On the Relevance of Neuroscience to Criminal Responsibility

Various authors debate the question of whether neuroscience is relevant to criminal responsibility. However, a plethora of different techniques and technologies, each with their own abilities and drawbacks, lurks beneath the label “neuroscience”; and in criminal law responsibility is not a single, unitary and generic concept, but it is rather a syndrome of at least six different concepts. Consequently, there are at least six different responsibility questions that the criminal law asks—at least one for each responsibility concept—and, I will suggest, a multitude of ways in which the techniques and technologies that comprise neuroscience might help us to address those diverse questions. In a way, on my account neuroscience is relevant to criminal responsibility in many ways, but I hesitate to state my position like this because doing so obscures two points which I would rather highlight: one, neither neuroscience nor criminal responsibility are as unified as that; and two, the criminal law asks many different responsibility questions and not just one generic question.     

Exploring gender differences in dating violence/harassment prevention programming in middle schools: results from a randomized experiment

In this study, we randomly assigned 123 sixth and seventh grade classrooms from seven middle schools in the greater Cleveland area to one of two five-session curricula addressing gender violence/sexual harassment (GV/SH) or to a no-treatment control group. A baseline survey and two follow-up surveys were administered immediately after the treatment (Wave 2) and about six months post-treatment (Wave 3). In an earlier paper, we demonstrated the effectiveness of two approaches to youth GV/SH prevention programming (a fact-based, law and justice curriculum and an interaction-based curriculum). In this paper, we explored whether these largely positive findings remain for both girls and boys, including whether girls experience higher levels of GV/SH than boys. Most of our statistical models proved to be non-statistically significant. However, in 2 of our 48 victimization/perpetration (any violence, sexual violence and non-sexual violence) models (across two post-intervention follow-up points), we observed that the interventions reduced peer (male or female, non-dating partner) sexual violence victimization and reduced peer perpetration, but another outcome model indicated that the interventions increased dating perpetration. These mixed findings will need to be explored further in future research. Regarding our primary research question, we observed no statistically significant differences for the treatment multiplied by gender interaction terms for any of the perpetration or victimization outcome models, suggesting that the treatment had similar effects on girls and boys. However, we did observe that boys are more involved in violence than girls: both as victims and perpetrators. Boys experienced significantly more of three types of victimization from peers and dating partners compared to what girls experienced at the hands of their peers and dating partners. As perpetrators, boys committed more sexual victimization against peers (immediately post-intervention only) and more sexual victimization against dating partners than girls. The implications of these results are discussed.     

What Lies Beneath: Exploring Links Between Asylum Policy and Hate Crime in the UK

This paper explores the link between increasing incidents of hate crime and the asylum policy of successive British governments with its central emphasis on deterrence. The constant problematisation of asylum seekers in the media and political discourse ensures that ‘anti-immigrant’ prejudice becomes mainstreamed as a common-sense response. The victims are not only the asylum seekers hoping for a better life but democratic society itself with its inherent values of pluralism and tolerance debased and destabilised.     

Governing Health and Social Security in the Twenty-First Century: Active Citizenship Through the Right to Participate

This article discusses the role of individual rights in the production of active citizenship. In recent years, the notion of ‘active citizenship’ has become an object of research in both political and social science. Studies that draw on the Foucaultian governmentality tradition have been particularly interested in various societal discourses and practices through which active citizenship is being produced. However, the role of law and rights has been neglected or even rejected in these studies. The aim of this article is thus to show that certain procedural rights, the right to participate in particular, constitute an important legal technology in the production of active citizenship. The analysis is based on the recent developments in Finnish social and health care law. It will also be argued that despite the apparently convergent subject-matter, Jürgen Habermas’s normative theory of the ‘procedural paradigm of law’ does not offer a meaningful framework in which to address the relationship between active citizenship and procedural rights since it is based on an overly narrow conception of subjectivity.     

Has the SARB become more effective post inflation targeting?

This paper assesses the impact of a monetary policy shock on 15 key macroeconomic variables of South Africa, in the pre- and post-inflation targeting periods. For this purpose, we use a Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregressive (FAVAR) model comprising of 107 monthly time series over two equal sub-samples of 1989:01–1997:12 and 2000:01–2008:12. The results, based on impulse response functions, are in line with economic theory and indicate no puzzling effects often observed with small-scale monetary Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models. More importantly, we find that the ability of monetary policy in affecting key macroeconomic variables, including inflation, has increased in the post-targeting period. But, majority of the effects are insignificant, which could, however, also be due to the shorter-lengths of the sub-samples relative to the number of variables used in this study, rather than depicting the inability of monetary policy to significantly affect the South African economy.     

Informal Controls and the Explanation of Propensity to Offend: A Test in Two Urban Samples

Propensity to offend is an important and stable predictor of offending. A person’s propensity is often thought of as a multidimensional trait consisting of morality and low self-control. The aim of this paper is to explain individual differences in propensity to offend as one single construct and two of its dimensions, namely morality and low self-control. It is well established that low levels of morality and low self-control increase the risk of offending. However, there is less empirical research that focuses on the main predictors of morality and self-control. Therefore the main research question for this study is to explain to what extent parental attachment, parental control and the school social bond have a direct effect on one’s propensity to offend (low morality or delinquency tolerance and low self-control). The data are drawn from two different samples of young adolescents in Antwerp, Belgium (N = 2,486), and Halmstad, Sweden (N = 1,003). The results show that parental control, parental attachment and the school social bond have direct effects on individual differences in propensity to offend, regardless of individual background variables. The results are highly equivalent in both samples. The similarity of the results across two independent samples suggests that the findings are stable. Implications for further studies are discussed.