Blended Sentencing Laws and the Punitive Turn in Juvenile Justice

In many states, young people today can receive a “blended” combination of both a juvenile sanction and an adult criminal sentence. We ask what accounts for the rise of blended sentencing in juvenile justice and whether this trend parallels crime control developments in the adult criminal justice system. We use event history analysis to model state adoption of blended sentencing laws from 1985 to 2008, examining the relative influence of social, political, administrative, and economic factors. We find that states with high unemployment, greater prosecutorial discretion, and disproportionate rates of African American incarceration are most likely to pass blended sentencing provisions. This suggests that the turn toward blended sentencing largely parallels the punitive turn in adult sentencing and corrections—and that theory and research on adult punishment productively extends to developments in juvenile justice.     

Estimation of the Value and Cost of Government and Market Supplied Goods

A review of previous research indicates that people's valuationsof government supplied services are not closely related to theircosts, raising the question of how much people know about thecosts of such goods. Respondents rated the value of governmentand market supplied goods and services and estimated their costsin three studies. The respondents made poor estimates of the percapita costs of supplying government services, and were littlebetter at estimating per capita expenditure on a range of marketsupplied goods (e.g., expenditure on fruit), but they were quiteaccurate at estimating the prices of individual market supplieditems. Rated values of individual market supplied itemscorrelated well with the costs of the items, but rated annualvalues of both government and market supplied goods were moreweakly correlated with their annual per capita costs. The resultssuggests that the inaccuracy in estimating the costs ofgovernment goods might arise because such items do not haveindividual item prices rather than because people generally donot pay for them themselves.     

Environmental Protection Versus Economic Development: A False Trade‐Off?

Is a trade‐off between the social benefits of regulation and the economic benefits of development inevitable? We argue that environmental regulation may deter economic growth in some contexts, however, in other contexts the benefits of regulation may be obtained with little or no economic loss. We develop an explanation of the economic impacts of state environmental policy based on a model of public influence on private resource allocation decisions. In this model, we assume utility‐maximizing firms will make investment choices based upon the projected profits on their investments and their willingness to accept the risk associated with the investments. We assert that state policies and administrative institutions influence perceptions of risk by increasing or decreasing uncertainty over future environmental policy and influence return on investments at particular locations by affecting firm‐level production costs. Our results confirm that certain administrative arrangements for environmental regulation may enhance, rather than impede, economic development.     

Dangerous Revisionism: On the Founders, ‘Neocons’ and the Importance of History

Debates regarding the Bush Administration's grand strategy began long before the forty-third president left office. A group of distinguished historians and political scientists have argued over the course of the last few years that the Administration's grand strategy did not represent a major break with historical precedent, as is sometimes argued, but continued the evangelical support for liberty that has always made the United States a “dangerous nation” to tyrants. Along the way, this revisionism creates straw men, and co-opts or redefines terms that are central to the traditional understanding of U.S. foreign policy. It also seems to misunderstand grand strategy itself, focusing almost entirely on continuity of ends while ignoring the rather glaring discontinuities in the ways that generations of U.S. presidents have chosen to pursue them. Overall, the revisionist project fails in both of its tasks, which are: To make the case that the Bush administration took actions of which the Founding Fathers would have understood and approved; and by implication, to justify the unnecessary, tragic war in Iraq.     

The Use of Mitochondrial DNA Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms to Assist in the Resolution of Three Challenging Forensic Cases

Abstract:  Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in an 11-plex assay were typed in three missing person cases involving highly degraded human remains. Unlike the traditional forensic approach to analyzing mtDNA which focuses on sequencing portions of the noncoding Control Region, this assay targets discriminatory SNPs that reside principally in the coding region. In two of the cases, the SNP typing successfully excluded one of two reference families that could not be excluded on the basis of mtDNA hypervariable region sequencing alone, and resulted in the final resolution of both decades-old cases. In a third case, SNP typing confirmed the sorting and reassociation of multiple commingled skeletal elements. The application of a specific mtDNA SNP assay in these cases demonstrates its utility in distinguishing samples when the most common Caucasian hypervariable region type is encountered in forensic casework.