“Darker than any prison,hotter than any human flame”: Punishment,choice, and culpability in A Clockwork Orange

Contemporary textbooks in criminal justice use A Clockwork Orange to illustrate issues of correctional and sentencing practices. This article challenges criminal justice faculty and students to use the film to explore the political and social realities of punishment, in particular the examination of the moral question of “voluntariness” and the implications for “treatment” as a mechanism of social control. This paper explores the moral questions of state sponsored social control and using the film satire invites the student to examine their beliefs about the political and social realities of punishment and rehabilitation.     

The perceived impacts of e-government on U.S. cities: A survey of Florida and Texas City managers

This study examines the perceived impacts of electronic government or e-government adoption on U.S. cities. This research conducted a survey of Texas and Florida city managers in the fall of 2005 to find out their opinions on the impact of e-government on their city government. The results indicated that e-government is having a positive impact on management, stakeholder involvement, needs and collaboration, and procurement in American cities. There are, however, concerns over spam or unsolicited e-mail and the ability of e-government to reduce the level of staffing. The results of this study imply that, according to city managers' perceptions, e-government adoption in American city governments is positively viewed as having an impact on their organizations and communities.     

Which starting style is faster in sprint running--standing or crouch start?

The purpose of this study was to further understand the biomechanical differences between the standing and crouch starting methods, and to investigate whether one of the starting styles provides better acceleration and proves to be faster. Six university track team sprinters performed 2 x 3 x 50 m trials. Digitised video, photocell timing, and velocity data revealed that during the first steps of the performance the standing start produced higher body centre of mass horizontal velocity than the crouch start. This may be due to the longer distance between the feet in the standing start, which caused longer push-off phases, and the work against gravity in the crouch start. However, this advantage in horizontal velocity disappeared by the 10 m mark, where similar velocities were recorded with both start styles. Further, there was no statistically significant difference between the two starting styles in horizontal velocity at the 25 m mark, nor in the time to reach the 25 m or 50 m mark. Regarding relay running, where athletes need to decide to adopt either a crouch start without starting blocks or a standing start, there seems to be no specific reason for outgoing athletes to use a crouch start, although this area warrants further investigation.     

Explaining Post-War Cinema Attendance in Great Britain

This paper models the interaction between cinema admissions and cinema supply in response to changes in exogenous variables, chiefly competition from television viewing. The relationship is estimated empirically by applying near Vector Autoregression (VAR) techniques to a long run of British annual data from 1950 to 1997. The results indicate that sustained negative shocks to cinema demand throughout most of the period reduced the supply of screens, inducing further falls in admissions and closures until a new equilibrium was attained. More recently, the introduction of multiplex cinemas has interrupted and partially reversed this downward demand-supply spiral.     

Counselor Educators' Experiences Preparing Preservice School Counselors: A Phenomenological Study

The authors conducted a phenomenological study to explore the experiences of 32 school counselor educators preparing preservice school counselors. Analysis of data from 3 focus groups revealed 3 themes: breadth versus depth, balancing specialties and professor partiality, and preparation versus practice. These results highlight the need for collaboration across counseling specialties at the preservice level.     

Child protection and justice systems processing of serious child abuse and neglect cases

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to examine the trajectory of cases through four systems: child protection, law enforcement, the dependency courts, and the criminal courts. METHOD: This study focused on a county selected from a 41-county telephone survey conducted for the National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-3). For this analysis prospective samples were drawn from law enforcement (n=225) and the county child protection (CPS) agency (n=225) and followed through in-depth case tracking across all agencies and through both the dependency and criminal court systems. RESULTS: The percentage of CPS cases opened in dependency court was similar to prior studies (29%), but the acceptance and prosecution rates were much higher--92% of the cases referred from CPS, including many cases of physical abuse. Compared to referrals from CPS to law enforcement (93%), few cases were referred from law enforcement to CPS (17%). Anecdotally, case referral patterns appeared to be influenced by communication patterns and mutual positive regard, regardless of the collaborative protocols in place. One of the most instructive findings was the degree of difficulty in tracking cases across organizations and the types of obstacles that impeded success. Disorganization was not an issue, rather internal structures set up to facilitate intra-organizational processing were the same structures that actually impeded cross-organizational case finding. CONCLUSIONS: It is not sufficient to rely on the existence of multi-disciplinary teams or Child Advocacy Centers to ensure collaboration. More attention to daily tasks and activities as well as the nature and quality of communication is warranted. On the technical side, use of common case identifiers on cases that are cross-referred is strongly recommended. Future studies should broaden the scope of inquiry to include the consequences of all case trajectories, rather than solely focusing on the justice system.     

Reflections on the Academic Policy Analysis Process and the UK Identity Cards Scheme

There is an increasing rhetoric from politicians for universities to become more involved in policy analysis and policy research. In this article, we reflect on our experiences of the analysis we conducted into the legislation to introduce biometric identity cards in the United Kingdom. We highlight how our work had direct consequences for the ongoing policy deliberation around this controversial piece of legislation. In particular, we highlight our role in the debate surrounding the government's figures for identity fraud and the concerns about the likely cost of the scheme to the government and taxpayer. We end the article by discussing some of the practical realities of such a foray into real politik.     

In search of invariant athletic behaviour in sport: An example from championship squash match‐play

Analysis of competitive sport performance from a priori observation is frequently used to prepare an athlete for a future contest. This practice necessarily assumes that the observed athletic behaviours are invariant, in that the data from an earlier contest apply to the next. We report different analyses of championship squash matches from 1987 and 1988 in search of such invariance and thus a general signature of athletic behaviour. The results show that once the preceding condition to an athletic response (shot) becomes more detailed, by either accounting for where on court the previous shot was played to, or by pairing the previous shot with its own antecedent, the corresponding response becomes more predictable (P > 0.25). This is especially the case for a squash champion when the forehand and backhand characteristics of his shot response are accounted for. The finding that the champion is more consistent if his forehand and backhand shot responses to a preceding shot are analysed separately, shows that the level of analytic detail is an important consideration if the derived information from sport analysis is to prepare an athlete reliably for future sport competition. Finally, we consider sport competition from an ecological perspective with regard to the natural organization and stability of non‐linear systems in an attempt to explain the empirical data.