Recognition and understanding of goals and roles: The key internal features of mental health court teams

The increasing involvement of people with mental illness in the criminal justice system has led to the formation of specialty programs such as mental health courts (hereafter MHCs). We discuss MHCs and the teams serving these courts. Specifically, we examine team members' perceptions of MHC goals and their own and others' roles on the MHC team. Using a semi-structured interview instrument, we conducted 59 face-to-face interviews with criminal justice and mental health treatment personnel representing 11 Ohio MHCs. Findings from our qualitative data analyses reveal that MHC personnel understand individuals' roles within the teams, recognize and appreciate the importance of different roles, and share common goals. MHCs could foster this level of understanding and agreement by working to recruit and retain individuals with experience in or willingness to learn about both the criminal justice and mental health systems. Future research should explore the impact of MHC team functioning on client outcomes.     

Beyond police crisis intervention: Moving “upstream” to manage cases and places of behavioral health vulnerability

Law enforcement officers continue to serve on the front lines as mental health interventionists, and as such have been subject to a wave of “first generation” reform designed to enhance their crisis response capabilities. Yet, this focus on crisis intervention has not answered recent calls to move “upstream” and bolster early intervention in the name of long-term recovery. This paper reports on findings from an action research project in Philadelphia aimed at exploring opportunities for enhanced upstream engagement. Study methods include spatial analyses of police mental health transportations from an eight year period (2004–2011) and qualitative data from twenty-three “framing conversations” with partners and other stakeholders, seven focus groups with police and outreach workers, five key informant interviews as well as document reviews of the service delivery system in Philadelphia. Recommendations include the need to move beyond a focus on what police can do to a wider conception of city agencies and business stakeholders who can influence vulnerable people and vulnerable spaces of the city. We argue for the need to develop shared principles and rules of engagement that clarify roles and stipulate how best to enlist city resources in a range of circumstances. Since issues of mental health, substance use and disorder are so tightly coupled, we stress the importance of establishing a data-driven approach to crime and disorder reduction in areas of the city we term “hotspots of vulnerability”. In line with a recovery philosophy, such an approach should reduce opportunities for anti-social behavior among the “dually labeled” in ways consistent with “procedural justice”. Furthermore, crime and disorder data flowing from police and security to behavioral health analysts could contribute to a more focused case management of “repeat utilizers” across the two systems. Our central argument is that a twin emphasis on “case management” and “place management” may provide the pillars needed to move upstream and strengthen interventions along a continuum of engagement.     

Enhancing Tax Compliance through Coercive and Legitimate Power of Tax Authorities by Concurrently Diminishing or Facilitating Trust in Tax Authorities

Both coercion, such as strict auditing and the use of fines, and legitimate procedures, such as assistance by tax authorities, are often discussed as means of enhancing tax compliance. However, the psychological mechanisms that determine the effectiveness of each strategy are not clear. Although highly relevant, there is rare empirical literature examining the effects of both strategies applied in combination. It is assumed that coercion decreases implicit trust in tax authorities, leading to the perception of a hostile antagonistic tax climate and enforced tax compliance. Conversely, it is suggested that legitimate power increases reason‐based trust in the tax authorities, leading to the perception of a service climate and eventually to voluntary cooperation. The combination of both strategies is assumed to cause greater levels of intended compliance than each strategy alone. We conducted two experimental studies with convenience samples of 261 taxpayers overall. The studies describe tax authorities as having low or high coercive power (e.g., imposing lenient or severe sanctions) and/or low or high legitimate power (e.g., having nontransparent or transparent procedures). Data analyses provide supportive evidence for the assumptions regarding the impact on intended tax compliance. Coercive power did not reduce implicit trust in tax authorities; however, it had an effect on reason‐based trust, interaction climate, and intended tax compliance if applied solely. When wielded in combination with legitimate power, it had no effect.     

Counterterrorism and Radical Eco-Groups: A Context for Exploring the Series Hazard Model

Objective

This study examines whether radical eco-groups have been deterred by legal sanctions. From a rational choice framework, I argue that members of these groups weigh costs and benefits. I measure an increase in costs, or an objective deterrence effect, through four federal sentencing acts targeted at reducing the criminal behavior of these groups [the tree-spiking clause of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act (ADA), the Animal Enterprise Protection Act (AEPA), the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), and the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA)] and hypothesize that this legislation decreased the hazard of subsequent attacks.

Methods

This research is a quasi-experimental design utilizing the 1,068 illegal incidents perpetrated in the name of the environment, animal, or both as extracted from the Eco-Incidents Database. Using series hazard modeling, I examine the time until the next incident, serious incident, and ideologically specific incident in relation to dummy variables operationalizing the enactment dates of the above legislation.

Results

All in all, the results are somewhat consistent with a rational choice framework and my hypotheses. The ADA decreased the hazard of another attack (11 %) and environment-only attack (15 %), while at the same time increasing the hazard of a terrorist, damage, and animal-related attack. AETA decreased the hazard of all (47 %), damage (42 %), and the behavior it was aimed at, that of animal-only incidents (52 %). However, neither the AEPA, nor AEDPA had a significant effect on any of the outcomes.

Conclusions

Overall, radical eco-groups were deterred by legal sanctions, but these findings are legislation and outcome specific in addition to including displacement effects.     

Doing justice to justice

Adshead's recognition that only when taken together can the many different conceptions of justice accommodate what is called for in the particularly demanding setting of forensic mental health care, is to be applauded. Each must be honoured and built into the systems of assessment and treatment that are the tasks of the forensic psychiatrist, she demonstrates. Adshead's far‐reaching revisions could resolve much that is troubling about the present practice of forensic psychiatry. Yet how much these revisions can overcome the moral dilemmas associated with dual roles in forensic psychiatry, is not so clear.     

Influencing the Bureaucracy: The Irony of Congressional Oversight

Does the president or Congress have more influence over policymaking by the bureaucracy? Despite a wealth of theoretical guidance, progress on this important question has proven elusive due to competing theoretical predictions and severe difficulties in measuring agency influence and oversight. We use a survey of federal executives to assess political influence, congressional oversight, and the policy preferences of agencies, committees, and the president on a comparable scale. Analyzing variation in political influence across and within agencies reveals that Congress is less influential relative to the White House when more committees are involved. While increasing the number of involved committees may maximize the electoral benefits for members, it may also undercut the ability of Congress as an institution to collectively respond to the actions of the presidency or the bureaucracy.     

What About Winning? Looking into the Blind Spot of the Theory of Campaign Professionalization

The international literature on campaign professionalization suggests that election campaigning has become increasingly slick and professional in recent decades. But while significant attention has been paid to changing campaign tools and tactics, one critical question has been consistently overlooked: Do professionalized campaigners perform better at the ballot box? This question should be a critical one for campaign scholars, yet the existing literature is almost entirely silent on the relationship between campaign professionalization and electoral outcomes. This paper reviews the existing literature for clues about how professionalized campaigning may help or hinder electoral performance and draws on recent research using Gibson and Rommele's (2009 Gibson , R. , and A. Rommele . ( 2009 ). Measuring the professionalization of political campaigning . Party Politics , 15 ( 3 ), 265 – 293 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) CAMPROF Index to identify avenues for further research on this under-examined topic.     

The Geography of U.S. Terrorist Incidents, 1970–2004

This paper describes the spatio-temporal trends in terrorist incidents in the United States, from 1970 through 2004. Utilizing the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and ancillary data, we examine both the frequency of incidents and their characteristics: location, target type, attack type, weapon type, and perpetrator group. While the frequency of terrorist incidents has declined since the 1970s, there still is significant activity nationwide. Instead of urban-rural or West Coast-East Coast divisions, the pattern is a more complex mosaic based on group identity, target, and weapon type. We conclude that there is an explicit geography of terrorism, one that is quite decentralized and highly localized.