From science to survival

He has written widely in his field and is author of The Search for Society; The Violent Imagination; The Red Lamp of Incest; Kinship and Marriage; Encounter with Anthropology,and co-author of The Imperial Animal.(with Lionel Tiger). This is an abridged version of the author’s new introduction to Encounter with Anthropology,to be published by Transaction.     

A latent structure analysis of delinquency

This paper uses latent structure analysis to develop a construct of delinquency based on a set of frequently used indicators of illegal behavior. Other methods, such as Guttman scaling and factor analytic procedures, are briefly reviewed as similar attempts to identify manifest (observed) variables that may act as indicators of a latent (unobserved or unobservable) variable, delinquency. The basic mathematical properties of the latent structure model employed in this paper are presented and then applied to a set of six self-report measures. The issue of external validity is also examined in a comparative analysis of an additive scale of delinquency and the latent class measure of delinquency. The latent class measure provides a considerable increase in the magnitude of association with such commonly studied correlates as attachment, peer delinquency, and instrumental attitudes toward the law.     

Environment Rights versus Environmental Wrongs: Forum over Substance?

Beginning with the 1972 Stockholm Declaration, there have been a number of international proclamations of a human right to a clean environment, both implicit and explicit. The highpoint of this movement towards an internationally recognized substantive right to a clean environment came with the 1992 Rio Declaration. This movement has continued forward in regional and specialized regimes – for example with respect to water and indigenous rights. There has also been a parallel move towards recognition of what can be considered procedural rights, which require public access to information, participation in decision making, and access to justice in environmental matters. This article argues that further development and use of these procedural rights will not only provide opportunities to protect environmental rights, but can also further the development of a substantive right to a clean environment.     

A measure of skewness in offense distributions

It has become a criminological fact of life that a small group of offenders is responsible for a far greater share of offending than its size would suggest. For example, it is well known that in the 1945 Philadelphia birth cohort, 6% of the cohort members committed 52% of the offenses. We argue, however, that the conventional percentaging approach to measuring skewness in offense distributions is inadequate. We propose and apply an alternative approach to measuring offense skewness which utilizes the offense distribution to its fullest and can easily and meaningfully be used for comparisons across or within study populations.     

The rise of religion and the fall of the civilization paradigm as explanations for intra-state conflict

The study presented here compares the impact of Samuel Huntington's concept of civilizations and that of religion on domestic conflict between 1960 and 2004 using the State Failure data set. The results show that examining the religious dimension of domestic conflict provides a better understanding of the dynamics of domestic conflict than does Huntington's concept of civilization. The results show that Huntington's predictions for conflict have not come to fruition as of 2004. Civilizational conflicts are a minority of all conflicts. Muslims, while engaging in a significant amount of inter-civilizational or inter-religious conflict, primarily fight other Muslims. When one takes population size into account, Muslims participate in a disproportionate amount of conflict. In absolute terms, Muslims participated in the majority of all religious conflict for the entire period covered by this study and in 2003 and 2004. Finally, religion increasingly impacts on domestic conflict. Religious conflicts—including religious wars like those in Afghanistan and Algeria, which are not civilizational but clearly between factions within the same religion—are consistently more common than civilizational conflict and became a majority of all conflict starting in 2002. This rise in religious conflict as a proportion of all domestic conflict is not a post-9/11 phenomenon, but is, rather, the result of processes that date back at least to the late 1970s.     

The impact of distributive and procedural justice on correctional staff job stress, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment

Correctional staff are the heart and soul of any correctional facility. While there was a significant body of research on the impact of the work environment on correctional staff, this study sought to expand that knowledge by examining the effects of distributive and procedural justice on correctional staff job stress, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. Multivariate models were estimated. Both forms of organizational justice had negative effects on job stress and organizational commitment; however, only procedural justice, but not distributive justice, had a significant impact on job satisfaction.