Nonsex offenses committed by child molesters: findings from a longitudinal study

This study, which used a prospective as well as a retrospective methodology, examined the criminal records of 30 child molesters prior to, and up to 10 years after an index event of sexual abuse for which they were convicted: 73% had convictions for other offenses, 60% had convictions for offenses other than sex offenses, 50% had convictions for property offenses, 27% had convictions for offenses involving violence, and 23% had convictions for drug offenses. Offending levels for nonsex offenses were significantly higher than the general adult male population. Any theory concerning the dynamics of sex offending against children needs to account for the level of nonsex offenses committed by child molesters.     

Mental competence and end-of-life decision making: death row volunteering and euthanasia

This article reports on a qualitative study of defense attorneys' perceptions of the mental competence or rationality of death row inmates' decisions to waive habeas appeals and proceed directly to execution. Interviews were conducted with twenty attorneys who have either directly represented or been closely involved with would-be volunteers. Through analytic comparison with another end-of-life decision, euthanasia, this article reports on four themes from the interviews: (a) attorneys' perceptions of the legal standard of competence, (b) their perceptions of the competency evaluation process, (c) implications of competing interpretive frames (i.e., volunteering vs. suicide), and (d) the rationality of decisions to waive appeals. Implications of research findings, particularly in terms of recent restructured models of competence, are also discussed.     

Galton's Two Papers on Voting as Robust Estimation

The relationship between voting and robust estimation was discussed by Francis Galton in 1907. His two papers in Nature are discussed and reprinted.     

The long‐term effects of public housing on self‐sufficiency

Recent years have witnessed an intensification of the debate about the fundamental purpose of public assistance to the poor and the effects of these programs on children. This study uses enriched data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine the effects of living in public housing as a child at some point between 1968 and 1982 on four young adult outcomes: welfare receipt; individual earnings; household earnings relative to the federal poverty line; and employment. Living in public housing during childhood increased employment, raised earnings, and reduced welfare use, but had no effect on household earnings relative to the poverty line. The beneficial effects could have arisen because public housing improved physical living conditions, reduced residential mobility, or enabled families to spend more of their income on items that benefit children's development. Whether these effects apply to contemporary public housing is unknown. © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Evidence for bias in hair testing and procedures to correct bias

A number of in vitro experiments show that different hair samples incorporate differing amounts of drugs under identical conditions. Incorporation of cocaine and morphine tends to be correlated with race, in that the hair of African American females incorporates higher concentrations of cocaine than does the hair of Caucasian males or females. Extrapolation of these data into populations has been fraught with difficulties because the dosages of drugs and their use patterns are unknown. Cosmetic treatments and hygiene alter drug binding, which must be considered in comparing populations because cosmetic treatments are often group dependent. Four reasons are proposed that account for the uptake and retention of drugs by hair and that may differ among groups: (1) permeability and other characteristics of the hair due to genetic influences, (2) cosmetic hair treatments and hair care habits (which may be culturally influenced), (3) drug removal during personal hygiene, and (4) manner and route of drug administration which can affect passive exposure to residual drugs in the environment. The data supporting bias in hair testing are reviewed and methods are proposed that use either the uptake of dyes or the incorporation of drug homologs to reduce bias.     

Motherless case in paternity testing

In paternity test using the DNA evidence, the analysis of the deficient case that the DNA profiles of mother or alleged father are not available is different from that of the trio case analyzed routinely. However, the motherless case that the genotypes of mother is not available has been requested and analyzed like the trio case. In this paper, we compared the motherless case and the trio case through the mean exclusion chance describing the probability of exclusion for a genetic marker system and the distribution of the probability of paternity calculated using the three current methods. We have also shown a case which can be falsely discriminated if it were requested in the analysis of the motherless case, and conclude that the analysis of the motherless case should be carefully conducted and the level for the discrimination should be different from that of the trio case.