Should children visit their parents in prison?

This preliminary note reports clinical interviews at the Oregon State Penitentiary with 22 children, ages 5 through 15, visiting their imprisoned fathers. A majority of these children were found to be socially isolated. All the children placed a high value on the prison visits, but also demonstrated a variety of conflicted feelings about their incarcerated father. These findings highlight the need for more data on children and families of imprisoned parents and for consistent and well-conceptualized policies of family visitation.     

Regime change and the convergence of democratic value orientations through socialization. Evidence from reunited Germany

Theories of socialization and political culture claim that public ideas about how a democracy should be shaped will only change slowly after regime changes. Thus, citizens’ value orientations should converge after a replacement of generations and through institutional learning. Pertaining to the development and convergence of individual conceptions of democracy or democratic value orientations, these assumptions have not yet been tested empirically. This article therefore provides an empirical test, drawing on the case of German reunification as a natural experiment. I analyse the development of democratic value orientations based on data from the sixth wave of the European Social Survey using both factor and cohort analysis. The findings provide strong support for the assumptions of socialization theories: More than 20 years after reunification, people who grew up in East Germany still show a higher affiliation to a socialist model of democracy than people socialized in the West, who instead show higher support for a liberal model. However, differences in democratic value orientations are converging for citizens less than 30 years of age across Germany, the first generation socialized entirely in a democratic political system.     

Child abuse and conviction of sexual crimes

A survey of 112 postreleased convicted felons was conducted concerning ways they were punished as children. A self-reported history of child-abusive punishment was compared with prison histories and police records. A significant relationship between self-reported abusive punishment and the sexual offender was found. Punishment data on a random sample of 376 noninstitutionalized Oregon male adults were compared to the felons. The latter group reported significantly higher rate of abusive childhood experiences than did the comparison group.     

Europäisierungsdruck und Parteiendifferenz in den deutschen Bundesländern

Based on the 2008 Rüffert judgment by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) which dealt with wage-related compliance requirements laid out in several German federal state procurement laws (Tariftreueerfordernis) the convergence induced by Europeanization through law is being investigated. Contrary to the initial presumption of unilinear adjustment, three different responses are identifiable. Conservative-liberal governments abolish the respective regulations. Conservative governments which are subject to influence from associations representing small- and medium-sized business enterprises absorb the adjudication by a rapid adjustment consistent with the European requirements. Coalitions led by the Social Democratic Party tend to a policy expansion influenced by smaller coalition partners. They codify more rather than less social and environmental standards in policy amendments. The case study points out the persistence of political party differences in the face of Europeanization which is dependent on a sufficient degree of programmatic incongruence as well as on the plurality of European law.     

Civil commitment by conservatorship: the workings of California's law

This article summarizes the conservatorship provisions of the California Civil Commitment Statute, the Lanterman-Petris-Short (LPS) Act and reviews the major findings from previous studies. By studying the hospital records of eighty-five gravely disabled patients affected by LPS, the authors address issues raised by these reports. The results indicate that the law's provisions work unevenly. Patients with acute and current disability received conservatorships more frequently than those who had been disabled in the past. There is some evidence that the process is used to confine threatening patients and does not function equally well for all diagnostic groups.     

Socio-political change and crime

This article offers an epistimological approach to criminological inquiry that draws on political and economic perspectives to create a theoretical context for hate crimes and xenophobia in contemporary Germany. The paper concludes that criminology as a discipline may be inadequate to grasp the complexities of criminal interactions and that criminology must draw heavily on the perspectives of other disciplines. Ultimately, it may be more important to illicit ideas rather than attempt to know the truth. The author wishes to note that this paper draws on an earlier published work and was constructed post facto from his comments and presentation at the conference.