Babies Can't Wait: A Judicial Response

During my career as a Family Court Judge over the past 12 years, I was faced daily with the difficult task of deciding whether or not to remove a newborn infant from the care of her mother and place the child in foster care upon discharge from the hospital. In the huge majority of cases, removal was ordered based upon the mother's history of substance abuse and the subsequent positive toxicology of the infant at birth. I could not risk the health and safety of this often premature and vulnerable infant to a mother with such an addiction to drugs that she would expose her child in utero to these toxic substances. Such a mother was incapable of caring for the basic needs of this vulnerable infant, and therefore removal was ordered. This decision saddened me because, as a mother myself, I knew of the critical bond existing between infant and mother during those critical first days and weeks of a child's life. That bond must be nurtured and strengthened and is crucial to a child's development.     

FURTHERING THE INTEGRATION OF ROUTINE ACTIVITY AND SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION THEORIES: SMALL UNITS OF ANALYSIS AND THE STUDY OF STREET ROBBERY AS A DIFFUSION PROCESS

Attempts to integrate the two predominant spatial theories of crime, social disorganization and routine activity theories, may benefit from examining empirical relationships at units of analysis smaller than the relatively large units characteristic of most ecological research (cities, SMSAs, census tracts, multiple city blocks). Small units of analysis, specifically, face blocks (both sides of a city block between two intersections) are analyzed in a study of street robbery within a medium-size southeastern U.S. city. Models of street robbery and street-robbery "potential" suggest a crime diffusion process. Several interaction effects between variables of social disorganization and routine activity theory are found, which may form the basis in future research for successful theoretical integration.     

POLITICAL PRESSURES,ORGANIZATIONAL IDENTITY,AND ATTENTION TO TASKS: ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PRE‐CRISIS FINANCIAL REGULATION

Regulatory agencies, like most public organizations, typically operate with multiple tasks and goals, which requires them to prioritize some tasks over others. Such prioritization, while essential, engenders a risk of bureaucratic oversight of significant material problems. Despite the ubiquity and importance of these concerns, our understanding of agencies' allocation of attention across tasks is limited. This article develops a model of agencies' allocation of attention across tasks, which involves an interaction between external public and political pressures and agencies' distinct organizational identities. A brief comparison between two cases of pre‐crisis financial regulation illustrates the proposed model. The two cases suggest that the British Financial Services Authority's and the Israeli Supervisor of Banks' distinct identities conditioned their responses to similarly vigorous pressures to devote more attention to firms' alleged mistreatment of their customers, with important implications for these regulators' attention to firms' capitalization and liquidity.     

Structure of State‐Level Tax and Expenditure Limits

While much consideration has been given to the approval process, base classification, and codification of tax and expenditure limits (or TELs), these factors tell us nothing about how they actually work. This study focuses exclusively on the technical elements of these limits and finds how states estimate their limits have over time eroded their potency. More specifically, if a state resets or rebases its limit annually by using actual revenues or expenditures for the preceding year, the limit will trend closely with actual revenues or expenditures, effectively restricting growth in spending as prescribed by law. However, if the law requires a state to estimate its limit using the appropriation limit for the preceding year instead of actual revenues or expenditures, that is, without rebasing, the limit will reflect cumulative changes to the base when it was first approved. Over time, the TEL cap is significantly above the states revenues or expenditures as it remains unaffected by the state's underlying fiscal and economic environment.