This paper is interdisciplinary in the approach to the stories found in Str8 Up and Gangs: The Untold Stories. Drawing from the knowledge of Indigenous Studies and the study of English Literature, this paper connects discourses of health and sickness, crime and punishment, and Canada's colonial legacy to Indigenous gangs in Canada. Finally, this paper demonstrates how narrative techniques have been applied in an attempt to help intervene and prevent the growth of Indigenous gangs in Canada.

Over the last several decades, punishment in school has become increasingly harsh. Students are suspended and expelled for minor infractions or are being referred to the criminal justice system for behaviors that, in the past, were largely dealt with by school administrators. In addition, school districts are hiring their own police and security forces, and surveillance technologies are becoming a permanent part of school budgets and spaces. Three converging social trends have facilitated these changes in school discipline: (1) the steady growth of a pervasive sense of social anxiety coupled with a political and cultural shift away from rehabilitative to more punitive forms of punishment (e.g., imprisonment, the death penalty, etc.); (2) a series of moral panics in the 1980s and 1990s about drugs, gangs, and violence that heightened fear of, and for, the nation’s youth; and, (3) shifts in both policing philosophy and funding towards increased police penetration into community settings. Concerns are mounting that the intertwining of schools and criminal justice has forged a “school-to-prison pipeline” for some students, especially special education students, poor students and students of color. My dissertation focuses on one aspect of the pipeline: issuing citations to students for school misbehavior. There are three questions I seek to address: For what behaviors or activities are students being ticketed? What are the characteristics of students being ticketed? After school- based citations enter the courtroom, how are these students processed? I use quantitative and qualitative data to address these questions. My larger argument is that school discipline processes not only have significant consequences for the life chances of our country’s young people, but they also have very serious consequences for the civil liberties of all public school students and for the socialization of our young people into the principals of democratic citizenship. / text

Several justifications exist for the death penalty, yet it is only recently that the concept of “closure” has come to serve as a rationale for American capital punishment. This contemporary justification promises murder victims’ families that the execution of their loved one’s murderer should provide them with “closure”—a contested word that typically denotes an end to the pain associated with their loved one’s murder. How and when this new narrative came about has garnered little scholarly attention, particularly as murder victims’ families begin to challenge closure as relevant to their healing. The goals of the current study seek to: 1) elucidate how closure entered the American death penalty debate; 2) illustrate the myriad meanings assigned to closure, identifying how various stakeholders have trafficked in the term’s use; 3) examine how closure has been used politically to legitimize death penalty practices and the state’s right to take life; and 4) critically analyze claims that closure has “symbolically transformed” the American death penalty today. The study employs discursive textual analysis of nearly 2500 American newspaper stories from 1989 to 2008, legislative hearings, legal case histories, academic and popular sources, and archival materials from American death penalty and victims’ rights groups during this twenty year period. The findings illustrate that closure entered death penalty discourse in the late 1980s, and reached a tipping point in news coverage in 2001 with Timothy McVeigh’s execution. While the term was used in nearly every way imaginable, the findings illustrate it was most prominently used in supporting secondary victims’ “right to view” the executions of their loved ones’ murderers and in justifying Timothy McVeigh’s execution for his role in the Oklahoma City Bombing. I argue that the media’s sensational portrayals of such historical moments allowed them to serve as “galvanizing events” ushering in closure as a powerful symbol in justifying the state’s right to take life and the view that executions are a form of “therapeutic justice.” Despite closure being used to support certain death penalty practices, the analyses presented here provide little support for the notion that closure has “symbolically transformed” American capital punishment today as has been suggested by some scholars. Closure is a small blip in print news coverage and does not resonate strongly with Americans’ support for capital punishment in national opinion polls. The study concludes with a critical examination of the role of closure as a contemporary, and empirically unchallenged, justification for the death penalty—one that serves as an empty promise for murder victims’ loved ones. / text

This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay examines a general theory of information based on informal contracting. The measurement problem—the disparity of true and measured performances—is at the core of many failures in incentive systems. Informal contracting can be a potential solution since, unlike in formal contracting, it can utilize a lot of qualitative and informative signals. However, informal contracting must be self-enforced. Given this trade-off between informativeness and self-enforcement, I show that a new source of statistical information is economically valuable in informal con- tracting if and only if it is sufficiently informative that it refines the existing pass/fail criterion. I also find that a new information is more likely valuable, as the stock of existing information is large. This information theory has implications on the measurement problem, a puzzle of relative performance evaluation and human resources management. I also provide a methodological contribution. For tractable analysis, the first-order approach (FOA) should be employed. Existing FOA-justifying conditions (e.g. the Mirrlees-Rogerson condition) are so strong that the information ranking condition can be applied only to a small set of information structures. Instead, I find a weak FOA- justifying condition, which holds in many prominent examples (with multi- variate normal or some of univariate exponential family distributions). The second essay analyzes the effectiveness of managerial punishments in mitigating moral hazard problem of government bailouts. Government bailouts of systemically important financial or industrial firms are necessary ex-post but cause moral hazard ex-ante. A seemingly perfect solution to this time-inconsistency problem is saving a firm while punishing its manager. I show that this idea does not necessarily work if ownership and management are separated. In this case, the shareholder(s) of the firm has to motivate the manager by using incentive contracts. Managerial punishments (such as Obama’s $500,000 bonus cap) could distort the incentive-contracting program. The shareholder’s ability to motivate the manager could then be reduced and thereby moral hazard could be exacerbated depending on corporate governance structures and punishment measures, which means the likelihood of future bailouts increases. As an alternative, I discuss the effectiveness of shareholder punishments. The third essay analyzes how education affect workers’ career-concerns. A person’s life consists of two important stages: the first stage as a student and the second stage as a worker. In order to address how a person chooses an education-career path, I examine an integrated model of education and career-concerns. In the first part, I analyze the welfare effect of education. In Spence’s job market signaling model, education as a sorting device improves efficiency by mitigating the lemon market problem. In my integrated model, by contrast, education as a sorting device can be detrimental to social welfare, as it eliminates the work incentive generated by career-concerns. In this regard, I suggest scholarship programs aimed at building human capital rather than sorting students. The second part provides a new perspective on education: education is job-risk hedging device (as well as human capital enhancing or sorting device). I show that highly risk-averse people take high education in order to hedge job-risk and pursue safe but medium-return work path. In contrast, lowly risk-averse people take low education, bear job-risk, and pursue high-risk high-return work path. This explains why some people finish college early and begin start-ups, whereas others take master’s or Ph.D. degrees and find safe but stable jobs. / text

Via their frequency of contact alone, Corrections Officers (COs) have maximal opportunity to role model pro-social behaviour and further rehabilitative outcomes for offenders. Yet previous research indicates that one of the barriers to COs adopting this additional and sometimes contradictory job requirement, is that COs generally maintain largely punitive attitudes towards inmates. The purpose of the current study was to determine whether one reason for CO punitiveness is that these frontline workers lack knowledge of basic forensic practice (FP) research findings which describe elements that lead to offender change. Utilizing mixed-methods, the nature of the relationship between FP knowledge and the Correctional Orientation of COs, consisting of support for rehabilitation (SR) and support for punishment (SP), was explored. Further examined was how FP knowledge, SR and SP related to COs self-reported engagement in Core Correctional Practices (CCPs) which delineate the quality of interactions that facilitate positive rehabilitative outcomes. Employing a new measure of Correctional Orientation developed and piloted on an undergraduate sample (N=148) in Study 1, Study 2 involved surveys of Corrections Workers (CWs) (N=227) employed in the four provincial adult correctional facilities in Saskatchewan. Hierarchical multiple regressions including demographic covariates confirmed a robust relationship between FP knowledge and SR, and FP knowledge and SP. Likewise, though FP knowledge was significantly positively correlated with CCPs, the addition of SR and SP to a third multiple regression on CCPs rendered the contribution of FP knowledge non-significant. SR was a better predictor of CCPs than SP. Finally, in Study 3, eight CWs varying in their survey responses were interviewed. Utilizing thematic analysis three broad models were produced which described the reasons CWs may or may not support rehabilitation or punishment and engage in CCPs. Additional themes describing how interviewees responded to FP research were also generated. In the discussion the findings of all three studies were combined. Notably, SR appears to be more responsive to FP knowledge than SP, while salient job-related experiences of CWs are likely to increase SP. Yet, CWs can increase their SR without a comparable decrease in their SP and vice versa. Interviewees felt that the largest obstacle to their engagement in CCPs were the current features of the institutional settings which generated a cynical, burnt-out and punitive staff culture whereby peer pressure was employed to maintain prescribed modes of interaction. Comprehensive recommendations for reducing stress and burnout, education and training targets, and hiring criteria which could screen out problematic applicants are provided.

Chapter 1 develops a model of parallel trading of corporate securities (shares, bonds) and derivatives in which a large trader can sometimes profitably acquire securities and the corporate control rights inherent therein for the sole purpose of reducing the corporation's value and gaining on a net short position in the corporation created through off-setting derivatives. At other times, the large trader profitably takes a net long position in the corporation and exercises its control rights to maximize the corporation's value. This strategy is profitable if and because other market participants cannot observe the large trader's orders and hence cannot predict how the control rights will be exercised. In effect, the large trader is benefitting from trading on private information about payoff uncertainty that the large trader itself creates. This problem is most likely to manifest in transactions that give blocking powers to small minorities, particularly out-of-bankruptcy restructurings and freezeouts, and is bound to become more severe when derivatives trade on an exchange rather than over-the-counter. Chapter 2 investigates in parallel the cross-country determinants of crime and punishment in the largest possible sample of countries with data on homicides, victimization by common crimes (ICVS), incarceration rates, and the death penalty. While models with a small number of plausible covariates predict much of the variation of homicide and incarceration rates between major developed countries, they predict only one seventh of the actual US incarceration rate. Chapter 3 probes into the pervasive correlations between legal origins, modern regulation, and economic outcomes around the world. Where legal origin is exogenous, it is almost perfectly correlated with another set of potentially relevant background variables: the colonial policies of the European powers that spread the "origin" legal systems through the world. The chapter attempts to disentangle these factors by exploiting the imperfect overlap of colonizer and legal origin, and looking at possible channels, such as the structure of the legal system, through which these factors might influence contemporary economic outcomes. It find strong evidence in favor of non-legal colonial explanations for economic growth. For other dependent variables, the results are mixed. / Economics

A growing body of research has emerged in order to better understand unethical behavior at work. However, most theory and research has focused on identifying personal and situational characteristics that predict unethical behavior. However, in order to develop a more complete picture of the phenomenon, research also needs to examine the outcomes of unethical behavior at work. In this research, I adopt research and theory from criminal justice in order to better understand how employees react to unethical behavior at work. In particular, I differentiate between two types of unethical behavior, namely premeditated and impulsive unethical behavior. Based on the criminal justice literature, I define impulsive unethical behaviors as unethical actions where the thought to act did not arise prior to the immediate situation, whereas premeditated unethical behaviors represent unethical actions where the thought to act occurred prior to the immediate situation. I argue that premeditated acts will result in more severe reactions than acts that are impulsive in nature. Specifically, I sought to examine observers' perceived unethicality and recommended punishment towards the two types of unethical behavior. Integrating attribution theory, I also explored three dimensions of attributions (i.e., controllability, stability, and intentionality) as mediating mechanisms. Then, utilizing ethical dissonance theory as an explanatory framework, I examined both wrongdoers' and observers' history of engaging unethical acts as potential moderators of the mediated effects. Finally, methods were presented for two studies. The first study utilized a field sample of adult workers, and the second study utilized a sample of university students. Based on the results from the two studies, I found evidence that the type of unethical behavior that a wrongdoer engages in matters in terms of how they will be evaluated. I also found that observers see premeditated behavior as more intentional, which drives their evaluations. Finally, both observers' and wrongdoers' past history impact my hypothesized model at different points along the causal chain. I hope my results help instigate a shift in the behavioral ethics literature; one that begins to integrate research from the criminal justice literature and one that shifts focus away from examining every possible predictor of unethical behavior at work to what happens following the act itself.

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South Africa has a complex history which has, among other things, affected the education system. The system is still in crisis in many ways. The purpose of this study is to investigate the educators’ approach to learners and vice versa in a South African school. It is to examine the overall respect between educators and learners and how educators give learners feedback. The aim is also to find out if corporal punishment is a common way to discipline learners and to investigate the educators’ way to give praise and confirmation. The study was made on a High School outside Cape Town and it includes qualitative interviews with three educators and three learners. The results of the interviews are presented in three categories, which is: feedback, respect and corporal punishment. First, the results show that the feedback is a subject that can be improved. According to the respondents they are doing things right but also quite a few things wrong. They all think that feedback is extremely important for the learners’ development, but only if it is provided in the right way. Second, it shows an overall lack of respect in the South African school, which is reflecting the issues in the communities and in the learners’ homes. But it is something that the Department of Basic Education is trying to improve with the help from the Life Orientation subject. Finally, the results show that a lot of the respondents have mixed feelings about the banning of corporal punishment and that is partly why it is hard to get rid of. This study shows a deeper understanding of these issues and why South Africa still struggle with developing their education system.

The use of corporal punishment in schools is a highly topical and much debated subject worldwide. With the advent of humanitarian principles, corporal punishment was classified by the United Nations (UN) as violence and child abuse and this led to the banning of its use in schools by many countries especially in the western world. Kenya is not an exception as it recently followed suit by banning the use of corporal punishment in schools, through the enactment of Education Act Number 30 of 2001. Despite the ban, information from press reports and other literature seem to indicate that the practice of corporal punishment continued unabated in Kenyan schools. However, there is little information to indicate: (1) whether infact corporal punishment was being practiced in the selected schools or the extent/prevalence and nature of its practice; (2) what maintains corporal punishment in schools; and (3) strategies for eliminating it. Moreover, the extent to which teachers and pupils are aware of the ban is not known. Three main goals of this study, therefore, were to establish: whether corporal punishment was being practiced in Nakuru Municipal primary schools in Kenya; the attitudes that the primary school teachers and pupils hold towards the use of corporal punishment in the selected schools and the impact, if any, that their attitudes had on the practice of this punishment in those schools. The study applied a Survey research design. Questionnaires, with both open-ended and closed-ended items were used to collect data from the respondents. The respondents' attitudes were expressed in terms of their beliefs, feelings and views about the use of corporal punishment in school. The attitudes were measured in terms of the respondents' degree of agreement and disagreement with the attitudinal statements measured along a Likert scale which gauged their beliefs, feelings and views about the use of corporal punishment in the selected schools. The target population consisted of teachers and pupils in four primary schools in Nakuru Municipality. A sample of 72 teachers and 160 pupils was selected. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse data using the SPSS software package. The results obtained indicated that corporal punishment was being practiced in the selected schools and the teachers and pupils this practice was supported. Corporal punishment was being practiced by teachers in Nakuru municipal primary schools despite their knowledge of the legal prohibitions and negative consequences of this practice. It was also established that the attitudes of the teachers and pupils towards the use of corporal punishment in school had a significant relationship with the practice of corporal punishment in the four selected schools. Where the teachers and pupils had a favourable or positive attitude towards the use of corporal punishment in school, the level of the practice of corporal punishment was very high but where the teachers and pupils has a negative attitude towards the use of corporal punishment in school, the level of the practice of corporal punishment was extremely low. The teachers and pupils justified the practice of corporal punishment in the selected schools under the belief that it had merits. It (corporal punishment) was believed to be a chastisement for children, a catalyst for good academic performance and the most effective deterrent for bad behavior, laziness and a corrective measure. The conclusion drawn was that the teachers’ and pupils’ attitudes towards the use of corporal punishment in school had a big impact on the practice of corporal punishment in the four Nakuru municipal primary schools. The study concludes with a set of recommendations for curtailing the use of corporal punishment in schools in Kenya. (1.) Abbreviated as CP in some parts of this report. / Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2003.