Discretionary Justice: Decision Making in a State Juvenile Parole Board

The literature in Criminal Justice is replete with commentary on both the virtues and injustices associated with adult parole board decision-making. There has been far less attention paid to juvenile parole boards in part because so few of them exist. Institutional release decisions in most states still remain the purview of juvenile institutional staff members. This paper examines parole Authority decision-making in a citizen-dominated state juvenile parole board. The paper focuses on the conduct of hearings, dispositional guidelines, criteria used by board members in decision-making and the advocacy role of parole officers and institutional staff. The influence of deinstitutionalization and least restrictive policies on parole Authority decision making is also discussed. During recent years, the literature in criminal justice has become replete with commentary on the virtues and injustices associated with parole board decision-making. Consequently, many questions have been raised about disparate sentences, the criteria used by parole boards in making decisions, unstructured discretion, and the pressing need for guidelines and statistically accurate parole prediction instruments. The intent of this paper is to examine parole decision-making in a state juvenile parole board where individualized treatment and rehabilitation have been long standing goals. The paper focuses upon the criteria used by board members in decision-making, the conduct of hearings, the guideline system used to determine a recommended length of confinement and the advocacy role of parole officers and institutional staff. The influence of deinstitutionalization and least restrictive policies on parole board decision-making is also discussed. The author is presently completing the second year of a two-year appointment as a member of the Parole Authority under discussion. Since December, 1983, the author has continuously observed and participated in approximately 300 individual parole hearings over thirty-seven hearing days.     

THE COURTS AND RISK ASSESSMENT1

In the past decade the federal courts have come to play an important role in reviewing agency decision-making on prospective risks. Questioning the conventional wisdom that judges are poorly equipped for the task, the authors outline the range of choices facing courts in such cases and contend that they cannot avoid making ultimate decisions on risk policy. However, recent Supreme Court cases on nuclear hazards and occupational benzene indicate narrowing of the scope for judicial review.     

Limiting State Involvement in Foreign Policy: The Governors and the National Guard in Perpich v. Defense

The National Guard is a largely successful intergovernmentalinstitution in the United States. In September 1989, however,the governor of Minnesota asked the U.S. Supreme Court to strikedown federal legislation that gives the Department of Defenseauthority to assign state National Guard units to active-dutyoverseas training without the consent of the governor. In Perpich(1990), the Supreme Court upheld the Montgomery Amendment allowingthe president to order members of a state's Guard to activeduty for training outside the United States even during peacetimewithout either the consent of the governor or the declarationof a national emergency. The Court did not address the factthat the president has ample authority under other statutesfor calling up the National Guard. The decision dealt only withthe authority for calling Guard units for two weeks of active-dutytraining. The practical effect of this interpretation of themilitia clauses of the U.S. Constitution is to reduce the states'authority for training to, at best, a ministerial function,even when Guard units are called up by the secretary of defenseonly for the purpose of training.     

Existence of a ‘structurally stable’ equilibrium for a non-collegial voting rule

This essay shows that, for any non-collegial voting rule, σ, there exists an integer, s(σ), with this property: if the policy space, W, has dimension no greater than s(σ), then there exists a profile of smooth utilities on W, such that the core for σ at this profile is non-empty and ‘structurally stable’ under sufficiently small perturbation. We also show how we may compute s(σ) for an arbitrary rule. This material is based upon work supported by NSF grant SES-84-18296, to the School of Social Sciences, University of California at Irvine. An early draft was written while the author was Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology. Thanks are due to Kenneth Shepsle, Dick McKelvey and Gary Cox for helpful comments, to Michael Chwe and Shaun Bowler for research assistance, and to Derek Hearl and Ian Budge for permission to make use of unpublished data.     

Political competition

Abstract Many previous theoretical analyses of multiparty coalition behaviour have been based either on one-dimensional policy model or on a constant-sum game interpretation. For theoretical and empirical reasons this paper focusses on a competitive two-dimensional model. In this model parties are concerned with policy outcomes but choose party positions both with a view to electoral consequences and as a basis for coalition bargaining. The political heart is proposed as the set of possible coalition outcomes. The heart is either the core of the political game or is determined by a small number of party positions. Under certain conditions an equilibrium in the choice of party positions can be shown to exist. The model suggests that parties can be categorized as either strong or weak core parties, anti-core parties or peripheral parties. This categorization of parties implies a typology of party systems, which gives some theoretical foundation for the occurrence of minority, minimal winning and surplus coalitions in many of the European countries in the postwar period.     

Gender Equality (And its Absence) in Singapore’s 2015 General Elections

Abstract

With the dust settled after Singapore’s 2015 parliamentary elections, the only aspect pundits and Singaporean politics watchers could agree on was that the People’s Action Party’s comeback from its performance at the 2011 elections, although not of Lazarus proportions, was most certainly unexpected. While the result of the 2015 elections has gone through several post-election analytical mills, what has been oddly absent in such analyses is a discussion of gender in Singaporean politics. This article considers the relationship between gender and Singaporean politics through the experience of the 2015 election and its results. It shows that while Singapore has moved some way towards assuaging the demands of liberal feminists for greater representation in the political sphere, much more has to be done in order for gender equality to be achieved. The article argues for the Group Representation Constituency method of electing parliamentarians to be adapted to ensure a greater number of female parliamentarians while a quota system may be required for cabinet to be truly representative of the female demographic of Singapore.