God, Mammon and Mussolini: The Ideology and Policy of the Citizens' League of South Australia, 1930–1934

Twelve months ago the suggestion that Australia needed a Dictator was received with a tolerant smile. A Mussolini might suit the Latin psychology but the Australian sentiment would not stand for one. Today a large number of persons representing every side of our civic and commercial life agree that the suggestion is a sound one. The only question is “Who is the man?‘     

Explaining School Corporal Punishment: Evangelical Protestantism and Social Capital in a Path Model

School corporal punishment is associated with many negative outcomes. This research explores the antecedents to the practice and prevalence of school corporal punishment. A series of regression models indicated that two variables were significant predictors of a state’s practice of school corporal punishment: rate of evangelical Protestant adherents and social capital. A path analysis indicated that these two variables significantly predicted the rate of school corporal punishment in practicing states. The path analysis also revealed a significant and negative relationship between rate of evangelical Protestant adherents and social capital, but no relationship between rate of mainstream Protestant adherents and social capital. A mediation analysis indicated that social capital serves as a mediating variable between evangelical Protestantism and rate of school corporal punishment. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Police deadly force as social control: Jamaica,Argentina, and Brazil

Conclusion When we consider a variety of indicators concerning the disproportionate use of deadly force by police-the ratio of civilians killed to those wounded, the ratio of civilians killed to police killed, and the ratio of police killings to the total homicide rate-the statistics, both official and unofficial, for Jamaica, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro all point toward the conclusion that the police are summarily executing suspects in routine, non-partisan cases. Directed almost exclusively against anonymous, poor people, this abuse of deadly force appears as an extreme form of coercive social control. When the threat of social unrest seems high--because of increased social mobilization together with increased economic misery--the police may summarily execute a large number of suspects, providing that both elite and lower-class opinion tolerates the executions as legitimate. In all these locations, while opinion is split, the police violence is minimally acceptable; indeed, the prevalence of private vigilantism signals its acceptability with the mass of people.Nonetheless, because Jamaica, Argentina, and Brazil are liberal states, it is difficult to view police homicides as legitimate except under the rubric of crime control and under the rule of law. Accordingiy, virtually all police killings are justified to the public as acts of self-defense, typically in the context of shoot-outs. This justification appears to be essential for organizing public opinion even though, for at least some people at all socioeconomic levels, summary executions, like vigilantism, are considered the proper punishment for alleged crimes. Experience in other countries suggests that it is possible for the authorities to limit and even prevent police violence. This effort will not be made in Jamaica, Argentina, or Brazil, however, so long as police use of deadly force constitutes a means of social control acceptable to both elite and mass opinion.B.A. Yale University 1957; LL.B., Harvard University 1960. My thanks are due to Bell Chevigny, Russell Karp, and Lois Whitman; to Americas Watch for sponsoring human rights investigations in Brazil and Jamaica; to the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales in Buenos Aires, Argentina; to Paulo Sergio Pinheiro and to the Nucleo de Estudos da Violência in Sâo Paulo, Brazil; and to Frances Piven and Anne Buckborough for essential research assistance. Thanks to my colleagues from the Law and Society Colloquium at New York University and from the 1988 annual meeting of the Law and Society Association for helpful comments. I am grateful for the generous support of the Filomen D'Agostino and Max E. Greenberg Research Fund of New York University School of Law.     

No Job Too Small: Justice Without Bargaining in the lower Criminal Courts

Plea bargaining and other informal disposition devices dominate case processing in the lower criminal courts. Consistently, studies have found such courts characterized by assembly-line procedures, deemphasis or disregard of formal due process rights, and guilty plea rates approaching 100% of all convictions. Caseload pressures, tendencies toward cooperation among courtroom participants and, above all, process costs of litigation that greatly outweigh the stakes in minor cases are widely thought to render informality and high guilty plea rates inevitable.
The study reported here challenges these assumptions. The author finds that in Philadelphia roughly one-fifth of all misdemeanor dispositions and one-half of all determinations of guilt are the result of genuine adversarial trials. He shows that an adversarial trial system need not impose prohibitive resource costs, even when extended to misdemeanor cases involving little likelihood of imprisonment, and that process costs will not deter defendants from invoking formal procedures when the court culture is committed to providing trials. Finally, the author argues that even routine misdemeanor cases benefit from guarantees of fairness and accuracy afforded by trial but unattainable when cases are processed by plea bargaining.