Is child saving dead? Attitudes toward juvenile rehabilitation in Illinois

In recent times, juvenile rehabilitation has been attacked both by liberals seeking to insert greater due process rights and protections into the juvenile justice system and by conservatives calling for more stringent handling of serious youthful offenders. The apparent pervasiveness of this attack raises the question, Is the philosophy of child saving dead? Data drawn from a survey conducted in Illinois suggest, however, that juvenile rehabilitation continues to receive support both from the public and from various groups associated with criminal justice practice and policy making. At the same time, there is also support for the notion that young criminals are responsible for their actions and are currently being treated too leniently by our courts. Finally, child saving is embraced most firmly by judges, lawyers, correctional administrators, and prison inmates and least strongly by legislators, prison guards, and the general public.     

Craniocervical injuries in judicial hangings: an anthropologic analysis of six cases

Restoration projects and archaeologic excavations in two Canadian prisons resulted in the recovery of the skeletons of six felons executed by judicial hanging. Damage inflicted by hanging on various skeletal elements was observed. Among the injuries seen were fractures of the hyoid cornua, styloid processes, occipital bones, and cervical vertebral bodies (C2) and transverse processes (C1, C2, C3, and C5). Despite the general uniformity of the hanging technique, which involved a subaural knot, the trauma to the skeletal elements and the cause of death varied among individuals. Although some of this variation was probably due to minor differences in hanging practices, individual anatomic peculiarities of the victims likely also contributed.     

Decentralization and the post-war political economy

Abstract This paper uses cross–national data for 21 OECD nations to examine whether there is evidence of a connection between measures of political and fiscal decentralization and the major, long–term, performance parameters of the post–war political economy. Findings of what is necessarily an exploratory analysis of a wide range of policy outcomes suggest that federalism and the proliferation of constitutional veto–points have inhibited the expansion of the socially protective state and that a low level of fiscal centralization appears to have restrained post–war inflationary pressures and gone along with higher rates of post–war economic growth. No evidence is found to connect either political or fiscal measures with postwar labour market performance.     

Reconciling cultural diversity with a democratic community: Mestizaje as opposed to the usual suspects

A fascinating development within the liberal‐communitarian debate is how to deal with cultural diversity in increasingly heterogeneous democracies. Particularly noteworthy are Will Kymlicka's recasting of liberalism to deal with cultural minorities, especially the indigenous peoples of Canada and Charles Taylor's and Michael Walzer's articulation of a ‘deep diversity’ with regard to the federal relationship of Quebec to Canada as a whole. Both approaches, though, insufficiently address how combinations of cultures have been underway in the Americas for the past 500 years. Instead, I contend that mestizaje, the combination of cultures which has ensued in Mexico and the United States Southwest, articulates a ‘unity in diversity’ in which cultures transform each other without culminating in assimilation. To bolster my exegesis of mestizaje from the works of the Virgil Elizondo and Gloria Anzaldua, I accent how Jeremy Waldron's cosmopolitanism, Iris Marion Young's relational group theory, and Homi Bhabha's hybridity similarly illustrate how proposals such as Kymlicka's or Taylor/Walzer's insufficiently incorporate how integral heterogeneity is to cultural identity. In view of how ‘the border’ between the United States and Mexico exemplifies the growing intersection of diverse cultures from the developed and developing world, mestizaje offers that the intersection of multiple cultures in collaborative—not hegemonic—relations is intrinsic to realizing democratic citizenship.     

Public or Personal Character in Election Campaigns: A Review of the Implications of the Judgment in Watkins v Woolas

Reviewing the Election Court's decision that a candidate's parliamentary election literature was unlawful under the Representation of the People Act, the Divisional Court held that statements could either be about a candidate's public character or his personal character but not both. Though the legislation was compatible with the ECHR if it penalised only the latter, the question for the courts is really a matter of whether statement impugns a candidate's character more than merely as a necessary implication of an allegation regarding conduct such as the breaking of election promises.