Explanations for violent behaviour—An interview study among forensic in-patients

The alleged relation between mental disorder and violent criminal behaviour has been investigated mainly from an epidemiological perspective. Population-based registry studies have shown that violence occurs more frequently among people with mental disorders, like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, compared with control subjects, but that the increased risk is largely mediated by drug abuse and socio-economic deprivation. The aim of this study was to explore how patients who have committed violent or sexual crimes and have been sentenced to forensic psychiatric care by a Swedish court of law construed their criminal actions in terms of causes. Forty-six participants from six different Swedish forensic psychiatric clinics were included in the study. A semi-structured interview study was conducted and the data was analysed using a thematic analysis. A large group of the participants did not believe that the mental disorder played any role in the criminal events. Contributing causes that were mentioned were drug abuse and social factors.     

The adult worker model family,gender equality and care: the search for new policy principles and the possibilities and problems of a capabilities approach

There is evidence that policy-makers in most Western welfare states are moving towards a new set of assumptions about the contributions that men and women make to families, based on an adult worker model. This paper first examines this shift in policy assumptions at the EU level and goes on to argue that there are real limits to the pursuit of a full adult worker model based on the commodification of care. In respect of gender equality, this in turn raises the issue of the terms and conditions on which such a shift in policy assumptions are made, particularly about the valuing and sharing of the unpaid work of care. The final part of the paper examines the possibilities offered by the capabilities approach of addressing these issues.     

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.     

Mentally disordered criminal offenders: Legal and criminological perspectives

Legal research in Sweden has traditionally focused on a systematization of the legal rules and their practical application, while the task of studying the effects of the application of the laws has been handed over to other branches of the social sciences. In contrast, new legal theories focusing on proactive and therapeutic dimensions in law have gained increasing attention in the international arena. These approaches may be better suited for evaluating legislation governing compulsory psychiatric care. Theoretical discussions and studies of causal mechanisms underlying criminal behaviour, as well as the implementation and value of instruments for predicting behaviour, are relevant to contemporary criminological research. Criminal behaviour varies across different groups of perpetrators, and the causes can be sought in the interplay between the individual and social factors. Multi-disciplinary efforts, integrating research from forensic psychiatry, psychology, sociology, and criminology, would be beneficial in leading to a better understanding of the causes underlying criminal behaviour.     

Economic Freedom and Growth: Decomposing the Effects

Most studies of the relation between economic freedom andgrowth of GDP have found a positive relation. One problem inthis area is the choice of economic freedom measure. A singlemeasure does not reflect the complex economic environment anda highly aggregated index makes it difficult to draw policyconclusions. In this paper we investigate what specific typesof economic freedom measures that are important for growth.The robustness of the results is carefully analysed since thepotential problem with multicollinearity is one of thenegative effects of decomposing an index. The results showthat economic freedom does matter for growth. This does notmean that increasing economic freedom, defined in generalterms, is good for economic growth since some of thecategories in the index are insignificant and some of thesignificant variables have negative effects.     

women,migration and precarity

This focus group took place at the Università di Napoli ‘L'Orientale’ and was structured around recent female migration patterns in the south of Italy. The discussion included academics, artists, and care workers. The condition of women migrants was seen as one of precarity in the two main contexts we discussed: work and places of encounter. In an effort to move away from the purely material dimension of migration and deal with its emotional and creative sides, many facets of the question of being away from home and creating a new home were fleshed out: expectations, defence mechanisms, nostalgia, stereotyping, racism, and multiculturalism. Participants raised a wide range of issues and proposed different perspectives which also point to larger tensions and challenges in gender and race relations.     

Investing in international security: rising powers and organizational choices

How do rising powers choose to allocate their finite resources among the multiple global and regional security organizations? Building on the literatures on forum shopping and rising powers, we argue that the different organizational investment choices of rising powers are explained by varying regional ideational affinities. Organizational settings have ideational foundations that can look very different from region to region. We argue that regional ideational affinity leads rising powers to invest in regional rather than global organizations. However, if the ideational composition of the region is highly diverse, global organizations are a better vehicle to accommodate rising powers’ emergent ambitions. To demonstrate our argument, we examine the choices of Brazil and South Africa in terms of their material and ideational investments in regional and global organizations.     

Welfare,work experience,and economic self‐sufficiency

The potential of former AFDC recipients to earn a living wage is central to the success of welfare‐to‐work programs. Previous studies have found that welfare recipihyphen;ents see little increase in their wages over time. Low wage growth could arise from either low returns to work experience or low levels of experience. This distinction is important for designing effective welfare policy. In the following paper, we estimate how wages grew with work experience between 1978 and 1992 for a national sample of women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We compare women who never received welfare with both short‐ and long‐term recipients in order to see to what extent the rates of wage growth with work experience differ. We find that they differ very little. We use numerous specification checks to test the robustness of our results and find consistent evidence that the wages of AFDC recipients grew at a rate similar to those of nonrecipients once work experience is taken into account. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.