Financing Arlington County, Virginia's Capital Programs: The Experience of the 1980s, The Outlook for the 1990s

County governments in the 1970s had few responsibilities beyond the courts and jail functions. Now, due to large suburban growth in the 1980s, county governments will find themselves immersed in capital financing issues. Arlington County, Virginia, is the setting of this article on the effects of major financings in the 1980s on a county government in the 1990s.     

Asia's odd men out: Australia, Japan, and the politics of regionalism

Australia and Japan have frequently had difficult relationshipswith their neighbours. This paper suggests that when seen intheir specific historical contexts, the fact that Australiaand Japan have become ‘Asia's odd men out’ is unsurprising.The central argument of this paper is that the consolidationand institutionalisation of regions is in large part a politicalexercise that reflects, and is informed by, discrete nationalconversations. Until and unless such national discourses alignwith wider transnational developments, regional processes areunlikely to prosper. An examination of Japan's and Australia'srespective attempts to engage with and define their region revealsjust how problematic this process can be. Received for publication April 4, 2006. Accepted for publication October 17, 2006.     

Suicide Risk in Emerging Adulthood: Associations with Screen Time over 10 years

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Suicide rates have increased over the past decade, and screen media (and social media in particular) are often blamed for this marked increase. However, there is...     

Including tourists in crime rate calculations for new casino jurisdictions: What difference does it make?

One way to analyze the effect of tourism on crime is to include the average number of visitors in the denominator used to calculate community crime rates. Modified crime rates were computed for 7 new casino jurisdictions and compared with traditional crime rates based on the resident population. A preand postcasino comparison indicates a minority of Part I crimes increased significantly regardless of which crime rate was used. While a majority of Part II crimes rose significantly when using the traditional crime rate, fewer than half the modified crime rates displayed any gains. It appears that a large concentration of casinos with a concomitant increase in tourism leads to an increase in Part II crimes. This project was supported by Grant No. 98-IJ-CX-0037 awarded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Points of view in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the U.S. Department of Justice.     

The crime control industry and the management of the surplus population

This essay examines what we are calling the ‘crime control industry’ and how the growth of such an industry relates to growing inequality and the need to ‘manage’ or ‘contain’ the ‘surplus population.’ Profits are a major moving force in this process, rather than the goal of reducing crime and suffering. An important component of this industry is the ‘prison industrial complex,’ one of the fastest growing industries in the U.S. Also included is a rapidly growing private security industry that includes private police and security guards, along with a growing supply of technology to aid in the ‘war on crime.’ Other components include drug testing companies, gated communities, and a booming gun industry. We conclude by outlining possible explanations for the growth of this industry.     

Contract Regimes and Reflexive Governance: Comparing Employment Service Reforms in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Australia

Contemporary debates concerning the nature of 'new governance' typically focus upon the shifting roles played by bureaucracies, networks and markets in the provision of public services (Kooiman 1993; Ormsby 1988). At the core of these recent changes we find a strong interest in having private agents deliver public services. Sometimes this is expressed as privatization and in other cases a 'mixed economy' of public and private participation may be devised (Williamson 1975; Moe 1984). In this study a number of central elements of neo-liberal public management are brought together in a single focus upon the 'contract regime' in order to examine the extent to which single initiatives might combine to produce a recognizable system of governance. Such an institutional form may then be more carefully specified and its impact compared in different governmental systems. Using a four-country comparison of employment service reform the study shows that distinctions based upon degree of privatization do not adequately explain regime types whereas distinctions based upon 'compliance-centred' or 'client-centred' forms of contracting are more powerful. The type of reflexive interaction between different elements or levels of contracting also explains country differences.     

A tale of a decade: European security governance and Russia

In the decade since the fall of the Berlin Wall the governance of European security has undergone a profound transformation. The beginning of this decade witnessed the end of the Cold War and, in parallel, the establishment of relatively inclusive mechanisms for addressing security‐related issues. While these mechanisms have largely endured (and, indeed, have been complemented by other types of interaction) they have not prevented the emergence of forms of exclusion on the continent. This is a condition of particular significance to Russia. Compared with its Soviet predecessor, it now enjoys far less influence in European security. Its exclusion, however, is only relative. Russia has retained a meaningful role and ‐ recent controversies over NATO enlargement and Kosovo notwithstanding ‐ the bases of its accommodation with the West still remain in place.     

Determinants of initial entry onto welfare by young women

Using data from the youngest cohorts of women in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this study constructs Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) histories starting at age 15. Most young women go on AFDC for the first time between ages 18 and 25 and do so in the first few years after the birth of their first baby. These histories are used to estimate models of the determinants of initial use of AFDC. The models provide mixed evidence that the financial or other incentives of welfare policy affect the likelihood and timing of AFDC use. Benefit levels do not seem to affect participation, but the presence of a program for medically needy families who are not on welfare appears to decrease entrance to welfare for some groups. Parental poverty, family structure, academic achievement, attitudes toward school, and race are significantly related to the likelihood of participating in AFDC, and the rate of entry. © 2000 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Privatization and the Courts: How Judicial Structures Shaped German Privatization

This article examines how legal institutional structures shaped the process of East German privatization by the Treuhandanstalt. It argues that the courts, as an important venue for oversight and accountability, were central to achieving the rapid and narrowly defined privatization carried out by the agency. Moreover, the experience of privatization after 1989 suggests the courts played a far more important role in shaping economic policy than one would have expected from traditional scholarship on public agencies, the courts, or the German legal system.     

Testing hot-spots police patrols against no-treatment controls: Temporal and spatial deterrence effects in the London Underground experiment

Our understanding of causality and effect size in randomized field experiments is challenged by variations in levels of baseline treatment dosage in control groups across experiments testing similar treatments. The clearest design is to compare treated cases with no-treatment controls in a sample that lacks any prior treatment at baseline. We applied that strategy in a randomized test of hot-spots police patrols on the previously never-patrolled, track-level platforms of the London Underground (LU). In a pretest–posttest, control-group design, we randomly assigned 57 of the LU's 115 highest crime platforms to receive foot patrol by officers in 15-minute doses, 4 times per day, during 8-hour shifts on 4 days a week for 6 months. The effect of 23,272 police arrivals at the treatment hot spots over 26 weeks was to reduce public calls for service by 21 percent on treated platforms relative to controls, primarily when police were absent (97 percent of the measured effect). This effect was six times larger than the mean standardized effect size found in the leading systematic review. This finding provides a benchmark against the baseline counterfactual of no patrol in hot spots, with strong evidence of residual deterrence and no evidence of local displacement.