Taking Your Academic Expertise Public: Lessons Learned Responding to the 11 September Crisis

The advantage of academic life is that society allows us to spend years reading things no one else reads, writing articles and books almost no one else reads, and traveling to places no one else travels to. But in times of crisis, when the totally unexpected becomes reality, society understandably expects that we serve our communities with knowledge, explanation, insights, and policy alternatives. The days, weeks, and months following the attacks of 11 September were such an occasion and many academics experienced sudden demands for public commentary and analysis. As international studies scholars, we have insights and knowledge that our communities require and desire, most notably in times of crisis. By responding to the best of our abilities, we are able to return something to society and help people understand more clearly the world in which we live. In this essay, we discuss how we handled this challenge in the wake of 11 September and the lessons we have learned through that process.     

Explaining San Diego’s Decline in Illegal Street‐Racing Casualties

Illegal street racing has become a pressing problem for cities and counties throughout the United States. In response to the problem, San Diego was the first city to pass a spectator ordinance, making attendance at an illegal street race an arrestable offense. Shortly after the spectator ordinance went into effect, a forfeiture ordinance was passed. This provides for forfeiture of vehicles used in illegal speed contests. A recent drop in illegal street‐racing casualties has been attributed to both ordinances, but other explanations are plausible, including an increase in media attention to the problem, a highly publicized prosecution for murder stemming from two illegal street racing fatalities, an increase in the number of sanctioned racing events, and enforcement of certain provisions in California’s Vehicle Code. Even in the face of these possible alternative explanations, several regression analyses revealed that the forfeiture ordinance had the most pronounced effect on street‐racing casualties.     

I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Help: How Can Public Health Perspectives Improve Outreach in Child Maltreatment Prevention Programs?

State and local governments are designing programs to prevent child maltreatment at an increasing rate. A relatively small portion of families offered these programs go on to engage in and complete services. Workers in a child maltreatment prevention program implemented across 21 sites in 1 state documented outreach efforts in logs maintained by program evaluators. Additionally, evaluators interviewed 23 outreach workers and supervisors who were developing and refining outreach strategies in this prevention program. Data from logs and responses to interviews speak to challenges in navigating prevention outreach with families to achieve engagement and buy-in, particularly when “cold-calling” about screened-out reports of child maltreatment. This paper presents a summary of barriers and facilitators of family engagement in outreach for prevention services, guidance from the public health literature on improving outreach strategies for at-risk populations, and suggested practice, policy, and research implications.     

Service Contact and Delivery of a Shelter Outreach Project

An experimental outreach program offered shelter-based support groups or phone counseling to battered women in the criminal and civil courts. The outreach project attempted to contact 1,895 eligible women drawn from the court dockets. Nearly 50% of these women could not be reached, another third refused services, and about a fifth of the women accepted either the shelter-based counseling or phone counseling. However, only 19% (n = 71) of those who accepted service (or less than 4% of the total eligible women) actually participated in the service. The women refused services primarily because they did not feel they needed them; they accepted service mainly to get help with their emotions. The women who participated in the shelter-based counseling tended to be of a higher social economic status than women who generally contacted the courts. The main problems for the women in phone counseling was recurring abuse from their partners and getting help for their children. The findings may suggest different types of battered women that warrant different strategies to reach them. The outreach efforts might be further developed, as well, to more actively recruit and engage women in general.     

街头诈骗案件的分析与控制对策

街头诈骗犯罪的防控是一项社会系统工程。应根据街头诈骗犯罪案件的规律和特点,通过社区宣传教育、强化公安基础工作等措施强化当前街头诈骗犯罪的预防工作。     

Encounters with panaceas: reading flyers and posters on ‘traditional’ healing – a reply to Kadenge and Ndlovu (2012)

Kadenge and Ndlovu [2012. “Encounters with Panaceas: Reading Flyers and Posters on ‘Traditional’ Healing in and Around Johannesburg's Central Business District.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 30 (3): 461–482] evaluated flyers and posters that advertise traditional and alternative healing methods which they regard as viable alternatives to biomedicine that may well transmit potent knowledge and facilitate new ways of thinking. They furthermore view these flyers and posters as a demonstration of the advertisers’ ‘adaptability’ and ‘sensitivity’ towards their customers (480–481). This article is a rebuttal of the aforementioned position towards, and judgement of these advertisers. Reading these flyers and posters from a misleading advertising and Kantian perspective reveals not a demonstration of adaptability, but rather dishonesty and exploitation; rather than transmitting ancient knowledge, they reinforce superstition and fear. These advertisements, often misleadingly clad as African, do not facilitate new ways of thinking, but merely facilitate deception.     

THE CODE OF THE STREET AND INMATE VIOLENCE: INVESTIGATING THE SALIENCE OF IMPORTED BELIEF SYSTEMS

Scholars have long argued that inmate behaviors stem in part from cultural belief systems that they “import” with them into incarcerative settings. Even so, few empirical assessments have tested this argument directly. Drawing on theoretical accounts of one such set of beliefs—the code of the street—and on importation theory, we hypothesize that individuals who adhere more strongly to the street code will be more likely, once incarcerated, to engage in violent behavior and that this effect will be amplified by such incarceration experiences as disciplinary sanctions and gang involvement, as well as the lack of educational programming, religious programming, and family support. We test these hypotheses using unique data that include measures of the street code belief system and incarceration experiences. The results support the argument that the code of the street belief system affects inmate violence and that the effect is more pronounced among inmates who lack family support, experience disciplinary sanctions, and are gang involved. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Street justice: a theoretical paradigm

Three theoretical perspectives examine the role of justice as a means of informal social control and as a reactionary process to dynamics of social strain and subcultural demands. This theoretical analysis is then applied to concepts of justice, including retributive, distributive, restorative, and procedural. The derived street justice paradigm incorporates these various forms of justice as they are linked with cultural imperatives associated with street culture and street crime. The linking of these concepts provides a clearer understanding of the motives and means of exacting justice in a state of heightened relative strain that is pronounced by a preference for revenge and violence. Implications for policy, future study, and theoretical expansion are discussed with particular emphasis on the application of the paradigm to non‐street crime and to policies directed toward involving community members in the justice process.     

多发性街面犯罪研究

以抢劫、抢夺、盗窃、扒窃、拎包、诈骗等为内容的多发性街面犯罪,近年来呈现高发势头,特别是犯罪主体与波及区域扩大以及危害程度加深,令人触目惊心。导致街面犯罪高发的因素是多方面的,既有城乡、贫富差距等一些本源性问题,也有法律制约和警务管理等外在因素。因此,重视民生,完善制度,发展经济,充分就业,健全社会保障,是根本的解决办法,而健全法律体系,强化警务防范与打击力度,则可以压缩街面犯罪空间,促使不法分子放弃犯罪并走向合法道路。