Banging the gavel on grading: justice musings of a new professor

Grading is a subjective process that may bring about justice-related questions, especially as they relate to fair student outcomes. Procedural and distributive justice guidelines, as discussed in the social psychology justice literature, can be used to frame the debate about fair grading and guide educators during the grade distribution process. These guidelines may help educators achieve various goals, including increasing students’ perceptions of justice, decreasing negative emotions, fostering group solidarity and harmony, and meeting student needs. First, however, educators must decide which classroom goals are most important, and how to assess student needs in a changing economy.     

Restoring the professor and the students: a circle process and contemplative practices in a restorative justice seminar

Limited research is published on teaching restorative justice in the criminal justice or justice studies curriculum in higher education. This article contributes to the discourse on restorative justice pedagogy by discussing a restorative justice seminar that is taught in a circle process with contemplative practices. Students learn the process of circles, one of the major processes in restorative justice practice, by modeling the practice with participation and leadership. Contemplative practices enhance the learning of restorative justice with meditation and reflection.     

The FDA and genetic testing: improper tools for a difficult problem

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recently issued draft guidance on how it intends to regulate laboratory-developed tests, including genetic tests. This article argues that genetic tests differ from traditional targets of FDA regulation in both product as well as industry landscape, and that the FDA''s traditional tools are ill-suited for regulating this space. While existing regulatory gaps do create risks in genetic testing, the regulatory burden of the FDA''s proposal introduces new risks for both test providers and patients that may offset the benefits. Incremental expansion of current oversight outside of the FDA can mitigate many of the risks necessitating increased oversight while avoiding the creation of new ones that could undermine this industry.     

Improving police response to persons with mental illness: a multi-level conceptualization of CIT

The large numbers of people with mental illness in jails and prisons has fueled policy concern in all domains of the justice system. This includes police practice, where initial decisions to involve persons in the justice system or divert them to mental health services are made. One approach to focus police response in these situations is the implementation of Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT). The CIT model is being implemented widely, with over 400 programs currently operating. While the limited evidence on CIT effectiveness is promising, research on CIT is limited in scope and conceptualization-much of it focusing on officer characteristics and training. In this paper we review the literature on CIT and present a conceptual model of police response to persons with mental illness that accounts for officer, organizational, mental health system and community level factors likely to influence implementation and effectiveness of CIT and other approaches. By moving our conceptualizations and research in this area to new levels of specificity, we may contribute more to effectiveness research on these interventions.     

Attrition in the RAND Health Insurance Experiment: a response to Nyman

In a prior article in this journal, John Nyman argues that the effect on health care use and spending found in the RAND Health Insurance Experiment is an artifact of greater voluntary attrition in the cost-sharing plans relative to the free care plan. Specifically, he speculates that those in the cost-sharing plans, when faced with a hospitalization, withdrew. His argument is implausible because (1) families facing a hospitalization would be worse off financially by withdrawing; (2) a large number of observational studies find a similar effect of cost sharing on use; (3) those who left did not differ in their utilization prior to leaving; (4) if there had been no attrition and cost sharing did not reduce hospitalization rates, each adult in each family that withdrew would have had to have been hospitalized once each year for the duration of time they would otherwise have been in the experiment, an implausibly high rate; (5) there are benign explanations for the higher attrition in the cost-sharing plans. Finally, we obtained follow-up health-status data on the great majority of those who left prematurely. We found the health-status findings were insensitive to the inclusion of the attrition cases.     

Coping with crowding: The prison system response to the crowding crisis

The prison crowding problem in the United States has been described by the Department of Justice as one of the most critical problems facing the criminal justice system (Gettinger, 1984). During the past several years numerous state and federal, public and private task forces and advisory groups have proposed solutions to the crisis but, as of yet, the proposals advanced by criminal justice policy analysts have done little to ease the crowding crisis. In light of the failure of various planning groups to deal with the problem of crowding, this paper examines how the correctional systems have coped with prison crowding through the use of shortterm ad hoc solutions during the 1980s.