A human rights-based practice framework for sexual offenders

Abstract

Human rights create a protective zone around people and allow them the opportunity to further their own valued personal projects without interference from others. In our view, the emphasis on community rights and protection may, paradoxically, reduce the effectiveness of sex offender rehabilitation by ignoring or failing to ensure that offenders’ core human interests are met. In this paper we consider how rights-based values and ideas can be integrated into therapeutic work with sex offenders in a way that safeguards the interests of offenders and the community. To this end we develop a rights-based normative framework (the Offender Practice Framework: OPF) that is orientated around the three strands of justice and accountability, offender needs and risk, and the utilization of empirically supported interventions and strength-based approaches. We examine the utility of this framework for the different phases of sex offender practice.     

The use of tactical polygraph with sex offenders

Abstract

Little is known about current re-entry practices, nor the extent to which they facilitate re-entry, reintegration and, ultimately, desistance from future offending. Göbbels, Ward and Willis recently developed the Integrative Theory of Desistance from Sex Offending (ITDSO), which comprehensively describes the individual desistance process in four phases. In the current research, the re-entry phase of the ITDSO was used as a theoretical framework to evaluate current re-entry practices in five North American sex offender treatment programmes. Inductive thematic analyses were conducted using interview data from programme directors and final client assignments. Eleven themes were identified. Findings are discussed in relation to their fit with the ITDSO and suggestions are made for improving re-entry practices so that they better promote desistance.     

Reconstructing and Reforming the Financial System in Conflict and ‘Post-Conflict’ Economies

Reconstructing the financial system in countries affected by violent conflict is crucial to successful and broad-based recovery. Particularly important tasks include: currency reform, rebuilding (or creating) central banks, revitalising the banking sector, and strengthening prudential supervision and regulation. Encouragement of private capital into the banking sector must be balanced by protection of the public interest, a task made more difficult by the nature of war-to-peace transition. Bank crises can destabilise economies in recovery from war, and their fiscal burden takes resources away from development and poverty spending – thereby threatening ‘post-conflict’ reconstruction itself.     

A cross-cultural validation of self-control theory

Several core propositions of self-control theory were tested utilizing self-reported data gathered from university students in Malta, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States. The results provide some support for the claim that ineffective parenting decreases self-control and strong support for the proposition that self-control increases deviant behavior. Additionally, tests of slope differences for key theoretical variables across samples generated findings that are largely consistent with the theory's cultural invariance thesis. Implications of the findings from this multinational test are discussed.     

The meat of the global food crisis

The global food crisis has been widely described in terms of the volatility of grain and oilseed markets and the associated worsening conditions of food security facing many poor people. Various explanations have been given for this volatility, including increasingly meat-centered diets and rising demand for animal feed, especially in China. This is a very partial reading, as the food crisis runs much deeper than recent market turbulence; when it is understood in terms of the biophysical contradictions of the industrial grain–oilseed–livestock complex and how they are now accelerating, meat moves to the center of the story. Industrial livestock production is the driving force behind rising meat consumption on a world scale, and the process of cycling great volumes of industrial grains and oilseeds through soaring populations of concentrated animals serves to magnify the land and resource budgets, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions associated with agriculture. These dynamics not only reflect disparities but are exacerbating them, foremost through climate change. Thus, this paper suggests that rising meat consumption and industrial livestock production should be understood together to comprise a powerful long-term vector of global inequality.     

Economic diplomacy and political leadership: An alternative foreign policy vision for South Africa

The article suggests that strategies for African engagement can no longer take sweeping views of the continent but need to differentiate policy responses. It also suggests that the real key to improving Africa lies with African leadership rather than external agencies and assistance.     

New town,new capital,new workplace? The employment relations of a Japnese inward investors in West Midlands new town

In this paper we examine the chracter of employment and industrial relatins withing new manufacturing industry in a new-town setting. We show how a combination ofnational and local state initiatives generated a new patterno of manuafacturin, dominated by foreign-owned companies. Drawing from extensive fieldwork in Japanese firms, we demonstrate,contra the ‘japanization’ thesis, that greenfield sites do not proved employers with unconstained opportunities to control labour. Rather, we highlight how capoital-labour relations development through interaction between large firms, state agencies and workers, producing an evoling and contested new employment settlement. Our analysis also undelines the limits confronting local state development strategies under a neo-liberal state regime.