Resilience in Inner City Youth: Childhood Predictors of Occupational Status Across the Lifespan

The present prospective study has followed a cohort of inner city men from adolescence (14±2) until age 65. While previous studies of shorter duration have identified numerous childhood factors that powerfully influence outcomes in young adulthood, this study examined the effect of these well-documented prognostic factors on occupational status across the lifespan. Consistent with previous studies, childhood environmental protector factors and parental social class predicted occupational status at age 25 significantly, but showed progressively weaker prediction at ages 32, 47 and 65. Timely early childhood development proved over time to be a far more important predictor than childhood social environment in adulthood. Ana C. DiRago is a Psychology Ph.D. student in the Clinical Science and Psychopathology Research area. She is involved with the Minnesota Twin Family Study. Her research interests include resilience and behavioral genetics in mood and anxiety disorders. George E. Vaillant is a Professor at Harvard Medical School. He has spent the last 30 years as Director of the Study of Adult Development charting adult development and the recovery process of schizophrenia, heroin addiction, and alcoholism. George considers Dan Offer a friend and long distance teacher.     

Population data for 15 Y-chromosome STRs in a population sample from Quito (Ecuador)

Population frequencies for the 9 Y-STR loci included in the "minimal haplotype" from Y-STR Haplotype Reference Database (YHRD), plus other 6 Y-STRs (DYS437, DYS438, DYS439, GATA A7.2, GATA H4 and GATA A10) were obtained for a sample of 120 males from Quito (Ecuador). One hundred and sixteen unique haplotypes were identified within the sample. Haplotype diversity (0.9994) was among the highest in comparison to other populations from Iberia and South-America. Genetic distances were calculated and our sample presented significative differences with all other samples, the lowest values being with a Guinean sample.     

Allelic frequencies of the 15 STR loci included in the AmpFlSTR Identifiler PCR Amplification Kit in an autochthonous sample from Spain

The aim of this study was to estimate the allelic frequencies of the 15 STR loci included in the AmpFlSTR Identifiler PCR Amplification Kit in a sample of 342 unrelated Caucasian individuals autochthonous from Spain to be used for forensic purposes and population studies. The combined power of discrimination and the combined power of exclusion for all of the 15 loci were 5.68x10(-18) and 0.9999964, respectively. According to the obtained data, the D18S51 locus may be considered the most informative among the tested loci.     

Restrictions on legal aid in family law cases in England and Wales: creating a necessary barrier to public funding or simply increasing the burden on the family courts?

The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) resulted in significant cuts to the availability and scope of legal aid in family law proceedings. Some four years after the cuts were implemented, there has been a great deal of research about their devastating impact on vulnerable groups and individuals. This paper considers the other victim of the cuts, the family court itself. It is currently bulging under pressure from both an increase in applicants who have been forced to represent themselves in family proceedings and also from a rise in applications for injunctions linked to domestic violence. This paper will draw on case law to demonstrate that the reforms implemented through LASPO have seemingly only succeeded in passing the burden from one publicly funded agency, the Legal Aid Agency, to another, HM Courts and Tribunals Service. The family court system is currently at breaking point and further government review is urgently needed if people are going to be able to continue to use the system effectively.     

Irrational Addicts and Responsible Pleasure Seekers: Constructions of the Drug User

Historically, drug use has been understood as a problem of epidemiology, psychiatry, physiology, and criminality requiring legal and medical governance. Consequently drug research tends to be underpinned by an imperative to better govern, and typically proposes policy interventions to prevent or solve drug problems. We argue that categories of ‘addictive’ and ‘recreational’ drug use are discursive forms of governance that are historically, politically and socially contingent. These constructions of the drug problem shape what drug users believe about themselves and how they enact these beliefs in their drug use practices. Based on qualitative interviews with young illicit drug users in Brisbane, Australia, this paper uses Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality to provide insights into how the governance of illicit drugs intersects with self-governance to create a drug user self. We propose a reconceptualisation of illicit drug use that takes into account the contingencies and subjective factors that shape the drug experience. This allows for an understanding of the relationships between discourses, policies, and practices in constructions of illicit drug users.     

Corruption as a Self‐Fulfilling Prophecy: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Costa Rica

An influential literature argues that corruption behaves as a self‐fulfilling prophecy. Its central claim is that the individual returns to corruption are a function of the perceived corruptibility of the other members of society. Empirically, this implies that if one were to exogenously increase beliefs about societal levels of corruption, willingness to engage in corruption should also increase. We evaluate this implication by utilizing an information experiment embedded in a large‐scale household survey recently conducted in the Gran Área Metropolitana of Costa Rica. Changes in beliefs about corruption were induced via the random assignment of an informational display depicting the increasing percentage of Costa Ricans who have personally witnessed an act of corruption. Consistent with the self‐fulfilling prophecy hypothesis, we find that internalizing the information from the display on average increased the probability that a respondent would be willing to bribe a police officer by approximately .05 to .10.     

Strategic voting in local elections: evidence from Portugal (1979–2013)

Do voters behave strategically in local elections? Does democratic experience influence voters’ capacity to behave strategically? Is there a relation between education and voters’ capacity to anticipate the mechanical effects of electoral statutes and adapt their behaviour accordingly? Using an original data set covering the complete democratic period, this paper studies strategic voting at the local level in Portugal. Using an ecological inference approach, we contribute to a vast body of literature on strategic voting by testing whether theories developed for national contexts travel to local contexts. Our findings suggest that (1) voters consistently defect to non-viable lists to support viable lists; (2) democratic experience helps voters to learn how to maximize their utility; and (3) education is important for voters’ ability to identify a strategic setting.     

Gang Phantasmagoria: How Racialized Gang Allegations Haunt Immigration Legal Work

Critical Criminology - Through an analysis of interviews with Southern California attorneys, supplemented by archival materials, this article contributes to the literature on gangs, critical...     

What do Household Surveys Really Tell Us about Risk,Shocks, and Risk Management in the Developing World?

We report on a project to explore empirical patterns in risk, shocks and risk management using recent household surveys with risk modules from 16 different developing countries. Natural disasters, health shocks, economic shocks, and asset loss are the most commonly reported types of shocks and, especially for the poor, often result in ‘bad’ coping responses that may perpetuate vulnerability. The information culled from these survey modules falls short of expectations in several ways.