The gendered construction of expert discourse: An analysis of psychiatric evaluations in criminal court

According to critical literature, psychiatrization is a central feature of gendered social control. It operates in a twofold process: by orienting women to medical institutions rather than the penal system, and, for those women who do enter the criminal justice system, by favoring an interpretation of their behavior in terms of mental health problems. However, the production of gendered social control cannot be reduced to institutional decision-making; it also leaves its traces in various discursive forms. One such form is forensic psychiatrists' discourse on the offenders they evaluate. Our study analyzes these forensic reports as units of a computerized database. Our goal is to gain insight into the text by means of systematic quantitative and qualitative procedures. Even though the expert discourse is shaped by specifications requested by the court, the discourse examined here constructs two very distinct identities that do not correspond to stereotyped conceptions about femininity and masculinity.     

Confessions: a Model of Officials' Perspectives on Accepting Gifts from Clients in Post-communist Europe

There is widespread criticism of the behaviour of junior officials in post-communist Europe where they are often accused of treating citizens unfairly and soliciting presents or bribes to solve citizens' problems. To get the perspective of officials themselves we interviewed 1307 junior officials and state employees in Ukraine, Bulgaria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. This paper focuses on their willingness to accept gifts from clients, their confessions to having done so, and the factors that lead some officials to accept gifts while others do not – factors such as occupational bargaining power and the (related) frequency of offers from clients, economic pressures, national and institutional cultures, fear of punishment, and moral perspectives on charging clients for favours. Economic pressures make officials more inclined to feel that they 'could not afford to refuse' gifts, but this motivation is only weakly related to actual behaviour. Occupational bargaining power and the frequency of offers from clients make them more likely to 'welcome' gifts or accept them 'out of politeness'– and these less excusable motivations are more strongly related to actual gift-taking.     

The World Wide Web and the U.S. Political News Market

We propose a framework for understanding how the Internet has affected the U.S. political news market. The framework is driven by the lower cost of production for online news and consumers' tendency to seek out media that conform to their own beliefs. The framework predicts that consumers of Internet news sources should hold more extreme political views and be interested in more diverse political issues than those who solely consume mainstream television news. We test these predictions using two large datasets with questions about news exposure and political views. Generally speaking, we find that consumers of generally left‐of‐center (right‐of‐center) cable news sources who combine their cable news viewing with online sources are more liberal (conservative) than those who do not. We also find that those who use online news content are more likely than those who consume only television news content to be interested in niche political issues.     

TrueAllele® Genotype Identification on DNA Mixtures Containing up to Five Unknown Contributors

Computer methods have been developed for mathematically interpreting mixed and low‐template DNA. The genotype modeling approach computationally separates out the contributors to a mixture, with uncertainty represented through probability. Comparison of inferred genotypes calculates a likelihood ratio (LR), which measures identification information. This study statistically examined the genotype modeling performance of Cybergenetics TrueAllele^® computer system. High‐ and low‐template DNA mixtures of known randomized composition containing 2, 3, 4, and 5 contributors were tested. Sensitivity, specificity, and reproducibility were established through LR quantification in each of these eight groups. Covariance analysis found LR behavior to be relatively invariant to DNA amount or contributor number. Analysis of variance found that consistent solutions were produced, once a sufficient number of contributors were considered. This study demonstrates the reliability of TrueAllele interpretation on complex DNA mixtures of representative casework composition. The results can help predict an information outcome for a DNA mixture analysis.     

An exploration of burglary in the criminal histories of sex offenders referred for civil commitment

Commission of nonsexual crimes generally antedates officially recorded sexual offenses. In particular, burglary has been hypothesized to be a potential ‘stepping stone’ in the development of one's sexual criminal career in the same way that marijuana has often been considered a ‘gateway drug’ to more serious drug-related offenses. The present study examined the officially recorded criminal histories of 828 male sex offenders to determine the relevance of burglary in their criminal histories. One third of the men in the sample (n=281, 34%) had been charged at least once for burglary. These 281 men committed a total of 762 separate incidents of burglary. Offenders with at least one officially recorded charge for burglary (BSOs) were compared with those with no such charges (SOs). Next, the characteristics of each burglary were examined and four distinct types of burglary were identified: nonsexual, covertly sexual, overtly sexual, and combination burglary/rape. BSOs accrued twice as many charges as the SOs and were significantly more likely to have an earlier age of onset, a longer criminal career, more employment problems, elementary school problems, antisocial behavior, and substance abuse.