Learning from Uncle Sam? Exploring U.S. Influences on British Crime Control Policy

This paper examines the idea of "policy transfer" in the arena of crime control. More specifically, it examines the influence of the United States on recent criminal justice and penal policy developments in Britain. Three policy areas are discussed: privatized corrections, "zero-tolerance" policing, and "three-strikes" sentencing. Changes in these areas are widely perceived as being strongly influenced by developments in the U.S., although there has yet to be a systematic empirical study of how and why these policy developments occurred. Drawing on a review of literature, this paper examines the plausibility of the idea of policy transfer and highlights distinct routes through which policy transfer may occur between jurisdictions. It uses Bennett's (1991) model of "policy convergence" as a framework for exploring how "emulation,""elite-networking,""harmonization," and "penetration" might have been relevant to policy changes in these areas. Finally, the paper considers how the concept of policy transfer in criminal justice and penal policy might be further examined empirically.     

Junto con los ninos: street children in Mexico

JUCONI, a nongovernmental organization founded in 1989 to help improve the lives of street children in Mexico, estimates that there are at least 100 street children living in the city of Puebla. The central goals of JUCONI are to help street children who want to change their lives, help them to handle their psychological and behavioral problems, and help them to improve their lives and leave the street life. The organization's approach to working with street children in Puebla, a city of more than 1 million inhabitants, is described, with implications evaluated for best practice. The 1990 World Summit for Children's ten-point plan for the year 2000 includes no strategy to protect street children. Current research neglects the moral and geographic dimensions of working with street children. This neglect has led many to view street children as a welfare concern, effectively paying less attention to their geographic context.     

Counterpoint Essay: Nine Reasons Why the CFO Act May Not Achieve its Objectives

The goals of the Chief Financial Officers (CFO) Act of 1990 are numerous and highly ideal. While these goals are commendable, several potential roadblocks to their achievement may exist. This article points out nine such potential reasons why, in practice, the CFO Act's goals may not be obtainable.     

Crimes of the powerful and beyond: An essay review

Conclusion I have argued that the problems withCrimes of the Powerful are instances of the inherent limitation of a criminology of the powerful and thus are not specific to a particular text, but refer centrally to a particular enterprise. These problems result from the contradictions entailed in the conjunction of criminology and political economy and the formal use of concepts derived from the latter as an explanation of, or gloss on, problems generated by the former. The formal introduction of the concepts of political economy does not, of itself, entail a break with the criminological agenda and, as a result, the analysis produced is inadequate to its object — the powerful. It is the position of this article that if one is to theorize upon either corporate crime or anti-trust law then political economy must assume priority — or else one simply establishes, as does Pearce, the criminality of big business. It is not the case that crime and law are irrelevant areas for political economy and, more especially Marxism, but rather that a proper understanding of the theoretical requirements necessary for an adequate analysis of corporate crime and anti-trust law must, of necessity, be founded in political economy, not criminology. Hitherto these requirements have not been met by criminology. This can be witnessed by the way in which criminology has addressed political economy, ie. in a purely arbitrary fashion in which concepts are simply adopted as if they were given — concepts which are effectively riddled with contradictions. Until these theoretical requirements are met, or built upon, then criminology is doomed to receive into itself a simple multiplication of texts likeCrimes of the Powerful together with all the consequent inadequacies associated with such texts. In such a context the powerful remains an ever elusive object     

A rapid method for blood alcohol determination by headspace analysis using an electrochemical detector.

A method for the determination of blood alcohol concentration by headspace analysis using an electrochemical detector is described. A determination can be made within 2 min, and only 0.1 ml of blood is required for each analysis. The detector response was linearly related to ethanol concentrations up to 3.0 mg/ml. The standard deviation of a single determination was +/- 0.014 mg/ml. The accuracy of the method based on comparison with an enzymatic (alcohol dehydrogenase) technique was high, the mean recovery being 102.2% of the attributed concentration. The ease of the operation and fast analysis time make the method ideal for serial determinations, for example during mass screening of biological samples for ethyl alcohol in forensic and toxicology laboratories.     

Dimock's naturalistic ethics

Between 1937 and 1958 Marshall Dimock developed a naturalistic account of the administrative function. This account emphasized an organic and instrumentalist account of ethics which was akin to American pragmatism in its ontological assumptions, vocabulary, and conceptualization. His theory was self-consciously aimed at identifying and responding to the problems of an administrative theory and practice plagued by dichotomies. Through an organizational leadership comprised of a moral elite, Dimock hoped to integrate the processes of administration and value creation.