Language disorders in disruptive behavior disordered homicidal youth.

Eight homicidal youths were assessed for language disorders and psychiatric diagnoses using a battery of standardized language tests and the Diagnostic Interview for Children and Adolescents. Both language disorders and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III-R psychiatric diagnoses were present in all subjects.     

宪政理念与宪法命运:中美第一部宪法比较分析

1787年制定的《美利坚合众国宪法》,既是美国的第一部宪法,也是近代世界的第部成文宪法。我们这里所要探讨的中国第一部宪法,则是指1923年制定的《中华民国法》。虽然,中国宪法起始于清末1903年的《钦定宪法大纲》及1911年颁布的《十九条》,辛亥革命发生后南京临时政府又颁布了《临时约法》,随后还有多种宪法性文件。〔但从立法意义上看,真正完成了宪法制定程序的只有1923年的《中华民国宪法》。因这部宪法可以算作是近代中国的第一部宪法。这部宪法之所以不被重视,是因为它伴着曹锟的总统贿选而产生,故有人将其称为“贿选宪法”,还有人称其…     

Statewide Assessment of Response to Domestic Violence in Louisiana

The Louisiana statewide assessment of domestic violence attitudes and services was a cooperative effort between the Louisiana Community Policing Institute and the Criminal Justice Program at the University of Louisiana, Monroe. The research project included both surveys and focus groups from Louisiana's eight law enforcement planning districts. Results indicate that the response to domestic violence in Louisiana is generally inadequate. Furthermore, problems exist with respect to the definition of domestic violence among agencies. Finally, four basic barriers to successful intervention were identified, including lack of resources, lack of education and training, victims' lack of confidence in the system, and lack of a coordinated response to the problem. Recommendations are presented for overcoming these obstacles.     

West African Voices

A new literary programme has been started in the West AfricanService of the B.B.C., and this article is a reprint of oneof the talks. The Ibo speaker was formerly in the Customs, andqualified as a barrister last November: he is also the authorof numerous poems in English, and of a novel, The Prince ofUtete. The other two are schoolmasters working as Assistantsat the School of Oriental and African Studies. For technicalreasons, the orthography is not quite complete.     

Randomized experiments in criminology: What have we learned in the last two decades?

This paper aims to review randomized experiments in criminology with offending outcomes and reasonably large numbers that were published between 1982 and 2004. A total of 83 experiments are summarized, compared with only 35 published between 1957 and 1981: 12 on policing, 13 on prevention, 14 on corrections, 22 on courts, and 22 on community interventions. Randomized experiments are still relatively uncommon, but there have been more large-scale multi-site experiments and replication programs. There have also been several experiments in which 100 or more places were randomly assigned. Relatively few experiments (only 10 out of 83) were conducted outside the United States. Meta-analyses suggest that prevention methods, correctional therapy, batterer programs, drug courts, juvenile restitution and deterrent policing were effective in reducing offending, while Scared Straight and boot camp programs caused a significant increase in offending.     

JUVENILITY AND PUNISHMENT: SENTENCING JUVENILES IN ADULT CRIMINAL COURT*

The study outlined in this article addressed a key limitation of prior research on the punishment of juveniles transferred to adult court by employing propensity score matching techniques to create more comparable samples of juvenile and young adult offenders. Using recent data from the Maryland State Commission on Criminal Sentencing Policy, it tested competing theoretical propositions about the salience of juvenile status in adult court. Findings indicate that even after rigorous statistical matching procedures, juvenile offenders are punished more severely than their young adult counterparts. We found no evidence that this “juvenile penalty” is exacerbated by an offender's race or gender, but it does vary starkly across offense type and mode of transfer, being driven primarily by drug crimes and discretionary waivers. The import of these findings is discussed as they relate to the future of juvenile justice policy regarding the continued use of juvenile transfer to adult court.     

Dirty tricks of cross-examination

A mock jury study was conducted to test the hypothesis that perceptions of a witness can be biased by presumptuous cross-examination questions. A total of 105 subjects read a rape trial in which the cross-examiner asked a question that implied something negative about the reputation of either the victim or an expert. Within each condition, the question was met with either a denial, an admission, or an objection from the witness's attorney. Results indicated that although ratings of the victim's credibility were not affected by the presumptuous question, the expert's credibility was significantly diminished—even when the question had elicited a denial or a sustained objection. Conceptual and practical implications of these findings are discussed.This research was supported by funds provided to the first author by the Bronfman Science Center.     

Municipal leadership and interest‐oriented mass participation: The process of housing reform plan in Shanghai 2

In the light of China's leadership transformation—from revolutionary to technocratic—in the reform era, this paper attempts to explore the new leadership through a case study of making of the Shanghai housing reform plan in 1991. After delineating housing problems and previous reforms in the mega‐city, this paper examines the process of the making of China's most comprehensive housing reform hereto, which inevitably invited conflicts of interests among social groups, especially between the ordinary urban residents who were in disadvantageous positions and the cadres who by and large benefited from old housing policies under China's planning system. The principal conclusion of the paper is that the ways of making the housing reform plan indicate that the current leadership is more responsive to ordinary people's interests and opinions than the Maoist leadership, even though both have much in common as the former inherites the latter.