U.S. experiences with racial and ethnic profiling: history, current issues, and the future

The issue of racial and ethnic bias in policing has been the focus of legal and criminal justice scholarship, court action, and public debate in the U.S. for a number of years. The issue has also been prominent in criminal justice scholarship, public discussion, and policy making in other countries, particularly the U.K., for an even longer period. This article surveys the history of the issue in the U.S. and attempts to give scholars and policy makers the benefit of the insights gained through the U.S. experience in handling the issue. Among these are the importance of the empirical question of the “hit rate” and how police use of race or ethnicity as a criterion changes it, and the difficulties of dealing with the thorny benchmarking issue. The article also discusses how advocates in the U.S. have attempted to meet and overcome arguments that police and their supporters have made in an attempt to minimize the problem or justify doing little or nothing about it.     

Assay of free and total tocainide by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with ultraviolet (UV) detection

A rapid high performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) method for the determination of tocainide, using N-(2,6-dimethylphenyl)-2-amino-butanimide as an internal standard, was developed. A methylene chloride extraction involving salting out at pH 9.0 was employed. An 85:15 mixture of 0.025M monobasic potassium phosphate at pH 3.0 and acetonitrile was used as the mobile phase. The separation and quantitative analysis of tocainide was performed on a mixed phase column with a 1.0-mL/min flow rate and detection at 210 nm. Separation of tocainide from some of its metabolites required the use of heptane sulfonic acid as an ion-pairing reagent. For the free-drug assay, the specimen was centrifuged through an Amicon Centrifree filter before being processed.     

Diverting and Abdicating Judicial Discretion: Cultural, Political, and Procedural Dynamics in California Juvenile Justice

Although tensions between substantive and formal rationality in the adult criminal justice system have received a great deal of attention, the existence of these tensions in the juvenile justice system has received little scholarly consideration. I seek to remedy this gap by exploring how punitive policies associated with the war on crime impact the formal and informal process of justice, the court community and work group, and the exercise of discretion in the juvenile courts. Drawing on qualitative data collected in three juvenile courts in Southern California, I identify the mechanisms by which prosecutors divert judicial discretion from the traditional rehabilitation-oriented bench officers to bench officers who are more accepting of the criminalization of juveniles. In addition, I investigate how and why rehabilitation-oriented bench officers at times abdicate their decisionmaking authority and make rulings that contradict their own assessments. My findings suggest that as the war on crime is extended to youth, the juvenile courts increasingly share the criminal courts' emphasis on offense rather than offender, enhanced prosecutorial power, and adversarial relationships within the court.     

Is Standing for Women a Stand Against Terrorism? Exploring the Connection Between Women's Rights and Terrorism

Previous large-N studies have found that the advancement of women's rights leads to a decline in conflict, but no large-N research has explored the possibility of a similar relationship between women's rights and terrorism. Nevertheless, policymakers have long argued that the advancement of women's rights forms a key component of counterterrorism policy. Simply put, we lay out a rationale for the argument that increased women's rights reduce the likelihood of terrorism. We test this hypothesis using CIRI's women's rights data combined with two datasets accounting for domestic terrorism and the production of transnational terrorism. While the results show that women's rights overall are not a panacea for both types of terrorism, the provision of women's rights is shown to have a negative relationship with domestic terrorism. States and international institutions should take the differing effects of women's rights across different types of terrorism into account when designing counterterrorism policies.     

Correction to: Coronial Inquests,Indigenous Suicide and the Colonial Narrative

Critical Criminology -