Informing the future of capacity building: lessons from an NGO partnership

Despite a recent surge in popularity, critical gaps remain in effectively building the capacity of organisations through global development projects. Two non-governmental organisations, FHI 360 and Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), established a partnership focused on strengthening CTPH's organisational capacity to conduct high quality monitoring and evaluation and to effectively advocate for integrated population, health, and environment work. To help inform the design and implementation of future capacity building programmes, the partners describe their lessons learnt as illustrated through the five key capacity building steps: stakeholder engagement and partnership formation; capacity needs assessment; capacity plan design; plan implementation; and evaluation.     

The Employment of Ex-Offenders and the UK's New Criminal Record Bureau

This article outlines the development of the UK's Criminal Records Bureau designed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the screening arrangements for potential employees by disclosure of their criminal records to employers. The Bureau builds on existing arrangements that have been in place for a number of years. The authors argue that this development, which includes a much wider availability of criminal records, is an example of a new social policy that has the potential for an unintended consequence of large scale social exclusion, by limiting the prospects of employment for ex-offenders.     

Investigation of the Criminal and Conditional Release Profiles of Canadian Federal Offenders as a Function of Psychopathy and Age

Using the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; R. D. Hare, 1991) diagnostic cutoff score of 30, the complete criminal career and community release profiles of 317 Canadian federal offenders (224 low scorers and 93 scoring within the psychopathic range) were investigated. Adult crimes were coded according to age at commission as well as either violent, nonviolent, or nonsexually violent. Changes in performance following release into the community also were examined. Results indicated that offenders scoring within the psychopathic range consistently committed more violent and nonviolent crimes than their counterparts for about three decades, spanning their late adolescence to their late 40s. Numbers of nonviolent criminal offenses committed by high PCL-R scorers declined considerably after age 30 relative to violent offenses, which declined and then rebounded in the late 30s before a major reduction was evidenced. Throughout adulthood, high PCL-R scorers failed during community release significantly faster than did low scorers. Importantly, from a risk management perspective, the release performance of low PCL-R scorers improved with age, whereas the opposite was seen for high scorers. Further, offenders scoring high on the PCL-R did not show a lower charge to conviction ratio with age, suggesting that they may not have been getting better at manipulating the legal system.     

Minimising corruption: Applying lessons from the crime prevention literature

This article explores how the criminology literature, particularly the literature on crime prevention, might supplement current efforts to minimise corruption. It seeks to identify and apply approaches to offenders and offending to the problem of minimising corruption. In summary, this article demonstrates that the crime prevention literature does have a number of applications for those interested in minimising corruption. In general terms, this literature advocates, amongst other things, taking an informed approach to corruption minimisation by developing an understanding of the process of engaging in corrupt conduct. Exploring the offender's perspective and considering different types of corruption separately are two strategies suggested to facilitate understanding the factors which underlie corrupt conduct. In this way those seeking to minimise corruption would be better placed to identify how and where to intervene to optimise the likelihood of prevention and hence be able to tailor prevention techniques to individual types of corruption. Six specific lessons from the crime prevention literature and their applications are illustrated in this article. This current article is intended to promote discussion of potential strategies for combating corruption by the growing numbers of people interested in this challenge. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Effective Sanctions in EC Law: A Moving Boundary in the Division of Competence

Abstract: This article details and analyses the development of European Court of Justice guidelines regarding sanctions provided by Member States to correct infractions of EC law. It will be shown that the contemporary policy of the Court significantly retreats from an early practice of non-interference with the discretion of national judges to attach domestic remedies for breach of substantive Community measures. Preliminary comments will be made on the possible impact of these developments on the constitutional structure of the Community, and in particular their potential effect on the continuing debate concerning the legitimacy of EC rules.