Harsh Punishment Research Articles

Criminalization Versus Decriminalization of Cannabis use in Nigeria: What is the Fuss About?

The continued criminalization and punitive approaches to cannabis use in Nigeria and elsewhere have not yielded positive expected outcomes. Many countries are now adopting new measures to cannabis control policies that are evidence-based, cost effective prevention, treatment and or interventions in favor of punitive approaches. There is large volume of scientific research supporting the need for decriminalization of cannabis use and put in place laws that prevent harsh criminal penalties for possession of small amount or use. In addition, government should review policies to support research and development of pharmaceutical cannabinoids and promoting research on the medical use of these compounds for the common good of humanity.

A Legal Appraisal of The Mechanism For The Enforcement of Measures To Fight Against Climate Change in Cameroon

The world in general and Cameroon in particular is on a mad rush towards economic growth and development. The resource to achieve this programme is sometimes very scarce and often come with a cost; that of influencing climate change. Every society is striving to live a very exorbitant standard of life and by so doing exploiting the environmental resources in such a way that instigates greenhouse gas that provokes climate change. Many laws, policies and declarations have been put in place with the intention to control the way business with the use of natural resources and operation of activities that can increase the quantity of greenhouse gases can be checkmated. Despite these measures, the earth continuous to experience increase in temperatures. This then calls to question the effectiveness of mechanisms for the respect of climate safety measures. This paper is seeks to investigate the effectiveness of the mechanisms put in place to enforce measures to fight climate change in Cameroon. In an attempt to address this objective, resort is made to laws, literature in this area, and other primary documents. It is discovered that judicial and administrative personnel lack the capacity to handle cases on climate change. The population does not also have the knowledge to protect and defend their environmental rights. In the end, we suggested that: the court and administrative officials should boost their capacity to handle issues on climate change; the population should be trained to drag to court violators of climate safety measures that go against their rights; the courts should take very harsh penalties against those who violate climate safety measures to deter others.

Blame Without Punishment for Addicts

On the moral model of addiction, addicts are morally responsible and blameworthy for their addictive behaviours. The model is sometimes resisted on the grounds that blaming addicts is incompatible with treating addiction in a compassionate and non-punitive way. I argue the moral model is consistent with addressing addiction compassionately and non-punitively and better accounts for both the role of addicts’ agency in the recovery process. If an addict is responsible for their addictive behaviours, and that behaviour is in some way bad or wrong, then that addict is blameworthy. If not, then they are not. But, if their addictive behaviour or behaviour which contributes to and perpetuates their condition of addiction, is not bad or wrong, then addiction is not an issue of moral concern. Addicts are blameworthy, but attributions of blame need not be followed by harsh treatment or punishment. Because blame and harsh treatment or punishment can be separated, there is no good reason to reject the moral model of addiction.

Palestinian Refugee Youth in Jordan: Parental Practices, Neighborhood Cohesion and Assistance, and Adolescent Wellbeing

In this study, a total of 335 Palestinian refugees (M = 15.5 years, SD = 1.05, 49% males), recruited from four United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) schools at the Al-Baqa’a and Jabal Al-Hussein refugee camps in Jordan, rated their neighborhood physical environment and neighborhood support and cohesion, separately rated their mothers’ and fathers’ parenting on several dimensions, and reported on their adjustment to these circumstances (internalizing symptoms, self-concept clarity, and norm breaking). Living in more dangerous physical environments was associated with higher levels of refugee youths’ internalizing symptoms and norm breaking, but effects were not significant when parenting was considered. Our study showed that higher levels of psychological control–disrespect (significantly for fathers and marginally for mothers) and marginally, higher levels of maternal harsh punishment were associated with more teen internalizing symptoms. In addition, fathers’ greater psychological control and lower levels of support had a marginally significant effect on teens’ greater norm breaking. For behavioral control, only mothers’ greater behavioral control was associated with refugee youths’ greater self-concept clarity but not with paternal behavioral control. Thus, fathers’ psychological control and mothers’ behavioral control had the biggest association with adolescent outcomes.

Essentialist thinking predicts culpability and punishment judgments

ABSTRACT People often perceive social groups (e.g. ethnic groups, occupations, gender groups) as having fixed membership and discrete boundaries. This paper proposes that essentialist beliefs about abstract crime concepts, as naturally defined and universally coherent, play a role in culpability and sentencing judgments. In three studies, a general sample of college students (Study 1, n = 52), a lay public sample recruited from MTurk (Study 2, n = 102), and a sample of college students recruited from criminal justice classrooms (Study 3, n = 62) read crime vignettes and made culpability and sentencing decisions. We measured essentialist beliefs about crime categories by using an adapted essentialism scale for crimes, hypothesizing that essentialist tendencies would predict higher culpability ratings and harsher punishments. Results showed that lay participants had an overall tendency to endorse essentialist statements, and their essentialist ratings significantly predicted culpability and sentencing judgments with regards to the corresponding crimes. In contrast, students with formal education in criminal justice showed significantly weaker essentialist thinking about crime concepts, and their essentialist ratings did not predict culpability and sentencing outcomes. The current findings provide new evidence regarding how essentialist thinking and subject matter knowledge frames lay understandings about crime concepts, and how such intuitive beliefs may systematically influence legal judgments.

The Ideology Factor and Individual Disengagements from the Muslim Brotherhood

Since 2011, there has been a growing wave of individuals leaving Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and many of them have opted for documented publicity by writing autobiographies narrating their whole journey. This article explores the ideological components of the disengagement process on the basis of a frame analysis of these writings. It seeks to understand how individuals acted against some of the meanings central to the Brotherhood’s ideological character and influence. They construct sets of meanings negating or renegotiating those long fixated, sanctified and ineluctable parts of the group’s ideology. The process of meaning making is situated within the Arab Spring where the Brotherhood’s dominant ideology also suffered from ruptures, incongruence or dissonance. For example, many exiters realized that the group’s ideology is not ‘evolutionary’ enough to align with a ‘revolutionary’ moment in Egypt’s history, and it thus failed to provide them with a sense of meaning regarding the dramatically changing world around them. The disillusionment goes beyond a battle of textually-situated meanings between the Brotherhood and its disgruntled members during the process of their departure from it. It appertains to a context of new resources and opportunities made available to exiters to resist, challenge, and even falsify the dominant ideology without incurring heavy losses or harsh penalties often meted out by the group against its ‘dissidents’. The agency of exiters, i.e., their capacity to act against the group’s ideology or manifest their rebellion against its elements, is also enabled by the state’s relative tolerance towards the exiters, a degree of social assimilation inside Egypt, internal ideological and organizational divisions inside the Brotherhood and geographical re-spatialization.

Moral Truth and Criminology: Back to Its Classical Roots

This paper argues for the relevance of classical criminology for addressing contemporary problems of the criminal justice system. Despite many fundamental differences in political and cultural contexts, the central themes of classical crimino­logy continue to be relevant for our time. One such theme is the criticism of criminal law for imposing very harsh penalties. Penalties become cruel if they produce fear rather than moral responsibility. Criminal laws based on fear rather than conscience and reason are the expressions of political tyranny. The importance of developing moral responsibility has been reflected in a number of contemporary criminological theories. They, however, differ from classical criminology in one important aspect. Contemporary criminology, even though accepting the importance of morality in preventing crimes, does not affirm the existence of a moral truth. Classical criminology, as developed by Beccaria and Bentham, is based on a belief in moral truth as the criterion for evaluating contemporary institutions of criminal law. One instance of moral truth is that crimes are acts of free will. In contrast, many contemporary criminological theories do not recognize the concept of free will, which still remains the underlying principle of responsibility in criminal law. Rational choice theory is an exception. The paper highlights some shortcomings of the classical and rational choice theories from the viewpoint of a criminal law theorist. However, these shortcomings do not reduce the overriding importance of the unity of law, morals, and criminology. In order to reach a greater unity between the disciplines of criminology and criminal law, there is a need for the return to, and the acceptance of the main ethical tenets of classical criminology.

Crime and (a Preference for) Punishment: The Effects of Drug Policy Reform on Policing Activity

We still know very little about the incentives of police, often due to data constraints and the underlying policy environment. Using geocoded crime data and a novel source of within-city spatial and temporal variation in punishment severity, I am able to shed light on enforcement behavior. I find that in parts of a city where drug penalties were weakened, there is a 13% decrease in drug arrests within a year; there is no displacement of non-drug offenses and majority black neighborhoods have a larger decline in drug arrests. If offenders were significantly deterred by harsher penalties, as the law intended and Becker’s (1968) model predicts, there should have been an increase in drug arrests. My results are therefore consistent with police treating enforcement effort and punishment severity as complementary. I also find that citywide crime and drug use do not increase following the weakening of drug penalties; this calls into question the War on Drugs view of punishment and suggests that certain types enforcement can be reduced without incurring large public safety costs.

A multi criteria decision analysis (MCDA) for evaluating and appraising government policy responses to non medical heroin use

BackgroundGlobally, non-medical heroin use is generating significant public health and social harms, and drug policy about heroin is a controversial field that encompasses many complex issues. Policy responses to illegal heroin markets have varied from militarized eradication of the opium poppy and harsh punishment of users, to more tolerant harm reduction approaches with decriminalized possession and use. MethodsThis paper reports the outcomes of a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) on four generic regulatory regimes of heroin: prohibition, decriminalisation, state control and free market. Invited experts on drug harms, addiction, criminology and drug policy developed a comprehensive set of 27 policy outcome criteria against which these drug policy regimes were assessed. ResultsState control of heroin was identified as the preferred policy option although other policy regimes scored better on specific outcome criteria. The free market model scored better than decriminalisation, with absolute prohibition scoring worst on every criterium. The ranking of the regimes was robust to variations in the criterion-specific weights. ConclusionThe implications of these findings for the development of future policy responses to heroin and opioids generally are discussed in detail. Despite increasing overdose deaths and an opioid epidemic in North America, prohibition remains the predominant policy approach to heroin regulation at present. It is hoped that the current paper adds to the discussion of finding a valid regulatory alternative.

Punitive ambiguity: State-level criminal record data quality in the era of widespread background screening

Prior research documents widespread deficiencies in the quality and completeness of official criminal records in the United States. In an era when the social reach of criminal records has expanded to an unprecedented degree, these deficiencies carry serious consequences for criminal record subjects. The present study develops the concept of punitive ambiguity to characterize the burdens of incomplete criminal records and examines how they vary at the state level, providing evidence that punitive ambiguity is racially patterned. Using data from the biennial Surveys of State Criminal History Information Systems, multivariate analyses find that states where African Americans make up larger shares of felony record populations report rap sheet dispositions at significantly lower levels, pairing low criminal record data quality with extensive legally-mandated background screening. The results carry implications for understanding the racialized burdens of a criminal record, as well as broader processes in the development of the American penal state that combine harsh formal punishments with chronic administrative neglect.

Disciplinary practices among orphaned children in Sub-Saharan Africa.

ObjectivesThis study considers whether orphans’ experiences with physically and psychologically violent discipline differ from non-orphans in sub-Saharan Africa, and to what extent national, community, household, caretaker, and child characteristics explain those differences.MethodsWe use cross-sectional Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) administered between 2010–2017 in 14 sub-Saharan African countries. The sample included 125,197 children, of which 2,937 were maternal orphans, 9,113 were paternal orphans, and 1,858 were double orphans. We estimate the difference between orphans and non-orphans experience of harsh discipline using multivariable logistic regressions with country fixed effects and clustered standard errors.ResultsFindings show that orphaned children experience less harsh discipline in the home. With the exception of double orphans’ experience with physically violent discipline, these differences persisted even after controlling for a rich set of child, household, and caretaker characteristics.ConclusionsWe propose two alternative explanations for our surprising findings and provide a supplementary analysis to help arbitrate between them. The evidence suggests that orphaned children (especially those with a deceased mother) are less likely to experience harsh discipline because of lower caretaker investment in their upbringing. We encourage future research to draw on in-depth interviews or household surveys with discipline data from multiple children in a home to further unpack why orphans tend to experience less harsh punishment than other children.

The Sharing of Abhorrent Violent Materials Act: The realities and implications of Australia’s new laws regulating social media companies

On 15 March 2019, a Facebook Live video was broadcast from Christchurch, New Zealand, documenting a terror attack which resulted in the death of fifty-one people. This attack highlighted a weakness in social media protections and a gap in legislation globally. In response, the Criminal Code Amendment (Sharing of Abhorrent Violent Material) Act 2019 (Cth) seeks to make internet service and social media providers accountable for the removal of abhorrent and violent content. This legislation sent waves through the international community, attracting criticisms for its fast adoption, perceived unrealistic obligations and harsh penalties, as well as its broad extraterritorial reach. This article will explore these criticisms. It asks, how is the Act exercising extraterritorial jurisdiction? Is there an unrealistic burden created? And if there is a breach, who will be charged? The article concludes that if these challenges are not adequately addressed, the Act will not only fail to achieve its goal of reducing the accessibility of abhorrent violent material, but will also pose a serious threat to the protection of human rights.

Feminism and Its Discontents: Punishing Sexual Violence in India

Following the infamous gang rape of a young woman in New Delhi in 2012, India introduced a host of legislative reforms, including harsh punishments for sexual offences. Indian feminist groups, though invested in some of these reforms, have been critical of the carceral approach, but other than denouncing the death penalty, they have largely abstained from conversations around appropriate punishments for sexual crimes. Mapping the responses of feminist groups to the J. S. Verma Committee, this article underscores inconsistencies between the positions on defining sexual offences on the one hand and suggesting appropriate punishments on the other. It argues that the absence of engagement around complex issues of criminal law and sentencing not only left feminists divided on the outcome in Mahmood Farooqui’s case but also revealed unintended consequences of the newly introduced law on rape. The article concludes by questioning the use of criminal law as a site for feminist reform.

The problem of desertation in the army of the Habsburg Empire: from the reign of Maria Theresa of the first decades of the nineteenth century

The article analyses the problem of desertion in the army of the Habsburg Empire and in the regiments recruited from Transylvania in the eighteenth century, a century considered by the historiography of the last decades as the classic ‘era of deserters.’ The causes of desertion are varied and they concern mainly the mode of recruitment specific to those times, when most men did not freely choose to become soldiers. Discipline based on harsh physical punishment, the strenuous efforts to which soldiers were subjected, especially during campaigns, the very poor hygiene and sanitary conditions, alcoholism and mental illnesses (melancholia, Heimweh) and, last but not least, the desire for adventure influenced this phenomenon. There were young men who defected without any qualms of conscience, going from one regiment to another or even from another army to another. In theory, defection was punishable by death, but in practice there was a wide variety of mitigating circumstances in the application of punishments, and the number of those executed was very small in relation to the number of defectors

The relationship between family processes and school absenteeism and dropout: a meta-analysis

ABSTRACT School absenteeism and dropout can have long-term detrimental consequences for young people. It is empirically established that children exposed to positive family processes (PFP) such as parental involvement, support, and high educational expectations have a reduced likelihood of being absent and dropping out of school. In contrast, negative family processes (NFP) such as conflict, maltreatment, low supervision, and harsh punishment have been shown to increase the likelihood of absenteeism and dropout. Using meta-analytic review, the present study aimed to investigate the relationship between PFP and NFP and school absenteeism and dropout among primary and secondary school students. Studies were identified through five electronic databases and the reference lists of included and key articles. The relationship between family process and school absenteeism or dropout in primary or secondary school children was analyzed across 33 studies. Effect sizes were used to conduct meta-analyses on overall relationships and multiple outcome analyses. The findings indicated a significant negative relationship between PFP and school absenteeism and dropout and a significant positive relationship between school absenteeism and dropout and NFP. The relationship between PFP and school absenteeism and dropout was strongest for primary school, whereas the correlation between NFP and absenteeism and dropout was strongest for secondary school students. The present findings support a systemic focus in understanding school absenteeism and dropout by highlighting the need for further research into the association between family processes and school attendance. In addition, the findings strengthen the need to view school attendance with a developmental lens and take into consideration family processes critical to lifespan development when designing psychological intervention.

Skittles as Matterphor

Skittles as Matterphor Patricia J. Williams1 (bio) Introduction My grandmother used to say that we live history from the inside out. By that, she was referring not only to the intergenerational transmission of memory, but also to the inextricable entanglements of bodies, minds, and the worlds through which we swim. What we see affects us in physical ways. We drink in our environments through complexly networked sensory apparatuses, and our brains strive to make orderly narrative meaning of even the greatest disorder. We proceed through time based on the composite of impressions we have formed; and we extrude our impressions by imprinting those understandings as actions in the world. It is thus we make-known: we craft knowledge by envisioning the world in palpably tactile fashion. My grandmother's most interesting aphorisms always grew from her meditations upon slavery. Her mother had been born "property" and it ate at her to think about the mobilizations of thought and law that shaped what she called "the undying pain of thinking things." "It burns me," she would say. Being burned by history was no mere metaphor to her. What my grandmother meant is captured precisely by the term "matterphor": a vividly energized power that is tangible yet ephemeral, regulatory yet shape-shifting, solidly normed but corrosively caustic. This essay will explore the matterphor of living history from the inside out in the context of contemporary American politics. Indeed, present debates about which lives "matter" are not merely discursive; they are consistently actualized as "inevitable" tragedies, sorrows destined-to-divide. I will offer an analysis of how our polity is repeatedly ignited by the live wire of race—a force field that flares, sizzles, and short circuits whole aspects of life in the United States. Consider the densely synesthetic messaging of just this one example: During the last weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump, Jr. tweeted a photo of a bowlful of Skittles with the legend: "If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you just three would kill, you would you take a handful? That's our Syrian refugee problem."2 [End Page 356] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Donald Trump Jr.'s skittles tweet (via Twitter) While the printed caption played upon anxieties about Muslim migrants stoked by Donald Sr., the image also invoked the death of Trayvon Martin, who was carrying a package of the candy when shot and killed by George Zimmerman.3 To certain audiences, that quiet visual reference undoubtedly signified danger even more efficiently than any thought of Syria; it operated perhaps like a Platonic pharmakon, layering a global sense of emergency atop domestic fears about race and crime and the vaguely juridical need to "stand your ground."4 This interpellation contained a coded reference to legal outcome: delivered as a public secret, it was made available to and through the senses, an insidiously sweet yet silent toxicity. It is an urgent matter of public interest to decode the signified rearrangements of legality that have been emerging during states of emergency occasioned by rapid political, cultural and technological change. While the ascendency of Donald Trump to the White House may have been a surprise to those who thought this race was only about-the-economy-stupid, there has been a rather uncharted background conversation, a twittered terrain of utter lawlessness, inspiring a certain schadenfreude about the necessity for extralegal, even anti-legal, resolution of interior, domestic ills. In her book Strange Encounters, philosopher Sara Ahmed describes the intriguing tension embodied in the sense of stranger danger; such fear is "not only projected onto the outside, but the inside is contained within a figure we imagine we have already faced."5 Trump plays a malleable "inside" against an increasingly ominous outside with [End Page 357] exceptional skill. His lurking, hulking, sniffing, sneering, threatening performances have scared up pictures of a ravaged America endlessly at risk from Mexican rapists, African American thugs, Chinese contagion, leftist agitators and Muslim terrorists.6 This American President has consistently referenced an imagined community where harsh punishments must be dealt, and gleeful retribution wreaked upon dark bodies. He has ventriloquized a narrative of warrior masculinity...

Managing Project Due Date and Material Supply in Project Supply Chains

This paper studies the coordinated management of project due date and material supply in project supply chains. We consider a two-stage project supply chain with an upstream supplier supplying key material to a downstream project firm under a flexible wholesale price contract. The project is subject to disruptions that impact both project duration and material demand. Therefore the project firm has to carefully decide its promised project due date to its customer, against which harsh penalties will be assessed, as well as material orders. The flexible wholesale price contract offers potential incentive for the supplier to carry excess materials that protect the project firm from material shortages. We first study a special case of our model that considers a single wholesale price contract allowing for only one ordering opportunity to the supplier. Our analysis indicates that project due date and material order decisions substitute each other in general, but they complement each other when project delay penalty rate changes. As the uncertainty distribution gets stochastically larger, we find that the project firm will always increase its material orders, but may increase or decrease its project due date. For the flexible wholesale price contract, we characterize the optimal solutions for the project supply chain by the implied decision coordination along two dimensions: supply chain coordination (between the project firm and the supplier) and cross-functional coordination (between the project and the procurement managers). We provide a contract space partition by the decision coordination and conduct sensitivity analysis of our solutions. We characterize the wholesale price contracts that achieve channel coordination and are Pareto efficient. Our analysis shows that not all Pareto efficient contracts coordinate the chain and not all inferior contracts can be improved to achieve channel coordination. Our numerical studies find that cost parameters have a greater impact on the contract space partition than distribution function, indicating that the type of coordination and policy needed for managing our project supply chain depends more on cost parameters than on risk parameters.

India's Cartel Penalty Practices, Optimal Restitution and Deterrence

We review the cartel penalty and leniency practices of the Competition Commission of India (CCI), in light of the law and economics literature on optimal penalties, as well as current practices in different jurisdictions. Our analysis reveals that although India’s Competition Act allows for a much harsher penalty than other jurisdictions in cartel cases, the actual practices followed by the CCI are often inconsistent and non-transparent, resulting in a large number of court cases and very low penalty recovery. This inconsistency also weakens the leniency programme adopted by the CCI in order to induce cartelists to come forward with evidence. In the majority of cases, penalties fall short of restitution and deterrence benchmarks suggested by some earlier literature. We conclude with some suggestions to improve India's penalty and leniency regime.

The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America by Robert H. Churchill

Reviewed by: The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America by Robert H. Churchill W. Thomas Mainwaring The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America. By Robert H. Churchill. (New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xiv, 256. Paper, $24.99, ISBN 978-1-108-73346-5; cloth, $99.99, ISBN 978-1-108-48912-6.) Robert H. Churchill’s The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America analyzes the connection between the Underground Railroad and the violence that fugitives encountered in various regions of the North. “The story of fugitives from enslavement and of the assistance that they received from the antislavery activists who would come to style themselves the Underground Railroad,” Churchill asserts, “is a story of violence” (p. 3). To understand the Underground Railroad, Churchill argues, one must understand the “culture of violence” that prevailed in four regions ranging from the border South to New England and much of the northern United States (p. 4). The cultural norms that sanctioned the use of violence in the border South were quite clear: whippings, beatings, and even harsher punishments were justified in the name of maintaining the slave system and white supremacy. The second region Churchill identifies is the tier of northern counties just above the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River. These borderland communities seldom contested the operations of slave catchers and the violence that they employed to capture freedom seekers. The reception of slave catchers was distinctly different in the third region, what Churchill calls the “Contested Region”—the northern two-thirds of Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey (p. 7). Here, community sentiments [End Page 121] insisted that slave catchers follow legal procedures and avoid violent methods of capturing fugitives. Slave catchers who violated these norms encountered resistance from these communities that opposed the flagrant use of violence. Finally, the fourth region, which Churchill designates as the “Free Soil Region,” encompassing New England, much of New York, Michigan, the environs of Chicago, and Wisconsin, rejected the culture of southern violence and offered open assistance to freedom seekers (p. 10). Churchill offers a sophisticated analysis of how these cultures of violence changed as the Underground Railroad evolved between the 1830s and 1860s, particularly in response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The collision of regional cultures happened most dramatically in instances of fugitive renditions and rescues. Churchill has developed an extensive database that attempts to record every rendition and rescue during these decades. In this effort he has gone beyond the work of Stanley W. Campbell, whose book The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850–1860 (Chapel Hill, 1970) has been the standard work in the field for fifty years. Churchill argues convincingly that Campbell’s interpretation that the North was either supportive or indifferent to the Fugitive Slave Act is misleading. Churchill’s evidence shows that there was much more resistance to the act than Campbell found. Only in the border region of the free states do Campbell’s findings hold true. But elsewhere after 1850, northern communities increasingly rallied to the cause of the fugitive and violently opposed renditions. Churchill contends that the Fugitive Slave Act was ultimately a failure in that it could not be enforced throughout much of the North (the number of rescues almost tripled after 1857). The reason for this failure was the change in attitudes in the Contested Region, which had once tolerated fugitive renditions as long as they were carried out according to legal procedures. By 1860, however, communities in this region had become alarmed by the proslavery violence that accompanied slave catchers. They had been exposed to “the brutality and arrogance of the violence of mastery” (p. 230). They came to change their cultural values to align with their Free Soil neighbors to the North in assisting freedom seekers and resisting slave catchers. Churchill’s fine study will be of interest to students of the Underground Railroad and more generally of the sectional crisis. He offers a wealth of examples and case studies to buttress his analysis of changing cultural attitudes about violence...

Creation of Komsomol Cafés in 1960s

This article, using extensive archival material, examines the history of the emergence of youth cafés, provides an analysis of the preconditions and historical conditions in which they were created, and highlights the problems that they had to overcome on their way. During the 1960s youth cafés was created throughout the country on the initiative of Komsomol members. There were places where one could have an interesting and fun time listening to jazz over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, dancing a popular twist, meeting poets and musicians and artists, or just going an impromptu stage to read poems. The youth café became a symbol of the 1960s. The feeling of freedom was first felt by young people who began to actively explore Western culture and lifestyle. Harsh administrative measures and punishments proved to be ineffective. This is how the idea of creating the first youth club, corresponding to the interests and demands of young people, arose, but under the supervision of an “elder brother” in the form of the Komsomol. Urban young boys and girls were attracted by the democratic atmosphere of the café, which the sixtiers would later write about more than once. In the mid-1960s this interesting experience was relocated to the countryside, but this was less successful. Even in large cities, not many cafés survived until the mid-1970s, faced with enough problems.