Piercing the surface: A mechanical analysis of stabbing with household tools

Estimating the applied power during a stabbing incident, or estimating the minimal force necessary to penetrate the body with a certain weapon is a challenging task in forensic practice. A thorough forensic evaluation of stabbing forces needs objective numerical experimental data. Stabbing tests of 12 different weapons – including knives, a pair of scissors, a fork, screwdrivers, a rasp, a corkscrew, and a utility knife blade – were performed with a Mecmesin MultiTest-dV material tester on pork loin and ballistic gel to estimate the stabbing forces and dynamics. Penetration force (F_p) and maximal force (F_max) were recorded, and the registered force curves were analyzed. F_max was 159.8–212.07 Newton (N), 30.56–30.58 N, 168.9–185.48 N for various knives; 171.39–190.43 N for the pair of scissors, 233.6 N for the fork; 532.65–562.65 N, 370.31–367.19 N and 314.51–432.89 N for various screwdrivers, 44.14–56.62 N for utility knife during pork loin stabbing. The butter knife, corkscrew and rasp were not able to penetrate the pork loin, and the curved fork bent during stabbing. The results prove that weapon characteristics greatly influence the force necessary for penetration. Maximal stabbing force depends mostly on tip sharpness, and the force sharply decreases after penetration occurs, which indicates that edge sharpness is not as important as tip characteristics during stabbing perpendicular to skin surface. The penetration force during stabbing with a pair of scissors is comparable to the penetration force of knives. Stabbing with screwdrivers generally needs larger force than average knives but depends greatly on screwdriver size.     

The Role of National Human Rights Institutions in the Implementation of the UN Guiding Principles

National human rights institutions (NHRIs) are key domestic mechanisms for promotion and protection of human rights. The institutions' broad mandate, competencies, and special status between state and nonstate actors on the one hand, and special status between the national and international levels on the other hand enable them to engage effectively in the field of business and human rights. Since 2009, NHRIs have been engaging with the international human rights system in order to increase understanding and raise awareness of their role in addressing business and human rights issues. As a result, they have contributed to the development of the UN “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework and obtained an evolving role within all pillars of the framework and in its implementation. This paper presents how these domestic institutions, bridging the national and international levels, fit into the UN legal regime for corporate responsibility for human rights and what contribution they make to the implementation of the UN Guiding Principles.     

Labor markets and incarceration: The China shock to American punishment

Studies have failed to show a positive effect of unemployment on incarceration despite reasons to expect such a relationship. We note that prior estimates have been muddied by the absence of substate data, a focus on prisons rather than on jails, limited measures of unemployment, and the fact that the health of the labor market is endogenous to incarceration. We instrument for local exposure to the rise of Chinese exports (“the China Shock”) to estimate the effect of job loss on American incarceration. Marshaling a new data set of prisoners and jail inmates by race at the commuting zone level, we show that negative shocks to local labor markets led to significant increases in total incarceration rates for both Blacks and Whites. The effect seems to be driven by increased prison rather than jail populations. This estimate is invisible to ordinary least squares, which may help explain null results reported by past work. Counterfactual exercises suggest that the effect of job loss was punitively consequential. Had employment gains from the 1990s been preserved into the 2000s, the U.S. incarceration rate would have grown significantly less than it did.     

Subsistence production and extended reproduction. A contribution to the discussion about modes of production

The present paper deals with what is considered to be the basic contradiction within the capitalist mode of production: the separation of subsistence production from social production. In the following some theses concerning how this separation works for accumulation and the way it is reproduced together with capital are presented. The central argument is that the separation is fundamentally necessary for accumulation. Within our present capitalist world economy housewives on the one hand and peasants (both men and women) on the other are the main subsistence producers. In different concrete forms both reproduce labour power for capital but are not compensated by capital. The way in which these two groups are integrated into the capitalist mode of production is through their marginalization, i.e. they form the consolidated mass of the industrial reserve army. As such they are continuously reproduced together with the process of extended reproduction of capital. They are two basic forms of capitalist relations of production.