Prosecution Complex: America\u27s Race to Convict and Its Impact on the Innocent

In lieu of an abstract, here is the review\u27s first paragraph: They say the first step to curing addiction is admitting that you have a problem. Daniel Medwed’s terrific book, PROSECUTION COMPLEX: AMERICA’S RACE TO CONVICT AND ITS IMPACT ON THE INNOCENT, attempts to do exactly that. The thesis of the book is laid out in the first few pages: prosecutors are professionally and politically incentivized to earn the greatest number of convictions. In conjunction with vast discretion over an individual’s case and powerful psychological forces that discourage prosecutors from critically entertaining the possibility of being wrong, an estimable but ultimately unknowable number of innocent people are convicted and sentenced to prison. As a result, just as with any other addiction, prosecutors’ thirst for convictions ultimately ends up hurting the ones around them, sometimes for unconscionable lengths of time

The Political Economy: Political Attitudes and Economic Behavior

It has long been recognized that voters bring their political behaviors in line with economic assessments. Recent work, however, suggests that citizens also engage in economic behaviors that align with their confidence—or lack thereof—in the political system. This alignment can happen consciously or, as we suggest, unconsciously, in the same way that positivity carries over to other behaviors on a micro-level. Using monthly time series data from 1978 to 2008, we contribute further evidence of this relationship by demonstrating that political confidence affects consumer behavior at the aggregate level over time. Our analyses employ measures more closely tied to the theoretical concepts of interest while simultaneously accounting for the complex relationships between subjective and objective economic indicators, economic behavior, political attitudes, and the media. Our results suggest that approval of the president not only increases the electorate’s willingness to spend money, but also affects the volatility of this spending. These findings suggest that the economy is influenced by politics beyond elections, and gives the “Chief Economist” another avenue by which they can affect the behavior of the electorate

On the number of transversals in a class of Latin squares

Denote by $\mathcal{A}_p^k$ the Latin square of order $n=p^k$ formed by the Cayley table of the additive group $(\mathbb{Z}_p^k,+)$, where $p$ is an odd prime and $k$ is a positive integer. It is shown that for each $p$ there exists $Q>0$ such that for all sufficiently large $k$, the number of transversals in $\mathcal{A}_p^k$ exceeds $(nQ)^{\frac{n}{p(p-1)}}$

How Priming Innocence Influences Public Opinion on Police Misconduct and False Convictions: A Research Note

Issues of innocence have become more salient to the public in recent years, including the problem of police misconduct. However, citizens also tend to be supportive of the police, perceiving them as ethical, honest, and trustworthy. Using a survey experiment with a nationally representative sample, we explore the degree to which public opinion toward police misconduct is influenced by priming respondents on the issue of innocence. We find that reminding citizens of these issues increases their willingness to admit police misconduct that contributes to this problem by roughly 7 percentage points overall. Moreover, this effect is driven by conservatives and, to a lesser extent, moderates, presumably because liberals do not need priming. In contrast, the efficacy of the prime was not affected (i.e., moderated) by the race of the respondent. We place these results in the context of the current debate regarding police use of force as well as the ideological divide in rhetoric surrounding the recent string of high-profile police shootings

Understanding perceptions of citizen demeanour: using an experimental design to understand the impact of encounter and observer characteristics

Systematic social observations of police-citizen encounters have revealed that citizen demeanour is an important predictor of outcomes (e.g. arrests and searches). Drawing from research on stereotypes and impression formation, we examine whether characteristics of the encounter and/or observer affect how respondents perceive demeanour. We exposed undergraduates (n = 255) to a randomly rotated series of five between-subjects design, in which characteristics of the encounter (citizen race, gender, or age; officer gender; neighbourhood context) and the level of demeanour displayed were manipulated. OLS regression was used to examine how these manipulations interact to produce our dependent variable – perceptions of demeanour – and whether characteristics of the observer matter for perceptions, independent of the manipulations. We find that some aspects of the encounter, specifically officer gender and the socio-economic context of the neighbourhood, influence perceptions of demeanour. Previous victimisation, observers’ race, and perceptions of the police also impact how demeanour is perceived. These findings suggest that understanding the impact of citizen demeanour on police-citizen encounters requires consideration of encounter and observer characteristics

Food Security in Developing Countries

This paper provides a systematic definition of food security, focusing on its different dimensions; examines the nature and magnitude of the different dimensions of food insecurity in developing countries; discusses the difficult tradeoffs that policy makers face in trying to address food security’s multiple dimensions simultaneously; and explores promising new approaches to address food insecurity. The geographic focus is on Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where the majority of the world’s food insecure people live.food security, hunger, poverty, food policy, economic development, Agricultural and Food Policy, Food Security and Poverty, International Development, O13, O19, Q18,

Framework and Initial Analyses of Fertilizer Profitability in Maize and Cotton in Zambia

Inorganic fertilizers will play a role in government programs, but whether or not a single policy is valuable for all farmers depends upon the net gain for the farmers. The research here seeks to demonstrate how to answer the question “Is fertilizer profitable in Zambia for maize and cotton in the smallholder sector?” This study identifies the key components determining profitability and then sets up a framework to evaluate the probability of farmers to obtain profitable results with fertilizer use on maize and cotton. Several cases are selected and the results are evaluated. Private profitability for the farmer at market prices is discussed, leaving social profitability to other researchers. A simple method for farmers and extensionists to use to assess a fertilizer investment is given, to assist in more site specific analysis, given prices and environment.food security, food policy, Zambia, maize, cotton, fertilizer, Agribusiness, Q18,