Predicting Juvenile Recidivism:Using the Indiana Department of Correction's Risk Assessment Instrument

The Indiana Department of Correction uses a Risk Assessment Instrument (RAI) to determine juvenile offenders' risk of recidivism and their placement in an IDOC facility. Although it is used to make important decisions, the RAI has not been well-validated. This article describes a study of convicted male juvenile offenders to determine how well the IDOC instrument, which is similar to that used in several states, predicted recidivism. We found that the RAI did not predict recidivism in our sample.     

Healing Families: An Outcome Evaluation of a Community Family Court

In this paper, a model community family court program that seeks to break the intergenerational cycle of crime and substance abuse by treating families holistically will be presented. This model court seeks to reduce crime and provide safe and permanent homes for children of substance‐abusing parents. In this community family court, the prototypical problem‐solving court has been both focused and expanded. The community family court provides a focused response designed to address the unique combination of problems facing families on a family‐by‐family basis. At the same time, supervision and treatment services have been expanded to include every family member and all open court cases including criminal charges, juvenile delinquency, dependency, and civil cases. An overview of the court's evolution and discussion of integrated services designed to provide a wraparound style intervention will be highlighted as key contributors to the largely positive results of this community family court's evaluation.     

University Students' Attitudes About Attributing Blame in Domestic Violence

This study examined university students' attitudes about attributing blame in incidents of domestic violence. The Domestic Violence Blame Scale (DVBS), which measures the attribution of blame for domestic violence to situational, perpetrator, societal, and victim factors, was used. The DVBS was administered to a voluntary sample of university students. Significant gender differences were found, with male students more likely to attribute blame to the victim for domestic violence than female students. Significant differences were also found between students with and without a prior history of violence in their family of origin. Students with prior experience of violence were more likely than their counterparts to ascribe blame for domestic violence to societal factors.     

The emotional motivation of righteous behavior

A distinction is made between two types of prosocial behavior: personal-helping and righteous behavior. Past studies suggest that sympathy may motivate personal helping but not righteous behavior. The latter may be better predicted by feelings of moral outrage and existential guilt. An experiment was designed to motivate a piece of righteous behavior, the writing of a political letter to stop the testing of nuclear weapons. A series of premeasures ascertained strength of attitude, sense of efficacy, acceptance of responsibility, and prior antinuclear behavior. Subjects who supported a nuclear freeze were exposed to material advocating a nuclear test ban, a video of a congressional aide who argued for the efficacy of writing letters to congressional representatives, and emotionally arousing material on the bombing of Hiroshima. After answering a questionnaire that included items to measure emotional state, subjects were individually given the opportunity to write a letter as they were waiting to be interviewed. Social pressure was deliberately minimized. Extent of moral outrage predicted both previous behavior and letter-writing behavior during the experiment. It combined with previous behavior and sense of efficacy to predict 56% of the variance in experimental behavior: Neither sympathy nor existential guilt were significantly related to this righteous behavior.     

Worldwide policy trends in agricultural extension: Part I

Agricultural extension is one of the oldest and most important prototypes for technology-transfer organizations. The purpose of this paper is to help policymakers to keep track of how extension is developing in countries throughout the world. Such attention is especially warranted as extension has come under attack both in its identification with the public sector and in how that tie is expressed. Five fundamental models for organizing extension are outlined: farmingsystems research and extension, farming-information dissemination, training and visit, communications for technology transfer, and the cooperative-extension system of the U.S. Part I of this two-part paper outlines the major policy issues raised by these models and Part II (to be published in a later issue) will provide an in-depth discussion of a central issue underlying these models: the appropriate role of public- versus private-sector extension.     

The occurrence of eye blinks during a guilty knowledge test

Abstract

In the present experiment we examined whether eye blinks could discriminate between guilty and innocent examinees in a Guilty Knowledge Test (GKT). Based on the assumption that guilty examinees would experience more cognitive load when responding to the key items than to the control items, we hypothesized that they would display fewer eye blinks during the key items than during the control items. For innocent examinees, responding to the key and control items should be equally demanding, and no differences in eye blinks between key and control items were expected. A total of 26 participants took part in an experiment where 13 guilty examinees committed a mock theft (of an exam paper) and the remaining 13 innocent examinees went on with their normal business. All participants underwent a GKT whereby their eye blinks were measured. Both guilty and innocent examinees displayed the pattern of eye blinks that we predicted. The implications of the findings are discussed.