Partners in clime: Public‐private partnerships and British Columbia's capacity to pursue climate policy objectives

Governments are increasingly using public‐private partnerships (P3s) to draw the private sector into more active participation in infrastructure development. Climate action initiatives have not typically yielded profitable results for the private sector, and might therefore constrain the placing of conditions by governments on P3 arrangements. This article investigates a major P3 infrastructure project in British Columbia – the Canada Line extension to Vancouver's urban rail transit network – and concludes that the P3 organization did not constrain the government's capacity to pursue policy objectives for climate action. This counterintuitive result occurred because public sector leadership enabled an effective engagement with environmental policy priorities.     

Ideological Competition and Conflict in the Judicial Hierarchy

Circuit splits, or conflicting rules across multiple U.S. Courts of Appeals, have important policy implications and dramatic effects on Supreme Court case selection, yet we know little about the incentives ideological lower courts face when deciding whether to initiate conflict. This article develops a formal model of a judicial hierarchy where lower court judges are subject to review by a high court with distaste for unresolved conflict, termed “split-intolerance,” and with uncertain preferences over policy. Lower courts may compete by investing costly effort in legal quality to make their rules more attractive. In equilibrium, lower courts may initiate conflict even when the odds of success before the high court are remote. Surprisingly, lower courts grow more likely to create conflict as the high court's split-intolerance increases; however, split-intolerance can also incentivize greater lower court effort. I present qualitative evidence illustrating the model's explanatory power.     

Can Light-Touch College-Going Interventions Make a Difference? Evidence from a Statewide Experiment in Michigan

I conduct a statewide experiment in Michigan with nearly 50,000 high-achieving high school seniors. Treated students are mailed a letter encouraging them to consider college and providing them with the web address of a college information website. I find that very high-achieving, low-income students, and very high-achieving, minority students are the most likely to navigate to the website. Small changes to letter content affect take-up. For example, highlighting college affordability induces 18 percent more students to the website than highlighting college choice, and 37 percent more than highlighting how to apply to college. I find a statistically precise zero impact on college enrollment among all students who were mailed the letter. However, low-income students experience a small increase in the probability that they enroll in college, driven by increases at four-year institutions. An examination of persistence through college, while imprecise, suggests that the students induced into college by the intervention persist at a lower rate than the inframarginal student.     

Examining Prison Effects on Recidivism: A Regression Discontinuity Approach

The “get-tough” era of punishment led to exponential growth in the rate of incarceration in the United States. Recent reviews of the literature indicate, however, that limited rigorous research exists examining the effect of imprisonment on the likelihood of future offending. As a result, scholars have called for assessment of this relationship, while using methodologies that can better account for selection effects. This study addresses these calls directly by applying regression discontinuity, a methodology well suited to account for selection bias, on a cohort of felony offenders in Florida. Results suggest that prison, as compared to non-incarcerative sanctions, has no appreciable impact on recidivism. Although no differential effects surfaced across race/ethnicity, the analyses indicated that imprisonment exerts a differential effect by gender with the effect being more criminogenic among males than females.     

Psychic investment in cruelty: three parables on race and imprisoning the mentally ill

Drawing on ethnographic and activist work in New York, I analyze three contemporary cases of mentally ill people charged violent crimes. State violence against them can be characterized as a differential and differentiated set of racial and gendered practices. The case studies offer something between a parable, a field report, and a cautionary tale of the dystopian tendencies already embedded within the criminal justice system in the United States. Based on these cases, I will argue that despite recent liberal reform, scant evidence suggests any deep shift in the web of agencies that pipe people, especially the mentally ill, into prison and jail, or a shift in the cruel and humiliating practices these agencies embody. For the society to achieve what Du Bois called an abolition democracy, the affective infrastructure and psychic investment in debasing subordinated others would have to be abolished.     

Confronting catastrophe: norms,efficiency and the evolution of the AIDS battle in the UN

Social environments played a powerful role in the institutional adaptations of the AIDS fighting agencies within the United Nations system. Since its AIDS apparatus has become operational, the UN has undertaken two major strategic shifts. The first shift saw the dissolution of the GPA, a small subunit of the WHO in favour of UNAIDS, a dedicated agency engaged in global advocacy. This shift involved a controversial bureaucratic process that led, finally, to a more human rights-based approach to the disease. The second shift saw an increased emphasis on ground-level efficiency. What caused these changes? Contributions in the rationalist tradition expect the UN to act as a multilateral goal-seeker looking to optimally address a major gap in global governance. A sociological framework sees normative changes within the UN as catalysts for change in its goals and structure. A synthesis of these traditions conceptualizes the UN's strategic shifts more clearly, capturing the interactive process between the organization and its strategic environment. UN agencies were forced to rationally adapt to changing conditions in prevailing AIDS norms.     

Evidence on the Effectiveness of Juvenile Court Sanctions

Purpose

The past decade has been witness to a proliferation of calls for evidence-based juvenile court sanctions—including various programs, interventions, services, and strategies or approaches—that reduce recidivism and improve mental health, drug dependency, and education outcomes. At the same time, an emerging body of work has identified “proven,” “evidence-based,” “best practice,” or, more generally, “effective” efforts to achieve these outcomes. Even so, grounds for concern exist regarding the evidence-base for these and other sanctions.

Methods

This paper describes the heterogeneity of sanctioning within juvenile justice and argues that, despite substantial advances in research, the heterogeneity severely delimits the generalizability of evaluations to date. It also raises questions about how much is in fact known about the effectiveness of many juvenile justice sanctions.

Conclusion

Extant research offers grounds for optimism. Even so, explicit articulation of the limitations of this research and the need for studies that examine external validity is important for developing evidence about “what works” in juvenile justice. Implications for research and policy are discussed.     

Religion and the Practices of Popular Constitutionalism: Sarah Gordon's The Spirit of the Law

Sarah Gordon's The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (2010) details the advent, beginning in the 1940s, of a “new constitutional world” pertaining to the religion clauses. By focusing on case studies, Gordon's narrative history shows the emergence, maturation, and waning of a rich historical moment in which religiously motivated popular constitutionalists had a profound impact on how the Constitution was technically interpreted by the courts. Shifting perspectives from history to ethnography, the essay synthesizes Gordon's stories to yield an anatomy of “religious” popular constitutionalism as it appears in Gordon's book and conjectures at what it might look like if we left court records behind.     

Court Sentencing Patterns for Environmental Crimes: Is There a “Green” Gap in Punishment?

Objectives

This study examines sentencing patterns for environmental crimes and tests the assumption that “green” offenders receive more lenient treatment from criminal courts than non-environmental offenders.

Methods

We present two sets of analyses. First, we present an empirical portrait of environmental felony offenses convicted in a single state (Florida) over a fifteen-year period and the resulting criminal sanctions. Second, we use a precision matching analysis to assess whether environmental offenders receive more lenient treatment when compared to non-environmental offenders with the same characteristics and offense severity scores.

Results

Findings indicate that an overall small percentage of felony convictions in state courts stem from environmental crimes. We also find that punishments for environmental crimes are more lenient than sanctions assigned to comparable non-environmental offenses when the environmental crime is ecological, but that punishments are sometimes harsher when the environmental crime involves animals.

Conclusions

The findings provide general support for the argument that courts and other formal institutions of social control treat environmental crimes more leniently than non-environmental crimes. This paper also raises important questions about citizen and state actors’ perceptions of crimes against the environment and, more generally, about the ways in which theories of court sentencing behaviors apply to environmental crime sanctioning decisions.