Doing time: A qualitative study of long-term incarceration and the impact of mental illness

Once convicted, the perpetrator of serious crime embarks upon a new journey: the challenge of adjusting to long-term imprisonment. Prisoners' views of incarceration and the meaning of this experience may affect their later adjustment to life in the community. On the basis of brief narrative responses collected during an epidemiological survey of the psychological health of prisoners in France, this study examined the impact of incarceration on psychological state in a group of 59 inmates serving long sentences. Qualitative content analysis and computer-assisted linguistic analysis (using ALCESTE software) were performed on the textual data of open responses to three standard questions. Using a combination of these two approaches, seven categories of the subjective experience of prisoners in the sample were identified: the Outside World, Others, Punishment, Time, Affects and Impulses, Self-Concept, and Speech. Further qualitative analyses were then performed to compare the responses of Severely Mentally Ill (SMI) subjects and subjects with no psychiatric disorder. These analyses revealed contrasting attitudes towards incarceration. SMI subjects spoke in more hostile and persecutory terms about their experience in prison, attributing suffering to external circumstances, while subjects with no psychiatric disorder evoked similar themes, but with an introspective attitude. The themes evoked by mentally ill individuals in our sample suggest that their reactions to the prison environment arise in part from aspects of their psychiatric symptoms, and this may have relevance to future mental health policy and practices in criminal corrections.     

Grassroots Civil Groups: The Potential and Limits of Democratic Change in Argentina's Interior Provinces

While the current crisis in Argentina has many facets--economic, political and social--it originated and has been fuelled by the unfulfilled promise of a democracy in which political leaders are accountable to society. In the 1990s it was widely hoped that the growing number of grassroots civil groups would contribute to democratisation, particularly in the interior provinces where clientelism and patronage have long been thought to hamper local development and the country's progress as a whole. Those hopes faded as social unrest broke out in Argentina's interior provinces in the mid-1990s and the country began its slide towards collapse by the end of the decade. Yet the problem of political change in the interior provinces remains a central issue in Argentina's current crisis, and its future prospects. The ability of civil groups to contribute to democratic change in the interior provinces is constrained in different ways, depending on whether clientelism or patronage prevail in social relationships. Clientelistic and patronage-based societies differently condition the types of grassroots groups that arise, the scope of their activities and their potential for contributing to democratic change. Exploring these differences offers important insights into Argentina's current crisis and the potential and limitations of change in the interior.     

The Legal Properties of Film

This article focuses on the manner in which the law of copyright in the UK has made sense of a particular cultural artifact – film – in the process of figuring it as an object in which property rights can subsist. It traces the history of legislative and judicial attempts to circumscribe the boundaries around this object, noting that two approaches have emerged and now co-exist: a 'physicalist' approach which treats a film as co-extensive with its recording on some medium; and a 'formalist' approach which treats a film as an expressive form exceeding this physical manifestation. It explains why each approach is reductive and impoverished when considered in relation to how films are figured as aesthetic objects; and concludes that a modified version of the available Marxist explanations of film copyright reveals the latter's understandings of film to be closely articulated with the purposes and values of the mainstream film industry. More generally, it suggests that a reappraisal of Marxist theory may be timely at this juncture, not least because it draws attention to law's role in exemplifying the entwinement of culture and economy at a number of levels.     

Political economy of agricultural policy

The present paper uses a paneldata estimation technique to combine the time series for individual countries (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States). We postulated the response of central banks in these countries to inflation, economic growth and current account surplus given the constraints to be the same among the sample countries. Differences between central bank independence come forward in a different structural pressure to lower or raise money market rates in these countries. The empirical results in this study coincide remarkably well with the legal indices of central bank independence.     

The role of managerial self-efficacy in corporate compliance with the law

Bandura's (1986) social cognitive theory is proposed as an alternative theoretical framework from which to view the role of managerial cognitions in determining corporate compliance with the law. A first test is made of the usefulness of the construct of managerial self-efficacy in predicting compliance. Data were drawn from interviews with 410 chief executives of small organizations. The predictive utility of self-efficacy is tested with three compliance measures: a self-assessed compliance measure. a government-assessed compliance measure taken at the same time as the self-efficacy measure, and a government-assessed compliance measure taken after a 2-year time lapse. After taking into account a number of significant background variables and making a distinction between self-efficacy beliefs and control beliefs, self-efficacy was found to be significantly related to compliance in all cases. The implications of these results for the regulatory process are discussed.This project has enjoyed the funding support of the Australian Department of Health, Housing and Community Services, the Australian Research Council, the American Bar Foundation, and the Australian National University. The author is indebted to her colleagues on the Nursing Home Regulation in Action Project-John Braithwaite, Valerie Braithwaite, Diane Gibson, Miriam Landau, and Toni Makkai.