In this study we examine the effects of deputies’ work orientations on their perceptions of the agency’s readiness for and the anticipated effectiveness of this initiative. The findings suggest interesting differences in the efforts of a traditional crime control orientation versus a more progressive community service orientation toward policing.     

Non-Voluntary Return? The Politics of Return to Afghanistan

The forced removal of 35 Afghan nationals from the UK in April 2003 calls into question the viability of the government's voluntary repatriation schemes and undermines the voluntary nature of return programmes. This article draws on the results of research conducted in 2002 to explore the views of the Afghan community about return. We evaluate three motivations for promoting return programmes: justice-based arguments, where return is the 'end of the refugee cycle'; human capital explanations, which focus on individual decisions to reverse the effects of brain-drain; and burden-relieving explanations, where return is an alternative to repatriation. Our findings suggest that domestic interest based arguments, rather than those founded on the protection of human rights, are driving the policy-making agenda. Returns are portrayed as a means of relieving the burden on welfare services, and placating an increasingly anti-immigrant public opinion. As well as individuals forcibly removed from Britain, other Afghans are being urged to return by means of financial inducements, and sometimes under the threat of repatriation. In this context, we can discern a new category of 'non-voluntary' returns where individual choice has little real meaning.     

Reviews

Hilary Pilkington, Migration, Displacement and Identity in Post‐Soviet Russia. London: Routledge, 1998, x + 252 pp., £16.99.

Sue Bridger & Frances Pine (eds), Surviving Post‐Socialism: Local Strategies and Regional Responses in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. London: Routledge, 1997; xvi + 224 pp., £45.00.

David Turnock, The East European Economy in Context: Communism and Transition. London: Routledge, 1997, x + 425 pp., £55.00.

Jan Winiecki (ed.), Institutional Barriers to Poland's Economic Development: The Incomplete Transition. London: Routledge, 1997, xi + 114 pp., £40.00.

Ray Taras (ed.), Postcommunist Presidents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, ix + 250 pp., £14.95.

Mary McAuley, Russia's Politics of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, xix + 351 pp., £50.00 h/b, £16.95 p/b.

G. D. G. Murrell, Russia's Transition to Democracy. An Internal Political History, 1989–1996. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1997, xii + 276 pp.

Karen Dawisha & Bruce Parrott (eds), The Consolidation of Democracy in East‐Central Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, xx + 389 pp. $24.95.

Andrew A. Michta, The Soldier‐Citizen. The Politics of the Polish Army after Communism. London: Macmillan Press, 1997, 122 pp., £40.00.

Wolfgang Stadler, Macht Sprache Gewalt: Rechtspopulistische Sprache am Beispiel V.V. Zirinovskijs vor dem Hintergrund der Wandlungen Politischer Sprache in Russland. Innsbruck: Verlag des Instituts für Sprachwissenschaft der Leopold‐Franzens‐Universität Innsbruck, 1997, 207 pp., ÖS480.

Steven L. Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, xiv + 337 pp., £33.50.

Peter H. Solomon, Jr (ed.), Reforming Justice in Russia, 1864–1996. Power, Culture, and the Limits of Legal Order. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997, x + 406 pp., $82.95.

Jussi Simpura & Boris M. Levin (eds), Demystifying Russian Drinking; Comparative Studies From the 1990s. Helsinki: National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health, 1997, 226 pp.

Kieran Williams, The Prague Spring and its Aftermath: Czechoslovak politics 1968–1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, xiii + 270 pp. £45.00 h/b, £15.95 p/b.

R. W. Davies, Soviet Economic Development from Lenin to Khrushchev. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, xxii + 96 pp., £19.95 h/b, £6.95 p/b.

Jane McDermid & Anna Hillyar, Women and Work in Russia 1880–1930: A Study in Continuity Through Change. London: Longman, 1998, vi + 236 pp., £40.00 h/b, £12.99 p/b.

Roger R. Reese, Stalin's Reluctant Soldiers. A Social History of the Red Army, 1925–1941. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1996, xii + 267 pp.

Thomas Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997, xii + 247 pp., £23.95.

Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj, Ukrainian Futurism, 1914–1930: A Historical and Critical Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, xviii + 413 pp., $35.00 h/b, $18.00 p/b.

Marcel Cornis‐Pope, The Unfinished Battles. Romanian Postmodernism Before and After 1989. Ia?i: Polirom Press, 1996, 192 pp., $22.00.