LEGAL STIGMA FOR MARIJUANA POSSESSION

A field experiment demonstrated that (1) the more serious a person's criminal history involving marijuana, the fewer positive responses were received from potential employers and (2) positions requiring bonding received fewer acceptances than those that made no such specification. No interaction between the combined effects of bonding and criminal record occurred. The present and previous studies suggest that legal stigma from a criminal record may affect employment opportunities in a generalizable manner and that even nonjail penalties have negative repercussions for future employment opportunities. This suggests inherent limitations to achieving a significant reduction of the harmful effects of criminalizarion by reducing the severity of penalties: some indirect costs of legal sanction appear to be inevitable.     

Redundant Regulation: Sanctioning Broker-Dealers

Using data from the SEC Docket this paper examines Securities and Exchange Commission administrative actions involving broker-dealer violations, focusing on disparities in the sanctioning of individual and organizational defendants. The analysis shows that the overall severity of sanctions received by individuals and organizations is similar, but the determinants of sanctions differ substantially. For individual violators, conventional measures of culpability figure prominently into the sanctioning decision. For organizations, operational viability is the principal determinant of sanction. This reliance upon measures of viability renders much of the SEC's control of organizations redundant: the most severe sanctions are reserved for firms that are already operationally or financially moribund. This pattern of regulatory redundancy is interpreted as an alternative accommodation to the difficulties of sanctioning organizations.     

CYNICAL STREETS: NEIGHBORHOOD SOCIAL PROCESSES AND PERCEPTIONS OF CRIMINAL INJUSTICE*

Studies have found that African Americans are more likely to perceive racial biases in the criminal justice system than are those from other racial groups. There is a limited understanding of how neighborhood social processes affect variation in these perceptions. This study formulates a series of hypotheses focused on whether perceived racial biases in the criminal justice system or perceptions of injustice vary as a function of levels of moral and legal cynicism as well as of adverse police–citizen encounters. These hypotheses are tested with multilevel regression models applied to data from a sample of 689 African Americans located in 39 neighborhoods. Findings from the regression models indicate that the positive association between structural disadvantage and perceptions of injustice is accounted for by moral and legal cynicism. Furthermore, adverse police encounters significantly increase perceptions of injustice; controlling for these encounters reduces the strength of the association between cynicism and injustice perceptions. Finally, the findings reveal that cynicism intensifies the association between adverse police encounters and perceptions of criminal injustice. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for research regarding perceived biases in the criminal justice system and neighborhood social processes.     

Family Ties: The Political Genealogy of Shining Path's Comrade Norah

Family was central to the political life of Augusta La Torre (or Comrade Norah), the second‐in‐command of the Peruvian Communist Party‐Shining Path (PCP‐SL). La Torre was the daughter of a Communist Party militant and the granddaughter of a prominent provincial political figure. She was also the wife of Shining Path founder Abimael Guzmán. La Torre's familial history demonstrates the importance of parental and grandparental contributions to Senderistas' political formation, and suggests that parents and children were sometimes united in their support for the Shining Path. La Torre's family ties, however, have also led numerous observers to question her revolutionary credentials.