New Federalism and Environmental Policy

This article examines the degree of correspondence between theconceptual underpinnings of President Reagan's New Federalismand the willingness and capacity of states to assume a largershare of environmental responsibilities. The findings indicatethat many of the states have not replaced federal aid reductionswith own-source revenues. Replacements that did occur were limitedto a single year and primarily in the area of hazardous wastemanagement grants. The implications of these findings are that"decentralization and defunding" of federal programs in theenvironmental area may have had an adverse effect on the states'ability to provide solutions to pressing environmental problemsin the first half of the 1980s.     

Why do corporations contribute to the Nature Conservancy?

Treating corporate contributions as purchases of valuable inputs, we hypothesize that firms for which genetic diversity, advertizing, and reputations of environmental responsibility are more valuable and firms for which the cost of contributing is less will be more likely contributors to the Nature Conservancy. These hypotheses are supported by logit estimations which find firms in industries where biological inputs are important, firms with high advertizing expenditures, firms in industries with high costs of meeting environmental regulations, and large firms are more likely to contribute and so become Corporate Associates of the Nature Conservancy.     

Screening for severe mental disorder in jails

Despite the demonstrated prevalence of severe mental disorder among jail detainees and the legal mandate to provide mental health services, most jails do not have the resources to incorporate traditional, time-consuming psychological assessment techniques into their routine intake process. As a result, a number of mentally ill jail detainees remain undetected and untreated. This study outlines the development of the Referral Decision Scale (RDS), which detects persons who have a high probability of having a severe mental disorder so that they can be given a complete diagnostic evaluation. The 14-item RDS was statistically derived using discriminant analysis from data collected via the NIMH Diagnostic Interview Schedule on 728 randomly selected male jail detainees and then validated on 1,149 prison inmates. The final validated version of the RDS had an overall sensitivity of 0.791, specificity of 0.987, and positive and negative predictive value of 0.791 and 0.013, respectively. Since these statistics far exceed current detection rates, the RDS is likely to facilitate the diversion of mentally ill detainees in situations where it is impractical to administer psychological examinations to all incoming inmates. Training requirements for the RDS and directions for future research are discussed.This research was supported in part by National Institute of Mental Health under grant No. R01MH37988. We would like to thank Karl Kilgore, Stuart Michaels, John Lyons, Karen Abram, Richard White, and Christine Davidson for their statistical insights and helpful comments. James Collins is due special thanks for making his North Carolina prison data available. We are also grateful to Philip Hardiman, Thomas Monahan, and Ronald Simmons for their cooperation with the data-collection process.     

Rapid death due to group A streptococcal infections. Necrotizing fasciitis and acute bacterial myositis.

Soft tissue infections due to the group A Streptococcus are difficult to diagnose and rapidly fatal. They may present to the forensic pathologist as an "obscure autopsy". Death may occur within or outside the hospital and with or without a history of fulminant infection or predisposing factors. It is important for the pathologist to exclude this condition through awareness of its existence and by appropriate dissection with retention of materials for microbiological and histological examination.