Police Prosecutor and Police Prison: A Note on Summary Justice in Austria

The Austrian Administrative Code, designed to manage relatively minor violations, authorizes an extraordinary court that practices summary justice through a police prosecutor who can impose short sentences to a police prison. This paper concentrates on the use of this remarkable legal institution as a form of holding action that reduces delay between formal charges and final disposition in prosecution under criminal law.     

ANGRY AGGRESSION AMONG THE “TRULY DISADVANTAGED”*

Violent incidents arising out of trivial conflicts and insults have been explained by subcultural theories of violence, but empirical support for those theories has been lacking. Recent cognitively oriented research on anger and aggression is combined in this analysis with W. Wilson's (1987) arguments about the “truly disadvantaged” to revise those theories. An individual-level theory explains the violent incidents, and an aggregate level theory explains the distribution of those incidents among social groups. A subculture of angry aggression arises under conditions of social isolation, when multiple feedback loops result in concentration effects.     

WINNING THE BATTLES AND THE WARS. An evaluation of comprehensive,community-based delinquency prevention programming

This three-year program evaluation investigated the primary prevention aspects of Youth Assistance (YA), a community-based program of the Oakland County Probate Court providing casework and prevention services. The activities studied included parent education sessions, supervised teen recreation, summer camp scholarships, skill building activities, and a one-to-one mentorship program. The goals of the study were to determine how effectively the program succeeded in mobilizing community volunteers, and to examine whether the incidence of neglect and delinquency had been reduced as a result of children and parents participating in one or more of these primary prevention activities. Ethnographical as well as quasi-experimental approaches were used. The following results are highlighted: YA primary prevention services do serve “at risk” populations in the community; overall, participation in the YA activities had positive effects on the participants, such as improved communication skills, increased respect for authority, and more use of positive discipline techniques; 92% of the primary prevention program participants had no subsequent contact with YA or the Court; the program is cost-effective. The study also confirmed that volunteers are an essential part of the success of a community-based prevention program. The study resulted in a number of specific recommendations which will be implemented over the next few years in order to continuously improve the program.     

A TEST OF VARIOUS PERSPECTIVES ON THE INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE*

Past research indicates that adults who were subject to severe physical discipline as children are often violent toward their spouse and children as adults. This association is usually attributed to modeling or the learning of attitudes that legitimate hitting family members. Using four waves of data from a sample of midwestern families, this study found only limited support for these explanations. Analysis showed that the relationship between childhood exposure to harsh parenting and recurrent adult violence toward children or a spouse was mediated by the extent to which parents displayed an antisocial orientation. This pattern of findings is consistent with criminological theories that view criminal and deviant behavior of all sorts as rooted in a general antisocial orientation acquired in childhood largely as a result of ineffective parenting.     

Accountability and Leadership in Twenty‐First Century Whitehall

In July 2013 the UK's coalition government published “The Civil Service Reform Plan – One Year on”, reporting on progress against minister Frances Maude's objectives to shake up the civil service. This followed various reported disagreements between ministers and civil servants over policy implementation, and a research report commissioned by the government from think tank IPPR into lessons from overseas for civil service reform. This trio of short articles reviews the government's proposals from three perspectives: that of the lead author of the IPPR report, a former senior civil servant, and the chair of the House of Commons Public Administration Committee (PASC) which oversees the civil service. The authors take differing views on the proposals, which include introduction of ‘extended ministerial offices’, and greater control by ministers over choosing their civil servants. Should these be seen as useful next steps, worrying developments, and/or large and important enough to merit a Commission on the civil service, as PASC has suggested?     

‘As time goes by’: Explaining the transposition of maritime directives1

The aim of this article is to explain the speed with which Member States transpose EC directives in the maritime sector. By discussing earlier work, the focus is on explanatory factors related to the contents of the directive that needs to be transposed and the context within which national transposition takes place. The authors' expectations have been tested using data across seven Member States and 32 maritime directives. Using survival analysis based on Cox regression, several political‐administrative and legal factors are identified that have an impact on the speed of transposition. The political sensitivity of the directive and the total number of national implementing measures lengthens the duration of transposition, while the degree of specialisation of the directive, the use of package law and experience speed up transposition. The authors also find that the impact of some of these explanatory factors changes over time. This underscores the importance of taking time seriously and to explore time dependency in further theoretical work on explaining policy‐making processes.