What happens when a reform works? The need to study unanticipated consequences of mandatory processing of domestic violence

One of the primary facets of the sociology of law is concerned with the relationships between formal rules and regulations having the force of governmental social control and the values, norms and practices of those who enforce them (or not). This “law in action” perspective enables research to test out the differential impact on legal decisions of both formal and informal aspects of social control (Hawkins, 1992). One of the limitations of recent work on domestic violence is that it focuses too narrowly on one or two negative sanctions, e.g., arrest or restraining orders, to the exclusion of the other options and the mix of formal and informal decisions in the criminal justice system as a whole (Reiss, 1974). This research attempts through a close analysis of the workings of the Quincy, Massachusetts criminal justice system in response to domestic violence, to identify the consequences, unanticipated and anticipated, of decisions made in several domains (public, police, prosecutors, and courts) of the criminal justice system. This study uses in-depth interviews with batterers, victims and criminal justice agency and related personnel as well as agency policies, training materials and records to examine possible unintended consequences of aggressive intervention in cases of domestic violence. This study will explore the impact of the Quincy Domestic Violence Program, considered to be a national model, on the lives of victims and offenders who are treated by the court. We have selected the District Court at Quincy, Massachusetts as our research site. It has a well deserved national reputation treating abusers systematically from the initial intake by arresting officers through close supervision in probation.     

Child Brides, Inegalitarianism, and the Fundamentalist Polygamous Family in the United States

Despite the ongoing shift in contemporary notions of what orwho constitutes a family, the idea of the polygamous familyremains on the margins of what is deemed a legitimate maritaland familial structure in liberal democratic societies suchas the US. Nevertheless, despite the illegality of polygamyand the social stigma attacted to it, thousands of Mormon Fundamentalistpolygamists live and practice in the US. This article assessesthe arguments in favor of and against the legalization and,consequently, the legitimatization of polygamous marriage. Itexplores three grounds polygamists have employed or could employto advocate legalization of the practice of plural marriage:freedom of religion, sexual privacy (as defined by the recentcase of Lawrence v. Texas), and contractualism. However, theauthor concludes that the impact of the Fundamentalist polygamouslifestyle on the autonomy, integrity, and equality of adultwomen and children is sufficiently troubling that lifting thesanction on plural marriage may run counter to basic considerationsof justice.     

Roosevelt, Truman and the Development of Postwar Grand Strategy

After its victory in World War II, it was clear that United States should move beyond the disastrous policies of the 1930s, but it was less clear how. Ultimately, a lasting postwar strategy was forged under President Truman. Appreciating how Truman moved well beyond Roosevelt's guiding assumptions is essential to understanding the evolution of American grand strategy. One sees that wartime planning and grand strategy formulation can prove quite inadequate for dealing with postwar challenges. An administration cannot be locked into assumptions, but must constantly test them. Thus, the Truman administration eventually developed and adopted containment and moved far beyond FDR's approach. More substantively, the fundamental geopolitical lesson of World War II and the early Cold War was that the United States must assume the essential balancing role relative to other major powers.     

Speed/pure war/power crime: Paul Virilio on the criminogenic accident and the virtual disappearance of the suicidal state

This essay applies the theoretical concepts of pure war and speed-politics developed by the critical theorist and urbanist Paul Virilio to the concept of power crime. The aim of this paper is to present readers unfamiliar with Virilio’s work with a philosophical methodology of great potential significance to critical criminology. It is divided into two major parts. The first part re-considers power crime and the broader criminogenic environment in terms of the Virilian notions of velocity, optics, and pure war: criminogenic phenomena are shown to be the necessary and unavoidable by-products of the wider convergences among political, economic, and military systems governed by speed. The second part consists of an empirical case study illustrating the practical applicability of these abstract Virilian concepts: the federal prosecution of the private security firm Custer Battles for fraud. The systemic corruption of the US military procurement process and the inability of the federal judicial system to provide a remedy for the fraud perpetrated against the American public is read as a key sign of the suspension of the liberal juro-political order and the effective abolition of the rule of law by fast moving, or “high velocity”, criminogenic processes.     

'Portrait of a profession revisited'

On the walls of my private office hang the photographs of my seven distinguished predecessors as Secretary of the Cabinet. I sometimes find myself staring at them for inspiration, not always successfully I admit. A week or two ago I found myself looking at the great Lord Bridges, Secretary of the Cabinet and War Cabinet from 1938 to 1946. I wondered what he would have made of it if in the space of a week one of his predecessors had published an article in The Spectator advertised as ‘The Descent of the Civil Servant’ and another had appeared on the Frost programme to reassure the world that the Service was still in good shape. Both predecessors, Lords Butler and Armstrong, I hasten to say, were acting in the most supportive spirit and spoke from what for all of us is a deeply shared view of the role of the Civil Service. But, staring at Bridges, I could see a bubble emerging from his mouth enquiring: what precisely is happening on your watch, Sir Richard?     

The Dictator Game, Fairness and Ethnicity in Postwar Bosnia

This study considers the effects of ethnic violence on norms of fairness. Once violence is a foregone conclusion, will cooperative norms ever (re‐)emerge beyond ethnic boundaries? We use an experiment that measures how fairly individuals in a postconflict setting treat their own ingroup in comparison to the outgroups—in this case, examining the behavior of 681 Muslims, Croats, and Serbs in postwar Bosnia‐Herzegovina. To assess fairness, we use the dictator game wherein subjects decide how to allocate a sum of money between themselves and an anonymous counterpart of varying ethnicity. We find that the effects of ethnicity on decision making are captured by our experiments. Although results indicate preferential ingroup treatment, the incidence and magnitude of outgroup bias is much less than expected. We conclude that norms of fairness across ethnicity are remarkably strong in Bosnia, and we take this to be a positive sign for reconciliation after violent conflict.