Legal Aim, Discretion, and Social Control

This study attempts to ascertain how the legal a i m of rehabilitation are applied, as well as their social control consequences for a group of offenders sentenced under the Federal Youth Corrections Act (FYCA) of 1950. Discriminant function analyses were conducted on a random sample of 452 persons selected f o r a "special" FYCA rehabilitative disposition and 758 persons accorded a regular punitive disposition, to determine 1) the factors that influence the judge's choice between these two outcomes; and 2) if persons sentenced under the special rehabilitative provision spend more or less time incarcerated, relative to those given a regular disposition Our analyses indicate that age is the single discriminator of much significance in determining whether an offender is given a FYCA or regular disposition, with younger persons more likely to receive rehabilitative treatment. Little support was found for the contention that greater intrusiveness of social control inevitably results from adoption of a rehabilitative form of social control as opposed to a regular punitive disposition. The implications of these findings for the application and consequences of the FYCA are discussed.     

MIDDLE MANAGEMENT AND POLICE DEMOCRATIZATION: A Reply to John E. Angell

This article responds to John Angell's (1971) proposal to abolish police middle management. With use of the data from a seven-city study of team policing (Sherman et al., 1973) and Tannenbaum's (1968) framework of control in organizations, the past obstructions and potential uses of middle management to police change are discussed. Rather than abolish or neutralize mid-management, I propose to expand their support functions as a positive aid to change.     

Doctors,Lawyers, and Malpractice Insurance: Is Physician Discipline or Legal Restrictions the Answer?

Legislatures have made numerous attempts to reduce medical malpractice costs by changing the legal rules governing malpractice suits. Additional changes through physician discipline are also under consideration. This paper - tests whether these changes have had the desired effects, using cross-state data. The empirical findings are that the results of changes in the legal rules are generally as expected, but that physician discipline seems to have little impact on either insurer costs or insurance rates, even after the discipline rules have been in effect for up to four years.     

FROM INITIAL DETERRENCE TO LONGTERM ESCALATION: SHORT-CUSTODY ARREST FOR POVERTY GHETTO DOMESTIC VIOLENCE*

Persons arrested for misdemeanor domestic violence are held in custody for widely varying lengths of time. To test the effects of this variance, we randomly assigned short (X?= 2.8 hours), full (X?= 11.1 hours), and no arrests (warning only) to a sample of 1,200 cases with predominantly unemployed suspects concentrated in black ghetto poverty neighborhoods in Milwaukee. Victim interviews and one official measure showed that short arrest had a substantial initial deterrent effect relative to the warning group. Longer term follow-up and before-after analysis, however, found neither arrest group reflected any deterrence. On the most comprehensive official measure, short arrest consistently showed significantly higher long-term recidivism than no arrest. Its deterrent effect ended at 30 days, but its criminogenic effect was significant after one year. We conclude that short-custody arrests for domestic violence in poverty ghetto areas may pose a dilemma between short- and long-term crime control, but longer custody arrests have no clear long-term effect in either direction.     

How Kant's View of Perfect and Imperfect Duties Resolves an Alleged Moral Dilemma for Judges*

Abstract. I clarify Kant's classification of duties and criticize the apocryphal tradition that, according to Kant, perfect duties trump imperfect duties. I then use Kant's view to argue that judges who believe that an action is immoral and should be illegal need not set aside their beliefs in order to comply with binding precedents that permit the action. The same view of morality that causes some people to oppose certain actions, including abortion, requires lower–court judges to comply with binding precedents. Therefore, someone's opposition to legal abortion, by itself, does not justify opposing that person's nomination to a lower court.     

Strategic Terror and Amateur Psychology

Terror is defined as deliberate acts of violence designed to create a psychological effect—terror—with the intention of causing a shift in the target's attitudes and behaviour. A distinction is drawn between tactical terrorism, when such acts are undertaken as part of a multifaceted campaign, and strategic terrorism, where they are undertaken as an independent means of achieving the desired political ends. This follows a familiar distinction in airpower theory. A set of historical examples from both airpower and terrorism, as well as the fictional works of H. G. Wells and Joseph Conrad, is used to demonstrate the reliance on amateur psychology, concerning the likely social responses to forms of attack. This helps explain why strategic terror is rarely successful, though tactical terror can be.     

PUBLIC SERVICE VALUES: A NEW APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF MOTIVATION IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

This article details an approach for empirically eliciting and examining public service values and their impact on decisions made by public servants. The approach involves adaptation of the Schwartz Portrait Values Questionnaire such that it: (1) elicits values relevant to an individual's public service role rather than broad personal values; and (2) incorporates values omitted by the Schwartz framework, including those identified by Jørgensen and Bozeman and others. To examine the impact of public service values on specific public management decisions, we use structured decision context statements similar to those proposed by Tetlock. We find that: (1) the adapted instrument maps favourably to the Schwartz personal value space; (2) the public service values space includes value sets that expand and refine the personal value space defined by Schwartz; and (3) the public service values elicited can be used to predict decisions made by respondents in specific public service decision contexts.     

Research Note: On the inverse relationship between votes and proximity for niche parties

Abstract.  Do niche parties occupying left-right policy positions that diverge sharply from the centre of the voter distribution gain more popular support than those moderately positioned along the left-right continuum? Cross-sectional analyses, based on observations from twelve Western European countries from 1984–1998, are presented that suggest the answer is 'yes'. By contrast, these analyses strongly suggest that for mainstream parties, policy radicalism depresses popular support. The implication of these findings is that for niche parties, it is the distinctiveness of their left-right positions that enhances their competitiveness in democratic elections. While this finding runs counter to the intuition of standard spatial theory, it is consistent with recent dynamic accounts of niche party responsiveness to shifts in public opinion and electoral support for niche parties. These findings have implications for party strategies, spatial theories and the understanding of political representation.