Assessing the Needs of Women Recently Released From Prison

The growing number of females incarcerated in the United States suggests that greater importance needs to be placed on preparing practitioners and communities for their eventual release from prison. Female offenders present a unique set of needs, including greater mental health, substance abuse, and medical health problems than their male counterparts. Furthermore, women may possess unique needs at various points of their involvement with the criminal justice system (i.e., before, during, and following a period of incarceration). The current study examines the needs of female offenders while they are reentering the community from the perspective of community service providers who work directly with recently incarcerated women. Survey results reveal that community service providers identify needs in 7 domains. Prevalence and urgency measures provide unique profiles of the needs of female offenders, and respondent reports of the effectiveness of the existing community-based service sector lead to numerous implications and suggestions for future research.     

Domestic violence case processing: a matter of local legal culture

As one enters a courthouse, its culture is communicated to its listening visitors. The manner in which the security guards speak; the length of time victims are kept waiting; the amount of bail a defendant is assessed; communicate messages to those who are paying attention. Domestic violence cases have long suffered from lenient treatment and dismissals in our criminal courts. This paper examines a unique explanation for this problem: the court’s local legal culture. The elements of two courts’ local legal culture that most profoundly impacted their processing of domestic violence cases are examined. Over a six month period, 23 in depth interviews were conducted with court workgroup members in two courts, one with a specialized domestic violence session and one without. Court room observations were used to supplement these interviews. The results were insightful and telling about how a court’s culture can, at times, be more influential on case processing than the law itself.     

The meaning of “the public interest” in communications policy,part I: Its origins in state and federal regulation

In the United Kingdom, a super-injunction is an interim action that prevents those against whom it is issued and any third parties who have notice of the injunction – including members of the media – from communicating about the subject in question. The media are not allowed to even reference the fact that there is an injunction in place. Often, the proceedings are anonymised, meaning the identities of the applicant and respondent are unknown, with initials replacing names. Super-injunctions and anonymised orders create tension between freedom of the press and privacy and deviate from fundamental principles of open justice. This article examines the role of super-injunctions in English media law, the tension between individual privacy and the need for an open justice system, and the implications of social media sites such as Twitter in the super-injunction process.     

Privacy Remedies and Costs in the UK: Uncertainties in Access and Relief

Due to the global and pervasive nature of the Internet, the increasingly intrusive nature of reporting by tabloids, the high cost of bringing privacy actions, and the difficulty and complexity involved in removing private information from the World Wide Web, privacy costs and remedies are under scrutiny in the United Kingdom. This article examines some of the proposed changes in this area including the availability of injunctions, pre-publication notification, levels of damage awards, opportunities for alternative dispute resolution, conditional fee agreements/success fees, and potential global solutions that may have an impact on the United States. The article argues that due to the nature of privacy claims initiated from information on the Internet, damage fee levels should be increased as well as the use of mediation and conditional fee agreements.     

Promoting Postsecondary Education in Low-Income Youth: The Moderating Role of Socio-Behavioral and Academic Skills in the Context of a Major Educational Reform

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Governments around the world are pressed to invest in postsecondary education. However, little research exists to document whether large-scale educational reforms...     

The roots of coercion and insurgency: exploiting the counterfactual case of Honduras

Anecdotal evidence points to a significant relationship between repression and rebellion and yet the quantitative civil war literature ignores state strategies, deeming them endogenous or perfectly correlated with polity type. This article seeks to bring the state back in again and examine the causes of states' strategies and the effects of these strategies on non-violent mobilisation. It finds that, under certain circumstances, a state's response to a peaceful opposition movement depends not on its institutions or capacity; rather, it is a function of the state's control of the national security apparatus, autonomy from its constituents, and resources fungible for reform. Additionally, the article concludes that state policy can play a more significant role in explaining the onset of civil conflict than do structural variables such as per capita income, terrain and population size. Historical analysis of coercion and insurgency in the counterfactual case of Honduras illustrates the plausibility of this argument.     

Lowering the age of consent: Legal,ethical, and clinical implications of adolescent-directed therapy

This article discusses a recently enacted Colorado law that aims to reduce the youth suicide rate by lowering the age of consent for psychotherapy from age 15 to age 12. The author discusses the challenges therapists face when young adolescents seek therapy without parental consent in cases involving interparental conflict. Suggestions for managing adolescent-directed therapy are offered.