Navigating Today's Remediation Cost Cap Market

The Remediation Cost Cap (RCC) market has experienced the boom-bust cycle common to many industries. This article discusses the current market conditions and insurance providers offering the product. The article asks you to determine whether you really need a RCC policy, and if so, provides helpful hints for managing the submission process. Finally, the article discusses the effects of contraction of RCC providers have had on the liability transfer industry.     

Educational Competency as an Indicator of Occupational Stress for Probation and Parole Officers

Probation and parole officers are assigned the responsibility of supervising convicted criminals in a community setting in such a way that the competing goals of punishment, public safety, offender rehabilitation, and deterrence are achieved. All the while, these tasks are accomplished within the confines of shrinking budgets, large case loads, increasingly high-risk offenders, low occupational prestige, and considerable political and public scrutiny. These competing demands often result in especially high levels of work-related stress. The point of this research is to consider the divergence in occupational stress among probation/parole officers and whether or not they felt educationally prepared for their job. The data for this study were collected during a two-month study period which began on March 15, 2005. Data were collected non-randomly through a national Internet based survey of active probation/parole officers. This study considers a sub-sample of 2, 364 officers from fifteen states. The results show probation/parole officers who feel educationally under-prepared are likely to experience higher levels of occupational stress and more likely to have negative manifestations of stress than those officers who feel well-prepared.     

INTERNATIONAL PARENTAL CHILD ABDUCTION: WHY WE NEED TO EXPAND CUSTODY RIGHTS PROTECTED UNDER THE CHILD ABDUCTION CONVENTION

The Child Abduction Convention, an international treaty, protects custody rights internationally among its member states by providing a remedy of return in cases where a child was wrongfully removed in violation of a parent's custody right. There is no such remedy for the violation of a parent's access (or visitation) rights. A ne exeat clause in a child custody agreement restrains a custodial parent from removing a child from a predetermined jurisdiction (such as a particular country) and can be issued when there is a risk that the custodial parent might flee to another country with the child(ren). Currently there is a circuit split within the United States as to whether a ne exeat right coupled with the right of access should equal a protected custody right under the Convention. Most international courts protect the ne exeat right under the Convention; however some do not. A ne exeat right should convey a protected custody right for policy reasons. The beneficial implications of a ne exeat right creating a protected custody right under the Child Abduction Convention clearly outweigh the detriments. While there is no instant solution to the inconsistencies among various courts in interpreting the Child Abduction Conventions’ scope in regard to a ne exeat right, there are ways to resolve the problem. If consistency in judicial interpretation cannot be achieved, a movement needs to be initiated to create a protocol to the Child Abduction Convention to further explain the scope of custody rights and ne exeat rights under the Convention.     

Opening a window into police internal affairs: Impact of procedural justice reform on third-party attitudes

The study explores the impact of a procedural innovation on justice judgments made by third party observers. The innovation involved the establishment of a review panel with civilian participants to monitor a police department's investigation of allegations of misconduct against its officers. The study distinguishes the impact on racial minority observers from that on racial majority observers. Data suggest that the innovation had a positive, though differing, impact on the justice judgments of both minority and majority observers.     

Analyzing Multiple-Item Measures of Crime and Deviance I: Item Response Theory Scaling

Multiple-item measures of self-reported offending typically provide the principal outcome measures for individual level research on the causes of crime and deviance. This article directs attention to the substantial problems presented by the task of forming composite scores for these measures, and it presents a possible solution to those problems. We consider scaling by means of the graded response model from item response theory (IRT) as a potential means of overcoming the shortcomings of traditional summative scaling and of obtaining valuable information about the strengths and weaknesses of our measures. We illustrate this strategy through a scale analysis of a fourteen-item, self-report measure of delinquency, using three years of data from the Monitoring the Future study, an annual national survey of high school seniors. The graded response model proves to be consistent with the data, and it provides results that address important substantive questions about self-report measures. The findings are informative about the strengths and weaknesses of alternative strategies for developing self-report instruments, indicating that there is little to be gained by making fine distinctions in the frequency of individual delinquent acts.