Matrimonial Breakdown and the Legal Process: The Limitations of No-Fault Divorce

This paper sets out the factors underlying the policy of no-fault divorce, and questions the attainability of its aims. From the writer's empirical research into the operation of English divorce law, it is argued that legal reforms are not of themselves enough to change the attitudes of divorcing parties to the breakdown of their marriage. Reform should take into account the dynamics of the process of breakdown, in particular, the likelihood that the parties will have different attitudes to the breakdown of the relationship.     

THE IMPACT OF ECONOMIC CONDITIONS ON ROBBERY AND PROPERTY CRIME: THE ROLE OF CONSUMER SENTIMENT*

Despite its long history in criminology, research on the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and rates of common crime remains limited. That is in part because many analysts doubt that any systematic relationship exists and in part because of disagreement with regard to the validity of the indicators typically used to measure economic conditions. We argue in this article that good theoretical reasons exist to expect macroeconomic effects on crime rates, but many theories imply that collective perceptions of economic hardship should have effects on crime that are independent of those of more “objective” economic indicators. To evaluate this argument, we examine the relationships between the Index of Consumer Sentiment and regional robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft rates in the United States between 1970 and 2003, which was a period of large swings in both consumer sentiment and instrumental crime. Controlling for several factors thought to influence temporal variation in crime rates, we find that consumer sentiment had significant effects on robbery and property crime rates over the period that were largely independent of the effects of unemployment and economic growth. We also find that consumer sentiment accounted for a sizable fraction of the crime decline during the 1990s and yields reasonably accurate predictions of changes in the four offenses in 2004 and in two of the four offenses in 2005. We conclude that the effects of collective economic perceptions should become an important focus of future research on crime trends.     

Out with the Old？

Some threads of an intricate cultural web spun by 5,000 years of love, family, and marriage hold strong today. Others are starting to weaken.     

IN LINE FOR PROSPERITY

A look at the ongoing "5 points in 1 line " coastline development project in Liaoning, Northeast China LIAONING Province in Northeast China was once the country's industrial engine. Within a decade of New China's founding, it was churning out everything from coal and steel to fighter jets. But the engine spluttered out in the mid-1990s, when many of Liaoning's state-owned     

Aftercare Reality and Reform

Aftercare is widely acknowledged to be a weak link in the juvenile justice continuum. This report describes Pennsylvania's recent efforts to envision and articulate a comprehensive aftercare system, to assess current local variations in aftercare practice in light of that vision, and to bring about the state‐ and county‐level reforms that will make comprehensive aftercare a reality statewide.     

Commune Democracy and Gorbachev's Reforms

The process of democratic restructuring in the Soviet Union since 1986 can be understood in terms of a revival of the democratic ideal of a participatory and self-managing society. The concept of commune democracy espoused by Marx and Lenin, however, is problematical, not least because of ambiguities in its relationship to the state, the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dirigisme of the party. Gorbachev's reforms are developing within the context of an attempt to regenerate commune democracy, and some of the hesitancies of the reform process can be attributed to the contradictions in the theory. The scope for a reconstituted civil society is limited by the inclusive tendencies of traditional commune democracy. The reform process may ultimately be able to exploit the ambiguities in commune democracy sufficiently to allow the development of a law-governed state.     

SOCIAL CLASS AND DELINQUENT BEHAVIOR

The apparent refutation by self-report studies of social class-related theories of juvenile delinquency is critically reviewed. Improper conceptualization and operationalization of “social class” are considered to be primary causes of inconsistent findings. A more appropriate “underclasslearning class” model of stratification is suggested. Although no empirical support is found for a relationship between self-reported delinquent behavior and socioeconomic status of father's occupation. indications are that social class is somewhat more related to self-reported delinquency using the underclass/earning class model. However, there is no reason to expect social class to emerge as a major correlate of delinquent behavior no matter how it is measured.