Reflections on the Olivetti Papers

Editor's Note: Professor Salvemini, professor of economics at the University of Bari and advisor to the Italian Minister of the Treasury, attended the Olivetti Conference on Budgetary problems in the fall of 1981. Papers from the conference were published in the Autumn 1982 issue of this journal. After reviewing both the conference proceedings and the papers published in Public Budgeting & Finance , Professor Salvemini has provided some further reflections and thoughts on the ideas presented at that conference.     

Sentencing Using Statistical Treatment Rules: What We Don’t Know Can Hurt Us

The existing literature seriously misinterprets the available evidence on the predictability of high rate criminal offending and thus the potential value of statistical treatment rules that impose stiffer punishments on offenders with higher predicted risk of recidivism. The misinterpretation results from the failure to take account of the fact that the data used in existing risk assessment exercises come from environments characterized by informal (and sometimes formal) attempts by judges and other actors to base penal treatments on expected recidivism. Findings of little or no predictive power for baseline covariates may simply indicate the efficient use of the available information. We lay out the problem in detail, provide examples from several literatures and then consider general solutions to the problem.

The frontier revisited: displacement,land and identity among farm labourers in the Sundays River Valley

This paper aims to unpack the dynamics of displacement and the relationship of physical movement to elements of space (i.e. land) and place (or identity), in the Sundays River Valley, near the town of Kirkwood, in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. It primarily uses the motif of frontiers to cast light on displacement as an ongoing phenomenon and explore the different eras of occupation of land in the Sundays River Valley, from the early nineteenth century until 1970. It relates different layers of belonging and identity to the unfolding of capitalism and apartheid in South Africa. The article argues that ties to land are multiple, contested and based upon dispossession and physical movement rather than upon stability. While such a high degree of contestation of oral evidence in the Sundays River Valley might not give current claimants a detailed legal basis for restitution, it is an academically valuable idea to explore the origins of the inhabitants in the Sundays River Valley – because it can indicate the degree to which local identities are influenced by experiences of disruption and displacement. The paper argues that frontier relationships in the SRV are central in the formation of larger systems of relationships of race and class, and that this casts new light on displacement (both as a historical event and a contemporary experience), in the formation of identity and place in southern Africa.     

Identifying Classes of Explanations for Crime Drop: Period and Cohort Effects for New York State

Objective

This paper advances current understanding of the contemporary crime drop by focusing on the changes in the age distribution of arrests from 1990 to 2010. Using the New York State Computerized Criminal History (CCH) file, which tracks every arrest in the state, we apply standard demographic methods to examine age-specific arrest rates over time. We test whether the 25 % drop in the felony arrest rate can be best explained by period or cohort effects with special attention to how the phenomenon varies across crime types and regions within the state.

Methods

Following the analytic approach of O’Brien and Stockard (J Quant Criminol 25(1):79–101, 2009), we fit the age–period–cohort (APC) model using the generalized inverse matrix, which creates an estimable model. We partition the model variation into each factor by subtracting the variation of the two-factor model from the variation of the three-factor model to provide a direct comparison of the two different classes of explanations for crime drop: period and cohort.

Results

Our analysis supports a cohort explanation over a period explanation. Controlling for the (substantial) variation due to age, the cohort effect accounts for twice as much of the remaining variation as the period effect. Specifically, the drop in arrest rates is concentrated in more recent birth cohorts across all ages. Although we found statistically significant age–period interaction effects for the younger age group (ages 16–20) in 1990 and 1995, the cohort effect was still a much stronger predictor of felony arrest rates than the period explanation, even with the age–period interaction.

Conclusions

The current study reports that the overall drop in felony arrest rates from 1990 to 2010 is mostly due to decreased arrests among those who were born after 1970 rather than a universal drop across different age groups. We discuss but do not test two potential explanations—the legalization of abortion and the ban on leaded gasoline—for the underlying factors associated with a different criminal propensity among birth cohorts.

     

Preliminary results of an investigation on postmortem variations in human skeletal mass of buried bones

Extreme fragmentation can complicate the inventory of human skeletal remains. In such cases, skeletal mass can provide information regarding skeleton completeness and the minimum number of individuals. For that purpose, several references for skeletal mass can be used to establish comparisons and draw inferences regarding those parameters. However, little is known about the feasibility of establishing comparisons between inherently different materials, as is the case of curated reference skeletal collections and human remains recovered from forensic and archaeological settings. The objective of this paper was to investigate the effect of inhumation, weather and heat exposure on the skeletal mass of two different bone types. This was investigated on a sample of 30 human bone fragments (14 trabecular bones and 16 compact bones) that was experimentally buried for two years after being submitted to one of four different heat treatments (left unburned; 500?°C; 900?°C; 1000?°C). Bones were exhumed periodically to assess time-related mass variation. Skeletal mass varied substantially, decreasing and increasing in accordance to the interchanging dry and wet seasons. However, trends were not the same for the two bone types and the four temperature thresholds. The reason for this appears to be related to water absorption and to the differential heat-induced changes in bone microporosity, volume, and composition. Our results suggest that mass comparisons against published references should be performed only after the skeletal remains have been preemptively dried from exogenous water.     

Application of three spectrometric methods to total selenium determination in postmortem material in a case of acute selenium compound poisoning

Three spectrometric methods, that is, spectrofluorimetry (SF), atomic absorption spectrometry with electrothermal atomization (ET-AAS), and atomic fluorescence spectrometry with hydride generation (HG-AFS) were used for the determination of total selenium in biological samples taken from postmortem material in a case of acute selenium compound poisoning. The precision of the SF, ET-AAS, and HG-AFS methods (RSD, n=10) was found to be in the ranges of 10.0-15.0, 3.0-6.0 and 1.0-1.5%, respectively, and the detection limit was 10.0, 4.0, and 0.1 μg/L of Se, respectively. In the case of HG-AFS, the analytical procedure takes less time and is less laborious than the other methods considered. The obtained results show the usefulness of the HG-AFS method as a supplementary analytical tool to the SF and ET-AAS methods with respect to the determination of selenium as well as the possibility of using this method as a primary one in forensic toxicology practice.