Attitudes and public punishment preferences: Finnish results of Scandinavian sense of justice research

Opinion polls have repeatedly shown that populations favour severe penalties for offenders. However, surveys using a case vignette method, where the attributes of the case described to the respondents are varied, produce more versatile results. Such research gives a nuanced picture of punitive attitudes. In this study, the sentence decisions of laypeople who are informed about the offender’s criminal history, ethnic background, gender, social issues and substance abuse were examined.

A representative mail survey collected in Finland as part of Scandinavian sense of justice research was used as empirical data. Respondents were presented with six criminal cases and asked to determine sentences for them. All respondents received the same vignettes, but the background attributes of the offenders varied randomly.

This study showed that all the background attributes had a clear connection to the sentence decisions. Considering these results, the idea of a ‘general punitive attitude’, which is commonly used in academic literature, appears to be too simple of a way to look at the relationship between attitudes and punishment decisions.     

Aggression, psychopathy and brain imaging — Review and future recommendations

Violent behavior appears to result from a complex web of interacting genetic as well as environmental factors. Psychopathy is a strong predictor for relapse in violent acts. The current review shed light on rapidly expanding knowledge in brain imaging related to violent behavior and psychopathy. A literature search was performed in PubMed, Cochrane and PsycInfo combining the key words: mentally disordered offender/aggression/violence/ crime/forensic psychiatry/brain imaging neuroimaging/fMRI/MRI/PET/SPECT/lack of empathy/psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder. The reviewed material, which consisted of 48 articles, indicates a rather strong consensus on the connection between dysfunctional parts of the frontal and temporal lobes and violent antisocial behavior and psychopathy. In future studies, it would be useful to focus on the limbic system and to investigate which parts of the frontal lobes and cerebral networks that are of interest in the psychopathic personality. Moreover, the reviewed material highlights some of the methodological difficulties in this area of research such as selection bias in the recruitment of patients, inadequate matching of control subjects, and sometimes incongruous results. In the future we hope that brain imaging can be used to map biological deviations in different offenders in order to try to learn more about the different mechanisms behind violent behaviors.     

Accountability and psychiatric disorders: How do forensic psychiatric professionals think?

Swedish penal law does not exculpate on the grounds of diminished accountability; persons judged to suffer from severe mental disorder are sentenced to forensic psychiatric care instead of prison. Re-introduction of accountability as a condition for legal responsibility has been advocated, not least by forensic psychiatric professionals. To investigate how professionals in forensic psychiatry would assess degree of accountability based on psychiatric diagnoses and case vignettes, 30 psychiatrists, 30 psychologists, 45 nurses, and 45 ward attendants from five forensic psychiatric clinics were interviewed. They were asked (i) to judge to which degree (on a dimensional scale from 1 to 5) each of 12 psychiatric diagnoses might affect accountability, (ii) to assess accountability from five case vignettes, and (iii) to list further factors they regarded as relevant for their assessment of accountability. All informants accepted to provide a dimensional assessment of accountability on this basis and consistently found most types of mental disorders to reduce accountability, especially psychotic disorders and dementia. Other factors thought to be relevant were substance abuse, social network, personality traits, social stress, and level of education.     

Taking It Out on the Body? A Phenomenological Study of Young Adults’ Gendered Experiences of Depression and Antidepressant Use

In this article, we use in-depth interviews with young adults in Sweden to explore the gendered and embodied experiences of depression and antidepressant use. Building upon previous phenomenological research, we analyse being depressed and on antidepressants as altered embodied states, in which corporealization—experiencing the body as a material object—is central. Feminist interventions by Toril Moi and Iris Marion Young inform our analysis of embodiment as gendered. The bodily facets of depression include the weight of the anxious body in crying and not sleeping, as well as the weakened or distorted relationship between body, mind and world in brooding thoughts and hopelessness. These experiences of corporealization are not expressed in gendered terms but, when acted out in depression, they do appear to be gendered. The female body becomes “the first battleground”—as the socially endorsed object upon which to act destructively. In contrast, male behaviour is not expressed as self-destructive, but projects in the world are emphasized at the cost of (bodily) well-being. Although antidepressants lift the corporeal weight of anxiety and low mood, they install a new, and in some respects more profound, corporealization of the body. This is expressed as feeling and caring less and being like a thing or machine. It can be understood in terms of an increased distance from the world—not articulated in gendered terms. As a way of existing in the world, the medicated state bears strong similarities to the depressed state from which it was originally an effort to escape. Thus, taking medication can be seen as yet another way of acting on the body as object. Furthermore, it could be suggested from our findings that when the body is not felt—when there is a breakdown of the meaningful relationship between the body and the world—the experience is less gendered.     

Managers’ Turnover in the Public Sector—The Role of Psychosocial Working Conditions

An important challenge for public organizations is to attract and retain skilled managers. The present study explores how profiles of psychosocial working conditions, assessed by the combination of managerial-specific job demands and job resources, longitudinally predict managers’ turnover intentions and actual turnover in Swedish municipalities. Considerable effects of managers’ psychosocial working conditions on turnover intentions but not on actual turnover were found. Thus, poor working conditions may result in psychologically detached managers in public organizations, which may have considerable and costly effects on both the organizations and the managers, in terms of decreased commitment, performance, and impaired health.     

Organisations as Epistemic Capital: the Case of Independent Children’s Rights Institutions

Why do national organisations proliferate in practically all areas of policymaking and organisational life, and why are they involved in supranational networks and organisations? The article approaches this mystery by exploring how organisations are built and used as authorities in domestic policymaking. The empirical focus is on the establishment of the institution of children’s ombudsman and its uses in influencing Finnish child policy. The theory developed in the article suggests that organisations are accumulations of authority, here termed epistemic capital, which is the primary reason that they are established and sustained. Once these are institutionalised, various actors can use the authority of organisations to legitimate their policy objectives. The case of independent children’s rights institutions shows how this mechanism operates in child policy. The Finnish office of the ombudsman for children has worked actively to become an established ontological and moral authority in child policy, and it has also attempted to utilise the mandate and authority of the United Nations and the Convention on the Rights of the Child to pressure the state into more child-friendly policy decisions.     

Does China have a geoeconomic strategy towards Zimbabwe? The case of the Zimbabwean natural resource sector

The Chinese party-state and Chinese companies have become increasingly active in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially in the natural resource sector. Accessing natural resources is assumed to be one of the main goals of both the Chinese government and relevant Chinese companies in resource-rich African countries. In the article, the interplay between Chinese party-state and state-owned enterprises in Zimbabwe is analyzed from the viewpoint of China’s geoeconomic strategy. While existing literature has focused on various facets of China’s Africa policy, details of collaboration between Chinese party-state and corporate actors remain largely unexamined. In the natural resource sector, such collaboration ranges from negotiating access to natural resources to arranging large Chinese-financed projects repaid or collateralized in natural resources. The article analyzes in detail the cases of three companies that have been involved in such arrangements in Zimbabwe’s natural resource sector between 2000 and 2013: NORINCO, AFECC, and CMEC. The central argument advanced in the article is that China’s Ministry of Commerce, Eximbank and CDB have pressured the Zimbabwean government to offer resources as collateral for further Chinese loans, in particular in the mid-2000's. The article concludes that while a geoeconomic strategy seems to be in place, its implementation is hindered by the great variety of actors involved.