FROM INITIAL DETERRENCE TO LONGTERM ESCALATION: SHORT-CUSTODY ARREST FOR POVERTY GHETTO DOMESTIC VIOLENCE*

Persons arrested for misdemeanor domestic violence are held in custody for widely varying lengths of time. To test the effects of this variance, we randomly assigned short (X?= 2.8 hours), full (X?= 11.1 hours), and no arrests (warning only) to a sample of 1,200 cases with predominantly unemployed suspects concentrated in black ghetto poverty neighborhoods in Milwaukee. Victim interviews and one official measure showed that short arrest had a substantial initial deterrent effect relative to the warning group. Longer term follow-up and before-after analysis, however, found neither arrest group reflected any deterrence. On the most comprehensive official measure, short arrest consistently showed significantly higher long-term recidivism than no arrest. Its deterrent effect ended at 30 days, but its criminogenic effect was significant after one year. We conclude that short-custody arrests for domestic violence in poverty ghetto areas may pose a dilemma between short- and long-term crime control, but longer custody arrests have no clear long-term effect in either direction.     

Reclaiming Futures: A Model for Judicial Leadership in Community Responses to Juvenile Substance Abuse

Juvenile courts across the country have become the leading service delivery system for youths with substance abuse problems, not by choice, but by necessity. At 10 communities around the nation, judges and project staff are in their fifth year of pioneering changes to the way the juvenile justice system helps teens in trouble with drugs, alcohol, and crime. These judges are part of Reclaiming Futures, an initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and they are working with local leaders to re‐invent the way law enforcement, courts, probation, detention facilities, treatment providers, families, schools, and the community work together to help troubled youths succeed. Together, they have written a guide for judges, court administrators, government entities, community leaders, and interested citizens to share the knowledge and experience they have gained from the nationwide Reclaiming Futures initiative. Their goal is to encourage and motivate others to launch similar projects in their communities, and to provide a blueprint for judges and others striving to undertake this level of collaboration.     

GOVERNANCE FROM THE BOTTOM UP: COMPLEXITY AND DIVERGENCE IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

This symposium article examines how the threefold governance framework of the symposium actually works across multiple policy sectors and multiple politically systems. It undertakes a comparative survey of governance‐related developments across three policy sectors: environment, education/higher education and forests. To control for differentiation in political structures, the article studies the policy sectors with respect to three political systems Canada, England and Germany, taking into account the role of the European Union, the federal systems and international actors. This broad macro comparative focus enables the authors to make one of the first empirical efforts to assess the presence and sweep of governance arrangements across both policy sectors and states; and to assess the degree of convergence around particular governance practices.