Geographies of Policing: Domestic Violence,Mandatory Arrest,and Police Liability

For most of United States history, the police did not intervene in domestic violence. To redress for this history, police departments began implementing mandatory arrest policies in the 1980s. These policies require police to arrest in cases of domestic violence when injuries are present, regardless of victim consent. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research conducted in central Pennsylvania, including participant observation in a domestic violence unit of a police department and interviews with police officers, this paper examines how mandatory arrest policies extend the spatial reach of the state into private space and intimate relationships. Specifically, I argue that the policing of domestic violence positions police officers as neoliberal subjects responsible for mediating abusive relationships on behalf of the state. This paper contributes to geographic research on policing in the private sphere, while also offering a detailed accounting of the mechanics of police practice.     

Bureaucratic Leverage over Policy Choice: Explaining the Dynamics of State-Level Reforms in Telecommunications Regulation

While state governments have enjoyed greater control over regulating local telephone service providers since 1984, movement toward efficiency-based policy reform (e.g., adoption of competitive markets) has proceeded slowly. We investigate this pattern by addressing how the degree of policy discretion held by state public utility commissions (PUCs) affects reform of local telephone exchange regulation. Using precise measures of both PUC discretion and state policy changes over time, we find that states with "stronger" PUCs (more policymaking authority) are significantly more likely to move toward efficiency-based policy regimes and away from traditional rate-of-return regimes. Greater PUC discretion systematically related to state adoption of efficiency-based reforms over time suggests that regulators are using updated information about policy impacts to inform their policymaking activities. Our findings contradict a common presumption that regulatory bureaucracies are simply motivated by a desire to increase their control over policymaking. Instead, state PUCs are a key source of telecommunications policy reform in the states.     

清代州县衙门经费

本文通过对清代州县衙门经费的量化分析,发现州县衙门经制性经费与实际所需之间有很大的差距.清廷虽然试图解决这一问题,但终清之世,效果寥寥.因此,州县官为了保障政务活动的进行,不得不采取征收田赋附加、差徭、杂税盈余等手段加以补苴,结果使百姓的负担日益加重.     

Presentational state power: temporal and spatial influences over asylum sector decisionmakers

Previous analyses of forced migration have drawn attention to the increasing discretion held by asylum sector decisionmakers. According to these accounts, as the state reacts to the political risks associated with asylum migration control, responsibility for forced migration management is increasingly transferred onto a range of intermediate actors, between state and society, including local government employees, asylum interviewers, immigration judges and security staff. Yet little research has directly addressed these intermediaries' collective experiences and the influences to which they are subject. The article therefore focuses attention explicitly upon the nominal conduct of this increasingly authorised, discretionary and highly heterogeneous population. Drawing upon 37 interviews across four sites at which asylum sector intermediaries have significant and increasing discretion over asylum seekers' experiences, the findings demonstrate the importance of institutionalised timing and spacing for the determination of their volitional conduct. The timing and spacing of government institutions are important, not only through their influence over asylum seekers directly, but also because they present asylum seekers to those with discretionary authority in ways that are conducive to exclusionary uses of this authority.     

Welfare Convergence,Bureaucracy, and Moral Distancing at the Food Bank

This paper seeks to extend geographic thinking on the changing constitution of the UK welfare state, suggesting the need to supplement ideas of the “shadow state” with an analysis of the blurring of the bureaucratic practices through which welfare is now delivered by public, private and third sector providers alike. Focusing on the growing convergence of the bureaucratic practices of benefits officials and food bank organisations, we interrogate the production of moral distance that characterise both. We reveal the ideological values embedded in voucher and referral systems used by many food banks, and the ways in which these systems further stigmatise and exclude people in need of support. Contrasting these practices with those of a variety of “ethical insurgents”, we suggest that food banks are sites of both the further cementing and of challenge to the injustices of Britain's new welfare apparatus.     

数字时代博物馆版权例外制度的困境与出路

全球博物馆在技术发展的加持下进入了新的发展阶段,数字化建设、藏品资源分享以及文创产品开发成为博物馆“角色转变”的新标杆。然而,现有的版权例外规则并不能满足博物馆的发展需求,更无法契合博物馆开放的馆藏作品的传播姿态,无力贴合博物馆文创产业发展的诉求。基于此,有必要通过适当放宽博物馆数字化建设的版权例外空间、合理延伸博物馆藏品传播的版权例外适用范围以及高效运用法定许可规则助推博物馆文创产业发展等措施,实现我国博物馆版权例外制度在数字时代下的良性变革。     

Constraints on Local Welfare Discretion in an Era of Second‐Order Devolution

Under devolution, state and local governments are expected to use the greater authority granted to them to design new and innovative programs that are tailored to local needs. Existing research on the devolution of welfare programs has reported substantial variation in the policies adopted by states in the wake of welfare reform. However, under second‐order devolution, local governments also gained discretion over welfare services. Some have argued that, while devolution should increase flexibility, local governments face constraints that limit their functional discretion. Using California as an example, I assess whether there is variation in the service priorities adopted by local governments and whether these priorities translate to frontline practices. I show differences in the service priorities of local governments; however, these priorities are not associated with differences in sanctioning or time‐limit exemptions. Thus, while local governments may formally adopt different priorities, state and federal policy choices, as well as client characteristics, may restrict priorities from translating into differences in caseworker behavior.     

Imperial modernity,national identity and capital punishment in the Samarcand Arson Case, 1931

ABSTRACT. This article draws upon the fascinating and little known 1931 Samarcand Arson Case involving the possible execution of adolescent white female inmates at a juvenile reformatory in North Carolina. Marked by nationalist discourses, the spectacle generated by this case indicates much about how white New South advocates construed national life and sought to construct a white ‘civilised’ collective identity, defending their region from Northern charges of Southern barbarism and asserting their place within the imperial politics of American nation building. The decision not to execute any of the sixteen defendants was informed by a series of interconnected ideas about sexuality, national danger, ‘civilisation’ and ‘race,’ suggesting that the presumed ‘legal chivalry’ extended to the young defendants was not a simple matter of gender bias, but involved a nuanced set of reasons related to negotiations of national belonging through racialised alliances.     

Constraining Bureaucrats Today Knowing You'll Be Gone Tomorrow: The Effect of Legislative Term Limits on Statutory Discretion

Do finite time horizons constrain a legislature's ability to control the bureaucracy? I argue that legislators subject to legislative term limits enact legislation with less statutory discretion today to ensure that their preferences are implemented by the bureaucracy tomorrow since most legislators will not be around to monitor the bureaucracy over the long term. Although past works suggest that legislative term limits decrease legislatures' rate of bureaucratic oversight, I find that term‐limited legislatures use ex ante means of bureaucratic control to a greater extent by granting less statutory discretion to the bureaucracy.