Cynicism: A factor in corrections work

Cynicism has long been known to be a characteristic in police work. A research study was undertaken to determine levels of cynicism commonly found among corrections workers. A twenty-question cynicism test, based on the one used by Niederhoffer in his study of New York City police officers, was used, but it was modified to fit the correctional setting. Results indicated a moderátely high level of operating cynicism in corrections officers, especially in those who work in “treatment” institutions.     

Precarious employment conditions affect work content in education and social work: results of work analyses

Work content is adversely affected by precarious employment conditions, with consequences for workers and clients/customers. Three examples are taken from professions involving long-term relations between workers and clients. Adult education teachers hired on short-term contracts to teach primarily immigrant populations prepare their courses under less favorable conditions than regular teachers and their employment context foments hostility among teachers. Special education technicians are hired on a seasonal basis which interferes with their ability to coordinate and plan their efforts in collaboration with teachers. Workers in shelters for women suffering conjugal violence who were hired on a casual or on-call basis were unable to follow up with women they helped during their shifts and more rarely engaged in one-on-one counseling. Precarious work contracts can affect mental health not only through employment insecurity but also through negative effects on the ability to do one's job and take pride in one's work, as well as weakening the interpersonal relationships on which successful, productive work depends.     

The effectiveness of service work: An analysis of recidivism

The Israeli “service work” law of 1987 enables a court to commute prison sentences of up to 6 months to service work in the community. This paper examines the correctional effectiveness of this new sanction by comparing the rate of recidivism (over a period of 14 months) among 407 offenders sentenced to service work to that of 950 comparable offenders sentenced to imprisonment. As the research design is quasi-experimental, an adjustment for confounders is carried out using the propensity score (PS) methodology. The estimation of the odds ratio of recidivism with respect to sanction comprises two steps: (a) the PS, which is the conditional probability of assignment to a particular sanction given a set of confounders, is estimated by a logistic model; and (b) the conditional probability of recidivism, given the PS and other covariates, is estimated by a second model. The findings indicate that before an adjustment for the systematic differences between the two sanctions was carried out, the odds for recidivism among prisoners were 2.4 times higher than the odds for service workers. After the adjustment, the odds ratio was reduced to 1.7. This estimate indicates that the service work sanction has a considerable correctional effect. The need to address additional criteria for the effectiveness of service work (e.g., net-widening) is emphasized.     

Marfan综合征研究进展

Marfan综合征是一种潜在的致命性结缔组织疾病,呈显性遗传,人群发病率约2～3人/万,主要累及骨、心血管及眼组织。遗传学检查证实系编码微纤维蛋白-1(fibrillin-1)的基因(FBN1)突变所致。部分病例除有骨骼、眼和心血管系统的病理改变外,还有不同程度的皮肤、被膜、肺及肌组织的改变。部分病例由于伴有严重的心血管系统改变而发生猝死。     

Employee concerns regarding self-managing work teams: A multidimensional justice perspective

The increase in the use of self-managing work teams in organizations has been accompanied by growing employee resistance and concern about what such dramatic changes mean to workers. Using an organizational justice perspective, this chapter identifies and examines employee concerns about the move to self-managing work teams in two Fortune 500 organizations. Employee fairness concerns regarding three types of justice—distributive, procedural, and interactional—are highlighted. Findings suggest that to address employee fairness concerns regarding the move to self-managing work teams, managers should act distributively, procedurally, and interactionally justly.[Self-managing work teams are] the right way and the only way to be productive.—Self-managing work team member in a Fortune 500 company     

The job in the joint: The impact of generation and gender on work stress in prison

Most of the existing literature on correctional officer work stress examined factors such as leadership, job environment, stress and job satisfaction. This study surveyed correctional officers and examined the impact of gender and generation on work stress. Results indicated that gender is a significant factor regarding work-related stress, more than any other demographic variable, although generation had a small impact on job stress. Generation and gender explained a miniscule portion of work stress variance. Further studies are needed to assess the overall relationship among demographic factors, non-static officer attributes, and job stress.     

The internal crisis of corrections: Professionalization and the work environment

Criminal justice policymakers and managers have viewed professionalization as a favored solution to the current crisis in correctional systems across the country. Utilizing case study data drawn from a state correctional system located in the western United States, we find that upgrading line correctional staff was a strategy used by top administrators to improve the image of their agency and maintain the autonomy of their prison system in the face of a threatened take-over by the federal court. However, in mandating the professionalization of their personnel, these managers failed to confront deeper organizational problems. Instead, they argued that an educated staff was the cure for acknowledged operational problems—including corruption and inhumane treatment. The failure to combine staff upgrading with more comprehensive organizational reforms merely heightened the frustrations within the workforce of the state's correctional institutions. In essence, these professionalization strategies represent a prime example of utilizing individual-level solutions to solve organizational-level problems.     

The new progress in Chinese Arbitration Law

The Chinese Arbitration Law of 1995, together with the Civil Procedure Law and other sources of arbitration laws, is served as the legal bases for the Chinese arbitration system. Compared with advanced arbitration systems in the world, there still exist some defects of the Chinese Arbitration Law due to its lack of rich legislative experience and the conservative attitude toward arbitration. However, the Judicial Interpretation by the Supreme Court of China in 1995 makes a progress in Chinese Arbitration Law by strengthening the support to arbitration, but not playing the interventionist role of it.     

The health and human rights movement: progress and obstacles

There is a new maturity about the health and human rights movement as it endeavours to integrate human rights into health policies at the national and international levels. In addition to the traditional human rights techniques, such as "naming and shaming", the movement is also using new approaches such as indicators, benchmarks and impact assessments. However, it is confronted with a range of major obstacles and this article focuses on two of them: the inadequate engagement within the health and human rights movement of (i) established human rights non-governmental organisations and (ii) health professionals. This article argues that established human rights non-governmental organisations should work on health and human rights issues, such as maternal mortality, just as vigorously as they already campaign on disappearances, torture and prisoners of conscience. Also, it emphasises that health and human rights complement and reinforce each other. Nevertheless, many health professionals have never heard of the right to the highest attainable standard of health. The article argues that there is no chance of operationalising the right to health without the active engagement of many more health professionals, and it makes some preliminary observations about steps that might be taken to deepen health professionals' engagement in the health and human rights movement.     

The work the document does: research, policy, and equity in health

At the center of the politics of health equity, in many countries and circumstances, stands a signal report of research. This article is concerned with what might be described as the architecture of such documents, including how they are produced and organized and the relationships they demonstrate with others that parallel, precede, and succeed them. The article examines how scientific and political authority is established and comments on the evidence of cross-national learning that these documents reveal. It discusses differences in how the problem of health equity is constructed in different countries and how research findings are converted into policy recommendations. It begins to trace a process of implementation by noting how these documents are referred to and written about. The argument is that the politics of health equity are expressed or realized in the documents and reports, which are its principal vehicle. This is not to claim that there is no world beyond the text or that the world somehow is a text, but that to fully understand that world we must understand the text and the work it does.