Designing safer health care through responsive regulation

• Self-regulation by the health professions, while improving, is no longer enough; external drivers for safer health care include governments, funders and consumers. • Enforced self-regulation is often more promising than a "command and control" stra

Social Capital, Rehabilitation, Tradition: Support for Restorative Justice in Japan and Australia

This paper investigates the attitudes and beliefs that the public hold about criminal behaviour in Japanese and Australian society, with a view to uncovering sources of resistance to, and support for, restorative justice. The study draws on a survey of 1,544 respondents from Japan and 1,967 respondents from Australia. In both societies, restorative justice met with greater acceptance among those who were (1) strong in social capital, (2) believed in offender reintegration and rehabilitation, (3) saw benefits for victims in forgiveness, and (4) were advocates for victims' voices being heard and amends made. The alternative 'just deserts' and deterrence models for dealing with crime were grounded in attitudes of punitiveness and fear of moral decay, and reservations about the value of reintegrating and rehabilitating offenders. Like restorative justice supporters, 'just deserts' and deterrence supporters expressed concern that victims' voices be heard and amends made. Winning public support for competing institutional arrangements may depend on who does best in meeting expectations for meeting the needs of victims

An evolving compliance model for tax enforcement

Decades of research on regulatory rule enforcement prompted a battle of sorts between those who favor a deterrence approach and those who promote compliance approaches, between punishment and persuasian (Reiss, 1984; Hawkins, 1984; Pearce and Tombs, 1990; Snider, 1990). In some areas, evidence suggests that deterrence works, if only modestly, as in the area of occupational health and safety (Scholz, 1991; Braithwaite, 1985). In nuclear safety and other realms, a shift away from a rule enforcement approach toward a more communitarian style of self-regulation improves compliance (Rees, 1994). In other domains, however, it is unclear whether the effect of increased deterrence is positive or negative (Makkai and Braithwaite, 1994). Tax enforcement is an area where the effects of deterrence and compliance approaches are unknown (Andreotti, Erard and Feinstein, 1998). When taxpayers are audited, for example, and a penalty imposed, it is unclear whether they learn that they got away with a lot of things that the audit did not detect. The deterrence sign will be positive if this is the bigger lesson than the lesson that cheating will be punished. Sometimes an audit succeeds in deterring cheating in the long run, but in the year or two after audit taxpayers believe they are unlikely to be audited, and this has a dramatic negative effect on compliance in those two years. This and other kinds of complexity have moved the compliance literature over the past decade away from a crude contest between punishment and persuasion. Rather the debate has been about how to get the right mix of the two. In the case studies discussed in this essay, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) became persuaded to an enforcement pyramid approach to regulation (Ayres and Braithwaite, 1992; Gunningham and Grabosky, 1998). This means regulatory staff prefer the low-cost option of persuasion first and escalate to more deterrenceoriented options (and ultimately to incapacitation) as less interventionist strategies successively fail. In this essay, we first consider the history of the development of an Australian Taxation Office (ATO) compliance model out of the work of the Cash Economy Task Force. Ultimately, the responsive regulatory model developed by this group was adopted as policy for all ATO operations. We consider how the model has begun to be applied in three domains: with large corporations, with high wealth individuals and in the cash economy. In each of these three domains taxpayer compliance is become more challenging

Attitudes Toward Animal Suffering: An Exploratory Study

A total of 302 undergraduates in the social sciences and the humanities at two Australian universities were given a questionnaire designed to explore public attitudes toward animal suffering. Though preliminary, the results strongly suggest that attitudes may greatly support animal welfare and animal rights. However, as reflected in the answers to the questionnaire, actual behavior does not always follow suit. The recommendation is made that the animal welfare/animal rights movement should perhaps emphasize raising people\u27s awareness of the inconsistencies between their attitudes toward animals and their behavior

Rethinking criminology through radical diversity in Asian reconciliation

Five cases of radical diversity in Asian reconciliation are used to suggest hypotheses for the kind of Asian relational theory building suggested in the contribution of Liu (2014) to this special issue: 1. Polynesian shame 2. Confucius and East Asian restorative justice 3. Indonesian and Timorese cultures of compliance with reconciliation agreements 4. Restorative justice hybridity in Pakistan and Afghanistan 5. Victim-initiated justice in Nepal

Minimally Sufficient Deterrence

Dangers exist in both maximalist approaches to deterrence and minimalist ones. A minimal sufficiency strategy aims to avert these dangers. The objectives are to convince people that the webs of relationships within which they live mean that lawbreaking will ultimately lead to desistance and remorse and to persuading offenders that predatory crime is simply wrong. Alternative support and control strategies should be attempted until desistance finally occurs. Communities can be helped to understand that this is how minimally sufficient deterrence works. By relying on layered strategies, this approach takes deterrence theory onto the terrain of complexity theory. It integrates approaches based on social support and recovery capital, dynamic concentration of deterrence, restorative justice, shame and pride management, responsive regulation, responsivity, indirect reciprocity, and incapacitation. Deterrence fails when it rejects complexity in favor of simple theories such as rational choice

Families and the Republic

Restorative and responsive justice can be a strategy of social work practice that builds democracy bottom-up by seeing families as building blocks of democracy and fonts of democratic sentiment. At the same time, because families are sites of the worst kinds of tyranny and the worst kinds of neglect, a rule of law is needed that imposes public human rights obligations on families. The republican ideal is that this rule of law that constrains people in families should come from the people. Restorative and responsive justice has a strategy for the justice of the people to bubble up into the justice of the law and for the justice of the law to filter down into the justice of the people. The role of the social worker is to be a bridge across which both those democratic impulses are enabled to flow. The empowering side of the social work role fits the first side of the duality where the will of families bubble up; the coercive side of the social work role fits the second where the justice of the law filters down

Enforced Self-Regulation: A New Strategy for Corporate Crime Control

Part I outlines the concept of enforced self-regulation, sketches its theoretical underpinnings, and illustrates its application in the context of corporate accounting standards. Part II argues the merits of enforced self-regulation. Part III dispels notions that the proposal is a radical departure from existing regulatory practice and points to areas in which necessary empirical research could be conducted by discussing incipient manifestations of partial enforced self-regulation models in the aviation, mining, and pharmaceutical industries. Part IV considers in some detail the weaknesses of the proposed model. The final Part considers the importance of determining an optimal mix of regulatory strategies; it concludes that enforced self-regulation could play an important role in such an optimal combination