Advancing Accountability: Moving Toward Victim Restoration

One of the goals of Pennsylvania's juvenile justice system is the “imposition of accountability” for offenses committed. This White Paper, originally published in 2006, takes the position that true accountability requires juvenile offenders to repair the harm caused by their offending behavior and to understand and acknowledge the wrongfulness of their actions, their responsibility for causing harm, and the impact of the crime on the crime victim and community. It identifies system responsibilities, restorative practices, and outcomes relative to accountability. This White Paper was the result of debate among focus group participants under the auspices of the State Advisory Group.     

The Veterans' Movements and the Early Republican State in Cuba

This article analyses the Cuban Association of Veterans and Patriots of 1923–1924. This was one among many of such organisations in the early republican period in Cuba. Its formation was motivated by a need to put political pressure on the incumbent administration of the nation for political, social and economic demands. Of particular interest is the insight an analysis of this movement gives us into early state formation in the early republican period, and how ties of loyalty from the wars of independence helped shape the politics and political party formation of post‐independence Cuba.     

REINVENTING THE AMERICAN FEDERAL GOVERNMENT: REFORM REDUX OR REAL CHANGE?

Reinventing government in the United States is the most recent of several efforts to reform public organizations and management. A cornerstone of the Clinton Administration's agenda for change, reinvention is proceeding on several levels. One is that of political symbolism and rhetoric: reduce waste, eliminate unnecessary programmes, and improve efficiency. Another level is found in the reinvention laboratories created throughout the federal government. Here the focus is on quality, customer service, streamlining processes and procedures, and eliminating unnecessary rules and regulations. A third level is found in policy and system changes; here the emphasis is on examining broad functions, decentralizing major activities, and providing legislative support for necessary changes.
Implementation of reinvention activities has been decentralized and loosely monitored. Many of the initiatives in the reinvention laboratories are difficult to track and analyse; changes at this level do appear, however, to be extensive and diverse. Broader legislative changes have not been so extensive and the Clinton Administration has been slow to introduce key legislative packages. The role of Congress is unclear.
Despite uneven progress and failure to ask key policy and implementation questions, reinvention is creating significant change in the federal government. The outcome of those changes and the long-term future of reinvention depend on the continued commitment of the members of the public service, as well as much clearer political support and will.     

PROTECTIVE SERVICES FOR THE ELDERLY: Do We Deal Competently with Incompetence?

Protective services are conceptualized as legal safeguards for aged individuals who are incapable of prudent financial or personal self-determination. Despite this protective intent, conservatorship, personal guardianship, and involuntary hospitalization may in fact work against elders' best interests as a result of their limitation of avenues for expressing autonomy and self-worth. In this article, psychological theories of effectance or control are applied to analyzing the effects of protective legal intervention upon older persons. The rationale of parens patriae is examined in terms of its conceptual appropriateness for application to the aged; social and legal sources of bias in protective philosophy are enumerated and discussed. Statutes and procedural conventions governing competency and commitment cases are similarly evaluated, and found from an effectance-theoretical perspective to pose substantial threats to older individuals' psychological and physical well-being. Although recommended statutory and procedural revisions would be helpful in ameliorating these negative effects, they are not sufficient to eradicate them. A conceptual reanalysis not only of the courts' responsibility and role in caring for the infirm, but of social policy in general as it is presently applied to the elderly, is therefore recommended.     

THE IMPACT OF FAMILY STRUCTURE AND QUALITY ON DELINQUENCY: A COMPARATIVE ASSESSMENT OF STRUCTURAL AND FUNCTIONAL FACTORS*

Despite the plethora of studies of broken homes, multivariate studies comparing the effects of the broken home and other theoretically relevant measures of the quality of family life are rare. This study examines the family structure versus family function issue by testing the comparative effects on self-reported delinquency of family structure and jive measures of family function. Five types of delinquency are considered. The data were obtained from a 1980 survey of 152 high school students in a small midwestern town. Item analysis and data reduction techniques were employed to construct six family quality indices and jive delinquency indices. Two types of family structure were examined: presence of both biological parents in the home v. other and single- v. two-parent homes. Multivariate analyses controlled for the effects of age and gender. Bivariate tests of the relationships between broken homes and delinquency were not significant, except for a moderate relationship between broken homes and status offenses. In addition, a bivariate relation between single-parent homes and delinquency was observed for status offenses only. Other forms of family dysfunction all were significantly related to overall delinquency and to status offenses. Moreover, several measures of family quality evidenced significant bivariate relationships to property offenses. violent offenses, and drug offenses. The importance of the broken home was further diminished when the direct effects of broken homes and home quality were examined in multivariate tests. Regression equations showed home quality and gender, rather than family structure, to be the more important determinants of delinquency. The family structure coefficient was significant in only 1 of 10 tests, a regression of broken home and home quality on status offenses. Efforts to expand the analysis to identify specific areas of family dysfunction were unenlightening.     

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.