Age-cohort analysis of arrest rates

Logistic regressions of age-period-cohort models for city arrest rates are estimated with data from seven U.S. cities for the years 1970–1980 to study the dependence of officially designated criminality in select offense categories on age. A sensitivity analysis is carried out to determine how dependent the findings are on details of model specification.     

Preliminary Study on the Effect of Heated Surfaces Upon Bloodstain Pattern Analysis

Bloodstain pattern analysis (BPA) involves the interpretation of distinct blood patterns found at crime scenes following a violent act. In this paper, we explored for the first time the effects of surface temperatures upon blood impacting a horizontal surface (steel) with its implications in BPA explored. Specific surface temperatures were explored over the range 24–250°C which relate to the four major boiling regimes of liquid media; natural convection, nucleate boiling, transition boiling, and film boiling, where a series of blood drops tests were performed at varying impact velocities. Blood was found to separate into its components at temperatures of 50°C+, displayed as temperature induced blood rings, where a single secondary and a series of further inner rings are exhibited. This consequently led to the development of a new constant expressing the decrease in spread factor (D_s/D_o) at the secondary ring.     

Can the Body Change the Score? Application of Sensory Modulation Principles in the Treatment of Traumatized Adolescents in Residential Settings

There is a compelling need for varied “trauma specific” treatment models for children and adolescents with complex trauma in residential treatment whose affect and behavioral dysregulation disrupts daily living and impedes treatment engagement. This conceptual paper introduces exploratory applications of sensory motor approaches to the treatment of affect and behavioral dysregulation. Sensory Integration, a specialization within occupational therapy (Ayres 1972, 2004) provides knowledge of the sensory motor systems and strategies for sensory modulation that addresses arousal regulation, which underlies this dysregulation. The article describes three clinically supported approaches to the use of sensory modulation in residential treatment sites: use of sensory rooms; use of sensory integration occupational therapists at residential treatment sites; and a trauma psychotherapy that utilizes sensory motor strategies to improve regulation and support trauma processing.     

From reorganizing to reinventing: sixty years and “we still don’t get it”

Sixty years ago the “Brownlow Committee Report” was written by some of the most prominent members of the emerging field of public administration. Its recommendations had serious consequences for the way both our democratic republic and the field of public administration have evolved. In developing principles in which to anchor the recommendations, Luther Gulick, who was both the intellectual and political force behind the committee, contributed to a confusion of the concepts of organizations and the polity and those of management and governance.

Some of the story of how the concepts promoted by Gulick and the Papers on the Science of Administration led to a misconception, which became public administration's living legacy is told in this article. We then discuss the Brownlow Committee Report as something which changed: our very conception of the Constitution; Gulick's rationale for cooperation with Franklin D. Roosevelt; the Report as a misplacement of organizational concepts upon a polity; the dimensions of constitutional change in the report; and the staying power of Gulick's and the Committee's ideas. In conclusion, we contend that if we are to move beyond Gulick's legacy, that the field must learn and act upon the distinctions between organizations and the polity and management and governance.

“The charge that the Brownlow Committee set in train the development of the “imperial presidency” can be advanced only by those who have not read the Committee's report.”

James Fesler, former staff member of the Brownlow Committee Public Administration Review (July/August, 1987)

“How interesting it is historically that we all assumed in the 1930s that all management, especially public management, flowed in a broad, strong stream of value-filled ethical performance. Were we blind or only naive until Nixon came along? Or were we so eager to ‘take politics out of administration’ that we threw the baby out with the bathwater?”

Luther Gulick, member of the Brownlow Committee From Stephen K. Blurnberg, “Seven Decades of Public Administration: A Tribute to Luther Gulick” Public Administration Review (March/April, 1981)

was as old in American politics as it was popular. Yet, before the end of his second term, Roosevelt, with the help of Charles Merriam, Herbert Brownlow, and Luther Gulick, would use such hoary symbolism towards ends that would fundamentally alter our perceptions of the constitutional order, the nature of the presidency, and public administration. How did this come to pass? Barry Karl says that “He (Roosevelt) had continued as President to look at reorganization through the eyes of those who saw in it a means of saving money, balancing the budget, and thereby giving security to the nation's economy.” But Karl adds, “By 1936, this viewpoint had undergone drastic revision.”⁽⁶⁾ The revision in his thinking replaced “saving money” with “managerial control” as the principal aim of reorganization. “Managerial control” by the president would enable him not only to manage New Deal programs but protect them against potential Republican counterattacks, i.e., in short, to strengthen his hand as president.

The impetus for this change apparently came directly from the President's experiences in seeking to administer the government's burgeoning and increasingly chaotic Executive Branch. Roosevelt was a skilled, intuitive, and flexible administrator. But, according to Karl, his experience in seeking to administer the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act with a loose arrangement, quickly dubbed “the five ring circus,” taught the President several lessons. First, “it demonstrated the growing dependence of the President on official staff, other than cabinet members, working exceedingly close to the President's own sphere of daily operation. “⁽⁷⁾ Second, the problems of administering the Act raised questions among the participants themselves as to whether or not the President could “administer and control so complex an operation as federal relief given the inadequate machinery in his possession.”⁽⁸⁾ In other words, the effort was not simply a “five ring circus” because of FDR's famed flexible and informal style, but also because of the inadequacy of the available structures. Karl notes that “despite the problems inherent in the fiscal machinery as it stood, a continued development of governments within governments could only lead to a dangerous chaos over which the President would have no control whatsoever.”⁽⁹⁾ The questions raised suggested to the President that perhaps there was some merit to the position of those urging that emergency agencies be absorbed into the existing framework. This could meet a very practical question by “placing agencies within the purview of budget and accounting procedures already in existence.”⁽¹⁰⁾

According to Gulick, FDR told Brownlow and him at a November 14, 1936, meeting “that, since the election, he had received a great many suggestions that he move for a constitutional convention for the United States” and observed that “with Coughlin and other crackpots about there was no way of keeping such an affair from getting out of hand. But,” he said, “there is more than one way of killing a cat, just as in this job I assigned you.”⁽¹¹⁾ Gulick also quotes FDR as specifically telling the Committee, “We have got to get over the notion that the purpose of reorganization is economy. . . . The reason for reorganization is good management.”⁽¹²⁾ Of course FDR meant management as in “presidential management.”

So it was that President Roosevelt by 1936 was prepared to do something quite beyond “abolishing useless offices” in the words of his 1932 speech--something significantly more constitutional in nature. His other aim was no doubt to strengthen his hand significantly to protect the New Deal programs from Republican counterattack. But whatever his aim, the practical effect was to treat the executive branch as a hierarchical organization headed by a chief executive of corporate or city management conception. In so doing, the delicate constitutional balance among branches was altered. Recommending the reorganization of the executive branch as they did inevitably led to reorganization of the larger whole, the government, which was not an organization, but something qualitatively different.⁽¹³⁾     

The ‘Criminalization’ of Social Security Law: Towards a Punitive Welfare State?

The aim of this article is to place certain recent legislative reforms in the field of social security within the context of the overall development of the welfare state, and examine to what extent a certain trend is discernable: namely, whether eligibility for various welfare benefits is becoming so contingent on socially acceptable behaviour as to make the welfare system less a means for the relief of poverty, its ostensible sole purpose, and more akin to an instrument of education, even punishment, for those who have recourse to social security benefits.