Displaced discretion under Ohio sentencing guidelines

The argument that curbing judicial sentencing discretion generates more prosecutorial discretion at earlier decision points in case processing received little empirical attention beyond Miethe's (1987) before/after study of the Minnesota guidelines. This article presents an examination of whether Ohio's sentencing reform resulted in significant changes in prosecutorial decisions related to indictment severity, dropped charges, charge reductions, and overall plea bargains. The implementation of determinate sentencing guidelines corresponded with a significant yet modest increase in the likelihood of charge reductions only. Some changes also occurred in the specific effects of various defendant characteristics on some of the outcomes examined, but these changes did not uniformly result in harsher dispositions for defendants facing greater social and economic disadvantage. Similar to Miethe's observation regarding Minnesota's sentencing scheme, any increase in levels of prosecutorial discretion that might have occurred under Ohio's latest scheme had not resulted in substantive extra-legal disparities in case dispositions.     

Examining Media Coverage of Drugs in Malaysian Media

Asian Journal of Criminology - It has been well-established that, in the USA, the news media contributes to the construction of moral panics regarding the use and users of various types of drugs....     

Major Combat Operations and Counterinsurgency Warfare: Plan Challe in Algeria, 1959–1960

In 1959–60, the French Army in Algeria achieved a major tactical and operational military success under the command of General Maurice Challe, in which the French destroyed half of the combat capability of the Algerian insurgency. Rather than adopting a population-centric, or “hearts and minds,” approach to coin, the French Army created an innovative method for military success based on the use of major combat operations against the military power of the insurgency. The success of major combat operations in Plan Challe is omitted or dismissed in most of the Algerian War historiography, which focuses instead on French pacification. An analysis of Plan Challe, however, provides lessons and examples for the conduct of a successful sustained counterguerrilla campaign, a coercive method seldom discussed in current debates over coin warfare.     

An evaluation of Pakistan's third five year plan

The decline in the share of agriculture and increase in secondary production's share have generally been found to accompany changes in per capita income. Cross‐section data have long exhibited such a ‘pattern of development’. Recent panel information combining cross‐section and time‐series data seemed to extend the behaviour to time series. Using analysis of co‐variance tests for such patterns over time, the paper rejects the assumption of homogeneous patterns over time. In addition 45 per cent of the individual countries deviate from the expected time series pattern. Thus such patterns certainly do appear in cross‐sections, but their existence across countries over time is not confirmed.     

Class War in the Voting Booth: Bias Against High-Income Congressional Candidates

Do Americans care how much money congressional candidates earn? We conducted three experiments to examine how candidates' incomes affect voters' perceptions of the candidates' traits and ultimately their vote intention. Subjects evaluated otherwise identical candidates with annual incomes randomly varying between $75,000, $3 million, and a candidate with no income information provided. Results from the three experiments are remarkably similar. Subjects viewed the $3 million earner as significantly more intelligent than the candidate with no income information provided, but this benefit of high income was overshadowed by significant biases against the $3 million candidate. Subjects consistently viewed the $3 million earner as less honest, less caring, and less representative of them than the other candidates. Ultimately, subjects were less likely to say they would vote for the $3 million candidate. These findings demonstrate that the campaign advantages that high-income candidates enjoy are somewhat offset by voters' initial bias against them.