Truancy Intervention Reduces Crime: Results from a Randomized Field Trial

Educational attainment is a fundamental cornerstone to success throughout the life-course. As a result, ensuring that young people remain in school and are not truant is critical. Although the importance of truancy as a risk factor for many adverse outcomes, including crime, has been well-documented, much less methodologically rigorous work has been undertaken to evaluate potentially promising prevention and intervention strategies. This paper uses a randomized field trial method to test how a partnership between police and schools targeting truancy impacts offending in a sample of high-risk truanting young people. We find that the truancy intervention reduces offending and we discuss the implications for practice and directions for future research.     

Designing an International Liability Regime to Compensate Victims of Solar Radiation Management

Solar radiation management (SRM) is a geoengineering method that promises to forestall the devastating impacts of climate change by cooling the atmosphere. Although SRM could avert a climate disaster, it also carries the potential to cause numerous, grave, and unequally distributed harms. In fact, some of these harms are unavoidable. A carefully designed liability regime can resolve SRM-related disputes and compensate victims of SRM deployment. This article considers existing international liability regimes in the context of the practical and normative challenges posed by SRM to offer recommendations for an international liability regime to govern SRM.     

Artistic enhancement in the production of photo-fit likenesses: An examination of its effectiveness in leading to suspect identification

Following a crime, witnesses are often asked by the police to construct a Photo-FIT likeness of the suspect. However, previous laboratory research has indicated that the quality of the likenesses produced can be very poor. This study investigated whether the artistic enhancement of the basic Photo-FIT by a skilled operator using a variety of techniques influenced the quality of the Photo-FIT impression produced, and in turn increased the likelihood of correct recognition from the Photo-FIT. Six professional police Photo-FIT operators produced one basic Photo-FIT which was not artistically enhanced in any way and one Photo-FIT which had been artistically enhanced. These two types of Photo-FIT were given to 105 police recruits who were required to identify which face that Photo-FIT represented from a photographic lineup of 12 ‘suspect’ photographs. Composites which had been enhanced were significantly more successful in leading to a correct identification than were basic composites which had not been enhanced. The implications of these findings for police procedure and practice in the employment of commercial composite systems are discussed.     

Obstruction in parliaments: a cross-national perspective

ABSTRACT

In legislative institutions, disruptions to the agenda and delays in processing legislation can have a significant impact on the ability of legislative majorities to realise success. Few previous studies have systematically examined parliamentary obstruction in non-U.S. settings. In this article, I investigate the extent to which obstruction occurs in parliaments around the world. The evidence, drawn from a 2016 survey of members of the Association of Secretaries General of Parliaments (ASGP) and supplemented with documentary evidence and interviews with parliamentary clerks and members of parliament in several countries demonstrates that obstructive behaviour occurs in a variety of types of national legislatures and across different political systems and institutional settings.     

The Survival of Gunshot Residues in Cremated Bone: An Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectrometry Study

Gunshot residue (GSR) has been sought and demonstrated on many types of material and with many techniques. Inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP‐OES) could be a useful method on difficult substrates, but a systematic study on burnt material has never been performed. Hence, this study aims at evaluating the usefulness and reliability of this method on burnt samples. Sixteen adult bovine ribs (eight with soft tissues, eight totally skeletonized) were shot using two kinds of projectile (both 9 mm full metal‐jacketed or unjacketed). Then, every sample was led to complete calcination in an electric oven. The area of the gunshot entrance wound was swabbed and analyzed by ICP‐OES; the results were also correlated with a previously published parallel study by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) equipped with an SEM–energy dispersive X‐ray analyzer. ICP‐OES proved to be very sensitive and reliable even on degraded material and can be an appropriate nondestructive method for detecting residues on difficult and delicate substrates such as burnt bone.     

Does Performance Management Lead to Better Outcomes? Evidence from the U.S. Public Transit Industry

Although performance management processes are widely assumed to be beneficial in improving organizational performance in the public sector, there is insufficient empirical evidence to back this claim. In this article, the authors examine the impact of performance management practices on organizational effectiveness in a particular segment of the public transit industry in the United States. The analysis utilizes original survey data on performance management practices comprising both strategy formulation and performance measurement in 88 small and medium‐sized local transit agencies in conjunction with comparative outcome data drawn from the National Transit Database maintained by the Federal Transit Administration. The results provide evidence that more extensive use of performance management practices does in fact contribute to increased effectiveness in this segment of the transit industry.     

Gendering the Cult of the Offensive

Theorists of the offense-defense balance frequently note that perceptions of technology, as well as military doctrine, play a role in states' perception of offense dominance or the “cult of the offensive.” I argue that gender may constitute the missing link in explaining this misperception and suggest three possible areas of investigation. First, the perceptions and uses of technologies are dependent upon gendered ideologies which encouraged disastrous strategies in the First World War. Second, gender is an integral part of nationalism that promotes offensive policies by defining masculinity in terms of heroic service to the nation. Third, gendered discourses of protection use the language of defense to legitimate offensive policies. By analyzing the roots of perceptions of offense dominance, feminist analysis shows how gender discourses and the production of gender identities are not confined to individuals and the private realm but rather are a pervasive fact of social life on an international scale.