The Core Executive, Modernization and the Creation of PESC, 1960-64

The period between 1957 and 1964 was one of immense yet underestimated political and administrative change. It culminated in what many have seen as a golden age in Whitehall. This is reflected by the wealth of records now available for the study of government and policy networks. The period is thus an ideal one for collaboration between historians and political scientists.
The decisional case study examined in this article focuses on the early years of the Public Expenditure Survey Committee, as viewed from the perspective of welfare policy. The drive to 'modernize' government started with attempts to 'roll back the state' and to hive off the implementation of policy to executive agencies, very similar to those pursued in the 1980s by Mrs Thatcher and Next Steps. The reasoned rejection of such a policy was symbolized by the creation of PESC, a centralized attempt to allocate resources rationally. PESC itself, however, was initially a failure. External circumstances, such as the breakdown of political and administrative networks within the core executive, and internal tensions, including the Treasury's covert attempt to impose its own departmental interest, led the Cabinet Secretary to conclude that the prioritization and strict control of forward expenditure commitments was 'not possible'. This case study demonstrates how future studies of the core executive might be broadened and deepened.     

A Criminological Approach to Explain Chronic Drunk Driving

The purpose of this paper is to use criminological theories to explain chronic drunk driving. There is little criminological research explaining recidivist drunk driving with criminological theories. Instead, most researchers posit that repeat drunk driving is explained as a byproduct of substance abuse. Although substance abuse is likely correlated to chronic drunk driving, theoretical explanations need to go further to understand a broader set of social and psychological predictors. Factor analysis and linear regression techniques are used to estimate the relationship between items from two assessment instruments with a number of drunken driving offenses. The sample consists of nearly 3,500 individuals on probation and parole in a Southwestern state. The findings support our contention that criminological frameworks are helpful to understand chronic DUI. We found significant results for volatility, antisocial friends, teenage deviance, and negative views of the law, while controlling for age, gender, marital status, and race. DUIs are a serious problem for the criminal justice system and understanding the individual level correlates of repetitive DUI is crucial for policy development. Further, chronic DUI offers criminologists an opportunity to determine the ability of criminological theories to explain this type of behavior.     

Beyond COVID-19: Five commentaries on expert knowledge,executive action,and accountability in governance and public administration

Several Canadian and international scholars offer commentaries on the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for governments and public service institutions, and fruitful directions for public administration research and practice. This first suite of commentaries focuses on the executive branch, variously considering: the challenge for governments to balance demands for accountability and learning while rethinking policy mixes as social solidarity and expert knowledge increasingly get challenged; how the policy-advisory systems of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and United Kingdom were structured and performed in response to the COVID-19 crisis; whether there are better ways to suspend the accountability repertoires of Parliamentary systems than the multiparty agreement struck by the minority Liberal government with several opposition parties; comparing the Canadian government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Global Financial Crisis and how each has brought the challenge of inequality to the fore; and whether the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated or disrupted digital government initiatives, reinforced traditional public administration values or more open government.     

A Disruptive Influence? “Prevent‐ing” Problems and Countering Violent Extremism Policy in Practice

This article describes how disrupting the activities of suspected violent extremists has become an increasingly significant construct in the policy and practice of the Prevent strand of UK Counter‐Terrorism. Informed by empirical data collected during semi‐structured interviews with police officers involved in conducting disruptions and members of the communities where these occurred, blended with a limited amount of field observation, the analysis documents how and why a logic of disruption has assumed increasing prominence in counter terrorism work. In respect of police interventions in particular, implementing disruptions, rather than pursuing fully‐fledged prosecutions, represents a pragmatic way of reconciling increasing demand with limited resources, as well as managing some of the difficulties of translating intelligence into legal evidence. Conceptualized in this way, the analysis positions disruption as a distinctive mode of crime prevention; one premised upon logics of near‐event interdiction. As such, it is understood as rather different in its operations and functions to other forms of “early intervention” that are increasingly prominent in much contemporary crime prevention policy. By focusing upon how specific Prevent interventions are implemented and performed this analysis makes a particular contribution to our knowledge of counter terrorism work. This reflects the fact that most previous studies of Prevent and other countering violent extremism programs have provided analyses of community perceptions and reactions to policing and the policy frame, rather than the configuration of the interventions themselves.     

A field study of adult witness interviewing practices in a Canadian police organization

Purpose. The current study examined witness interviewing practices in a Canadian police organization. The effect of interviewer, interviewee, and interview characteristics on those practices was also examined. Method. Ninety witness interviews from a Canadian police organization were coded for the following interviewing practices: types of questions asked (i.e. open‐ended, probing, closed‐ended, clarification, multiple, leading, opinion/statement, and re‐asked), the number of interruptions, percentage of words spoken by interviewer, type of pre‐interview instructions (consequential vs. generic), and whether or not a free narrative was requested (and when requested during the interview). Characteristics pertaining to the interviewer (e.g. primary interviewer's age), interviewee (e.g. witness gender), and interview (e.g. crime type) were also coded. Results. Results showed that closed‐ended and probing questions were the most widely asked questions, and that open‐ended questions were asked relatively infrequently. It was also found that the 80–20 talking rule was violated in 89% of the interviews, interviewers rarely interrupted the witnesses, and free narratives were requested often. Overall, the effect of interviewer, interview, or interviewee characteristics on interviewing practices was minimal. Conclusions. The finding that scientifically prescribed interviewing practices are employed rarely by Canadian police officers highlights a need for increased professional interviewing training. The finding that practices are largely unaffected by personal and situational factors suggests that such training would be equally beneficial for all types of interviewers, interviewees, and contexts.     

Interviewing Witnesses: The Effect of Forced Confabulation on Event Memory

After viewing a crime video, participants answered 16 answerable and 6 unanswerable questions. Those in the "voluntary guess" condition had a "don't know" response option; those in the "forced guess" condition did not. One week later the same questions were answered with a "don't know" option. In both experiments, information generated from forced confabulation was less likely remembered than information voluntarily self-generated. Further, when the same answer was given to an unanswerable question both times, the confidence expressed in the answer increased over time in both the forced and the voluntary guess conditions. Pressing eyewitnesses to answer questions, especially questions repeated thrice (Experiment 2), may not be an effective practice because it reliably increases intrusion errors but not correct recall.     

Cautioning jurors regarding co-witness discussion: the impact of judicial warnings

Abstract

The research seeks to identify the most common problem areas and associated treatment needs of incarcerated and recently released offenders, to determine the importance of prison-based treatment and to assess the motivation of offenders towards treatment. Interviews were scheduled with representatives of three participant categories: drug-involved incarcerated offenders (n=18), recently released prisoners (n=15) and treatment staff members (n=18), resulting in 1971 statements. Using the qualitative software package WinMAX98, these expressions were categorized in a tree structure, after a codification process of the raw material. The results suggest that there is a difference in opinion between offenders and service providers with regard to the most important problems related to incarceration and re-entry. The findings further indicate that released offenders struggle more often than incarcerated offenders with problems concerning their psychological status. Therefore, the need for continuous through-care and aftercare is apparent, as is the necessity to assess the participants’ support expectancies and their individual needs. Motivating offenders to take part in (prison-based) treatment initiatives and aftercare is a major challenge, which can be accomplished by cooperation and partnerships between the criminal justice system and community-based treatment providers.     

Investigating the relationship between justice‐vengeance motivations and punitive sentencing recommendations

Purpose. The present research investigated the relationship between underlying justice and vengeance motivations and sentencing recommendations made by expert clinicians, semi‐experts, and lay‐people. It was hypothesized that the semi‐experts would recommend significantly different sentence lengths from those recommended by the expert and lay‐person groups, in line with previous research findings. It was also hypothesized that justice and vengeance motivations would be related to punitive sentencing recommendations, and that these would not be the same across the three levels of expertise. Method. An independent groups design was utilized in the main analysis, with participants belonging to three distinct levels of clinical experience (experts, semi‐experts, and lay‐people). A questionnaire was administered, with participants being measured on levels of justice and vengeance motivations, and asked to recommend appropriate sentence lengths based on nine separate crime‐scenarios. These covariables were correlated and the correlation coefficients were compared across the three levels of expertise. Results. The former hypothesis was not upheld. Findings do, however, support the latter hypothesis, with the key finding indicating that for both justice and vengeance motivations in punitive judgement, it is the lay‐participants who appear distinct from the experts and semi‐experts. Conclusions. The current findings emphasize that while expert and lay‐person judgements may often appear to be the same, different processes and motivations underlying clinical judgements are occurring at the different stages of expertise. With the differences in the relationships between justice and vengeance motivations and judgements found in the current research, it is argued that expert and lay judgements that appear to be the same are, in fact, distinguishable and are related to quite different underlying motivations and decision‐making processes.     

Inferring ethnic origin by means of an STR profile

We report the use of DNA profiles from six STR loci for inferring the ethnic origin of a crime stain and discuss how such inference may be used as intelligence information to reduce the expected number of interviews to resolve a case. To enable this work, databases have been created for five British ethnic groups (Caucasians, Afro-Caribbeans, Indian sub-continentals, Southeast Asians and Middle Easterners) that together comprise 99.7% of the UK population.