Investigating Probation Strategies with Juvenile Offenders: The Influence of Officers’ Attitudes and Youth Characteristics

Probation officers are the focal point for most interventions with delinquent youths in the juvenile justice system. The present study examines probation strategies and interventions in a sample of 308 probation officers who completed the Probation Practices Assessment Survey (PPAS) in a web-based survey. The PPAS measures six probation approaches: deterrence, restorative justice, treatment, confrontation, counseling, and behavioral tactics. Structural equation models and latent class analyses showed that probation officers use multiple approaches with delinquent youths consistent with the balanced and restorative justice movement. Younger youths, high-risk youths, and youths with prior social service involvements are likely to receive more intensive interventions. The implications of these findings for improving probation practices with delinquent youth are discussed.     

Too risk averse to stay honest?: Business corruption,uncertainty and attitudes toward risk

The presence of business-corruption provokes firms to make choices between legal business approaches and illegal bribery. The outcome of a chosen strategy will usually be uncertain at the time the decision is made, and a firm’s decision will depend partly on its attitude towards risk. Drawing on empirical results about business corruption, this paper describes the risks, uncertainties and benefits attached to bribery, and specifies their impact on firms’ propensity to offer bribes. It then demonstrates how risk averse firms can be more inclined to offer bribes than risk neutral and risk attracted firms.     

Challenges to democracy building and the role of civil society

This article addresses the issue of the challenges of democracy building and the role of civil society in this process by focusing on three countries in southeastern Europe, Albania, Bulgaria, and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Since the 1990s, when these three post-communist states undertook the democratization process, formidable challenges and obstacles to the democratization process have been encountered by all three states which facilitates a comparative analysis, while differences remain as well, especially since Bulgaria became a member of the European Union in 2007. The development of an indigenous civil society is perceived as both a necessary prerequisite for a qualitative democracy to develop and be maintained in these societies, and as a project under construction that needs to be culturally contextualized to be relevant to the population it purports to serve.     

Diffusion of Compliance in the ‘Race towards Brussels?’ A Spatial Approach to EU Accession Conditionality

Previous studies identified several determinants that help explain candidate states’ compliance with EU accession conditionality. However, one influence has largely been neglected so far: states’ spatial dependency. Is it possible to observe diffusion to the extent that states’ interlinkages allow their compliance with the acquis communautaire to be assessed? Are candidate states more – or perhaps even less – likely to comply with EU law when other candidates do? The paper seeks to address these questions. By building on existing research on policy diffusion, it develops a theoretical framework for studying candidates’ compliance with EU law over the accession process according to their spatial dependence. The theoretical argument focuses on ‘competitive learning’ and is tested with quantitative data. The results suggest that candidates’ levels of compliance are indeed driven by spatial interlinkages; however, free riding seems more prevalent than enhanced compliance.     

A comparison of men who committed different types of sexual assault in a community sample

This study extends past research by examining predictors of different types of sexual assault perpetration in a community sample. Computer-assisted self-interviews were conducted with a representative sample of 163 men in one large urban community. As hypothesized, many variables that are significant predictors of sexual assault perpetration in college student samples were also significant predictors in this sample, including empathy, adult attachment, attitudes about casual sex, sexual dominance, alcohol consumption in sexual situations, and peer approval of forced sex. For most measures, the strongest differences were between nonassaulters and men who committed acts that met standard legal definitions of rape. Men who committed forced sexual contact and verbal coercion tended to have scores that fell in between those of the other two groups. The implications of these findings are discussed for community-based sexual assault prevention programs.     

Perpetration of Gay and Lesbian Partner Violence: A Disempowerment Perspective

Gay men and lesbians may experience domestic violence at rates as high as, or higher than heterosexuals, yet there is a noticeable absence of empirical research investigating this phenomenon. This study investigated same-sex partner violence from a disempowerment perspective to determine the influence of (a) individual characteristics, (b) family of origin factors, and (c) intimate relationship factors. A sample of 77 individuals in distressed relationships (40 gay men and 37 lesbians) were administered a series of quantitative measures in our project office. Data primarily were analyzed using two-way ANOVAs (gender×perpetrator of violence). The greatest number of differences between perpetrators and nonperpetrators was found in individual characteristics. Implications for practitioners working with gay men and lesbians experiencing partner violence are discussed.     

Black visuality and the practice of refusal

What constitutes a practice of refusal? This article engages the practice of refusal collaboratively articulated by the Practicing Refusal Collective, a group founded three years ago by myself and Saidiya Hartman. It does so by unpacking a series of keywords that, I argue, define the contours of an emergent black visuality that itself constitutes a practice of refusal as enacted by two contemporary artists who are creating radical modalities of witnessing that refuse authoritative forms of visuality which function to refuse blackness itself. Focusing on works by Arthur Jafa and Luke Willis Thompson, and viewing them through their use of critical optics of relationality and adjacency, the article explores the affective labor required by their respective cinematic practices and their capacity to engage negation as generative and radically transformative.