Crimes of Color: Risk, Profiling, and the Contemporary Racialization of Social Control

In the United States the phenomenon of racial profiling has emerged as an important and controversial issue within political and criminal justice policy debates. For the most part, these debates have assumed a sort of racism at work in order to explain law enforcement's use of criminal profiles largely determined by racial classifications. Accordingly, many have worked to expose this allegedly racist behavior in the hopes that such exposure will bring an end to the practice. This essay argues that racial profiling is embedded in much larger social developments that must be explored in order to understand the role race now plays in the maintenance of social order in contemporary American society.     

State Spaceport Initiatives: Economic and Political Innovation in an Intergovernmental Context

State spaceports are an interesting example of intergovernmentalrelations because activities conducted at such facilities spanthe state, federal, and international realms. Five states—Alaska,California, Florida, New Mexico, and Virginia—are themost visible participants in the process. In this study, thesupporting rationales for such endeavors are discussed withinthe context of the broader contours of intergovernmental relations.The field is a product of the post-Cold War period during whichopportunities for state space activities arose due to changesin the national security environment. Three distinct but interrelatedexplanations are suggested for why the field has developed slowly,although during the past two years, progress in achieving goalshas begun to occur.     

Margaret M. deGuzman and Valerie Oosterveld (eds.), The Elgar Companion to the International Criminal Court,Elgar, Cheltenham/Northampton, 2020, 431 pp

Criminal Law Forum -     

THE CURRENTS BENEATH THE “RISING TIDE” OF SCHOOL CHOICE: AN ANALYSIS OF STUDENT ENROLLMENT FLOWS IN THE CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Existing research highlights that families face geographic, social, and psychological constraints that may limit the extent to which competition can take hold in school choice programs. In this paper, we address the implications of such findings by creating a network of student flows from 11 cohorts of eighth‐grade students in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). We applied a custom algorithm to group together schools with similar sending and receiving patterns, and calculated the difference in mean achievement between a student's attended and assigned high schools. For all identified school groupings, we found that the students were on average moving to higher achieving schools. We also found that the movement toward higher achieving schools of the top achievement quartile of students was over twice as large as that of the bottom quartile, but that the flows of both the highest and lowest achieving student quartiles were toward higher achieving destinations. Our results suggest that student movements in CPS between the years of 2001 to 2005 were consistent with creating market pressure for improvement as well as increasing segregation by achievement. However, further research into how schools responded to those movements is required to make inferences about the level or consequences of competition generated by choice‐related reforms during that time.     

Caustic Ingestion—A Forensic Overview

The ingestion of corrosive substances may produce severe burns to the upper aerodigestive tract and stomach, particularly if the pH is greater than 12 or less than two. There is a biphasic age grouping with adult cases most often involving self‐harm and pediatric cases accidental ingestion. Three cases are reported to demonstrate characteristic features following the ingestion of potassium hydroxide, glacial acetic acid and Lysol^®, respectively. All deaths were due to the effects of caustic burns to the upper aerodigestive tract, esophagus and stomach with perforation and/or hemorrhage. The extent of injuries in these cases depends on the nature, amount, and concentration of the agent and on the exposure time. A point to note at autopsy is that tissue damage may also occur from postmortem exposure. Typical injuries involve perioral, limb, and trunk burns, with extensive aerodigestive liquefactive/coagulative necrosis causing hemorrhage and perforation.