Chapter 3: The Influence of Juveniles' Race on Police Decision-Making: An Exploratory Study

Previous studies evaluating the effects of juveniles' race on police decision-making have rendered inconclusive results. Many of these studies have suffered from methodological shortcomings. The present study utilized vignettes to describe police-juvenile encounters in order to determine police charging practices for black and white youth. The results suggest modest offense-related race effects. Black youth tend to be charged with more offenses while white youth were released more frequently. A refinement in the research methodology is indicated for further explorations of the critical issue of police bias.     

A Prospective Investigation of Racial Disparity in the Juvenile Justice System

Abstract Black males are over-represented in the juvenile justice system. With the exception of a few recent studies, most investigations to determine why such over-representation exists have used retrospective data from existing records, conceptualized their research as a series of separate juvenile justice decisions, and employed bivariate and zero-order correlation techniques. This paper presents the results of a prospective study designed to determine why disproportionately more black than white males are represented in Georgia's juvenile justice system. Youth from eight communities were tracked through four decision points: police apprehension, and juvenile court intake, adjudication, and disposition. The study examines the direct and indirect effects of race on decision making. Multivariate analysis methods allowed specification of results for each separate decision point as well as the cumulative effects of race across decision points.     

Street children in North and Latin America: Preliminary data fromproyecto alternativos in Tegucigalpa and some comparisons with the U.S. case

The decade of the 1980s witnessed a dramatic transformation in the character of homelessness in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world. Whereas in previous decades the U.S. homeless were predominantly older, largely white, brokendown alcoholic men (or at least were stereotypified as such), today a sizable fraction are women and children. Indeed, women, children, and youth now comprise more than three-eighths of the total homeless population of the United States (Wright 1989). As the U.S. homeless have come to be comprised of proportionally more women and children, so have they come more and more to resemble the street populations of the Third World, where homelessness, family disorganization, exploitation, and abandonment of children have become increasingly important problems during the past decade.     

Ways of Knowing and Inclusive Management Practices

The authors engage structural and agentic perspectives to examine opportunities for deliberation and the purposeful role of managers in creating those opportunities. Drawing on actor-network theory as a way of understanding the process of structuring knowledge, this essay focuses on the continuous enactment and reenactment of networks of human and nonhuman actants and the associations that connect them. This thinking is applied to policy issues, which the authors propose should be understood as ways of knowing. The fluidity of such ways of knowing provides opportunities for public managers to use the inclusive practices associated with boundary experiences, boundary objects, and boundary organizations to facilitate deliberation.     

The Street‐Level Bureaucrats of Elections: Selection Methods for Local Election Officials

The 2000 presidential election and the recount battle in Florida focused attention on local election administration in the United States. The Help America Vote Act , passed by the federal government in 2002, requires wholesale changes in voting equipment and other election procedures. However, the law did not address the selection of individuals who manage elections: both state and local election officials play a great role implementing federal and state election laws. Recently, several election reform advocates have argued for shifting to nonpartisan election administrators in the United States. Others, particularly associations representing election officials, have not endorsed that position. To inform this debate, we provide data on the selection methods and party affiliations for all local election officials in the United States (more than 4,500 individuals or commissions). We find considerable variation in the methods used to select state and local election officials in the United States.