Countering Punitiveness: Understanding Stability in Canada's Imprisonment Rate

Canada's imprisonment rate has not changed appreciably since 1960. This stability contrasts with the increased imprisonment rates experienced by Canada's most obvious comparators—the United States and England and Wales. We examine this divergence and propose several interrelated explanations for Canada's anomalous pattern. While Canada is shown not to be immune to pressure for harsher practices and policies, it has been able to counter or balance these trends with other more moderating forces. In particular, we suggest that Canadians have largely been able to escape several of the wider forces or "risk factors" at the root of higher incarceration in other countries. Further, we suggest that certain protective factors of a historical, cultural, and structural nature can also be identified that have limited the extent to which Canada has adopted the same punitive policies documented in the United States and England and Wales.     

Age Adjustment and Recall Bias in the Analysis of Domestic Violence Data: Methodological Improvements Through the Application of Survival Analysis Methods

This methodological paper presents the utility of survival analysis methods to provide age adjustment in the analysis of domestic violence data. These methods improve the estimation of lifetime probability of domestic violence, improve identification of patterns of first victimization over the lifespan, and provide methods of testing risk factors for first victimization while adjusting for the respondents' age. Most importantly, these methods allow a new investigation of recall bias. Results suggest that lifetime probability of abuse may have been substantially underestimated in previous studies because of problems in recall/disclosure encountered by middle-aged women.     

The age of death: Appraising public opinion of juvenile capital punishment

Despite its original purpose to protect and rehabilitate wayward children, the juvenile system has grown more punitive and has embraced the use of harsher punishments, including execution, for juvenile offenders. Relatively little is known, however, about public attitudes toward the use of capital punishment for juveniles. This research explored the determinants of death penalty opinion, identified the minimum age at which respondents were willing to allow a juvenile to be put to death and examined the willingness of respondents to support an alternative sentence of life without the possibility of parole (LWOP). The results suggested that, while one-quarter of the sample was willing to execute juveniles who were fifteen and under at the time of the crime, there was less support for the execution of juveniles than of adults. In addition, of those who supported the use of the death penalty for juveniles, almost one-half would support LWOP as an alternative to the death penalty.     

'The disenchantment conference': Frustration and humour at the world disarmament conference, 1932

A parody of the work of the Air Commission of the World Disarmament Conference of 1932-34 reveals the cynicism and boredom, as well as the personality, of the officials in the British delegation. In doing so, it demonstrates something of the futility of trying resolve the question of disarmament when bureaucrats and military experts are given free reign.     

Reframe policymaking dysfunction through bipartisan-inclusion leadership

Policy Sciences - Persistent policy failures have been examined in recent years with a focus on the role of political systems. We evaluate the growth of dysfunctional policymaking in the U.S. and...     

Auckland,New Zealand – fair game for central party politics

This paper explores the influence of central party politics in Auckland local government, in New Zealand’s largest city, following the 2010 amalgamation. Political parties have been an accepted and dominant presence in European representative democratic local government, throughout the 20^th century. Not so, however, in New Zealand and Australia, where citizens have ‘flocked to the banner “Keep Politics out of Local Government”. Our analysis of the self-declared party accreditation status of candidates and elected members demonstrates that political affiliation, at least in the main centre Auckland, is on the rise, counter to assumptions that New Zealand local government is largely removed from central politics.     

Workers,state, and development in Brazil: powers of labour,chains of value

This paper examines the significance of landscape and memory in peasant–state relations in Eritrea since independence in the early 1990s. During this period, people were being resettled around cultivable land in the western lowlands as a means of recuperating land and society after prolonged warfare. Projects of statemaking in Eritrea, involving both refugee resettlement and agrarian development, have drawn from a national narrative of lost fertility and deforestation caused by generations of colonial extraction and violence. This paper explores how shared memories of environmental change, an ecological nostalgia, become a means through which people from diverse ethno-linguistic, religious, and regional backgrounds come together to imagine a collective future based in creating livelihood from farm land. However, as people reclaim remembered landscapes and face the challenges of rebuilding communities and livelihoods during a time of tense political and economic change, their ideas of a shared future diverge from state-led projects of nation-building. This article argues that ecological nostalgia legitimises state interventions into rural livelihoods but also provides a means for people to speak and critique the state under conditions of increasing fear and silencing.     

Female repeat offenders negotiating identity

This study examines the process of identity negotiation for Israeli female ex-convicts who were separated for extensive periods of time from their children and eventually lost custody over them. The content analysis of in-depth interviews reveals that these women were able to reconstruct their biographies and retrospectively account for their crimes and drug addiction in terms of the sexual, physical, and economic abuse they had endured and by appeal to higher loyalties, their children who they had to provide for. However, when having to account for their fallings as mothers, all biographical reconstruction, external blame, and accusation collapsed. Looking at themselves through their children's eyes, female offenders were simply unable to renegotiate the imputed identity of incompetent mother. They could neither confront their children's anger nor explain to them why they had abandoned them. Permanently alienated from the center of motherhood, these women were doomed to an existential chaos.