Business group drops opposition to drug users' health centre

A legal intervention by the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users has forced the Community Alliance to abandon a petition against a health contact centre in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.     

Displacing Marginalized Bodies: How Human Rights Discourses Function in the Law and in Communities

In this article, we examine disability and eugenics discourses and the ways they function in spaces where vulnerable persons have been historically excluded by the state and blamed for their own “immiseration.” We ask how queer theories of repudiation, abjection, and vulnerability lend insight into the ways that people with intellectual disabilities are discursively located outside normative discourses of home, care, and quality of life, and whether these discourses shifted to serve this vulnerable population when historically the very places in question repudiated them, infringed on their human rights, and questioned their sexuality. To address these questions, we focus on the recent and impending closures of Virginia’s Training Centers, residential institutions for persons with intellectual disabilities now scheduled for staggered closures before 2020.     

Unpacking the Diaspora Channel in New Democracies: When Do Migrants Act Politically Back Home?

Migrant influence on politics back home has arguably become broader and deeper in the wake of a widespread convergence between out-migration and democratization. This article seeks to identify the structural conditions under which migrants from post-1980 democracies are likely to activate the “diaspora channel” of political influence back home. Specifically, I identify, explain, and code two sets of incentives likely to induce migrants to engage in home-country politics from abroad: (1) socioeconomic incentives generated by cross-border linkages and migrant characteristics likely to predispose them toward broader forms of transnational engagement and (2) political incentives generated by diaspora politicization and formal access to the political process in the home country. I score these incentives in 40 developing countries and then generate hypotheses about the degree to which migrants from these countries are likely to activate the diaspora channel through participation in home-country elections, lobbying for policy changes by the home-country government, or transnational coproduction.     

Criminal-thinking styles and illegal behavior among college students: validation of the PICTS

The present study examined the relation of self-reported criminal-thinking styles and self-reported illegal behavior among college students. Participants were 177 male and 216 female (N=393) undergraduate students. Participants were divided by gender and further classified into four groups of self-reported illegal behavior: control-status offenses, drug crimes, property crimes, and violent crimes against people. The psychological inventory of criminal-thinking styles (PICTS) (1) measured criminal-thinking patterns on eight scales. Results indicated that males who committed violent crimes against people endorsed significantly higher levels of distorted criminal-thinking patterns on all scales than the control-status offenses, and drug crimes groups. Interestingly, female participants who committed property crimes displayed six significantly elevated PICTS scales whereas females with violent crimes against people had significant elevations on only four of the criminal-thinking style scales. These results extend Walter's initial validation of the PICTS with incarcerated respondents to a non-incarcerated population and show potential use of the PICTS with other populations.