China’s Implementation of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime

Seven years since signing and four years into its implementation, how well is China living up to the terms and spirit of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC)? This paper reviews China’s compliance with UNTOC’s requirements concerning domestic criminal law and concludes that current P.R.C. law is substantially in conformity with UNTOC, though further legislative action is necessary to achieve full compliance. Looking beyond the law on the books, China continues to be a staunch supporter of international cooperation, as called for by UNTOC. Yet UNTOC has received scant attention in China compared with other multilateral instruments in the criminal justice realm. The timeline of reform begs the question whether UNTOC is responsible for goading China into taking any concrete legislative action. This paper posits that, in the absence of UNTOC, China’s domestic law would look exactly the same today.     

Aggregation effects on male-to-female arrest rate ratios in New York State, 1972 to 1984

The purpose of this paper is to assess the effects of data aggregation on a specification of the relationship between sex and arrest rate trends. The analysis focuses on the empirical implications when arrest data are aggregated across dimensions that are likely to affect the sex-crime relationship. The data for the analysis consist of 4,119,358 male and female adult arrests in New York State for the 13-year period ending in 1984. Results indicate that race, regional differences, and the legal seriousness of the arrest charge produce significantly different patterns of sex convergence across time. On the basis of these results, we suggest serious limitations in past analyses of female crime rates and in the value of Uniform Crime Report (UCR) data for addressing theoretically relevant questions concerning the social correlates of official crime.     

Policy impacts of the New Jersey income maintenance experiment

This paper deals with a major piece of policy relevant social science research, the New Jersey Experiment in Income Maintenance, and a proposed piece of social legislation, the Family Assistance Plan. An attempt is made to assess the impact which the experiment had on political decision-makers, both in the Administration and the Congress, during deliberations over the legislation. The channels of communication between the researchers and the decision-makers are elaborated; the relevance of the research to the concerns of the decision-makers is described; and the impact of the research on these decision-makers is evaluated.It is suggested that there are two major uses of research in the policy process, technical and political. One involves resolving technical details of program design and administration; the other involves convincing decision-makers that a particular policy alternative is the correct one to support. Through analysis of primary documents, it is concluded that the major impact of the experiment to date has been in technical areas. Experimental findings and methods were used by the Administration to support its position and the preliminary data contributed to House discussions.The information sources of the Congress and the Administration are compared and despite disparities, it is pointed out that research cannot change values and values are an important factor in determining a decision-maker's attitude toward an innovation.It is concluded that if systematic thinking and research are to play a role in the process of policy formulation and implementation, each part of the process not only has to have access to research, but also the ability to evaluate that research. It is to be expected that under existing conditions the major immediate contribution of research such as the New Jersey Experiment to policy discussions will be in very technical areas, with the possibility of making a contribution to change in the climate of opinion over time.     

‘Every Hungarian of any value to intelligence’: Tibor Eckhardt,John Grombach,and the Pond

Abstract

Tibor Eckhardt, a Hungarian émigré, was a key player in American intelligence operations regarding Hungary during World War II and the early Cold War. He worked closely with a secretive American intelligence organization headed by John Grombach, an American intelligence officer who was a vehement opponent of the CIA. Though Eckhardt and Grombach shared concerns about the CIA, they were also forced to cooperate with it. Eckhardt’s endeavors and those of the many Hungarians whose intelligence work he coordinated were ultimately futile. Hence, they were representative of the efforts of freedom-loving Hungarians to liberate their country during the Cold War.     

Quantification of Maxillary Dental Arcade Curvature and the Estimation of Biological Ancestry in Forensic Anthropology

Previous studies suggest that palate shape is a useful indicator of biological ancestry in human remains. This study evaluates interobserver error in ancestry estimation using palate shape and explores palate shape variation in Gullah (descendants of West Africans) and Seminole (Indigenous American) population samples using geometric morphometric analysis. Ten participants were asked to ascribe biological ancestry and shape to 28 dental casts based on a classification scheme employed in previous studies. The mean correct classification was 42.0%, indicating that the likelihood of assigning the correct ancestry is very poor and not significantly different from random assignment (p = 0.12). The accuracy analysis based on categorical classification of the casts was complemented by geometric morphometric analysis of nine 3D landmarks reflecting palate shape of 158 casts. Principal component analysis results show no difference between populations regarding palate shape, and cross‐validated discriminant function analysis correctly classified only 62.0% of the specimens. Combined, these results show that previous methods to estimate ancestry are inaccurate and that this inaccuracy is probably due to a lack of palate shape differences between groups, rather than limitation of the analytical method per se. Therefore, we recommend caution should be used when choosing to apply the analysis of palate shape in forensically relevant contexts.     

Examining the Consequences of the “Prevalent Life Events” of Arrest and Incarceration among an Urban African-American Cohort

The life course perspective has traditionally examined prevalent adult life events, such as marriage and employment, and their potential to redirect offending trajectories. However, for African-Americans, the life events of arrest and incarceration are becoming equally prevalent in young adulthood. Therefore, it is critical to understand how these “standard” criminal justice practices, which are designed to deter as well as punish, affect deviance among this population. This study evaluates the long-term consequences of criminal justice intervention on substance use and offending into midlife among an African-American community cohort using propensity score matching and multivariate regression analyses. The results largely point to a criminogenic effect of criminal justice intervention on midlife deviance with a particularly strong effect of young adult arrest on rates of violent and property arrest counts into midlife. The theoretical and policy implications of the findings are discussed.     

The Effects of General Pretrial Publicity on Juror Decisions: An Examination of Moderators and Mediating Mechanisms

Two studies examined three moderators (gender, attitudes, and media slant) and four mediators (accessibility, evidence importance, evidence plausibility, and standards of guilt) of general pretrial publicity's influence on juror decisions. In Study 1, participants who watched a prodefense rape story were more likely to report that they would need more inculpatory evidence to convict a defendant of rape than were participants who watched a proprosecution rape story. In Study 2, participants watched news stories, one of which was a proprosecution rape story, a prodefense rape story, or a nonrape story. In an ostensibly unrelated study, participants indicated their attitudes toward rape, watched a rape trial, and provided trial and witness ratings. Accessibility did not mediate the media effects on participants' judgments of rape importance; however, attitudes moderated media effects. Rape news influenced juror ratings of the importance of evidence about the complainant's behavior. Finally, media altered the standards participants used to determine defendant guilt. Implications for understanding the mechanisms responsible for pretrial publicity effects are discussed.     

A novel multiplex for simultaneous amplification of 20 Y chromosome STR markers

A multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay capable of simultaneously amplifying 20 Y chromosome short tandem repeat (STR) markers has been developed to aid human identity testing and male population studies. These markers include all of the Y STRs that make up the "extended haplotype" used in Europe (DYS19, DYS385, DYS389I/II, DYS390, DYS391, DYS392, DYS393, and YCAII) plus additional polymorphic Y STRs (DYS437, DYS438, DYS439, DYS447, DYS448, DYS388, DYS426, GATA A7.1, and GATA H4). Primers for the markers DYS385, DYS389, and YCAII target duplicated regions of the Y chromosome and thus can provide two polymorphic peaks for each respective primer set. This Y STR 20plex, which utilizes 34 different PCR primers, is the first to include a simultaneous amplification of all the markers within the European "minimal" and "extended" haplotypes. Relative primer positions are compared between the newly developed primers described here and previously published ones. Efforts were made to avoid X chromosome homology in the primer design as well as close packing of PCR product size ranges in order to keep all alleles less than 350 bp through careful examination of known allele ranges. Haplotype comparisons between the 20plex and a commercially available kit found excellent agreement across the 76 samples in the Y chromosome consortium panel.