Relinquishing custody as a requisite for receiving services for children with serious emotional disorders

A review of the literature was conducted to assess the extent and nature of the practice of requiring parents to transfer custody in order to receive public funding for intensive services needed by their child/adolescent who had a serious emotional disorder. The review focused on the legal and policy basis of this practice as well as its social and psychological impact on child and family. We conclude that the practice of transfer of custody as a requirement for receiving financial aid occurs in a majority of states, though the actual extent of this practice is not known. The major factor influencing the use of transfer of custody appears to be the absence of an appropriate and adequate system of services for children and adolescents with serious emotional disorders. We recommend that the practice of requiring custody transfer for the sole purpose of receiving services be abolished and offer several suggestions for improving acess to services.Preparation of this article was supported in part by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) under contract no. 89MF761903. The authors are grateful to John Burke and Kelly Kelleher of the Division of Biometry and Applied Sciences, NIMH for their assistance on this project. Laurie Flynn, Executive Director for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, was very helpful during the informative stage of the project. Barbara Friesen, Director of the Research and Training Center at Portland State University, gave us useful guidance throughout the project. We thank Stephen Hill, Consultant to the National Governors' Association, for his help. We are grateful to Amy Hewitt and Carol Ishler for their assistance in preparing this report. We also would like to acknowledge several individuals who assisted us with research reported in this article. We are grateful to Governor Richard F. Celeste of Ohio for his letter of support for the state survey of custody transfer practices. We appreciate the efforts on behalf of this survey by staff from the State of Ohio, particularly Jean Ellen Stevens, Administrative Assistant to the Director of the Department of Mental Health. Margraret McNally assisted in the compilation of data for both surveys.     

Animal-related fatalities--part II: characteristic autopsy findings and variable causes of death associated with envenomation, poisoning, anaphylaxis, asphyxiation, and sepsis

In addition to blunt and sharp trauma, animal-related fatalities may result from envenomation, poisoning, anaphylaxis, asphyxiation, and sepsis. Although the majority of envenomation deaths are caused by hornets, bees, and wasps, the mechanism of death is most often anaphylaxis. Envenomation resulting from the injection of a poison or toxin into a victim occurs with snakes, spiders, and scorpions on land. Marine animal envenomation may result from stings and bites from jellyfish, octopus, stonefish, cone fish, stingrays, and sea snakes. At autopsy, the findings may be extremely subtle, and so a history of exposure is required. Poisoning may also occur from ingesting certain fish, with three main forms of neurotoxin poisoning involving ciguatera, tetrodotoxin ingestion, and paralytic shellfish poisoning. Asphyxiation may follow upper airway occlusion or neck/chest compression by animals, and sepsis may follow bites. Autopsy analysis of cases requires extensive toxinological, toxicological, and biochemical analyses of body fluids.     

Skepticism and Sanction: The Benefits of Rejecting Moral Responsibility

It is sometimes objected that we cannot adopt skepticism about moral responsibility, because the criminal justice system plays an indispensable social function. In this paper, I examine the implications of moral responsibility skepticism for the punishment of those convicted of crime, with special attention to recent arguments by Saul Smilansky. Smilansky claims that the skeptic is committed to fully compensating the incarcerated for their detention, and that this compensation would both be too costly to be practical and would remove the deterrent function from incarceration. I argue that the skeptic is not committed to full compensation of the offender, and that the costs of such compensation would in any case be far smaller than Smilansky thinks. In fact, I claim, the costs of the criminal justice system to which the skeptic is committed might be very much lower than the costs ?C economic, social and moral ?C we currently pay as a consequence of our system of punishment.     

The Impact of Pro-Government Militias on Human Rights Violations

New data show that between 1982 and 2007, in over 60 countries governments were linked to and cooperated with informal armed groups within their own borders. Given the prevalence of these linkages, we ask how such links between governments and informal armed groups influence the risk of repression. We draw on principal-agent arguments to explore how issues of monitoring and control help understanding of the impact of militias on human rights violations. We argue that such informal agents increase accountability problems for the governments, which is likely to worsen human rights conditions for two reasons. First, it is more difficult for governments to control and to train these militias, and they may have private interests in the use of violence. Second, informal armed groups allow governments to shift responsibility and use repression for strategic benefits while evading accountability. Using a global dataset from 1982 to 2007, we show that pro-government militias increase the risk of repression and that the presence of militias also affects the type of violations that we observe.     

Quality of criminal responsibility reports submitted to the Hawaii judiciary

This paper is the third in a series of research reports on quality of forensic mental health evaluations submitted to the Hawaii judiciary. Previous studies examined quality of reports assessing competency to stand trial (CST) and post-acquittal conditional release, in felony defendants undergoing court-ordered examinations. Utilizing a 44-item quality coding instrument, this study examined quality of criminal responsibility reports in a sample of 150 forensic mental health evaluations conducted between 2006 and 2010 by court-appointed panels. Raters attained high levels of agreement in training and quality coding. Similar to the previous studies, overall quality of reports was mediocre, falling below the .80 quality criterion score for report elements, regardless of evaluator professional identification or employment status. Level of agreement between evaluators and judicial sanity determinations was “fair” using Cicchetti's (1994) standards for interpretation of intra-class correlations. Level of agreement was lower than previously published findings for CST reports and better than conditional release reports. Reasons for mediocre report quality and “fair” inter-rater agreement are discussed, including the fact that criminal responsibility evaluations are complex, retrospective in nature, and involve significant degrees of inference. In contrast to CST evaluations, assessment of criminal responsibility involves a mental state at the time of the offense evaluation. Threats to reliability in forensic reports are discussed. Suggestions for improvement of report quality are proffered, including standardization of procedures and report format and use of forensic assessment instruments.     

“Us” and “Them”: Ulster Loyalist Perspectives on the IRA and Irish Republicanism

This article draws on data from one-to-one interviews with members and former members of the Ulster Volunteer Force, Ulster Defence Association, Red Hand Commando, Ulster Political Research Group, and the Progressive Unionist Party to explore the dynamic and fluid perceptions of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Sinn Féin among Ulster loyalists. The article will explore how attitudes and perceptions are influenced by the shifting political landscape in Northern Ireland as Ulster loyalists come to terms with the new realities created by the peace process, security normalization, decommissioning, and the rise in the threat of dissident republican violence. The article will also demonstrate that these perceptions are not purely antagonistic and based on the creation of negative, stereotypical “enemy images” fuelled by decades of conflict, but pragmatic, bound to societal and local events, and influenced by intragroup attitudes and divisions, in addition to the expected conflictual ingroup vs. outgroup relationships. Finally, the article will explore how loyalists employ republicanism and the transformation of the Provisional IRA in particular, as a mirror or benchmark to reflect on their own progress since 1994.     

Actions Speak Louder than Words: A Behavioral Analysis of 183 Individuals Convicted for Terrorist Offenses in the United States from 1995 to 2012

Involvement in terrorism has traditionally been discussed in relatively simplistic ways with little effort spent on developing a deeper understanding of what involvement actually entails, and how it differs from person to person. In this paper, we present the results of a three‐year project focused on 183 individuals associated with the global jihadist movement who were convicted in the United States, for terrorist offenses, between 1995 and 2012. These data were developed by a large‐scale, open‐source data collection activity that involved a coding dictionary of more than 120 variables. We identify and explore the diversity of behaviors that constitute involvement in terrorism. We also compare lone actors and those who acted as part of a group, finding that lone actors differed from group‐based actors in key demographic attributes and were more likely to be involved in attack execution behaviors. Implications for counterterrorism are then discussed.