Child Abuse,Neglect, and Dependency Mediation Pilot Project

The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA) established a goal of one year from removal to permanence for all children taken into protective custody. When the Family Court of Mecklenburg County (Charlotte), N.C., opened its doors in 1999, more than half of the children in the protective custody of the Department of Social Services had been in custody for 12 months or more. Innovative approaches were needed to provide children in Mecklenburg County with a safe and permanent home in a more timely manner. The Child Abuse, Neglect, and Dependency Mediation Pilot Project was one approach selected by the Mecklenburg County Family Court to help achieve ASFA's goal of one year to permanence. This article details the court's two‐year journey to make dependency mediation a reality.     

The Many Beginnings of Philip Aneurin Thomas

This volume pays tribute to the many achievements of Philip Aneurin Thomas. When asked to write a biographical account of his life, I was struck by how many beginnings Phil had been involved in. Early experiences in the United States and East Africa made him part of an important group of scholars who brought new ways of thinking about law and the law school to the United Kingdom in the 1970s. He was there at the beginning of the socio-legal movement, making a major contribution to the multi-disciplinary research environment that socio-legal scholars now take for granted, and instrumental in establishing a number of institutions, including this journal. Finally, his personal and academic trajectory cannot be fully understood without an understanding of the importance of his being Welsh and a committed socialist.     

Mais Médicos: Cuba's Medical Internationalism Programme in Brazil

In 2014, at the request of the Brazilian government and under the sponsorship of PAHO, the Cuban government sent 11,400 doctors to work in underserved areas. This article examines the origins and development of this programme, Mais Médicos. The significance of this programme is explored, as well as what it illustrates about south‐south cooperation as a whole.     

LEGAL CYNICISM,COLLECTIVE EFFICACY,AND THE ECOLOGY OF ARREST*

Ethnographic evidence reveals that many crimes in poor minority neighborhoods evade criminal justice sanctioning, thus leading to a negative association between the proportion of minority residents in a neighborhood and the arrest rate. To explain this finding, we extend recent theoretical explications of the concept of legal cynicism. Legal cynicism refers to a cultural orientation in which the law and the agents of its enforcement are viewed as illegitimate, unresponsive, and ill equipped to ensure public safety. Crime might flourish in neighborhoods characterized by legal cynicism because individuals who view the law as illegitimate are less likely to comply with it; yet because of legal cynicism, these crimes might go unreported and therefore unsanctioned. This study draws on data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods to test the importance of legal cynicism for understanding geographic variation in the probability of arrest. We find that, in neighborhoods characterized by high levels of legal cynicism, crimes are much less likely to lead to an arrest than in neighborhoods where citizens view the police more favorably. Findings also reveal that residents of highly cynical neighborhoods are less likely to engage in collective efficacy and that collective efficacy mediates the association between legal cynicism and the probability of arrest.     

RESIDENTIAL CHANGE AS A TURNING POINT IN THE LIFE COURSE OF CRIME: DESISTANCE OR TEMPORARY CESSATION?*

Many former prisoners return home to the same residential environment, with the same criminal opportunities and criminal peers, where they resided before incarceration. If the path to desistance from crime largely requires knifing off from past situations and establishing a new set of routine activities, then returning to one's old environment and routines may drastically limit an ex‐prisoner's already dismal chances of desisting from crime. This study tests these ideas by examining how forced residential migration caused by Hurricane Katrina affected the likelihood of reincarceration among a sample of ex‐prisoners originally from New Orleans, LA. Property damage from the hurricane induced some ex‐prisoners who otherwise would have moved back to their former neighborhoods to move to new neighborhoods. Findings from an instrumental variables survival analysis reveal that those parolees who moved to a new parish following release were substantially less likely to be reincarcerated during the first 3 years after release than those ex‐offenders who moved back to the parish where they were originally convicted. Moreover, at no point in the 3‐year time period was the hazard of reincarceration greater for those parolees who moved than for those who returned to the same parish.     

The Concept of Subsidiarity and the Debate on European Cooperation: Pitfalls and Possibilities1

This article explores whether and how subsidiarity can serve as an instructive aid to discussion and clarification of the current and future structure and functioning of the European Community. W e argue that the debate over the principle of subsidiarity may be undermined or cut off prematurely in at least three ways. First, if the debate is conducted with a view to arriving at a fairly fixed, detailed and instrumental understanding of the allocation of responsibilities and tasks between different levels of government. Second, if the principle of subsidiarity is mainly used as an instrument of political expediency and opportunism to further organizational or self interests. Third, if the principle is linked to and interpreted as an endorsement and justification of existing (entrenched) political and social doctrines. In a concluding last section we consider how the principle of subsidiarity may contribute to constructive discussion.     

Religiosity and Delinquency

This article explores the contradictory findings that have characterized the relationship between religion and delinquency. The data are based on interviews with 600 adolescents attending public school in the Atlanta, Georgia area. A wide variety of religious and delinquency measures were used, allowing a complete examination of the relationship. The existence of a weak to moderate negative zero-order relationship was verified. Religious salience, belief in the power of personal prayer, and orthodoxy were found to be related more strongly to delinquency than the most often-used variable, church attendance. Most important, in spite of the relatively strong zero-order relationship between a number of religiosity and delinquency measures, within a multivariate context religion's contribution as an independent variable was not statistically significant. Possible explanations for this finding are discussed.     

Cuba's Medical Internationalism: Development and Rationale

Since 1960, Cuba has been involved in providing medical support to the developing world, and at present has some 40,000 personnel in 74 countries – more than all of the G-8 countries combined. This article traces the evolution from its first (1960) mission to the current stage. The article also analyses various explanations for this extraordinary mixture of diplomacy and humanitarianism.