Two Imaginaries of Citizenship in Turkey: the Republican and ��Ethical�� Models

Notions of sovereign state-rule and citizenship which rest on the twentieth century epistemology of state centrism define the ??right to have rights?? in terms of a national, unified category of state membership. In its association of citizenship with state sovereignty, the republican citizenship model in Turkey allows the state bureaucracy to act with key unitary agency in managing the relationship between religion and politics. In contesting the republican model on both religious and civil grounds, a notion of ??ethical?? citizenship has emerged based on the extension of rights and freedoms through citizen activism. This paper illustrates this process through a comparative analysis of the religiously inspired demand by female students to remove the headscarf ban and by Alevi individuals to remove the designation of Islam from national identification cards.     

The Kids are Alright: Making a Case for Abolition of the Juvenile Justice System

When considering abolition of the criminal justice system, there is no greater or more impactful relevance than for juveniles that find themselves inextricably linked to the juvenile justice system. From its inception, the philosophical foundation of juvenile care was to provide individualized, compassionate assistance to young men and women perceived to be in need of emotional care and/or social control. With the establishment of the Cook County Juvenile Court in 1899, the American juvenile justice system has endured a 118-year odyssey that has produced progressively rational, largely unsympathetic, and increasingly punitive practices. With happenings such as the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’, ‘juvenile life without the possibility of parole’, ‘teen courts’, and ‘deferred prosecution probation’, current juveniles that make unassuming mistakes and errors in judgment are adjoined to a system that sustains and reinforces itself through these mistakes and errors. The charge of this article is to recommend the abolition of the contemporary juvenile justice system, with safeguards for the protection from serious offenders and a return to the compassionate care that is warranted for the majority of juveniles that currently bolster the system.     

Diamonds,gold and crime displacement: Hatton Garden,and the evolution of organised crime in the UK

The 2015 Hatton Garden Heist was described as the ‘largest burglary in English legal history’. However, the global attention that this spectacular crime attracted to ‘The Garden’ tended to concentrate upon the value of the stolen goods and the vintage of the burglars. What has been ignored is how the burglary shone a spotlight into Hatton Garden itself, as an area with a unique ‘upperworld’ commercial profile and skills cluster that we identify as an incubator and facilitator for organised crime. The Garden is the UK’s foremost jewellery production and retail centre and this paper seeks to explore how Hatton Garden’s businesses integrated with a fluid criminal population to transition, through hosting lucrative (and bureaucratically complex) VAT gold frauds from 1980 to the early 1990s, to become a major base for sophisticated acquisitive criminal activities. Based on extensive interviews over a thirty year period, evidence from a personal research archive and public records, this paper details a cultural community with a unique criminal profile due to the particularities of its geographical location, ethnic composition, trading culture, skills base and international connections. The processes and structures that facilitate criminal markets are largely under-researched (Antonopoulos et al. 2015: 11), and this paper considers how elements of Hatton Garden’s ‘upperworld’ businesses integrated with project criminals, displaced by policing strategies, to effect this transition.     

The boundary ranges of the free flight of particles of gunpowder and metals in shots from a hand firearm

On the basis of equations of external ballistics and probability theory the largest possible distances of free (independent) flight of gunshot powder and metal particles having different forms and sizes were calculated. Experimental control of the calculated data for different types of battle and sports hand fire-arms was carried out. The correspondence of the calculated data to maximal free (independent) particle flight in blank shots was stated. In experiments with cartridges equipped with bullets the distances of free particle flight were significantly lesser (by 53-65%) which may be connected with effect of gunshot projectile on the process of particle distribution. Reversed adapted formulas and calculation variants are presented.     

Assessment of disputed identity of blood alcohol samples using DNA fingerprinting

DNA fingerprinting is a perfect tool for investigating the identity of disputed blood by alcohol samples extracted. However, blood samples stored at an ambient temperature for longer periods can show considerable degradation of high-molecular DNA, diminishing the value of fingerprint investigation because of loss of the less frequent bands formed by the longer DNA fragments. Addition of the complexing agent EDTA can retard this degradation. Determination of the sex with DNA probes in the blood alcohol sample increases confidence in the investigation.