Correctional destabilization and jail violence: The consequences of prison depopulation legislation

Purpose

This study explored the effects of prison depopulation on local jail violence through a general systems perspective – where an abrupt shift in the processing of offenders had the potential to create ripple effects through other organizations – of the criminal justice system.

Methods

In 2011, California passed the Criminal Justice Realignment legislation aimed to reduce prison population by making low-level felony offenders ineligible for state incarceration and diverting those already in state prison for the included offenses from state to county-level community supervision once paroled. This study incorporated bivariate and negative binomial regression analyses to model officially-recorded county jail panel data to estimate the effects of state prison depopulation on California county jails.

Results

Findings demonstrated support for the general systems framework as there was a significant decrease in jail utility in the bivariate analysis and a significant increase in jail violence in the multivariate analysis associated with passage of California’s prison depopulation legislation.

Conclusions

The results supported the notion of an interconnected criminal justice system. Policy implications include the consequences of increased violence on jail operations, the potential for a cadre of habitual offenders, and generalizing these findings to the community.     

On the consequences of ignoring genetic influences in criminological research

Purpose

Many criminological scholars explore the social causes of crime while giving little consideration to the possibility that genetic factors underlie the observed associations. Indeed, the standard social science method (SSSM) assumes genetic influences do not confound the association between X and Y. Yet, a nascent stream of evidence has questioned the validity of this approach by revealing many criminological variables are at least partially affected by genetic influences. As a result, a substantial proportion of the literature may be misspecified due to uncontrolled genetic factors. No effort has been made to directly estimate the extent to which genetic confounding has biased the associations presented in criminological studies.

Methods

The present study seeks to address this issue by drawing on simulated datasets.

Results/Conclusions

Results suggest genetic confounding may account for a negligible portion of the relationship between X and Y when their correlation (r_yx) is larger than the correlation between genetic factors and Y (i.e., r_yx > r_yg). Genetic confounding appears to be much more problematic when the correlation between X and Y is in the moderate-to-small range (e.g., r_yx = .20) and the genetic effect is in the moderate-to-large range (e.g., r_yg ≥ .30).     

Expanding the Conversation: Multiplier Effects From a Deliberative Field Experiment

Do formal deliberative events influence larger patterns of political discussion and public opinion? Critics argue that only a tiny number of people can participate in any given gathering and that deliberation may not remedy—and may in fact exacerbate—inequalities. We assess these criticisms with an experimental design merging a formal deliberative session with data on participants’ social networks. We conducted a field experiment in which randomly selected constituents attended an online deliberative session with their U.S. Senator. We find that attending the deliberative session dramatically increased interpersonal political discussion on topics relating to the event. Importantly, after an extensive series of moderation checks, we find that no participant/nodal characteristics, or dyadic/network characteristics, conditioned these effects; this provides reassurance that observed, positive spillovers are not limited to certain portions of the citizenry. The results of our study suggest that even relatively small-scale deliberative encounters can have a broader effect in the mass public, and that these events are equal-opportunity multipliers.     

Book reviews

Toward a Global Civil Society edited by M. Walzer. Providence, RI and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995. Pp.341. £31. ISBN 1 57181 05 4

Politics UK by Bill Jones, Andrew Gray, Dennis Kavanagh, Michael Moran, Philip Norton and Anthony Seldon. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall, 1998 (3rd edn). £16.50 (paperback). Pp.xiv + 571; index. ISBN 0132696061

Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought by Jennifer Tolbert Roberts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Pp.426. £38 (hardback); £13.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 691 05697 8 and 02919 9

The Rise and Fall of State Socialism: Industrial Society and the Socialist State by David Lane. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. Pp.viii + 233; index. £45 (hardback); £12.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 74560 742 X and 743 8

Government and Politics in Africa by William Tordoff. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. Pp.xxii + 326; notes and references; index. £45 (hardback); £14.99 (paperback). ISBN 0 333 69473 2 and 69474 0

Democracy in Zambia: Challenges for the Third Republic edited by Owen Sichone and Bornwell C. Chikulo. Harare: SAPES Books, 1996. Pp.237; index. NP (paperback). ISBN 1 77905 047 X

Mapping the Women's Movement edited by Monica Threlfall. London: Verso/New Left Review, 1996. Pp.vii + 312; index. £44.95 (hardback); £13.95 (paperback). ISBN 1 85984 984 9 and 120 1

Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy by Robert Putnam. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993. Pp.xiii + 258. £11.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 691037388

Culture and Politics by Oliver H. Woshinsky. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1995. Pp.xv + 205; index. £15. ISBNO 13 311366 3

Political Ideas in Modern Britain by Rodney Barker. London: Routledge, 1997 (2nd edn). Pp.352; index; bibliography. £45 (hardback); £14.99 (paperback). ISBN 0 415 161665 and 07121 6     

Authoritarian Elections in Egypt: Formal Institutions and Informal Mechanisms of Rule

In recent years, electoral processes in non-democratic settings have been analysed either within the framework of transitology or disregarded entirely by scholars of comparative politics. Analysing the Egyptian case, this article proposes a different conceptual framework. The interaction between electoral institutions and authoritarian dynamics is conceptualized in terms of the relationship between formal and informal institutions. In the Egyptian authoritarian political system, informal mechanisms of neopatrimonial rule not only take precedence over formalized rules and procedures but integrate formal electoral institutions into the authoritarian system. Drawing on empirical evidence from legislative elections under the rule of President Husni Mubarak, this article identifies three main functions for electoral processes in non-democratic settings: (1) Electoral contests serve to periodically renew channels of clientelist inclusion, drawing both voters and deputies into networks of patronage culminating at the top of the political system. (2) Formal inclusion of parts of the opposition into the electoral arena enhances the range of means available to the ruling elite in order to control these actors. (3) Pitted against each other in electoral contests, individual members of the ruling elite's lower echelons are effectively controlled and tied to the informal structures of rule. Thus, the principal traits of the Egyptian neopatrimonial regime remain unchanged, with formal electoral processes subverted by informal institutions of authoritarian rule to an extent as to fulfil distinctly authoritarian functions.     

Considerations on inequality and politics in Thailand

In Thailand, economic inequality has long been a fact of life. It is a “general inequality of condition” that can be seen to influence all aspects of social, economic, and political life. Yet inequality has not always been associated with political activism. Following the 2006 military coup, however, there has been a deliberate and politicized linking of inequality and politics. The article explores a complex of political events – elections, coup, constitution, and the political ascent of Thaksin Shinawatra – that has given rise to a relatively recent politicization of economic and political inequalities, now invoked in street politics – a rhetoric developed amongst pro-Thaksin red shirts that challenged the status quo and generates conflict over the nature of electoral democracy.     

Islamist militancy in Sierra Leone

This article examines the contemporary Islamic trends in post-conflict Sierra Leone (through 2009) against the background of international concerns that the country might become a haven for religiously-inspired violence. It argues that there is some evidence that prolonged economic impoverishment and foreign religious influences, especially from Saudi Arabia and Iran, have led to a reinvigoration of Islam in post-war Sierra Leone. Though this reinvigoration has resulted in the visibility of more purist strains of the religion, there are no indications that the Sierra Leonean Muslim groups are actively participating in any worldwide jihadist network or will engage in large-scale religiously-inspired extremism and violence. The recent history of the country indicates that attempts to mobilise religious sympathies for political ends in Sierra Leone have been short-lived and largely unsuccessful