INTERROGATING RACE,CRIME, AND JUSTICE IN A TIME OF UNEASE AND RACIAL TENSION

This address has a twofold purpose. First, as the first African American to serve as president of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), I celebrate the contributions of scholars of color to the study of crime and criminal justice and to the ASC. I do so by pointing out the accomplishments of several African American scholars whose contributions are numerous and exemplary. I also emphasize that African Americans are joined in their efforts by scholars of multiple other colors, including, Latinos/as, Native Americans, and Asians. Second, in view of responses to apparent unrest and racial tension in U.S. society that is signaled by lethal violence between police and U.S. residents of color, I offer four recommendations regarding how we might proceed with our research, and report our findings, in ways that improve the likelihood of helping to inform societal debates and policy developments around crime and justice issues. In my conclusion, I encourage the ASC to 1) continue to grow the diversity of its membership and to integrate the research and findings of scholars of color into the mainstream of criminology; and 2) take further steps to conduct research and share findings with diverse audiences to ensure that post‐truth does not become normative regarding crime and justice issues.     

The Historical Development of Corporate Criminal Liability

The application of criminal liability to corporations grew out of a minor common law doctrine that masters were criminally liable if their servants created a public nuisance by throwing something out of the house onto the street. The expansion of that doctrine to full corporate criminal liability was primarily the result of judicial interpretation of common law and existing statutory laws, rather than the result of any-deliberate legislative action Civil law countries, lacking the tradition of judicial interpretation, have never developed the concept of corporate criminality. Corporate criminal liability will probably continue to expand in common law countries, regardless of its merits.     

The Somali Question

The Member of Parliament for South-East Essex, gave the addressWhich follows at a Joint meeting of the Royal African Societyand the Royal Commonwealth Society on May 1, 1958. BrigadierS. H. Longrigg presided.     

Toward a theoretical explanation of premature cabinet termination

Abstract. We propose a rational choice model of premature cabinet termination involving considerations of expected gain in terms of electoral payoffs, policy payoffs, or portfolio payoffs. This approach, which distinguishes contextual variables that will generally affect the nature of cost-benefit calculations made by political actors from the factors that are most likely to have a direct impact on a particular decision to precipitate a cabinet crisis, leads us to several testable hypotheses. We provide a first illustrative test of our predictions with data from the Netherlands.     

The End of the Youth Gang

The varying attention criminologists have paid to youth gangs over the past several decades cannot be explained completely by the actual seriousness of gang delinquency and its extent relative to other kinds of delinquency. In order to explain this changing focus of attention by delinquency researchers, this article explores the interrelationships among four types of factors: social and political conditions, ideology, current sociological theory, and available methods. We focus on ideology and methodology, and argue that when ideology is largely centrist, such as during the 1950s and 1960s, theory would most likely be interactionist or subcultural and gangs would likely be of interest. During periods of greater ideological polarization, such as the late 1960s, however, we would expect to find more theoretical and empirical concern with either the individual or with social and economic structure and little interest in gangs.     

Policy responsiveness to all citizens or only to voters? A longitudinal analysis of policy responsiveness in OECD countries

A close connection between public opinion and policy is considered a vital element of democracy. In representative systems, elections are assumed to play a role in realising such congruence. If those who participate in elections are not representative of the public at large, it follows that the reliance on elections as a mechanism of representation entails a risk of unequal representation. In this paper, we evaluate whether voters are better represented by means of an analysis of policy responsiveness to voters and citizens in democracies worldwide. We construct a uniquely comprehensive dataset that includes measures of citizens’ and voters’ ideological (left–right) positions, and data on welfare spending in Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries since 1980. We find evidence of policy responsiveness to voters, but not to the public at large. Since additional tests suggest that the mechanism of electoral turnout does not cause this voter-policy responsiveness, we outline alternate mechanisms to test in future research.