STATE PRISON POPULATIONS AND THEIR GROWTH, 1971–1991*

We extend earlier analyses of the factors that explain differences among the U.S. states in imprisonment rates by demonstrating the importance of state culture and political arrangements to the explanation of imprisonment rates, and growth in those rates, for the years 1971–1991.     

Hidden Enterprise and Property Rights Reform in Socialist Hungary*

The particular historical trajectories of economic reform in East European socialist systems were important causal factors in their transformation, and often account for the different paths now open to each. Taking the case of Hungary, this article argues that socialist reforms, even when justifiably assessed as ineffective attempts at improved efficiency, interacted with an expanding second economy to alter in a gradual but profound manner the state-imposed relationship between the political and economic realms. This process of incremental social and ideological change “politicized” the economy and partially “privatized” the public sector, albeit often in informal ways. The turning-point was a 1982 reform of property-rights which legalized much of the second economy and opened up newly-legitimate channels for its cooperation with the state sector. By formalizing the previously informal relationship of mutual dependence between the state and the second economy, these statutes engendered new economic and political contradictions and possibilities in the system, as the enfranchisement of previously-excluded groups led to further concessions on the part of the state. The legalization of the second economy, the public campaign to legitimize the private sector, and the creation of new private partnership forms constituted a significant difference between the legacy of Hungarian socialism and other East European varieties.     

Negotiating the Networks of Space,Time and Substance: A Geographical Perspective on the Sustainable Citizen

This paper provides a critical geographical analysis of the emerging ideals associated with sustainable citizenship. We argue that the principles behind sustainable citizenship force us to think through the full range of geographical factors which frame citizenship and yet which are routinely overlooked in both geographical and non-geographical work on the citizen. We take the sustainable citizen to be both an epistemological challenge to existing paradigms of citizenship and a contemporary national and international policy goal. As an epistemological category we claim that the very notion of a sustainable citizen destabilizes the spatial, temporal and material parameters upon which modern forms of citizenship are based. At the same time, however, we also consider the limitations associated with contemporary national and international attempts to create a more sustainable citizenry, arguing that such initiatives often belie the radical potential of thinking about citizenship in sustainable terms. We take as our empirical focus the recently implemented curriculum for global citizenship and sustainable development being enacted in Welsh schools. Drawing on interviews carried out with education officials, teachers and students, we explore what sustainable citizenship means and the opportunities and challenges it faces as a political project.     

ECOLOGICAL NETWORKS AND URBAN CRIME: THE STRUCTURE OF SHARED ROUTINE ACTIVITY LOCATIONS AND NEIGHBORHOOD‐LEVEL INFORMAL CONTROL CAPACITY

By drawing on the work of Jacobs (1961), we hypothesize that public contact among neighborhood residents while engaged in day‐to‐day routines, captured by the aggregate network structure of shared local exposure, is consequential for crime. Neighborhoods in which residents come into contact more extensively in the course of conventional routines will exhibit higher levels of public familiarity, trust, and collective efficacy with implications for the informal social control of crime. We employ the concept of ecological (“eco‐”) networks—networks linking households within neighborhoods through shared activity locations—to formalize the notion of overlapping routines. By using microsimulations of household travel patterns to construct census tract‐level eco‐networks for Columbus, OH, we examine the hypothesis that eco‐network intensity (the probability that households tied through one location in a neighborhood eco‐network will also be tied through another visited location) is negatively associated with tract‐level crime rates (N = 192). Fitted spatial autoregressive models offer evidence that neighborhoods with higher intensity eco‐networks exhibit lower levels of violent and property crime. In contrast, a higher prevalence of nonresident visitors to a given tract is positively associated with property crime. The results of these analyses hold the potential to enrich insight into the ecological processes that shape variation in neighborhood crime.     

Resource Sovereignties in Bolivia: Re‐Conceptualising the Relationship between Indigenous Identities and the Environment during the TIPNIS Conflict

This paper examines the active re‐construction of indigenous identities within the Plurinational State of Bolivia through the case study of a resource conflict that arose with the government's announcement of its intention to build a road through a national park and indigenous territory, the Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure (TIPNIS; Indigenous Territory and Isiboro Sécure National Park). Ethnographic fieldwork shows that both the state and the lowland indigenous movement have fashioned essentialised understandings of an indigenous identity linked to the environment in order to legitimise competing resource sovereignty claims.     

LONG‐TERM TRENDS IN CRIMES OF VIOLENCE (COMMENT ON COONEY, 2003)*

Empirical and theoretical issues posed by Mark Cooney's (2003) analysis of long‐term trends in crimes of violence are discussed.     

GOVERNING MENTAL HEALTH CARE: HOW POWER IS EXERTED IN AND THROUGH A QUALITY IMPROVEMENT COLLABORATIVE

We investigated the role of power in public governance using a Foucauldian conceptualization of power, i.e., power is produced by a range of techniques as diverse as language and measuring. We draw on an evaluation study of a quality improvement collaborative, in which different mental health care organizations were encouraged to improve their care in a structured way. We analyzed how the different actors involved in the collaborative were governed and came to govern themselves differently. Measurement instruments were an example of a dominant mechanism by which actors at different levels of the collaborative were governed: by accounting for improvements, introducing or strengthening a certain way of thinking about health care clients, and changing how clients thought about and acted upon themselves. We argue that the focus on consequences of governing techniques is fruitful for studying governmentality and leads to new research questions in the context of public policy analyses.