Integrated DNA and Fingerprint Analyses in the Identification of 60‐Year‐Old Mummified Human Remains Discovered in an Alaskan Glacier

Abstract: This report describes the identification of a merchant mariner who perished in 1948 when Northwest Airlines Flight 4422, a DC‐4 carrying 24 seamen and six crew members crashed into Mount Sanford, Alaska. Fifty‐one years later, a human forearm and hand were found close by the wreckage of the plane, prompting identification efforts using DNA and fingerprints. There were significant challenges to both the fingerprint and DNA analyses. The hand was badly desiccated, making fingerprint friction‐ridge detail almost invisible and the remains had been embalmed upon discovery, making DNA amplification difficult. We present the results of an interdisciplinary approach that successfully addressed these challenges and ultimately led to the identification of the remains. These efforts relied on efficient fingerprint rejuvenation and imaging techniques that improved print resolution, as well as new DNA extraction techniques optimized for aggressively embalmed remains.     

Desistance and Attitudes Towards Sex Offenders: Facilitation or Hindrance?

In an ideal world, there would be a seamless relationship between interventions that focus on risk factors causally associated with sexual reoffending and the subsequent release of, and ongoing support for, offenders into the community. However, emotionally fueled and uninformed public responses to news of released sex offenders, and the legislation such responses have inspired, severely hinder this process. Our aims in this paper are to review findings of research on community attitudes about sex offenders within a desistance framework. More specifically, we provide a synthesis of the current research literature on attitudes towards sex offenders. Second, we consider in more detail those studies that include community member samples. Third, we review interventions aimed at promoting attitude change amongst professionals working with sex offenders and finally formulate some recommendations for promoting positive attitude change amongst the general public.     

Consequences of mental and physical health for reentry and recidivism: Toward a health‐based model of desistance*

During the last few decades, criminologists have identified several adult roles and statuses, including employment, positive family relations, and economic stability, as critical for promoting successful reintegration and desistance. Very few researchers, however, have investigated the conditions that serve to bring about these transitions and successes crucial for behavior change. As a complement to a burgeoning amount of literature on the impact of incarceration on health, we emphasize the reverse: Health has important implications for reentry outcomes and reincarceration. Informed by multiple disciplines, we advance a health‐based model of desistance in which both mental and physical dimensions of health affect life chances in the employment and family realms and ultimately recidivism. Investigating this issue with longitudinal data from the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (SVORI) and structural equation models, we find overall support for the health‐based model of desistance. Our results indicate several significant pathways through which both manifestations of health influence employment, family conflict, financial problems, and crime and reincarceration. The findings highlight the need for implementation of correctional and transitional policies to improve health among the incarcerated and avert health‐related reentry failures.     

Judicial Stereotyping Associated with Genetic Essentialist Biases toward Mental Disorders and Potential Negative Effects on Sentencing

This research, utilizing qualitative methodology with grounded theory, develops a model that illuminates a process by which judicial stereotyping associated with genetic essentialist biases toward mental disorders may affect judges' views regarding the sentencing and punishment of offenders with mental disorder diagnoses presented or understood to be genetically influenced. Data, collected through interviews with a sample of 59 Pennsylvania State Court judges, suggest that judges exhibit stereotyping behavior by linking the relationships between three particular genetic essentialist biases (immutability, informativeness, uniformity) and three types of stigmatization (pessimism, dangerousness, family stigma) associated with each bias. When judges exhibited this stereotyping behavior without the effects of intervening conditions, they then expressed how knowledge of the genetic influences of an offender's mental disorder would negatively influence views on punishment, specifically related to more restrictive sentences and support for deterrence and incapacitation. Three intervening conditions associated with judges' personal characteristics (personal experiences involving genetics, strength of determinism vs. free will beliefs, having no personal experiences with mental disorders) influenced whether judges' sentencing views were negatively influenced by such knowledge on genetics. Implications related to therapeutic jurisprudence are discussed.     

Pornography, Pragmatism, and Proscription

The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 criminalizes the possession of extreme pornography, namely, images of bestiality, necrophilia, and life-threatening or serious violence, and is the immediate context for this article which seeks to present a pragmatic liberal humanist critique of pornography regulation. Such a critique, derived in particular from the writings of Nussbaum and Rorty, presents an alternative case for regulation, eschewing the visceral competing fundamentalisms which characterized the 'porn wars' of the 1980s and 1990s. Whilst moral and epistemological philosophers squabble with radical feminists and radical libertarians, extreme pornography can nurture real injustice and ruin real lives. A pragmatic liberal humanism demands a pragmatic response to extreme pornography. The first part of this article will revisit the longer history of the 'porn wars'; the second describes the parameters of a pragmatic liberal humanist critique; the third examines the shorter history of pornography regulation written into the provisions now enacted in the 2008 Act.     

Finkelhor's precondition model of child sexual abuse: A critique

Abstract

This paper critically discusses an extremely influential multi-factorial theory of child molestation, Finkelhor's Precondition Model. This model was one of the first comprehensive theories of the sexual abuse of children and represents a significant achievement. It provides a clear framework for approaching the study of men who have sexually abused children and has lead to both clear treatment goals and clinical innovations. It has rarely, however, been systematically critically examined and the cogency of its core constructs evaluated. Our analysis suggests that alongside its strengths, Finkelhor's Precondition Model has some conceptual problems. It suffers from vagueness; contains overlapping constructs; and a rich array of vulnerability factors that require teasing out and clarification. The model's attempts to provide a taxonomy highlight the diversity inherent in child sexual abuse, but it has not yet provided a structure to adequately inform treatment.