Mandibular ramus height as an indicator of human infant age

There were two goals to be achieved from the analysis of 53 skeletonized infants from the Southwest Collection at the National Museum of Natural History. The first objective was to determine whether this infant sample could be aged based on a mandibular measurement. The second was to determine which dimension of the mandible, if any, most accurately predicts infant age within a six-month range. Seven osteometric measurements were applied to each mandible. Statistical analysis determined that the individuals in the Smithsonian's Southwest Collection that were under two-years-old could be accurately aged to within six months. Out of these seven measurements the most accurate age-at-death estimates were generated based on the maximum height of the mandibular ramus. This finding can potentially aid investigators in determining the age-at-death of infants.     

Preventing Prevention

Preventing climate change and damage from natural disasters typically requires policies with up‐front costs that promise a flow of benefits over time. Why has obtaining such policies in a competitive electoral democracy proved so intractable? We develop a formal model of electoral accountability in this context, in which politicians have private information about their motivations. The model shows why fully rational voters, though certain that incumbents spend less on disaster prevention than is good for them, reelect incumbents at very high rates. In addition, in such equilibria, voters would punish incumbents who spent more on disaster prevention. This equilibrium is consistent with (and implies) some of the major empirical regularities observed in the literature on voting and disaster prevention. We discuss some implications of our analysis for advancing public debates about disaster and climate change mitigation.     

The lack of experimental research in criminology—evidence from Criminology and Justice Quarterly

Journal of Experimental Criminology - Despite experiments being termed the “gold standard,” criminology has been slow to adopt experimentation as a methodology. The goal of this...     

Mapping silent citizenship: how democratic theory hears citizens' silence and why it matters

Democratic theory hears silent citizenship as disengagement or disempowerment. Normatively, silent citizenship evokes the specter of civic passivity – of democratic citizens variably characterized by apathy, disaffection, selfishness, or a lack of political knowledge. Empirically, silent citizenship is linked to deficits of democracy – including voter turnout rates, the quality of political representation, and overall government responsiveness. One problem with these conclusions, however, is that we lack any systematic conceptualization of the range of different attitudes democratic citizens might hold in silence. This article seeks to fill in this conceptual gap by mapping the range of possible motivations for citizens to remain silent in developed liberal democratic systems. The key to doing so, I argue, is to distinguish between two measures of democratic citizenship: empowerment and communication. Separating these two measures reveals an entire spectrum of motivations for silence, which I organize into five distinct degrees of silent citizenship.     

Sentencing practices under the Arkansas sentencing guideline structure

In the last thirty years, research on differential sentencing practices became one of the dominant thrusts of academic interest in criminal justice studies. This was mainly because several reforms had been added to the various sentencing structures in the United States, one of which was the adoption of guideline based sentencing strategies. Although several studies were conducted regarding the impact of these guidelines, these were provided by a limited number of sources. For instance, the majority of this research was conducted on data collected by the United States Sentencing Commission and the Pennsylvania Sentencing Commission. This study attempted to further the discussion on sentencing practices by examining data from a new source, the Arkansas Office of Courts. This study first examined the judge's decision to imprison and jail the defendant using logistic regression, and second, for those individuals incarcerated, OLS and negative binomial regression analyses were conducted to explore potential disparities in the length of prison and jail sentences. The results of this analysis in Arkansas illustrated striking comparisons to studies that were conducted on other guideline structures. The legally relevant variables were the greatest predictors of whether or not an offender was sentenced to prison. Extralegal variables, on the other hand, had negligible effects. Implications for policy are also discussed.