Missed Opportunities and New Risks: Penal Policy in England and Wales in the Past Twenty‐Five Years

This paper discusses trends in criminal justice and penal policy over the past twenty‐five years. This period has been characterised as a time of penal populism, which originated in the failure of the 1991 Criminal Justice Act, and the competition between the main political parties to be ‘tough on crime’. However, this is not the only trend to be found in penal policy. There has continued to be a strong undertow of support for rehabilitation and community penalties, including restorative justice. There has been pressure from the left as much as the right to take domestic violence, sexual offences against women and children, and hate crimes more seriously. There have been pressures to meet performance targets—which gradually transformed into calls to build the legitimacy of the justice system. Finally, there have been pressures to privatise criminal justice agencies. These various impulses have sometimes amplified and sometimes counteracted the pressures towards tough penal policy. If the period of intense penal populism ran from 1993 to 2007, inertia in the system has ensured that there have been no significant attempts to row back from tough policies, and to reassert the values of penal parsimony. Given that money has been tight since 2007 and crime has continued to fall, this must amount to a lost opportunity of significant proportions.     

RETHINKING URBAN COMPETITIVENESS,COHESION AND GOVERNANCE

RETHINKING URBAN COMPETITIVENESS, COHESION AND GOVERNANCE
Nick Buck, Ian Gordon, Alan Harding and Ivan Turok (eds)
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 317 pp., £19.99 (pb) ISBN: 1403906807     

A sheriff, two bullets and three problems

This paper analyzes deterrence in international conflicts. Assume a strong country has several opponents and faces a military capacity constraint, which is not exhausted after just one war. Two main effects are at work. If the strong country is constrained, then reputation is more expensive and may occur less often. The problem is that the opponents may (but need not) be more aggressive compared to a world without a constraint. It may be that an “axis of evil” does not exist before a war occurs, but is implicitly formed even by moderate countries after the first war was waged. A point of interest is whether the constrained strong country should obtain additional capacity, given that the objective is to minimize the number of wars. The analysis sheds some new light on the U.S. foreign policy, the United Nations and the “axis of evil”     

英国"托护"青少年的心理健康问题

托护(looked after)青少年是指父母无力监护、监护不力以及受到家庭虐待的青少年.这类由政府专门机构或寄养家庭收养的青少年,他们的心理健康问题复杂多样.     

Does retirement education teach people to save pension distributions?

As defined contribution pension plans have become increasingly common over the past two decades, so have lump sum distributions from those plans. Employees who elect such a distribution take the balance of their pension account with them when they leave a job. They can then choose to maintain the funds in accounts designated for retirement, invest them in other saving vehicles, or spend them. If spent pension distributions are not replaced by other savings, however, the future elderly are unlikely to be able to maintain a desirable standard of living. With employee-funded pensions expected to play an increasingly important role in financing Americans' retirement, saving these funds in essential. This article is the first to examine the relationship between retirement education--specifically, meetings sponsored by employers or by public and private institutions--and the saving of lump sum distributions. Two definitions of saving are used: one that includes reinvestment only in tax-deferred saving vehicles, and a broader one that includes tax-deferred vehicles, general saving vehicles (stocks, bonds, savings accounts, and so on), and paying off debt. The analysis also evaluates the effects of retirement education on specific groups identified in previous research as being less likely to keep their pension distributions in tax-deferred accounts: namely, women, younger persons, and persons with less than a college education. The same groups tend to be less financially secure in retirement, making the effects of retirement education on them particularly relevant. With an econometric model using ordinary least squares and data from the 1992 Health and Retirement Study, the analysis finds that retirement education does not affect the overall likelihood that employees will save their distributions, whether in tax-deferred or non-tax-deferred vehicles. The picture is more complicated for subgroups of employees. Attending a retirement meeting is associated with an increased likelihood of saving among persons age 40 and under but a decreased probability of saving among college graduates and women. No effect was found for men, individuals over age 40, or persons who did not graduate from college. The finding that retirement education increases the likelihood of younger persons' saving a distribution is reassuring, for these workers are America's future retirees. However, the finding that attending a meeting does not increase saving among some of the most financially vulnerable groups is a matter of concern to policymakers. Further study of the long-term effects of spending pension distributions is needed.