Anticipating organized and transnational crime

This paper seeks to identify ways in which governments and lawenforcement agencies might enhance the effectiveness of their efforts toanticipate organized crime. It starts by defining what is meant byanticipation, and differentiating it from the much more difficult task ofprediction. The analysis then identifies some of the methods and modelsthat are generally accepted as part of the existing knowledge base onorganized crime and highlights how these can be used to anticipate futuredevelopments and to develop warnings about how criminal organizationsmight evolve and behave in the future. The knowledge base includespolitical, economic, sociological, strategic, and composite models and showshow they provide a foundation for anticipating future developments inorganized crime. The models are either models about the kind ofenvironment in which organized crime flourishes or models about the waysin which organized crime behaves. What we do, in effect, is to identifyand elucidate `models' in ways that provide propositions about the kindsof developments, innovations or changes we might see in organized crime(both domestic and transnational) in the future. Underlying indicators provide warning about future manifestations of organized crime. Anticipating these manifestations provides a basis for appropriatepreventive, defensive or mitigating strategies. Finally, the article providessome examples of specific techniques of information collection andintelligence analysis that might assist in this task of anticipation.     

Cardiac conducting tissue. A simplified technique for examination of the SA and AV nodes

We describe a modified method for examination of the atrioventricular and sinoatrial nodes that displays the major elements of the cardiac conducting system, yet is not time-consuming for the technician. We examined 31 cases in three categories: cases with previous cardiac history, sudden deaths from no known cause, and cases where death was sudden and accidental. All cases showed histologic abnormalities in the cardiac tissue. We contend that our method would permit such examination to be routinely used in the pathology laboratory.     

The abrogation of subjectivity in the psychiatric courtroom: Toward a psychoanalytic semiotic analysis

Conclusion We examined, on a cursory and suggestive level, the role of desire in the psychiatric courtroom. Employing selected conceptualizations from Lacan's semiosis, we demonstrated how this desire is essentially quashed and silenced by the clinicolegal community. Put another way, given the opinion inBoggs, we see how the essential being and way of knowing for diverse mentally ill citizens, are repressed by the psycholegal establishment. Indeed, followingBoggs, the only knowledge claims embraced by the court were those articulations uttered by experts, and others similarly situated, who spoke the jargon of psychiatric justice. Not only does this decision making deny and invalidate the disparate voices of psychiatric consumers, it limits prospects for developing new and alternative sign meanings in law that more fully represent the experiences of the differently abled and other disenfranchised groups. Thus, regrettably,Boggs symbolizes not only the loss of agency for disordered subjects in the clinicolegal system but, more generally, the law's failure to promote emancipatory justice.     

Deterrence and social control: Rethinking the relationship

Until recent years, the operationalization of the deterrence concept has been largely legal in nature. That is, deterrence was defined in terms of certainty and celerity of arrest and severity of sanction. Contemporary research has called this narrow viewpoint into question, pointing out that legal factors are only part of the range of social-control mechanisms. One of the more important of these reformulations was found to have an analytical flaw which could have easily affected the results (Meier and Johnson, 1977). The present study corrects the analysis problems of this previous study and upholds the findings that, for a sample of adult Texas residents, extralegal factors are of more import for determining marijuana use than traditional legal deterrence. Since both legal and extralegal factors are products of the social context, deterrence may be appropriately incorporated into contemporary social- control theories.     

Sir John Bradbury and the Reparations Commission, 1920-25

This article looks at a neglected episode during the work of the Reparations Commission of 1920-25 leading up to the Dawes Plan of 1924, when the British delegate to the Commission, Sir John Bradbury, drew up a plan to reschedule German reparation payments in an attempt to take the venom out of the debate over these payments. It takes as its documentary basis the previously unpublished papers of Sir John in his role as Britain's representative on the Reparations Commission from 1920 to 1925. The article concludes that Bradbury's plan had the potential to defuse at least some of the problems encountered in the political and economic results of the reparations policy and that it made a significant contribution to the thinking that emerged in the Dawes Plan.     

Coetzee’s stones: Dusklands and the nonhuman witness

Bringing together theoretical writing on objects, testimony, and trauma to develop the category of the “nonhuman witness,” this essay considers the narrative, ethical, and ecological work performed by peripheral objects in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974). Coetzee’s insistent object catalogues acquire narrative agency and provide material for a counter-narrative parody of first-personal reports of violence in Dusklands. Such collections of nonhuman witnesses further disclose the longer temporality of ecological violence that extends beyond the text’s represented and imagined casualties. Linking the paired novellas of Dusklands, which concern 1970s America and 1760s South Africa, the essay finds in Coetzee’s strange early work a durable ethical contribution to South African literature precisely for its attention to nonhuman claimants and environments.