Caught in the Act: States Doing Some Things Right in Juvenile Justice

Bashing of juvenile justice systems in the United States is commonplace. We wondered if this is justified. As a product of our everyday practice and academic assessment, this article draws attention to salutary developments on several fronts, including reduced confinement, systematic assessment of child risks and needs, including use of structured decision‐making tools, evidence based services, and construction of comprehensive service plans. Our goal is to draw attention to best practices such as these that can lead to further advancements in juvenile justice systems.     

Pinpointing the Powerful: Covoting Network Centrality as a Measure of Political Influence

This article introduces centrality in covoting networks as a measure of influence. Based on a simple cueing dynamic, it conceptualizes those lawmakers as most central—and thus as having the greatest signaling influence—who impact the greatest number of colleagues' voting decisions. A formal proof and an agent‐based simulation show that cue‐providers are always more central than followers; hence, we can use real‐world voting data to identify the most influential legislators. To confirm the measure's construct validity, we predict covoting centrality in the European Parliament and find those factors that are expected to impact legislators' influence to predict their centrality.     

Question,ethos, event: Foucault on Kant and Enlightenment

The use of labour values as a basis for economic calculation in a socialist economy is defended. A resource allocation mechanism is outlined that uses a combination of labour value calculation with market clearing prices for consumer goods. Conditions for full employment are specified. A type theoretic analysis of economic calculation is presented. Information theory is used to estimate the information content of real price vectors. It is demonstrated that both price calculations and value calculations are type theory equivalent and that both involve information loss. It is shown that modern computer technology is capable of computing up to date labour values with comparative ease.     

Subsidized housing and neighborhood racial transition: An empirical investigation

Abstract

Popular wisdom has it that the development of project‐based assisted housing will cause whites to flee or avoid the surrounding neighborhood, leading to rapid racial transition. This article examines the question of whether the development of several types of project‐based, federally assisted housing had an impact on neighborhood racial transition during the 1980s. In general, the development of assisted housing in a neighborhood did not lead to racial transition, nor did it approach levels suggesting “white flight” in the few instances where racial transition did occur.

The results of our analysis suggest that one of the major criticisms of project‐based assisted housing—that it contributes to racial segregation by causing white flight—is not supported by empirical evidence.     

Housing Choice Vouchers and Crime in Charlotte,NC

Recent media attention and research have focused on the effect of housing vouchers on crime, with different conclusions. The purpose of this study is to bring further evidence to the voucher–crime debate, using annual data from 2000 to 2009 for Charlotte-Mecklenburg County. We study the relationship between crime counts and housing vouchers with quantile regression models with year and census tract fixed effects. We found that voucher households are associated with increased crime, controlling for past crime levels. Estimates vary, however, with the concentration of vouchers in the neighborhood, with little impact in areas with low concentrations. Estimates also vary with the neighborhood crime level. We extend the literature by examining the effect of different voucher family types, finding no evidence that elderly households or nonelderly households without disabilities and without children are associated with more crime. However, we found a very significant positive association for nonelderly households without disabilities with children. Our results indicate that significant crime reductions could be accomplished by focusing U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, local housing agency, and criminal justice resources on the types of places and voucher families most at risk for crime problems when a family uses a voucher to move into a new neighborhood.     

Fantasy machine: philanthrocapitalism as an ideological formation

Philanthrocapitalism is promoted as a form of development funding that infuses philanthropy with the dynamism and innovation of capitalist enterprise. Millennium Promise is a philanthrocapitalist organisation based in New York, which finances the Millennium Villages Project (mvp) across 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. At the level of its discursive articulation Millennium Promise appears as a Foucauldian ‘anti-politics machine’: a mechanism of transnational governmentality devoted to the biopolitical production of entrepreneurial subjects organised in self-disciplining communities. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and field research conducted in Uganda, I argue that philanthrocapitalism is better understood as an ideological formation, which mobilises a disavowed enjoyment of global inequality. In the case of Millennium Promise this enjoyment is structured by specific social fantasies: cause-related marketing campaigns invite Western consumers to enjoy their imagined distance from ‘African’ suffering; the mvp functions as a narcissistic mirror, which offers a reflection of capitalist society cleansed of its class antagonism; and, through the staging of messianic rituals, the mvp mobilises a shared enjoyment of pseudo-colonial relations of domination. I conclude that philanthrocapitalism is not an anti-politics machine but a fantasy machine, which demonstrates the limitations of Foucauldian critique, and forces us to confront our own relations to enjoyment.     

Literary Reviews

Classic realism. The Time of the Hero. Mario Vargas Llosa. Translated from the Spanish by Lysander Kemp. London: Picador. 1986. 409pp. £4.50pb

The Green House. Mario Vargas Llosa. Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa. London: Picador. 1986. 405pp. £3.95pb

Colluding with darkness. Of Love and Shadows. Isabel Allende. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden. London: Cape. 1987. 274pp. £10.95hb

The Lizard's Tail. Luisa Valenzuela. Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa. London: Serpent's Tail. 1987. 279pp. £7.95pb

Brazilian journeys. The Land. Antônio Torres. Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Neves. London: Readers International. 1987. 136pp. £3.95pb

Sergeant Getulio. Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro. Translated from the Portuguese by the author. London: Faber and Faber. 1986. 146pp. £3.95pb

Macunaíma. Mário de Andrade. Translated from the Portuguese by E A Goodland. London: Quartet. 1984. 168pp. £8.95hb

Philosophy and intuition. Family Ties. Clarice Lispector. Translated from the Portuguese with an Afterword by Giovanni Pontiero. Manchester: Carcanet Press. 1985. 140pp. £8.95hb/£3.50pb

The Foreign Legion. Clarice Lispector. Translated from the Portuguese with an Afterword by Giovanni Pontiero. Manchester: Carcanet Press. 1986. 219pp. £8.95hb

The Hour of the Star. Clarice Lispector. Translated from the Portuguese with an Afterword by Giovanni Pontiero. Manchester: Carcanet Press. 1986. 96pp. £8.95hb

Western filters. Genesis. Eduardo Galeano. Translated from the Spanish by Cedric Belfrage. London: Methuen. 1987. 293pp. £3.95pb

Cultures of resistance. The Last Song of Manuel Sendero. Ariel Dorfman. Translated from the Spanish by George R Shivers with the author. New York: Viking. 1987. 450pp. S18.95hb

Power and polemics. End Papers. Breyten Breytenbach. London: Faber and Faber. 1986. 270pp. £12.50hb

Mating Birds. Lewis Nkosi. London: Constable. 1986. 184pp. £8.95hb

The Scaffold. Edward Lurie. London: Zed Books. 1986. 237pp. £4.95pb

A mind of winter. Memory of Departure. Abdulrazak Gurnah. London: Cape. 1987. 159pp. £9.95hb

Yoruba destinies. Pauper, Brawler and Slanderer. Amos Tutuola. London: Faber and Faber. 1987. 156pp. £9.95hb/£3.95pb

Shared history: novels from the francophone Caribbean. The Ripening. Edouard Glissant. Translated from the French by Michael Dash. London: Heinemann Educational Books. 1985. 195pp. n/p

Cathedral of the August Heat: A Novel of Haiti. Pierre Clitandre. Translated from the French by Bridget Jones. London: Readers International. 1987. 159pp. £8.95hb/£4.95pb

A Caribbean poet questing. Mother Poem. 1977. 122pp. £3.95pb Sun Poem. 1982. 104pp. £4.95pb X/Self. 1987. 131pp. £6.95pb Edward Kamau Brathwaite Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fatal passivity: women in Arabic fiction. From Sleep Unbound. Andree Chedid. Translated from the French by Sharon Spencer. London: Serpent's Tail. 1987. 160pp. £4.95pb

The Story of Zahra. Hanan al‐Shaykh. Translated from the Arabic by Peter Ford with the author. London: Pavanne. 1986. 184pp. £2.95pb

Death of an Ex‐Minister. Nawal El Saadawi. Translated from the Arabic by Shirley Eber. London: Methuen. 1987. 110pp. £9.50hb/£2.95pb

Rival unrealities. Sorraya in a Coma. Esmail Fassih. Translated from the Persian. London: Zed. 1985. 287pp. £9.95hb/£4.95pb

Indian truths. Truth Tales. Edited by Kali for Women. London: Women's Press. 1987. 201pp. £8.95hb/£3.95pb

Stories. Satyajit Ray. Translated from the Bengali by the author. London: Secker and Warburg. 1987. 190pp. £10.95hb