Psychiatric assessment after every six years of the TBS order in the Netherlands

Protecting the public from dangerous mentally ill offenders is an important issue in may countries. The UK, Scotland and Germany for example are looking for new ways to deal with this issue and some have looked at the Dutch system of first sending the offender to prison for a number of years and then for treatment to a secure clinical facility. Dutch law uses the term TBS: detention at the government's pleasure. Legal rights of the patient under the TBS-order are protected by regular evaluations to help the court determine if the patient still poses a danger to society. These evaluations take place every two years, at the end of each extension period. Every six years an extra assessment by independent experts is obligatory. In this same period other types of assessment occur too, such as for transferral to a long-stay unit. A complicated succession of experts may visit the patient, asking the same questions and using the same files, distracting his or her attention and motivation from the treatment process. This system is threatened by the qualitative and quantitative scarcity of properly qualified experts. Measures have been taken to counteract these difficulties, but will they suffice?     

A Two-Step Econometric Estimation of Covariates of Side Selling: The Case of Coffee Cooperatives in Southwest Ethiopia

Despite their apparent economic benefit to smallholder farmers, cooperatives are vulnerable to the problem of side selling. Using cross-sectional household data and Cragg’s regression model, we identified the determinants of side selling by coffee cooperative farmers in southwest Ethiopia. The bootstrapping technique was applied to extract average partial effects from the model coefficients. Certified, elder and educated farmers who have off-farm income and trust in the cooperative leadership have been found to side-sell significantly less. Nonetheless, cooperative group size and late payment favoured more side selling. Based on these findings, possible interventions are highlighted for improving cooperative members’ commitment and the performance of coffee cooperatives in the region.     

When the Data Source Writes the Conclusion: Evaluating Agricultural Policies

Statistics describe realities, but they also shape them, since they are used to design or support policies. As such accurate statistics are important. Using the agricultural sector in Rwanda as a case study, we demonstrate that dubious statistics can spread quickly. According to data from the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), yields have increased by 60 per cent since the implementation of large scale agricultural reforms, while other datasets point towards more modest gains. Yet, estimates in line with those of the FAO dominate the official discourse. We suggest that the discrepancies between datasets may be explained by the difficulties of collecting accurate agricultural statistics combined with an incentive to overestimate yields to show that the reforms have worked.     

A Survey of International Studies Programs at Liberal Arts Colleges and Universities in the Midwest: Characteristics and Correlates

International studies majors have become increasingly popular at liberal arts colleges and universities in the Midwest. What are the features of various international studies programs, particularly regarding the degree of "structure" in the major? What factors appear to be related to whether a liberal arts college or university offers an international studies major in the first place? What explains the variations that exist that characterize international studies majors? This paper empirically investigates these questions by surveying sixty-six liberal arts and sciences colleges and universities in Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri. We find that although international studies majors are somewhat prevalent in the "heartland," there is considerable variation in how they are structured. Further, the results suggest that whether or not an institution has an international studies program is largely a function of whether an institution has a graduate program in a field that allows for a concentration in international affairs. We conclude with some observations that might promote future discussion on development of international studies majors.     

Written records of police interrogation: differential registration as determinant of statement credibility and interrogation quality

Abstract

The backbone of Dutch criminal procedure is the case file including a large number of written records. In Dutch courts the focus is primarily on evaluation of written records. The written record of police interrogation is a mediated account of the interrogation itself. In this study we explore how individual differences in the production of written records by police officers affect the jurists' evaluation of the suspect's story and of the quality of the interrogation itself. In the first study, five police officers produced written records of one and the same interrogation on video of a denying suspect. In the second study, three of those written records are evaluated by jurists. They are asked to determine story acceptability of the suspect and procedural fairness of the interrogation. Findings show that a short and simple interrogation of a suspect results in written records that are quite different (Study I). It is further shown that these differences affect the jurists' evaluation of some of the core issues addressed in a criminal process (Study II). Implications of these findings are discussed as well as a number of possible ways to improve the current state of affairs.     

Memory,suffering, survival tactics,and healing among Jopadhola women in post-war Uganda

This ethnographic case study addresses the question of how women in Jopadhola patriarchal society in Eastern Uganda remember three decades of civil war and violence and survived its aftermath. When the war ended, little changed for these women, who are still exposed to a continuum of gender-based violence and continue to use the same tactics that, during the war, enabled them somehow to live with their suffering. Local NGOs, with the support of the government, have started to assist Jopadhola women to improve the quality of their present-day lives. By rebuilding their human and social capital, these NGOs are also creating the space for women to heal their war memories.     

Empirical Investigation into Spatial Integration Without Direct Trade: Comparative Analysis Before and After the Establishment of the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the spatial price cointegration of coffee markets in Ethiopia in the pre and post Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) era using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) cointegration framework. The study takes into consideration a market condition in which government policy restricts arbitrage coffee trade between coffee producing areas. Using coffee price data from 1998–2013 and applying a bounds test approach and Toda–Yamamoto Granger causality test, the study finds that the establishment of ECX has strengthened regional integration rather than a national harmony between producer markets. We also find evidence that, since the establishment of ECX, an opportunity was created for high quality coffee to dominate price formation while also allowing lower quality coffee producing areas to establish themselves. The study underlines the importance of market transparency and exchange of price information between producer markets.     

Organizing to rule: structure,agent, and explaining presidential management styles in Africa

Recent studies of comparative presidentialism have emphasized the importance of informal relationships between presidents and other political actors in explaining how presidents build governing coalitions. What has generally been under-investigated in the literature is how the characteristics of “presidents as agents” impact how they interact with other political actors – in particular, how presidents relate to their cabinets in terms of turnover and inclusiveness. We hypothesize that presidents who were former rebel leaders will behave very differently from presidents that do not have such backgrounds. To test our hypotheses, we collected data from 36 countries that are classified either as presidential or semi-presidential systems in Africa with 93 individual presidential administrations from 1990 to 2009. We found that presidents who were former rebel leaders were less likely to have major cabinet turnovers than other presidents. However, former rebel leaders did not have less politically inclusive cabinets (at least in partisan terms) but did have less ethnically inclusive cabinets than presidents with other backgrounds. The results suggest that agent characteristics, that is, the previous experiences of the president as a decision maker, are as important as the structural constraints he or she faces.