Triad-related homicides in Hong Kong

This study provides an overview of the first systematic research on triad-related homicide in a Chinese society. In the 10-year period from 1989 to 1998, 11.9% of all homicides or a total of 95 triad-related homicides were extracted from the Hong Kong Homicide Monitoring Database. These events resulted in 124 victims (13.2 percent of all victims) and involved 526 known offenders. Triad homicides were classified into various types based on different combinations of circumstances, motivation, and outcomes including unintended outcomes.     

The Gender Gap among Teen Survey Respondents: Why are Boys more Likely to Report a Gun in the Home than Girls?

It is a reliable though unexplained feature of national surveys that include items on gun ownership that wives are less likely to report a gun in the home than husbands. In this article we extend the inquiry regarding this gender gap in reporting of household guns to include adolescent children (age 12–17 years). The California Health Interview Survey of 2001, the largest-ever state survey of its kind, includes over 4000 marital households in which both a parent and adolescent child were interviewed and asked whether there was a gun in the home. There is little “age gap” in reporting—California teens are almost as likely to say that there is a gun as are their parents—but there is a gender gap among both the teens and their parents. We also find a large gap in personal experience with guns—boys are three times as likely to report hunting or shooting with a family member than girls. This difference in experience fully accounts for the gender gap in reporting. The relevance of these findings for the interpretation of survey data is clear. Whether there is a gun reported in a home depends to a remarkable extent on which member of the household is asked the question. Hence, the method of selection of respondent(s) from within a household will affect estimates of the patterns and prevalence of gun ownership, and, potentially, the accuracy of case–control studies that use self-report information about guns in the home.

The Darfur Commission as a Model for Future Responses to Crisis Situations

The various special procedures so far set up by the Commissionon Human Rights (CHR) to investigate serious violations of humanrights are very different from what can be achieved by a commissionof inquiry. There is almost no comparison in terms of the scaleof resources, the expertise mobilized, the amount of detailcontained in the Commission's Report, the precision and weightof the legal analysis, and the consequent power of the finalproduct to galvanize both public opinion and inter-governmentalaction. The Darfur Commission may also serve to expand the bridgebeing built between the Commission of Human Rights and the SecurityCouncil (SC). The practice of appointing commissions of inquiryhas immense potential in that it can provide the type of specialistinput necessary if the human rights machinery and the SC areto form part of a continuum. Commissions of inquiry reportsmay contribute to promoting transparency and accountabilityin the work of the SC, since the Council, when determining whetheror not to take action in a human rights situation, has to respondto a carefully documented and a well argued analytical report.Finally, the establishment of such commissions to evaluate whetheror not a situation warrants referral to the ICC provides anappropriate filtering mechanism before the Council takes a decision.     

Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Models with Beta-Distributed Dependent Variables

Research in political science is often concerned with modelingdependent variables that are proportions. Proportions are relevantin a wide variety of substantive areas, including elections,the bureaucracy, and interest groups. Yet because most researchersrely upon an approach, OLS, that does not recognize key aspectsof proportions, the conclusions we reach from normal modelsmay not provide the best understanding of phenomena of interestin these areas. In this paper, I use Monte Carlo simulationsto show that maximum likelihood estimation of these data usingthe beta distribution may provide more accurate and more preciseresults. I then present empirical analyses illustrating someof these differences.     

Temperance and the origins of the new penology

This article discusses the nineteenth century origins of indeterminate sentencing and discretionary penology. Was this idea an offshoot of contemporary positivist criminology, emanating from Europe, or was it a separate development in the United States? It is argued that although European influences were felt, the “new penology” was clearly an American product. However, it did not derive either from new insights in social science, or from simple reforming zeal. Rather, the new penology is seen here as an outgrowth of the contemporaneous temperance movement, which in turn resulted from social and ethnic conflict. The article suggests that the temperance movement was central to the evolution of discretionary penology, and crucial in keeping these ideas alive until the new positivism made itself felt. In summary, the temperance movement is seen as a vital, through understudied, force in the evolution of the twentieth century justice system in the United States.     

Deadlines,routines, and change

Routines, the habitual and predictable behavior patterns of an organization, play central roles in both maintaining organizational performance and in adapting such performance to changing conditions. Deadlines interact with routines in important ways in influencing the course of organizational adaptation. This paper examines the role of routines and deadlines in influencing change in a regulatory program. It describes the adaptation of routines in the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) water pollution and pesticide programs in response to pressures and deadlines imposed by Congress, the courts, and the White House. The programs analyzed offer contrasting glimpses of the effects of routines on organizational change. Routines may be collective and shared by the members of an organization or unique to the specific groups or subgroups within it. When the organization primarily has widely-shared routines, few options will be perceived; consequently, collective routines tend to blunt the impact of pressures for change. On the other hand, routines that become fragmented, diverse, and individual in the face of repeated external pressures may facilitate change.