Sentencing commissions: Lessons for future reformers

1978–1982, Director, Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission, St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S.A.; B.A., University of Oklahoma 1964; M.A., University of Oklahoma 1966.     

Minimizing the Effects of Temporal Aggregation on Event Data Analysis

Event data remains one of the best means for evaluating reciprocity and triangularity in international politics. One difficulty with using this type of data has been its susceptibility to the statistical effects of temporal aggregation. This article examines the concept of the natural interval in event data analysis, specifies how a user-selected aggregation interval affects measured stimulus–response behavior, and proposes a method for calculating a minimum threshold for the natural interval. The article then examines how such a minimum threshold reduces the impact of misspecification on perceived relationships for the Amazon River Basin and the Jordan River Basin.     

THE CIA'S SECRET POWERS

The secret powers conferred by the National Security Act of 1947 have been used over the years to train, arms, and develop the terrorist enemies, such as al-Qaida, that are now the chief justification for those powers in the public mind. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, CIA programs have shifted power from moderate to Islamist Muslim groups, contributed to vastly increased heroin production in the area, and helped consolidate the ISI as Pakistan's drug-financed intelligence agency a “state within a state” that has promoted both al-Qaida and terrorism in other areas such as Kashmir. The secret powers, by preventing rational discussion, have spawned disastrous policy decisions that even the CIA itself has opposed, notably the decision to supply Stingers to the Afghan rebels. The most conspicuous deep political consequence of these policies in Pakistan and Afghanistan has been the indirect training and arming of cadres who eventually participated in the specific events of 9/11: the culmination of a series of terrorist attacks against the territorial United States for which the CIA itself had already, in 1998, secretly admitted partial responsibility. This responsibility is reflected in the present inability of the U.S. government and media to report honestly on what actually happened in the 9/11 attacks.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Cultural Criminology: An Invitation</Emphasis>… to What?

Since the mid 1990s, a strand of criminology emerged that is concerned with the co-constitution of crime and culture under the general rubric of ‘cultural criminology’. In the titles Cultural Criminology Unleashed and Cultural Criminology: An Invitation, criminologists spearheading this brand of criminology make claims for its originality and its status as a subversive alternative to conventional criminological approaches to studies of crime and deviance. The basis for the ‘new’ cultural criminology is its ostensible ability to account for the culture and subcultures of crime, the criminalization of cultural and subcultural activities, and the politics of criminalization. This paper offers a comparison of cultural criminology to 1960s and 1970s labeling theory to assess whether or not cultural criminology has developed a grammar of critique capable of resolving fundamental contradictions that haunt critical criminology and contesting contemporary administrative criminology. Points of comparison are made through ontological categories of power and criminal identity and a consideration of the epistemological categories of the respective bodies of literature.