No change is a good change? Restrictive deterrence in illegal drug markets

Purpose

This study applies the concept of restrictive deterrence to a sample of drug market offenders. In particular, we assess the influence of behavioral changes post-arrest on time to rearrest.

Methods

The sample consists of arrest data on all drug offences in South Australia from the start of 2000 to the end of 2007 (n = 26819). Cox proportional hazard models are used to conduct survival analyses. Supplementary models focus on those repeatedly arrested for cannabis cultivation to assess the influence of adjusting amounts of drugs on time to rearrest.

Results

Changing behaviors is related to more rapid rearrest. Switching offense location, drug seriousness, and charge seriousness are all risk factors. However, among offenders repeatedly arrested for cannabis cultivation, changing location and increasing the number of plants they grow is related to a longer period before rearrest.

Conclusions

Offenders that change their drug market behavior after being arrested appear to be placing themselves in situations in which they are more likely to fail due to the dangers of breaking into an unfamiliar market or offense pattern. Offenders with the longest post-arrest survival seem to be those that maintain their overall pattern of behavior while implementing subtle arrest avoidance techniques.     

A genealogy of EU discourses and practices of deliberative governance: Beyond states and markets?

The article offers a genealogy of ‘deliberative governance’ in the EU—an important contemporary discourse and practice of ‘throughput legitimacy’ within that setting. It focuses on three key episodes: the late 1990s ‘Governance’ reports of the European Commission's in‐house think‐tank, the Forward Studies Unit (FSU); the Commission's 2001 White Paper on Governance; and the EU's ‘Open Method of Coordination’, which emerged in the 1990s and was widely studied in the early and mid‐2000s. The genealogy serves to highlight the particular intellectual lineages and political contingencies associated with such a discourse and in so doing points to its exclusive potential in both theory and practice. In particular, the article argues that it excludes, on the one hand, those championing the enduring sociological and normative importance of the nation state and an associated representative majoritarianism and, on the other hand, those (excessively) critical of a functionalist, neoliberal, market‐making status quo.     

Elderly British men: homohysteria and orthodox masculinities

Abstract

There is limited research about homosociality and physical tactility between men in the early to middle decades of the twentieth century. This research utilizes 27 in-depth interviews with heterosexual British men aged between 65 and 91 in order to explore their masculinity and homosociality, then and today. Participants were interviewed about (1) their recollections of masculinity and same-sex friendships aged 18; (2) their awareness of, and attitudes towards, homosexuality at this age; and (3) their current views regarding today’s heterosexual male’s gendered behaviours, inclusive of their kissing, cuddling and loving other men. Results show that men born between 1924 and 1951 lived in absence of, or desire for, homosocial affection. Even today they look upon the display of inclusive masculinities by today’s male youth with disdain. We suggest that their antipathy towards homosociality is reflective of elevated cultural homophobia and homohysteria of their youths.     

Refugees,economic migrants and weak cosmopolitanism

This article takes issue with several features of David Miller’s account of justice with respect to refugees and to economic migrants, as outlined in Strangers in our Midst. It suggests that even within the terms of his own weak cosmopolitanism, the requirements of justice are more demanding than he acknowledges. In particular, the argument advanced criticizes Miller’s ‘fair shares’ argument concerning obligations to refugees and his recourse to ‘mutual advantage’ in theorizing economic migration.     

An integrated technique for the analysis of skin bite marks

The high number of murder, rape, and child abuse cases in South Africa has led to increased numbers of bite mark cases being heard in high courts. Objective analysis to match perpetrators to bite marks at crime scenes must be able to withstand vigorous cross-examination to be of value in conviction of perpetrators. An analysis technique is described in four stages, namely determination of the mark to be a human bite mark, pattern association analysis, metric analysis and comparison with the population data, and illustrated by a real case study. New and accepted techniques are combined to determine the likelihood ratio of guilt expressed as one of a range of conclusions described in the paper. Each stage of the analysis adds to the confirmation (or rejection) of concordance between the dental features present on the victim and the dentition of the suspect. The results illustrate identification to a high degree of certainty.