GENDER AND SOUTHERN PUNISHMENT AFTER THE CIVIL WAR*

Recent scholarship raises two questions about the historical relationship between gender and official responses to criminality. First, to what extent has the formal social control of women changed in the past two centuries? Second, to what extent can changes in the presence of women within the criminal justice system be traced to the same factors that account for the changing presence of men? To address these questions, I focus on women incarcerated for felonies in a southern state (Georgia) between 1870 and 1940. Along with a comparable sample of male offenders, this population forms the basis of a time-series analysis that compares, and seeks to account for, trends in admission rates. The analysis yields little evidence that women disappeared from formal system of punishment. Instead, there were gender similarities in punishment trends and in explanations for those trends. Concluding the paper is a discussion of its implications for further research on gender differences in punishment.     

Leadership and the public sector: an internationally comparative benchmarking analysis

In this article the concept of leadership is explored. Particular attention is given to examining the dynamics of individual and team leadership, as it is postulated that the impact of top people and top teams is crucial to the running of today's organizations. The results of an extensive survey conducted across the departments of the Civil Service of a European country government will be presented. These results will be benchmarked against the results of a worldwide survey of business leaders, spanning 12 countries and the responses of top managers in National Health Service (HNS) Trusts, UK. Emphasis will be given to the necessity of conducting effective team leadership through high quality dialogue and through cabinet responsibility in order to successfully lead and maintain the organization on its agreed path. Finally, approaches to the development of leadership for those already in top positions and for those entering into such challenging positions, will be discussed.     

Job Approval and Senate Election Outcomes In the United States

A growing body of congressional scholarship investigates variation in the incumbent electoral advantage that depends on factors such as competence, political skill, and ideological extremity. This article contributes to this line of work by providing analysis of the relationship between senators' home‐state approval ratings and their electoral fortunes using newly available data from the Job Approval Ratings (JAR) collection. The findings show that senatorial job approval affects retirement, quality‐candidate emergence, campaign spending, and outcomes. The myriad indirect effects suggest that strategic political actors are central to the process by which incumbents are held accountable for the reputations they develop in their constituencies.     

ECONOMIC THREAT AND RACIAL DISPARITIES IN INCARCERATION: THE CASE OF POSTBELLUM GEORGIA

Economic threat figures prominently in recent explanations of lethal social control directed against blacks after the Civil War. As the position of whites and blacks became more similar, racial antagonisms intensified and found expression in efforts to suppress and intimidate blacks through lynchings and executions. This paper applies the economic threat hypothesis to the exercise of nonlethal social control in Georgia between 1874 and 1936. Time series analysis indicates that declines in racial inequality slightly increased racial disparities in incarceration. More noticeably, they decreased the black male incarceration rate and increased its white counterpart. The paper concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and empirical implications of the results.     

REVIEWS

Past or Future Crimes: Deservedness and Dangerousness in the Sentencing of Criminals by Andrew von Hirsch.
Confronting Crime: An American Challenge by Elliot Currie.
The Great American Crime Myth by Kevin N. Wright. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985.     

Down to Earth: Race and Substance in the Andes

Abstract — The racial identities of Indians and mestizos in a highland Peruvian region are closely associated with their relative positions to the earth. The agricultural Indians are closer to the earth and the town-dwelling mestizos are further from it. This distinction is maintained and reinforced through the use of material objects in everyday life, especially earthen objects (adobe bricks, clay pots, dirt roads) and to earth-touching objects (shoes, floors). This distinction accords with the relativity and fluidity of racial identities of individuals. The origins of this notion are traced to political and religious ideology in colonial and post-colonial Peru.     

Greening Industry Without Enforcement? An Assessment of the World Bank's Pollution Regulation Model for Developing Countries

The best comparative and overview source now available for knowledge about pollution regulation in developing countries is the 2000 World Bank policy research report called Greening Industry . The World Bank finds that there is a new model for pollution regulation in lower- and middle-level income countries that is an alternative to "traditional" command and control regulation. The new model stresses flexible norms and nonstate pressures on regulated enterprises coming from communities and markets. This article presents an investigation into this new model. It finds that the prevalence of weak law enforcement may undermine the new model's potential to control pollution in developing countries. It also contends that social and market pressures only occur under certain circumstances often not found in lower- and middle-level income countries. Therefore, the article concludes that developing countries require smart mixes of various regulatory instruments appropriate in the given state and nonstate regulatory capacities, instead of contrasting state and nonstate regulation.     

TESTING THE TRANSITIVITY OF REPORTED RISK PERCEPTIONS: EVIDENCE OF COHERENT ARBITRARINESS

An often implicit assumption of perceptual deterrence tests is that the elicited values pertaining to arrest risk reflect stable underlying beliefs. But researchers in other disciplines have found that reported expectations are highly susceptible to exogenous factors (e.g., anchors and question ordering), indicating that such values are somewhat arbitrary responses to probabilistic questions. At the same time, reported expectations are coherent within persons, such that respondents rank order them rationally. For deterrence, then, absolute values reported on arrest risks are likely not stable but individuals still rank order specific crimes in meaningful ways. We examine the interpretability of reported arrest risk for three possibilities: 1) Reported risks are stable probabilistic values; 2) reported risks are arbitrary and uninformative for deterrence research; or 3) reported risks display “coherent arbitrariness” with unstable values between individuals but stable rank ordering of crimes within individuals. Through the use of three random experiments of college students, our results indicate that elicited risk perceptions are arbitrary in that they are influenced by the presentation of anchors and question ordering. Nevertheless, the rank ordering of crimes within and across conditions is unaffected by the presentation of anchors, suggesting that reported risks are locally coherent within persons.