Squaring the circle: domestic welfare,migrants rights,and human rights

Domestic welfare reform and the management of international migration in Britain have been described by David Cameron as ‘two sides of the same coin’. Heightened conditions and sanctions for the benefit-dependent domestic population, both in and out of work, are being harnessed as a means of promoting labour market change and reducing demand for low-skilled migrants – often EU workers, whose own access to benefit is being curtailed. Arguments about the post-national expansion of rights and associated cosmopolitan debate implicitly measure migrants rights against a normative model of citizenship as the yardstick of full social inclusion, but with little attention to how far citizenship itself falls short of this promise. Taking Britain as a case study, this paper considers how the concept of civic stratification can further advance analysis of the link between domestic welfare, migration and human rights in a context of intensifying controls for both migrants and citizens.     

JUVENILE WAIVER AS A MECHANISM OF SOCIAL STRATIFICATION: A FOCUS ON HUMAN CAPITAL*

The historic transformations of the criminal justice system must be justified and interpreted through the effects on criminals (Maruna and Immarigeon, 2011). The push for harsher sentencing policies for juvenile offenders specifically through the use of juvenile waiver to criminal court is one such policy that is not well understood in terms of its effects on offenders, especially in terms of broader outcomes beyond recidivism. We use data from the Pathways to Desistance Study, which consists of a sample of adolescent offenders followed for 7 years postadjudication, to investigate the effect juvenile waiver has on human capital acquisition and yield among 557 adolescents from Maricopa County, Arizona. By using various matching specifications, our findings demonstrate that juveniles transferred to adult court experience no deleterious effects on human capital in terms of educational acquisition compared with similar youth retained in the juvenile system, yet they still earn considerably less income 7 years postadjudication. These results suggest that an important and unintended collateral consequence of juvenile waiver is an increase in social stratification potentially through labeling and labor market discrimination.     

论强关系的凸显与当前我国社会分层

自改革以来，强关系在资源和地位获得过程中的作用日前凸显，加剧了资源封闭，促进了精英的再生，增强了阶层结构刚性，阻碍了低层阶层的向上流动，并在很大程度上影响了经济、社会的协调发展。这是由于政府法律、制度、政策不够完善，相关职能部门的执行能力弱化以及功能异化，导致人们有可能或不得不转而依赖强关系。因此，我们必须在加强现代社会建设和培育现代社会资本的同时，努力完善制度政策，加强相关部门职能建设，加快制度结构调整，形成政府、市场与以弱关系为基础的社会之间多元并存、相互制约、相互弥补的制度结构，为促进合理的社会分层机制与社会阶层结构创造条件。     

论犯罪化过程的阶层化构造——从社会危害性到法益侵害性的进阶

犯罪化的过程即犯罪范围的选择,事关刑事立法的正当性,而这首先与犯罪的本质特征相关。社会危害性和法益侵害性,分别属于立法层面和司法层面的犯罪概念的本质特征,各有其特征、作用。犯罪化的过程事实上是从社会危害性到法益侵害性的过程,将这一过程进行阶层化构建,有利于强化刑事立法的正当性：第一阶层检验某一行为是否具有社会危害性,即是否存在严重损害、深度冒犯和高度危险（风险）。第二阶层检验将该行为犯罪化是否具有公众认同基础。第三阶层检验将其犯罪化是否符合效益原则。     

我国社会阶层分化下的边缘人口内涵界定与特征探析

边缘人口是社会阶层结构分化中出现的特殊群体,他们的产生源于体制或制度的缺陷,对社会资源占有的非公平性容易使其成为社会的不稳定因素。边缘人口的构成是一个动态的范畴,就现阶段而言,我国的边缘人口主要包括农民工、失地农民、流动儿童和低保边缘人口,他们具有面临权利贫困困境、生活质量低层次、依靠自身力量很难改变所处的边缘地位、“相对剥夺感”真实而强烈、不等同于弱势群体和贫困人口的基本特征。     

Using Booking Data to Model Drug User Arrest Rates: A Preliminary to Estimating the Prevalence of Chronic Drug Use

Public policy is often concerned with the size and characteristics of special populations that are difficult to reach in household surveys. Chronic drug users, who often live outside conventional households, provide the illustration motivating this paper. An alternative to household surveys is to question chronic drug users where they congregate—jails, treatment programs, and shelters, for example. Using such opportunistic data for prevalence estimation raises difficult problems for statistical inference: Study subjects who arrive at the collection points cannot be deemed a random sample of the general population. However, if we could estimate the rates at which chronic drug users arrive at the collection points, then we could use those estimates to weight the sample to represent the population. This paper presents a modified Poisson mixture model used to estimate the stochastic process that accounts for how chronic drug users get arrested. It uses that model to estimate arrest rates for 38 counties using up to sixteen quarters of data from the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring survey.

The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Robbed: Inequality in U.S. Criminal Victimization, 1974–2000

This paper investigates inequality in criminal victimization in the United States over the past quarter century. By analyzing data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, it shows that the crime drop since the early 1970s has benefited upper-income households much more than the poor, so that criminal victimization has become more concentrated among the poor (particularly in the area of nonstranger violence). The paper then decomposes this trend statistically in order to investigate factors that may explain it. That analysis finds that demographic changes in each quintile explain a significant share of the growing concentration of criminal victimization among the poor.     

“Systemically Significant States”: Tracing the G20’s Membership Category as a New Logic of Stratification in the International System

ABSTRACT

The international system has long distinguished classes of states, such as “great powers”. Recently, “systemically significant states” has emerged as a new designation within global financial governance. This designation was introduced by the G7 to justify the new membership composition of the G20, and has since been adopted in policy documents and recommendations by other institutions, such as the IMF. This article traces the origins of the term “systemically significant” and argues that, although nominally meant to be a term of inclusion and a signal of the pluralisation of governance authority, it instead serves as a new category of stratification rooted in a neoliberal governmentality of risk.     

Sex Offender Community Notification and Community Stratification

Community notification laws have been passed by the federal government and legislature of every state. At the very least, these laws require local law enforcement officials to publicize the personal and residential information of known sex offenders. Although researchers and other social commentators have begun to assess the effects of community notification on targeted sex offenders and on criminal justice practices and practitioners, the potential consequences of the policy for different types of communities have received only scant attention. Using sex offender registry and US Census data for two states (Nebraska and Oklahoma), we examine the relationship between community characteristics and the residential patterns of sex offenders. Findings from mapping and regression analyses suggest a greater concentration of sex offenders in disadvantaged communities than in more affluent communities. To the extent that community notification allows residents of more affluent communities to mobilize resources in order to remove identified sex offenders, it may increase the geographical clustering of these offenders in areas already facing a greater risk and having fewer resources to manage the problem. Implications of findings in terms of “concentrated disadvantage” are discussed.     

当前中国私营企业劳动关系研究

国际金融危机凸显了中国私营企业劳动关系的本质——雇佣。但在社会主义市场经济条件下,中国私营企业劳动关系却又呈现出不同于资本主义剥削的社会主义特色。正是这种具有社会主义特色的雇佣,决定了中国私营企业劳动关系的现状是复杂的、不平衡的、然而又不是不可调和的。危机影响下,私营企业劳动关系矛盾正在加剧,构建私营企业和谐劳动关系对劳方、资方及政府三方来说,都是迫在眉睫之事。