Do “Off‐Site” Adult Businesses Have Secondary Effects? Legal Doctrine,Social Theory,and Empirical Evidence

Recent federal court decisions appear to limit the ability of cities to mitigate the ambient crime risks associated with adult entertainment businesses. In one instance, a court has assumed that criminological theories do not apply to "off-site" adult businesses. After developing the legal doctrine of secondary effects, we demonstrate that the prevailing criminological theory applies to all adult business models. To corroborate the theory, we report the results of a before/after quasi-experiment for an off-site adult business. When an off-site adult business opens, ambient crime risk doubles compared to a control area. As theory predicts, moreover, ambient victimization risk is most acute in night-time hours. The theoretical development and empirical results have obvious implications for the evolving legal doctrine of secondary effects.     

DRUG USE AND DESISTANCE PROCESSES

Sampson and Laub's age‐graded theory of informal social control emphasizes the importance of adult social bonds such as marriage and stable employment in redirecting behavior in a more prosocial direction. Heavy alcohol use has also been shown to influence persistent patterns of offending as well as more episodic offending across the life course. Sampson and Laub's life‐course theory emphasizes the negative impact of alcohol use on marital and employment bonds. Although alcohol has indeed been shown to have significant effects on criminal offending, we argue that drug use and the drug culture in which many contemporary offenders are enmeshed have consequences that often complicate desistance processes in ways that alcohol does not. Drug use and its lifestyle concomitants bring together a host of distinctive social dynamics that compromise multiple life domains. The current project investigates the role of drug use on desistance processes relying on a contemporary sample of previously institutionalized youth. We draw on three waves of data from the Ohio life‐course study, a project that spans some 21 years. The results support the assertion that drug use exerts unique effects on desistance processes, once levels of alcohol use are taken into account. We investigate possible mechanisms that help to explain the differential impact of drug use on offending and find that social network effects, particularly partner criminality, explain some but not all of the negative impact of drug use on life‐course patterns of criminal offending.     

Is the Future of Electoral Reform Local?

The Electoral Reform Society has recently published two reports putting the case for electoral reform in local government. These suggest acceptance, in the wake of defeat in the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum, that the group's ultimate goal of change to the Westminster electoral system is unlikely to be fulfilled soon and that a more gradual strategy is therefore needed. This paper examines this shift by asking three questions. First, is Westminster electoral reform really a dead letter? Second, is local electoral reform more likely—and, if so, just how much more likely? Third, would local electoral reform matter in itself?     

FACIAL PROFILING: RACE,PHYSICAL APPEARANCE,AND PUNISHMENT*

We investigate the associations among physical appearance, threat perceptions, and criminal punishment. Psychological ideas about impression formation are integrated with criminological perspectives on sentencing to generate and test unique hypotheses about the associations among defendant facial characteristics, subjective evaluations of threatening appearance, and judicial imprisonment decisions. We analyze newly collected data that link booking photos, criminal histories, and sentencing information for more than 1,100 convicted felony defendants. Our findings indicate that Black defendants are perceived to be more threatening in appearance. Other facial characteristics, such as physical attractiveness, baby‐faced appearance, facial scars, and visible tattoos, also influence perceptions of threat, as do criminal history scores. Furthermore, some physical appearance characteristics are significantly related to imprisonment decisions, even after controlling for other relevant case characteristics. These and other findings are discussed as they relate to psychological research on impression formation, criminological theories of court actor decision‐making, and sociological work on race and punishment.     

The Influence of Conference Committees on Policy Outcomes

This article examines the effect that the spatial location of conference committees relative to the parent bodies has on congressional policy outcomes. The article presents a theoretical model proposing that conferees choose policies that maximize their policy utility subject to the constraint of gaining House and Senate majorities on the conference report. I tested the model using conferences on bills associated with votes that generated liberal‐conservative divisions. The results confirm that, under specified conditions, conferees pull outcomes away from the parent bodies toward conferee preferences.     

LOCAL ENTERPRISE BOARDS: THE SHORT HISTORY OF A RADICAL INITIATIVE

Local enterprise boards were first developed as radical initiatives For economic intervention in the early 1980s. Despite the closeness of their dates of birth, however, and the apparent similarity of the organizational forms (and titles) which they adopted, the differences between the boards were as significant as their shared features. The ambitions of each of the five first-wave boards were quite distinct. Some were more radical than others: some were concerned to challenge the market, whilst others were more concerned to work with it. But the experience of market-based intervention through the last decade as well as the legislative and financial constraints imposed by central government have encouraged a degree of convergence, particularly as grander ambitions have been modified. Partnership with the private sector (including the financial sector) became increasingly important for all of them, to the extent that legislation to restrict the operation of local authority based companies of this sort seems misplaced, at least if it is intended to undermine local socialism. The enterprise boards now seem to offer a better model for the involvement of business in regional and local government, than they do as trojan horses for the local authority left.