Recommending Juvenile Offenders for Pretrial Release

Courthistories of 501 juvenile offenders prosecuted in adult court were followed as part of an effort to develop a point scale recommendation system for a large pretrial services agency. The point scale and two variations used criteria that predicted a warrant (failure to appear for one or more scheduled appearances) more accurately than when other traditional criteria used for adults were applied to this population. The juvenile offenders, although facing trial on charges of high severity, had lower warrant and recidivism rates during court processing than comparable samples of 16-year-old adult defendants. Implications are discussed for the efficacy of prosecuting juveniles in the adult system and the feasibility of separate pretrial recommendation systems to enable a higher proportion of reliable defendants to secure release pending trial.     

Who should pay for bad genes?

Parents have long been able to influence the genetic composition of their children through their choice of a reproductive partner, if only very approximately. They are, however, increasingly able to determine the genetic make-up of their children in other, more precise ways, such as by selecting a particular gamete or embryo or by genetically modifying an embryo prior to artificial implantation. This Article discusses parents' obligations to their children and other members of the community stemming from their children's genes. In a just state, it argues, parents would be responsible for redressing any genetic disadvantage their children suffer as a result of parents' voluntary actions. Within the context of a liberal egalitarian account of distributive justice, this responsibility might most fairly be discharged through a compulsory insurance plan that provides compensation to genetically disadvantaged children when they might have had non-disadvantaged children instead would in some circumstances incur greater liability, because they could not fairly push the cost of their choices off on other members of the insurance pool. The Article also asks whether parents wrong a child by allowing it to be born with a genetic impairment when, had they taken steps to remove the impairment, the unimpaired child they had would have been a different person from the genetically disadvantaged child because the better-off child's capacities and experiences differed considerably from those that the disadvantaged child would have had. Contrary to many people's moral intuitions, the Article argues that parents do not wrong such a child. Nevertheless, parents remain morally obligated to bear any added costs occasioned by the child's impairment. Any other approach would allow them unjustly to shift the burden of their choices to other parents. Finally, the Article takes up the much debated question of whether parents harm a child by allowing it to be born with a life not worth living when they could have prevented its birth. It suggests that the answer to this question should be irrelevant to parents' legal liability. Acting on behalf of the parental insurance pool, the state may nonetheless adopt a variety of measures to help potential parents avoid giving birth to such children, which one can assume virtually all would prefer.     

Japanese voluntary environmental agreements: Bargaining power and reciprocity as contributors to effectiveness

Theoretical and empirical research on voluntarism has focused primarily on U.S. and European examples, but has generally failed to consider the Japanese system of voluntary environmental agreements. Nevertheless, Japanese VEAs are one of the worlds oldest experiments in voluntary policy; careful analysis of the characteristics and contexts may improve understanding about the critical factors associated with effective voluntary policy. This paper reviews the extant literature on voluntarism focusing specifically on the bargaining context within which agreements are negotiated. It details three factors that contribute to the effectiveness of voluntary policy generally: regulatory bargaining power, non-regulatory bargaining power and reciprocity. The paper then provides a brief but detailed analysis of the development of voluntary agreements in Japan. Comparisons with voluntary policies in the U.S. and Europe are included. Findings indicate similarities and some significant differences between the Japanese system and other national systems of voluntary policy. Conclusions discuss implications for theory and policy.     

An Alu-based, MGB Eclipse real-time PCR method for quantitation of human DNA in forensic samples

The forensic community needs quick, reliable methods to quantitate human DNA in crime scene samples to replace the laborious and imprecise slot blot method. A real-time PCR based method has the possibility of allowing development of a faster and more quantitative assay. Alu sequences are primate-specific and are found in many copies in the human genome, making these sequences an excellent target or marker for human DNA. This paper describes the development of a real-time Alu sequence-based assay using MGB Eclipse primers and probes. The advantages of this assay are simplicity, speed, less hands-on-time and automated quantitation, as well as a large dynamic range (128 ng/microL to 0.5 pg/microL).     

STR-genotyping from human medieval tooth and bone samples

We extracted the DNA contained in samples of bones and teeth from 10 skeletons excavated from the Gravette site (400-1000 AD, south of France). Ancient DNA was analysed by autosomal short tandem repeats (STRs). The DNA present in these ancient remains appeared very degraded, but nevertheless, better conserved in tooth than in bone samples. Moreover, we showed that the DNA extracted from ancient dental pulp was not exempt from polymerase chain reaction (PCR) inhibitors, which could result from extreme DNA fragmentation. An adapted protocol with a supplementary step of purification removed this inhibition.     

The Impact of School Mental Health Services on Out-of-School Suspension Rates

The current study investigated whether the presence of school-based mental health clinicians in an urban school district was associated with reduced out-of-school suspension rates. Forty one elementary schools with expanded school mental health (ESMH) programs were compared to 41 schools without ESMH programs. Correlational analyses revealed associations between suspension outcomes and several school-level demographic variables including school attendance rate, percent of students in poverty, and percent of nonwhite students in the school. After controlling for these variables, however, results of stepwise linear regressions demonstrated no significant differences between ESMH and non-ESMH schools on suspension outcomes. Results of the current study suggest that the presence of ESMH clinicians will not necessarily impact suspension rates in an elementary school. Targeted and well-implemented approaches to address behaviors that lead to suspension, or school- and system-level policies to provide alternatives to suspensions, will likely be a better route to achieving this outcome.     

Course,Co-Occurrence,and Longitudinal Associations of Emotional Disturbance and Delinquency from Adolescence to Young Adulthood: A Six-Year Three-Wave Study

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Three questions were examined in this study: (a) What is the course of emotional disturbance and delinquency during adolescence and young adulthood? (b) To what...