Fewer politicians and smaller assemblies: how party elites rationalise reducing the number of seats in a legislature – lessons from Canada

Scholars are unable to rationalise the number of elected representatives in legislative assemblies. This study offers some insights into the political arithmetic by examining the rare event of reducing seats in a legislature. It is hypothesised that a policy of cutting electoral districts occurs during a search for cost efficiencies and a burst of populism. Interviews with party elites involved with seven seat reduction events in Canadian provinces establishes that the primary reason for the policy is its symbolic value. The message of fewer politicians sets an example for belt-tightening across government that will assist the executive branch with its austerity agenda. In these situations, the final number of members of a legislature matters little to a cabinet and most legislators compared with the broader symbolism of a smaller legislative branch.     

What can we do to reduce disciplinary school exclusion? A systematic review and meta-analysis

Journal of Experimental Criminology - To systematically review and quantitatively synthesise the evidence for the impact of different types of school-based interventions on the reduction of school...     

A Forensic Exploration of the Microsoft Windows 10 Timeline

The Microsoft Windows operating system continues to dominate the desktop computing market. With such high levels of usage comes an inferred likelihood of digital forensic practitioners encountering this platform during their investigations. As part of any forensic examination of a digital device, operating system artifacts, which support the identification and understanding of how a user has behaved on their system provide a potential source of evidence. Now, following Microsoft's April 2018 build 1803 release with its incorporated “Timeline” feature, the potential for identifying and tracking user activity has increased. This work provides a timely examination of the Windows 10 Timeline feature demonstrating the ability to recover activity‐based content from within its stored database log files. Examination results and underpinning experimental methodologies are offered, demonstrating the ability to recover activity tile and process information in conjunction with the Windows Timeline. Further, an SQL query has been provided to support the interpretation of data stored within the ActivitiesCache.db .     

Recidivism in a Sample of Serious Adolescent Offenders

Objectives

A broad research literature in criminology documents key aspects of how criminal offending develops and changes over the life span. We contribute to this literature by showcasing methods that are useful for studying medium-term patterns of subsequent criminal justice system involvement among a sample of serious adolescent offenders making the transition to early adulthood.

Methods

Our approach relies on 7 years of post-enrollment follow-up from the Pathways to Desistance Study. Each person in the study was adjudicated delinquent for or convicted of one or more relatively serious offenses during adolescence. Their local jurisdiction juvenile court petition records and their adult FBI arrest records were systematically searched.

Results

We estimate in-sample 7 year recidivism rates in the 75–80 % range. Our analysis also provides recidivism rate estimates among different demographic groups within the sample. Extrapolated long-term recidivism rates are estimated to be on the order of 79–89 %.

Conclusions

The Pathways data suggest that recidivism rates of serious adolescent offenders are high and quite comparable to the rates estimated on other samples of serious offenders in the extant literature. Our analysis also reveals a pattern of heightened recidivism risk during the earliest months and years of the follow-up period followed by a steep decline.

     

Structural Constraints,Risky Lifestyles,and Repeat Victimization

Objectives

Research indicates that victims who make changes to their risky behavioral routines are better able to avoid being victimized again in the future. Nevertheless, some victims’ abilities to change their behaviors may be limited by what Hindelang et al. in Victims of personal crime: an empirical foundation for a theory of personal victimization. Ballinger, Cambridge (1978) referred to as “structural constraints.” To assess this issue, we determine: (1) whether victims who reside in communities characterized by structural constraints (e.g., concentrated disadvantage) are more likely to continue engaging in risky behaviors (e.g., offending, illicit drug use, and getting drunk) after being victimized; and (2) whether victims who continue to engage in risky lifestyles have an increased likelihood of repeat victimization.

Methods

Ten waves of data (spanning nearly 7 years) from the Pathways to Desistance Study are used, and multilevel models are estimated to examine changes to risky lifestyles and repeat victimization among a subsample of victims.

Results

Findings indicate that community-level structural constraints impose limits on the changes that victims make to their risky lifestyles, and that these changes influence repeat victimization.

Conclusions

We conclude that, in the context of repeat victimization, structural constraints are both real and consequential, and that future theory and research should continue to explore how context shapes and influences victims’ behavioral routines.

     

A quasi-experimental test of the effects of criminal justice involvement on later mental health

Objectives

While many criminological theories posit causal hypotheses, many studies fail to use methods that adequately address the three criteria of causality. This is particularly important when assessing the impact of criminal justice involvement on later outcomes. Due to practical and ethical concerns, it is challenging to randomize criminal sanctions, so quasi-experimental methods such as propensity score matching are often used to approximate a randomized design. Based on longitudinal data from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, the current study used propensity score matching to investigate the extent to which convictions and/or incarcerations in the first two decades of life were related to adverse mental health during middle adulthood.

Methods

Propensity scores were utilized to match those with and without criminal justice involvement on a wide range of risk factors for offending.

Results

The results indicated that there were no significant differences in mental health between those involved in the criminal justice system and those without such involvement.

Conclusions

The results did not detect a relationship between justice system involvement and later mental health suggesting that the consequences of criminal justice involvement may only be limited to certain domains.