Applied Grand Strategy: Making Tough Choices in an Era of Limits and Constraint

This article hopes to contribute to the strategic content of U.S. foreign policy by offering a definition of grand strategy and case for reorienting U.S. policy around it. Rather than advocate a specific grand strategy—a matter still open for debate—the analysis concludes with a set of attributes to assess whether a proposed grand strategy constitutes a “good” grand strategy. It concludes by introducing the concept of an applied grand strategy approach, which may help to identify and assess the strategic implications of foreign policy choices.     

Social ecology, individual risk, and recidivism: A multilevel examination of main and moderating influences

Purpose

Despite a longstanding tradition in criminology to consider the impact of neighborhood context on crime-related outcomes, criminologists have largely ignored the influence of social ecology on recidivism until recently. The purpose of the present study was to examine the main and moderating influences of social ecology on recidivism.

Materials and Methods

The present study used hierarchical nonlinear modeling to estimate the effects of concentrated disadvantage, immigrant concentration, and residential stability on recidivism for a sample of offenders released from custody/supervision in 2006 and nested within Iowa counties. We controlled for individual-level risk for recidivism using the Level of Service Inventory-Revised (LSI-R), a validated risk assessment instrument. We also examined whether the relationship between LSI-R score and recidivism varied across counties, and if so, whether this variation can be explained by social structural characteristics.

Results

Results indicate that residential stability was the only contextual variable significantly related to recidivism. The relationship between individual-level risk and recidivism did not vary across contexts.

Conclusions

The findings suggest that the social structural context has limited influence on recidivism, while the LSI-R is a robust predictor of recidivism across contexts. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory, practice, and future research.     

The Dud Effect: Adding Highly Dissimilar Fillers Increases Confidence in Lineup Identifications

Recent research in decision-making has demonstrated the “dud-alternative effect”—the tendency to become more confident that a chosen response option is correct if it is surrounded by implausible response options (Windschitl & Chambers, J Exp Psychol 30:198–215, 2004). This finding may be applicable to a lineup task: The presence of duds (i.e., highly dissimilar fillers) may increase a witness’s confidence that an identified (non-dud) lineup member is the criminal. Four studies (N = 665) demonstrate that the mere presence of highly dissimilar fillers inflates witnesses’ confidence in a mistaken identification (Studies 1–4), provides evidence that this confidence inflation is due to the duds inflating the perceived similarity of the other lineup members to the criminal (Studies 2, 3), and delineates some conditions under which the effect holds (Studies 3, 4). The addition of highly dissimilar lineup members, far from being inert, as is often implicitly assumed, can bias witnesses’ confidence reports.     

Accountability in the Internet of Things

Accountability of governing bodies in the Internet of Things (IoT) is of major importance and requires a partly different approach than applied in the (general) Internet. Improving accountability makes the implementation of new general principles necessary in order to provide for a stable and foreseeable legal framework on which businesses can rely. In particular, standards need to be introduced that hold governing bodies accountable, information should be made more readily available and beneficiaries of accountability must be able to impose some sort of sanction on the accountable in case of non-compliance. Improving accountability by creating such framework also supports the betterment of security in the Internet of Things.     

Shades of blue: Confidence in the police in the world

Purpose

The present study tests the hypothesis that regime nature as a structural characteristic explains variations in public confidence in the police.

Methods

Combining five sources of data from 50 nations with 69,309 respondents, the current article extends the extant research by using hierarchical logistic regression analyses with ample sample sizes at both levels to test the hypothesis with a series of control variables.

Findings

In addition to the largely consistent findings from the individual-level predictors, the results show that that there is a U-shaper convex curvilinear relationship between the levels of democracy and confidence in the police. Residents in long-term stable authoritarian regimes as well as in long-term stable democracies display elevated levels of confidence in the police, whereas short-term or unstable authoritarian nations and nations in democratic transition have the lowest level of confidence in the police. Besides, confidence in the police is higher among citizens in nations with more government efficiency and is lower among residents of countries with higher homicide rates.

Conclusion

Regime nature is important in understanding confidence in the police. In addition, governments should make more efforts to promote their efficiency in order to win citizens’ support and they are expected to reduce homicide rates.     

Take the car keys away: Metropolitan structure and the long road to delinquency

Purpose

This research fulfills a void in offender mobility discourse. Metropolitan socioeconomic and spatial structure, defined in crime pattern theory as the urban backcloth, plays a significant role in shaping travel behavior; and yet, current analysis of offender mobility continues to favor individual characteristics to account for travel range.

Methods

Using a large sample of juveniles, both delinquent and at-risk youth (N = 2,552), this study compared the predictive utility of individual characteristics against indicators of urban backcloth.

Results

Delinquent youth were found to be more sensitive to the environmental conditions exerted by community-level socioeconomic characteristics than their at-risk counterparts. However, two factors—intercity hierarchical structure and motor vehicle access—accounted for travel variability among all youth.

Conclusions

Offending behavior must be examined within the context of a dynamic environmental context formed by the metropolitan socioeconomic and spatial structure. Delinquents constitute an identifiable subgroup of youth.     

Gender differences in the effects of prison on recidivism

Purpose

This study examines gender differences in the effectiveness of prison in reducing recidivism.

Methods

Using data on released male and female prisoners, we apply a propensity score matching methodology to compare the effects of prison on recidivism versus three counterfactual conditions—jail, intensive probation, and probation.

Results

The analyses indicated that a prison term, as compared to placement on intensive probation or traditional probation, is associated with a greater likelihood of property and drug recidivism. There was little evidence that recidivism was greater when compared to jail, that prison increased the likelihood of violent or other recidivism, or that the criminogenic effect of prison is appreciably greater for females or males.

Conclusions

The findings do not support arguments that prison is an effective alternative to non-incarcerative punishments or that it exerts a differential effect on females or males. Further research is needed on what features of the prison experience contribute to the observed effects.     

Cyber pornography in India and its implication on cyber café operators

Cyber pornography plays an accessory role in negative social issues such as child abuse, violence against women, rape, inequality, relationship and family breakdown, youth crime, promiscuity and sexually transmitted diseases. Cyberspace and the pornographic matter transmitted through it have created challenges for India’s antiquated laws. The lack of jurisdictional boundaries and the sheer volume of traffic that the Internet can handle, as well as the potential for anonymity have resulted in a complete lack of control over what appears on the Web at the click of a mouse button. Before there was no liability of a cyber café owner but with the introduction of the Information Technology Amendment Act, 2008, the responsibilities of Cyber Café owners have only increased. This paper deals with the Cyber pornography, its legal implications and the liability of cyber café owner under the Information Technology Amendment Act, 2008.     

Privacy and the precautionary principle

The precautionary principle – which implies that where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing protective measures – has been adopted as a standard of environmental and health protection in international and European legislation. This article offers an overview of the precautionary principle as a legal standard applicable to European privacy and data protection legislation. For this reason, it takes particularly into account the guidelines of this legislation as well as the privacy impact assessment framework, raised by the European Commission through the Recommendation on Radio-Frequency Identification applications. In brief, the article stresses the role of the precautionary principle in improving privacy protection through liability, prudence and transparency.