Exploring the “Lost and Found” of Justice Theory and Research

Scientific interest in the nature of how people think about justice and fairness began approximately 70 years ago with Stouffer’s classic study on the American soldier. Since then there have been numerous theoretical frameworks and thousands of research studies conducted on what people perceive as fair and the consequences of making a fairness judgment. The goal of this article is to dig through the “lost and found” box of justice research in an attempt to re-examine where we have been, issues and ideas we may have forgotten, and to gain insight on directions we may want to go in the future. The key rediscovery of this review is that perspective matters. Specifically, how people interpret fairness depends critically on whether they are viewing a situation in terms of their material, social, or moral needs and goals. The implications of adopting a contingent theory of how people reason about fairness are discussed.

Breadth and Intensity of Youth Activity Involvement as Contexts for Positive Development

Research has linked youth activity involvement to positive development. However, past studies have confounded at least two separable dimensions of involvement: breadth (number of activities) and intensity (participation frequency). Theory and the limited available evidence suggest that these dimensions may make independent contributions to development. Based on self-reports from 7430 high school students, this study assessed whether breadth and intensity dimensions were related to each other, to a typical aggregate measure of involvement, and to various indicators of positive development. Breadth and intensity were moderately interrelated and, in combination, they explained the majority of the variance in the typical involvement measure. Both dimensions were positively related to each development index. When examined simultaneously, only breadth had a unique relation with each developmental index. Further, evidence of nonlinear effects was found. Findings were consistent across age levels. Implications for measurement of involvement and interpretations of the extant research are discussed.

Human trafficking revisited: legal,enforcement and ethnographic narratives on sex trafficking to Western Europe

In this paper we focus on the ways ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ are imagined in the narratives on women who have been trafficked to West Europe for sexual exploitation. Three specific domains: international/national law, local law enforcement and ethnographic academic perspective are particularly important as they strongly influence political reaction to trafficking and describe the phenomenon from the perspective of the individuals concerned. In our analysis, an explanation of the diversity of the perceptions in these three domains is provided.     

License plate reader (LPR) police patrols in crime hot spots: an experimental evaluation in two adjacent jurisdictions

Objectives  

This randomized controlled experiment tests whether license plate readers (LPR) deter crime generally, and automobile crime more specifically in crime hot spots. The limited intervention tested here reflects one current likely use of LPR at the time of this publication.     

Score-based likelihood ratios for handwriting evidence

Score-based approaches for computing forensic likelihood ratios are becoming more prevalent in the forensic literature. When two items of evidential value are entangled via a scorefunction, several nuances arise when attempting to model the score behavior under the competing source-level propositions. Specific assumptions must be made in order to appropriately model the numerator and denominator probability distributions. This process is fairly straightforward for the numerator of the score-based likelihood ratio, entailing the generation of a database of scores obtained by pairing items of evidence from the same source. However, this process presents ambiguities for the denominator database generation - in particular, how best to generate a database of scores between two items of different sources. Many alternatives have appeared in the literature, three of which we will consider in detail. They differ in their approach to generating denominator databases, by pairing (1) the item of known source with randomly selected items from a relevant database; (2) the item of unknown source with randomly generated items from a relevant database; or (3) two randomly generated items. When the two items differ in type, perhaps one having higher information content, these three alternatives can produce very different denominator databases. While each of these alternatives has appeared in the literature, the decision of how to generate the denominator database is often made without calling attention to the subjective nature of this process. In this paper, we compare each of the three methods (and the resulting score-based likelihood ratios), which can be thought of as three distinct interpretations of the denominator proposition. Our goal in performing these comparisons is to illustrate the effect that subtle modifications of these propositions can have on inferences drawn from the evidence evaluation procedure. The study was performed using a data set composed of cursive writing samples from over 400 writers. We found that, when provided with the same two items of evidence, the three methods often would lead to differing conclusions (with rates of disagreement ranging from 0.005 to 0.48). Rates of misleading evidence and Tippet plots are both used to characterize the range of behavior for the methods over varying sized questioned documents. The appendix shows that the three score-based likelihood ratios are theoretically very different not only from each other, but also from the likelihood ratio, and as a consequence each display drastically different behavior.     

Negative democracy and the distortion of american character

The managerial role in our society has done more to erode the development of American character than assist it. For public administration, a more appropriate role is based in the idea of governance. Governance puts the development of character as the first priority of public administration. Adopting this role does not necessarily require structural reform in public institutions or a dismantling of the market, but instead calls for a commitment to a changed disposition among public officials regarding the purposes of government and the potentialities of human relationship. The administrative role must move away from instrumental conceptions of management that focus our minds upon discrete decisions and achievements, to one that embraces life as an ongoing process of maturation in democratic community.

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture on earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building, no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no art; not letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Thomas Hobbes

The Leviathan

To many great civilizations past and present, the unity of nature is a fact of immediate experience that needs no special pleading. In the West, however, much of the history of science is concerned with separating and reducing this unity into ever smaller and smaller fragments out of which nature has somehow to be glued back together.

Mae-Wan Ho

We have two kinds of politics in this country...the politics of greed and the politics of guilt. We have to create the politics of convergence.

Sen. William Bradley D-New Jersey April, 1992