Probation absconders: A unique risk group?

While examination of probation violations is common in the literature, probationers who abscond from community supervision have rarely been examined. These violators are circumventing justice and may pose a serious risk to public safety. This article compares the characteristics of absconders to those of offenders who successfully completed probation and offenders revoked from probation because of other violations. Absconders and revoked probationers generally presented the least favorable risk profiles, but did not differ significantly from one another on probation conditions, “stakes in conformity,” or prior felonies—although revoked probationers had more misdemeanors and a younger age of onset for officially recorded crime. Combined with the violation behaviors of absconders while on probation, these similarities suggest a strong chance of being revoked to prison had absconders remained under supervision. Employment, recorded address changes, and lower supervision burden on offenders were among the best predictors of successfully completing probation versus absconding.     

The failure of postmodern criminology

Postmodernism has recently washed up on the shores of criminology, and is the subject of considerable theoretical debate. This essay critically assesses some of the most trenchant and relevant components of the theoretical bases for postmodernism, and sketches out their applicability to criminology. It argues that postmodernism can be of little assistance to intellectuals committed to critique and fundamental social change. While postmodernists look down so severely at ‘old-fashioned’ ‘meta-narratives’ like Marxism, it is now they who are falling off the contemporary agenda, because they are dated and theoretically flawed. My main argument is that the theoretical imporverishment of postmodernism creates an obstacle to the development of a truly critical criminology. One of the current challenges of critical criminology is to amplify the critique of postmodern criminology and to reorient the trajectory of critical criminology away from the postmodern detour. The essay explores the historical context of the emergence of postmodernism, the modernist/ postmodernist era, deconstructionism, ‘meta-narratives’, idealism, form and content, fragmentation/pluralism/relativism, absence of progressive praxis, conservatism and Marxism.     

Political Science, Public Administration and the Danish Civil Service Profession

The history of Danish political science is young, and public administration has from the beginning been part of the training of political scientists. This background reflects a double strategy: first, in order to ensure political scientists a position in the labour market, they were launched as a new kind of generalist, competing with lawyers and economists. Second, public administration has from the very beginning been seen as a subfield of political science. Even if the institutions engaging in PA research and training have varying profiles, the integration of the discipline in political science is still dominant. So far it has been a success, whether measured at the level of political science graduates in the civil service or the level of PA research. However, the paper argues that in a tougher labour market, generalists with a broad political science background face severe competition from lawyers and economists, and that this must have implications for the direction of research and training in public administration.     

The Greater Yellowstone policy debate: What is the policy problem?

Yellowstone National Park and the surrounding mountainous region comprise the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), a 19 million acre area that is one of the few relatively intact ecosystems in the lower 48 states. Conservationists believe that continuation of present land management practices in the region will disrupt the ecological integrity of the GYE. Many authors have identified and described these threats, but as yet there has been no sustained effort to make sense of these threats in the context of the ongoing dynamic policy debate. We develop the foundation for such understanding by examining the implicit problem definitions that have emerged from this debate. They fall into three general categories: 1) a scientific definition, 2) an economic definition, and 3) a bureaucratic definition. This process produces an exploratory definition of the policy problem, which suggests a strategy for better understanding and policy design. We propose several intervention points at which substantive, one-the-ground improvements in the management of the GYE are possible.     

Topoi in Summa: Virtual Justice as Determinant for Aquinas’ Placement of Law

This study shows the spatial juxtaposition and separation of topics regarding law in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae. These topics are his treatise on legal structures among morals in its part I-II, and his treatise on legal justice among virtues in its part II-II. This difference in the topics’ placements requires mediation by the virtuality of law, in order to grasp the distances and bridges between the two treatments of law.