Constitutional courts as arbiters of post-conflict territorial self-government: Bosnia and Macedonia

Constitutional and supreme courts frequently end up examining the political and legal questions at the heart of peace agreements and post-conflict constitutions. Where a peace agreement has included territorial self-government (TSG) provisions courts are often endowed with the capacity to adjudicate disputes between state and sub-state levels of government. The effectiveness of courts in fulfilling this role as not been comprehensively examined. This article fills this important gap examining whether the results of existing research on the role of constitutional and supreme courts in resolving disputes in traditional federalism also apply in these particular circumstances. It finds that where TSG is used as a conflict management mechanism judicial review can have centralizing tendencies if this occurs it can largely be attributed to the processes used to select though the devolutionary multinational nature of the states is also relevant.     

Female inmates, family caregivers, and young children's adjustment: A research agenda and implications for corrections programming

Attendant to the exponential increase in rates of incarceration of mothers with young children in the United States, programming has been established to help mothers attend to parenting skills and other family concerns while incarcerated. Unfortunately, most programs overlook the important, ongoing relationship between incarcerated mothers and family members caring for their children—most often, the inmates' own mothers. Research reveals that children's behavior problems escalate when different co-caregivers fail to coordinate parenting efforts and interventions, work in opposition, or disparage or undermine one another. This article presents relevant research on co-caregiving and child adjustment, highlights major knowledge gaps in need of study to better understand incarcerated mothers and their families, and proposes that existing interventions with such mothers can be strengthened through targeting and cultivating functional coparenting alliances in families.     

Selflessness and self‐interest: Public morality and the Xu Honggang campaign

The Chinese state has continued to promote a public morality based on self‐sacrifice even as it has advocated a market economic system which tolerates self‐interest. This paper looks at the Xu Honggang campaign of 1994 and argues that the state has been unable to prevent the leakage of market sensibilities into public morality. Despite its ostensible encouragement of crime intervention, the Xu Honggang campaign failed to provide models of citizen action and diluted selflessness by commoditizing it.     

A NATIONAL SURVEY OF US POLICE ON PREPARATION AND CONDUCT OF IDENTIFICATION LINEUPS

A great deal of research has been aimed at identifying the factors that produce errors in eyewitness identification. However, most of this work has been conducted in laboratory environments using undergraduates and naive lay persons as research participants. Little information is available on what police officers do in the course of their identification activities. The present research investigated the procedures that police officers report employing when constructing and administering eyewitness identification lineups. We developed a survey that addresses a number of these issues, including experience, sources of lineup foils, lineup formation and display, lineup fairness evaluation, presence of suspect's attorney, witness instructions, historical records, and legal challenges. Surveys were sent to 500 US police jurisdictions; 220 were returned. Several survey items showed results consistent with previous laboratory research, however police officers reported using some procedures that are different from those established as most effective in the research literature. This paper summarizes the results of our survey and discusses the implications for future research and forensic procedures.     

Static risk factors predict sexual misconduct among incarcerated female sexual offenders

Abstract

Although there has been a great deal of research conducted on sexual offenders in recent years, the vast majority of studies have focused on male perpetrators. Little is known about female sexual perpetrators, due primarily to the small number of offenders/offences and sociocultural factors. This study evaluated if there was an association between static risk factors [as delineated by the Static-99 and Rapid Risk Assessment for Sex Offender Recidivism (RRASOR)] and institutional sexual misconduct for incarcerated female sexual offenders. In addition to demographic information, total Static scores were obtained from a file review along with institutional conduct reports. The STATIC-99 and RRASOR scores from intake information significantly predicted sexual conduct reports in prison.     

A Contingent Approach to the Organization and Management of Public–Private Partnerships: An Empirical Study of English Health Care

Public–private partnerships (PPPs) have become a prominent feature of contemporary public policy. Although research shows variation in the contractual configuration of partnerships, there is little evidence of how these shape service and workforce organization. Through comparative ethnographic research on two PPP health care providers in the English National Health Service, this article develops the idea that PPPs exhibit “tight” and “loose” arrangements that relate to “downstream” service and workforce management. It induces four empirically grounded mediating factors to describe this relationship. The first relates to the “dependence” between partners in terms of financing, strategy, and resource sharing; the second to the “strategic orientation” of leaders; the third to the composition of the “professional workforce”; and the fourth to the “management approach” to service and workforce organization. The article contributes to the research literature by exploring the contingencies in how PPPs are operationalized on the ground.     

When Does Evidence of Eyewitness Confidence Inflation Affect Judgments in a Criminal Trial?

Two studies investigated perceptions of eyewitness confidence inflation: increases in a witness's confidence between the time of the identification and the trial. Experiment 1 (N = 90) demonstrated that, for White participants, assessments of the strength of the defense case, the eyewitness's view, and participants' confidence in the eyewitness's accuracy were more favorable to the defense when there was evidence that the eyewitness's confidence increased over time (mere inflation condition), compared with a control condition. In addition, assessments of the defendant's guilt and the eyewitness's accuracy were more favorable to the defense when the eyewitness was aggressively challenged about the change in her confidence report (inflation + challenge). Experiment 2 (N = 360) demonstrated that, for Hispanic participants, sensitivity to confidence inflation did not interact with manipulations of the eyewitness's or defendant's race (White vs. Hispanic). In addition, the confidence inflation effect did not replicate with the Hispanic participants. Results are interpreted in terms of the ingroup bias in legal judgments and directions for future research.     

Intimate partner violence and long-term psychosocial functioning in a national sample of American women

Using a nationally representative sample of American married or cohabiting women, this prospective study examined women who reported or denied intimate partner violence (IPV) at wave 1 and compared them on a range of psychosocial outcomes at a 5-year follow-up. This study also examined the rate of divorce or separation during the 5-year interval among women who reported IPV at wave 1 and explored whether certain predictors were related to ending an abusive relationship with an intimate partner during the period. Women with IPV at wave 1, compared to women without IPV, were significantly more likely to experience a greater degree of depressive symptoms and functional impairment and less self-esteem and life satisfaction at the 5-year follow-up. Also, nearly half of the women in an abusive relationship left the relationship within the period. Leaving the abusive relationship was associated with lower individual income and more social support at wave 1.