Conclusion: Is competency management a passing fad?

Is competency management a passing fad; is it a catch‐all term to cover diverse national patterns of development or a symptom of wider changes within bureaucracies? As the papers published here suggest, it is more likely to be a passing fad in Europe than the USA. Competency management addresses rather different agendas in different countries and while it does not embrace as diverse a collection of activities as ‘new public management’, there is substantial range in the issues it does address. European experience suggests competency is more likely to be ephemeral and concerned with repackaging rather than bringing something substantially new to personnel management in the upper reaches of civil services. Without taking too rosy a view of US experience, there may be a stronger case for arguing that contemporary competency management approaches there have brought something new to a longer standing debate in public and private management.     

Police deadly force as social control: Jamaica,Argentina, and Brazil

Conclusion When we consider a variety of indicators concerning the disproportionate use of deadly force by police-the ratio of civilians killed to those wounded, the ratio of civilians killed to police killed, and the ratio of police killings to the total homicide rate-the statistics, both official and unofficial, for Jamaica, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro all point toward the conclusion that the police are summarily executing suspects in routine, non-partisan cases. Directed almost exclusively against anonymous, poor people, this abuse of deadly force appears as an extreme form of coercive social control. When the threat of social unrest seems high--because of increased social mobilization together with increased economic misery--the police may summarily execute a large number of suspects, providing that both elite and lower-class opinion tolerates the executions as legitimate. In all these locations, while opinion is split, the police violence is minimally acceptable; indeed, the prevalence of private vigilantism signals its acceptability with the mass of people.Nonetheless, because Jamaica, Argentina, and Brazil are liberal states, it is difficult to view police homicides as legitimate except under the rubric of crime control and under the rule of law. Accordingiy, virtually all police killings are justified to the public as acts of self-defense, typically in the context of shoot-outs. This justification appears to be essential for organizing public opinion even though, for at least some people at all socioeconomic levels, summary executions, like vigilantism, are considered the proper punishment for alleged crimes. Experience in other countries suggests that it is possible for the authorities to limit and even prevent police violence. This effort will not be made in Jamaica, Argentina, or Brazil, however, so long as police use of deadly force constitutes a means of social control acceptable to both elite and mass opinion.B.A. Yale University 1957; LL.B., Harvard University 1960. My thanks are due to Bell Chevigny, Russell Karp, and Lois Whitman; to Americas Watch for sponsoring human rights investigations in Brazil and Jamaica; to the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales in Buenos Aires, Argentina; to Paulo Sergio Pinheiro and to the Nucleo de Estudos da Violência in Sâo Paulo, Brazil; and to Frances Piven and Anne Buckborough for essential research assistance. Thanks to my colleagues from the Law and Society Colloquium at New York University and from the 1988 annual meeting of the Law and Society Association for helpful comments. I am grateful for the generous support of the Filomen D'Agostino and Max E. Greenberg Research Fund of New York University School of Law.     

The goals of community-based corrections: An analysis of state legal codes

The increased reliance on community-based correctional programs has been influenced by rising offender populations and the need for states to lessen prison crowding. The ability of community-based corrections to provide rehabilitation, punishment, reintegration, and counseling services has been an issue among both researchers and administrators. Some researchers have asserted that community-based correctional programs have multiple or competing functions. This study examines 1992 legal codes for all fifty states to determine the legally prescribed goals as mandated by state legislatures. The findings suggest that rehabilitation is the primary legislatively mandated goal, and that most states have multiple purposes for handling offenders in the community. Suggestions for future research in the area of community-based corrections goals are made.