Urgent issues and prospects in reforming interrogation practices in the United States and Canada

The current article presents a series of commentaries on urgent issues and prospects in reforming interrogation practices in Canada and the United States. Researchers and practitioners, who have devoted much of their careers to the field of police and intelligence interrogations, were asked to provide their insights on an area of interrogation research that they believe requires immediate attention. The submitted independent commentaries covered a variety of topics – from police recruitment, interrogation training, use of proper interrogation practices, and the treatment of confession evidence in court. Common concerns from the contributions pertained to the lag between scientific knowledge on interrogations and the application of such knowledge in the justice system, and the glaring disparity between the treatment of similar issues in the interrogation context versus other criminal justice contexts. A primary intent of this collection of commentaries is to serve as a resource pointing researchers in the direction of the fundamental areas that require immediate consideration and encouraging them to simultaneously pursue solutions to the overarching concerns that emerged from this project.     

Alliteration in Mate Selection: Does Barbara Still Marry Barry?

More than 30 years ago research found that alliteration is a factor in assortative mating (i.e., marriages). Alliterative matches were even more frequent when using nicknames than when using given names. Subsequently, researchers have confirmed the higher than chance occurrence of alliterative matches for given names. But nicknames have not been examined over the past 30 years. The present research finds support for three hypotheses. As predicted, nicknames are more associated with alliterative matches than are given names. Implications for practice are discussed.     

Recruitment and coercion in Japan’s far north: evidence from colonial Karafuto’s forestry and construction industries, 1910–37

In 1905, Karafuto (Southern Sakhalin) became Japan’s second formal colony and the most sparsely populated territory in the Japanese empire. Despite its peripheral location and small population the colony was of important economic value, boasting considerable natural resources such as marine products, coal, oil and timber. This combination of richness and remoteness meant that enterprises in the colony faced an acute labour shortage. This paper examines the ways that enterprises operating in Karafuto sought to circumvent this problem by analysing the recruitment, management and maintenance of labour in Karafuto’s forestry and construction industries. It is found that a degree of coercion emerged at worksites in the colony, as management struggled to hold onto its workforce for the entirety of a project; however, coercion was not the norm and was strongly associated with specific recruitment grounds. Utilizing contemporary social research, colonial newspaper reports, oral testimony and other sources this paper finds that recruits from further afield were more likely to be involved in incidents of abuse than those in close proximity to Karafuto. Local connections, strength in numbers and mutual dependence of workers from these areas and Karafuto-based recruiters for work/labour served to reduce levels of conflict between the two parties.     

Information Technology,Political Participation,and the Evolution of Chinese Policymaking

Although information technology is playing a fundamental role in China's political development, relatively little is known about the contours of online participation in government policymaking. This article presents the results of a survey of individuals who, in 2008, used the Internet to submit comments on the central government's plan to reform the nation's health system. The responses demonstrate that participants were, in the aggregate, well-educated professionals who live in urban areas and were especially likely to work in the medical and health industry. Substantial numbers of participants commented as a means of expressing concerns about the overall direction of reform, as well as on specific elements of the proposal itself. Participants generally anticipated no more than a modest degree of government responsiveness, although high expectations were held for comments from government officials and individuals who worked in the medical and health industry. Overall, these attributes and attitudes are illustrative of the evolution, as opposed to transformation, of the political system that is occurring in online contexts where neither democratization nor the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party is of immediate salience to government officials and societal stakeholders.     

Trust and Distrust as Distinct Concepts: Why Studying Distrust in Institutions is Important

Abstract

Scholarship of trust in institutions has tended to see trust and distrust as opposites on one continuum. Theoretical advances have challenged this view and now consider trust and distrust as different constructs, and thus as constructs with different characteristics and partly different determinants. Current empirical research on trust in government has so far done little to incorporate these findings, and has largely continued to rely on traditional survey items assuming a trust–distrust continuum. We rely on the literature in organization studies and political science to argue in favour of measuring citizen trust and distrust as distinct concepts and discuss future research challenges.     

Editors note

As the African Peer Review Mechanism marks its fifth birthday in 2007, the authors take stock of the initiative's successes and challenges. The APRM can claim considerable achievements but the complexity of the process, its slow pace, and problems in some review countries raise questions which are highlighted in this detailed examination.