POLICY-MAKING AND THE SCOTTISH OFFICE: THE DESIGNATION OF CUMBERNAULD NEW TOWN

The role of the Scottish Office in policy-making has been subject to a number of interpretations. It is difficult to regard it as having its own reserved policy spheres but it is clear that in certain circumstances it has the ability to forge its own policy lines. In the 1950s, in contradiction to the stated policy of the then Conservative Government. the Scottish Office was able to secure the designation of a new town at Cumbernauld. The main impetus for this policy came from the civil servants in the Department of Health for Scotland, seeking to preserve the philosophy of the 1946 Clyde Valley Plan. The case study throws considerable light on the bargaining process within government, the role of the secretary of state as spokesman for Scottish interests and the way in which the Scottish Office can gain Cabinet approval for its proposals.     

FEDERAL LEGISLATION AND GUN MARKETS: HOW MUCH HAVE RECENT REFORMS OF THE FEDERAL FIREARMS LICENSING SYSTEM REDUCED CRIMINAL GUN SUPPLIERS?*

Research Summary: Following reforms of the federal firearms licensing system, nearly 70% of the nation's retail gun dealers active in 1994 dropped out of business by 1998. Dropout dealers supplied one‐third of guns recovered and traced by police but were linked to fewer crime guns than were other dealers, most likely because dropouts tended to be lower volume dealers. It is not clear if guns sold by dropouts had a higher probability of being used in crime, but guns supplied by dropouts did not move into criminal channels more quickly. Policy Implications: If federal reforms have reduced the availability of guns to criminals, the effect has probably been more modest than suggested by the overall reduction in dealers. Producing further reductions in the flow of guns to criminals through oversight of gun dealers will require refinement in the identification of problematic gun dealers.     

JUVENILE COURT INTAKE An Analysis of Discretionary Decision-Making

An increasing amount of pressure has been directed toward juvenile court operations, much of which has focused on the hypothesized abuse of the broad discretionary decision-making power that has traditionally been vested in the court. In this paper, we attempt to examine the extent to which factors not directly associated with the nature of the alleged offense may alter the probability that a juvenile w.11 be referred for a formal hearing in the juvenile court, a step which many analysts feel may have the unintended function of promoting rather than inhibiting subsequent involvement in delinquent behavior. Based on an analysis of 346 cases, our findings show that a number of variables that are not of direct legal relevance do exert a significant influence on the dispositional process, but the magnitude of this influence is not as great as many have been led to expect given the orientation of some explanatory models, particularly those based on the propositions of the labeling school.     

RIVAL EXPLANATIONS OF PUBLIC OWNERSHIP, ITS FAILURE AND PRIVATIZATION

This article contrasts three types of explanation of three events – the initial nationalization of many British industries, mainly in the 1940s, the failure of most nationalized industries to be economically successful by the 1970s and the privatization of most of them in the 1980s and 1990s. Its first section summarizes briefly an ordinary historical account of each event as developed elsewhere at greater length (in Foster 1992). The second section considers Chicagoan and Virginian explanations of the same events; and whether they are consistent with the other historical explanations. It concludes that Chicagoan theories do not explain any of these episodes plausibly, except possible rail nationalization, but in that case it worked in any sense only over an implausibly long period. Virginian type explanations have greater power in explaining both nationalization and its so-called'failure'thereafter. It is more difficult to explain privatization satisfactorily in Virginian terms.     

INCARCERATION AND POPULATION HEALTH IN WEALTHY DEMOCRACIES*

Everywhere you look, incarceration seems to be doing harm. Research has implicated incarceration not only in worse outcomes for individuals, their families, and their communities but also in growing inequality. Yet incarceration may not always harm society—even if it does harm those who experience it. To consider this possibility, I build an argument demonstrating how the macro‐level consequences of incarceration may be distinctively harmful in the United States, focusing on the incarceration–health relationship as one indicator of a broader phenomenon. I then test my hypothesis by using an unbalanced panel data set including 21 developed democracies (N = 414) and a series of ordinary least‐squares models predicting three measures of population health as a function of incarceration. Models including only a main effect of incarceration demonstrate an inverse association between changes in incarceration and changes in population health. Models including an incarceration by U.S. interaction, however, indicate that the population health consequences of changes in incarceration are far worse in the United States than elsewhere. Taken together, the results indicate that the United States is exceptional for both its rate of incarceration and its effects of incarceration, although it is unclear what drives this exceptionalism in effects.     

CLASS,GENDER, AND ARREST: AN INTERGENERATIONAL ANALYSIS OF WORKPLACE POWER AND CONTROL*

Power‐control theory posits that parental workplace positions affect adolescent law violation. To date, however, no test of the theory has directly measured occupational power and control. This paper tests whether parental and adolescent workplace freedom and control affect criminal behavior and arrest as the theory predicts, using data from a prospective longitudinal survey of 1, 000 adolescents and their parents. The results suggest sex differentials in the effects of maternal authority position and parental freedom and control. In particular, daughters whose mothers hold authority positions are more likely to be arrested than are daughters whose mothers do not hold such positions. The effects of adolescent employment also differ by sex, with perceived workplace power and control reducing rates of arrest among females but increasing them among males.     

PATERNAL INCARCERATION AND CHILDREN'S RISK OF BEING CHARGED BY EARLY ADULTHOOD: EVIDENCE FROM A DANISH POLICY SHOCK*

In this article, we exploit a Danish criminal justice reform that dramatically decreased the risk of incarceration for individuals convicted of some types of crimes to isolate how having a father who was eligible for a noncustodial sentence under the reform affected a child's risk of ever subsequently being charged with a crime. Specifically, we use a difference‐in‐differences framework to compare all Danish children 12–18 years of age whose fathers were eligible for a noncustodial sentence instead of incarceration under the reform [N = 1,546] with a reference group of children whose fathers were convicted of similar crimes but were ineligible [N = 1,852] in the 2 years surrounding when the reform was enacted [July 1, 2000] as a way of testing the effects of the reform on children's risk of ever being charged with a crime by 22–28 years of age. Our estimates indicate that having a father sentenced under the reform sharply decreased the risk of being charged in the next 10 years for boys but not for girls. Taken together, these results indicate that both paternal criminality and paternal incarceration promote the criminal justice contact of male children and, hence, that paternal incarceration is not solely a symptom of criminality but also a cause of it.     

ECOLOGICAL NETWORKS AND URBAN CRIME: THE STRUCTURE OF SHARED ROUTINE ACTIVITY LOCATIONS AND NEIGHBORHOOD‐LEVEL INFORMAL CONTROL CAPACITY

By drawing on the work of Jacobs (1961), we hypothesize that public contact among neighborhood residents while engaged in day‐to‐day routines, captured by the aggregate network structure of shared local exposure, is consequential for crime. Neighborhoods in which residents come into contact more extensively in the course of conventional routines will exhibit higher levels of public familiarity, trust, and collective efficacy with implications for the informal social control of crime. We employ the concept of ecological (“eco‐”) networks—networks linking households within neighborhoods through shared activity locations—to formalize the notion of overlapping routines. By using microsimulations of household travel patterns to construct census tract‐level eco‐networks for Columbus, OH, we examine the hypothesis that eco‐network intensity (the probability that households tied through one location in a neighborhood eco‐network will also be tied through another visited location) is negatively associated with tract‐level crime rates (N = 192). Fitted spatial autoregressive models offer evidence that neighborhoods with higher intensity eco‐networks exhibit lower levels of violent and property crime. In contrast, a higher prevalence of nonresident visitors to a given tract is positively associated with property crime. The results of these analyses hold the potential to enrich insight into the ecological processes that shape variation in neighborhood crime.