Coercion and Contract at the Margins: Deportable Labor and the Laws of Employment Termination Under US Capitalism (1942–2015)

In 1917, Congress created the status of temporary labor migrant. A new kind of restricted worker born from nineteenth‐century free labor politics, employer and citizen worker demands under modern liberal capitalism, and state labor market regulation, temporary migrants have always had an employer‐dependent legal status and been subject to deportation. Yet, since 1942, changing rights and legal processes have governed migrant employment termination across sectors. By drawing on employment cases from archival and unpublished files made available to me under FOIA, and court decisions, I compare the impact of laws of employment termination on deportable laborers beginning in 1942, when government agencies planned migration, and under privatized migration after 1964. From agriculture and war to today's service and knowledge economies, I demonstrate how employment rights have always shaped deportable workers' legal status. Yet, I also show how today's rights and legal processes, in contrast to the past, hardly mitigate employer control over migrants under contemporary capitalism.     

Homicides committed by youth assailants: a retrospective study

The pediatric population has received considerable attention in the forensic community; the youth assailant of homicide, however, is understudied. The authors retrospectively reviewed all cases referred to the Forensic Pathology Section of the Medical University of South Carolina between January 1991 and May 2006. Cases included in the study were homicides in which 1 or more assailants were 19 years of age or younger. The cases were examined as to the cause and manner of death, victim age, gender, race, incident location, weapon used, assailant-victim relationship, assailant age, gender, race, motive, and postmortem toxicology results. Assailant information was obtained from forensic records at Medical University of South Carolina, police department records, and online search engines of South Carolina State newspaper archives confirmed by law enforcement reports. The youth assailants were predominantly black men, 15 to 19 years of age (range, 4-19 years). Most victims were black male acquaintances, and the motive was most often an argument. The most common cause of death was cerebral laceration because of a gunshot wound. The incident occurred in the home in 41% of cases, followed by the street in 31%. Victim toxicology was frequently positive for cocaine, marijuana, and alcohol.     

On the Diagnosticity of Multiple-Witness Identifications

It is not uncommon for there to be multiple eyewitnesses to a crime, each of whom is later shown a lineup. How is the probative value, or diagnosticity, of such multiple-witness identifications to be evaluated? Previous treatments have focused on the diagnosticity of a single eyewitness’s response to a lineup (Wells and Lindsay, Psychol. Bull. 3 (1980) 776); however, the results of eyewitness identification experiments indicate that the responses of multiple independent witnesses may often be inconsistent. The present paper calculates response diagnosticity for multiple witnesses and shows how diagnostic probabilities change across various combinations of consistent and inconsistent witness responses. Multiple-witness diagnosticity is examined across variation in the conditions of observation, lineup composition, and lineup presentation. In general, the diagnostic probabilities of guilt were shown to increase with the addition of suspect identifications and decrease with the addition of nonidentifications. Foil identification results were more complicated-diagnostic of innocence in many cases, but nondiagnostic or diagnostic of innocence in biased lineups. These analyses illustrate the importance of securing clear records of all witness responses, rather than myopically focusing on the witness who identified the suspect while ignoring those witnesses who did not.     

Women and NGO professionalisation: a case study of Jordan

This article examines the impact of NGO professionalisation on the recruitment of NGO staff. Based on an in-depth survey of employees in 20 advocacy NGOs in Jordan, it demonstrates the gendered impact of professionalisation. The majority of NGO employees are highly educated women, often Western-educated, who work in NGOs primarily for career opportunities and because they are attracted by the NGO's goals. In contrast to existing literature, this article argues that gender considerations, such as job flexibility to accommodate household duties, play less of a role in determining the reasons why women seek work in NGOs and their degree of job satisfaction.     

Prejudice and the Medical Profession: A Five-Year Update

Over the past decades the mortality rate in the United States has decreased, and life expectancy has increased. Yet a number of recent studies have drawn Americans' attention to the fact that racial and ethnic disparities persist in health care. It is clear that the U.S. health care system, which is the envy of the world, is not only flawed by basic injustices, but may be the cause of both injury and death for members of racial and ethnic minorities. Progress has been made in several areas since the original Institute of Medicine 2002 report. However, five years later, the 2007 National Healthcare Disparities Report (NHDR) reported that overall, disparities in quality and access for minority groups and poor populations have not been reduced since the original report. The three key themes that have emerged from this report are the following: (1) overall, disparities in health care quality and access are not getting smaller; (2) progress is being made, but many of the biggest gaps in quality and access have not been reduced; and (3) the problem of persistent uninsur-ance is a major barrier to reducing disparities. Unless measures are taken to address this racism, unless a new sense of trust is established between the medical establishment and racial and ethnic minorities, these injustices will continue to deepen and expand, and more lives will be placed in jeopardy. What is needed is a comprehensive, multi-level, culturally relevant strategy that contains interventions that target individuals, communities, and the nation as a whole. This will entail understanding the causes of racism in the medical profession, identifying practical interventions that address racism in individuals, communities, and the nation as a whole, and forming partnerships that will work to develop a new sense of trust between the medical establishment and the minority communities.     

Beyond regulatory capture: Coproducing expertise for critical infrastructure protection

Complex industries such as petroleum production, civil aviation, and nuclear power produce “public risks” that are widely distributed and temporally remote, and thus tend to be ignored by the risk producers. Regulation is perhaps the most common policy tool for governing such risks, but requires expert knowledge that often resides solely within the industries. Hence, many scholars and policymakers raise concerns about “regulatory capture,” wherein regulation serves private interests rather than the public good. This paper argues that regulatory capture framing has tended to limit understanding of expertise and its role in governing public risks. Most studies of regulatory capture treat expertise as a source of knowledge and skills that are created exogenously to political processes, and which can therefore be politically neutral. By contrast, we draw on work in science and technology studies that highlight the value‐laden and relational nature of knowledge and expertise, showing how its formation is endogenous to political processes. Thus, we argue for both broadening analyses of regulatory capture to consider the historically contingent and uncertain process of creating expert knowledge, and going beyond the capture framing by considering the challenge of negotiating different epistemologies and ways of life. We illustrate this analytic strategy by examining the history of and current debate about critical infrastructure protection standards to protect the United States electric power grid from cyberattack. We conclude by considering the broader implications of these findings for governing public risks.     

The Social and Geographic Patterns of Sexual Offending: Is Sex Offender Residence Restriction Legislation Practical?

The development of sex offender residence restriction legislation was predicated on the assumption that sex offenders pose an increased risk to the public. The goal of such legislation was to create “sex-offender-free” zones in an effort to decrease sex offenders’ access to potential victims. Such legislation prohibits registered sex offenders from residing near landmarks where children are known to congregate. Empirical evidence thus far has failed to demonstrate that residing near these landmarks contributes to sex offenders’ ability to access victims, and may actually be doing more harm than good. The current study questions the rationale behind the implementation of residence restrictions and if this rationale is consistent with the realities of victim selection and sexual offending among incarcerated sex offenders. The sample consisted of 270 males incarcerated in a New Jersey correctional facility. The results demonstrate that most sex offenders resided within a 2,500-foot restricted landmark zone. However, after examining the methods sex offenders used and examining how far they traveled to meet or establish contact with their victims, residing near restricted landmarks did not contribute to victim selection. Of the 270 sex offenders, the offense patterns consistent with many residence restrictions were applicable to less than 1%.     

Elk management and policy in southern Greater Yellowstone: Assessing the constitutive process

The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, USA, is recognized globally as a model for land and wildlife conservation, management, and policy. A major policy problem in the region is the highly contentious winter feeding of elk (Cervus elaphus) on 23 government feed grounds in western Wyoming through cooperative management under several state and federal agencies. Numerous non-governmental groups and concerned citizens are also affected by elk management or seek to contribute to management policies. The long-term controversy shows that this issue centers on how management and policy should be made and who should be involved in decision-making—the constitutive policy process. This paper examines and appraises the constitutive process in this case, including how competency, authority, and control are allocated. It also looks at how institutions, analytic techniques, procedures, and people are structured, selected, and included or excluded in decision-making processes. Our data come from a multi-method approach over the past decade, including participant-observation, historical literature, interviews, media analysis, and technical reports. Our analysis shows that institutional dynamics severely constrain the scope of deliberations, the production of practical problem definitions, and the search for improvements in elk management. We recommend that participants focus on the constitutive level of policy making, i.e., the underlying structure and functioning of policy processes, learn how these elements function and affect processes and outcomes, and learn to configure them in ways that embody democratic principles, serve common interests, and resolve policy problems.     

Children with Incarcerated Parents and Developmental Trajectories of Internalizing Problems across Adolescence

American Journal of Criminal Justice - Research over the past several decades has documented the effect of parental incarceration on child development. While many findings point to a negative...     

Balancing Regionalism and Localism: How Institutions and Incentives Shape American Transportation Policy

Public policy decisions are increasingly made by regional governance efforts that involve diverse decision makers from multiple government units within a geographic region. These decision-making bodies face competing pressures to represent regional and local interests. We study how decision makers balance preferences for regionalism and localism within metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), the policymaking entities that are responsible for implementing U.S. federal surface transportation policy at the regional level. Our model of regional governance relates variation in regional policy outcomes to the incentives of MPO decision makers and the institutional environments in which they interact. Analyzing data from a sample of the nation's largest metropolitan areas, we find that MPOs dominated by elected officials produce more locally focused policies, holding other factors constant, while MPOs dominated by nonelected public managers produce more regionally oriented policies. Contextual factors, as well as the regional governance institutions themselves, further shape the balance between regionalism and localism.