The Positive Role of School Climate on School Victimization,Depression, and Suicidal Ideation Among School-Attending Homeless Youth

Although homeless youth face a higher risk of victimization and mental health problems, little is known about school victimization and mental health outcomes for school-attending homeless youth. This study examined the relationship between school climate and school-related victimization and mental health problems among homeless youth. Multivariate analyses were conducted to examine the relationship between school climate factors and school victimization, suicidal ideation, and depression tendency in a representative sample of 1,169 school-attending homeless youth in 9th and 11th grades in California. Findings show that school-attending homeless youth are at high risk of being victimized at school and have high rates of depression tendency and suicidal ideation. Positive school climate, especially perceived high expectations from teachers and safety in school, was associated with lower rates of school victimization and mental health problems. The role of supportive school climate in the lives of school-attending homeless youth is discussed and future implications are suggested.     

A Neo‐Institutional Account of Prison Diffusion

Interest in legal innovations, particularly in the criminal law realm, often centers on an innovation's emergence, but not its subsequent diffusion. Typifying this trend, existing accounts of the prison's historical roots persuasively explain the prison's “birth” in Jacksonian‐Era northern coastal cities, but not its subsequent rapid, widespread, and homogenous diffusion across a culturally, politically, and economically diverse terrain. Instead, this study offers a neo‐institutional account of the prison's diffusion, emphasizing the importance of national, field‐level pressures rather than local, contextual factors. This study distinguishes between the prison's innovation and early adoption, which can be explained by the need to replace earlier proto‐prisons, and its subsequent adoption, particularly in the South and frontier states, which was driven by the desire to conform to increasingly widespread practices. This study further attributes the isomorphic nature of the diffusion to institutional pressures, including uncertainty surrounding the new technology, pseudoprofessional penal reformers and their claims about competing models of confinement, and contingent historical factors that reinforced these institutional pressures. This study illustrates the importance of distinguishing between the motivations that initiate criminal law innovations and those that advance their diffusion.     

Women in the American Society for Public Administration: Another Decade of Progress But Still a Way to Go

During ASPA's first fifty years (1939–1989), the role of women in the Society evolved from virtual invisibility, to token representation, to major participation. In the 1990s, women's role in ASPA continued to expand. They achieved just about full partnership with male colleagues in the organization's governance and they increased their contributions to ASPA's efforts to support the improvement of theory and practice in public administration through research and scholarship. However, women have not yet achieved parity with their male colleagues in scholarly output. For women to achieve full equality with men in ASPA, they must be better represented in contributions to literature and knowledge in the profession.     

The Consequences of Prisoners’ Micro‐Resistance

For more than twenty years, scholars have called for greater attention to the consequences of micro‐resistance to legality. Using archival data from Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary (1829–1875), I examine the consequences of noncompliant prisoner behavior. I find that prisoners’ noncompliance often entailed substantial costs to prisoners, particularly in comparison to the substantial benefits of complying with the prison regime. Despite its cost to prisoners, noncompliance did not have a single set of uniformly negative consequences for the prison regime. In fact, some forms of noncompliance may have actually protected the prison's reputation. Prison administrators, external allies, and critics used episodes of noncompliance for their own goals and to reinforce their preexisting claims about the propriety of competing prison designs, yielding this variable significance of noncompliance. As this study illustrates, connecting prisoner misconduct to power dynamics in the broader field produces a fuller understanding of micro‐resistance's consequences.     

Terrorism and piracy: A legal view

Abstract

Terrorist attacks on persons or property on the high seas or in the newly designated “exclusive economic zones” bear analogy closer to the traditional international law of “piracy” than most observers suspect. In traditional practice “private ends” in the usual sense was not an essential element of the offense; the label and its legal results were attached to unrecognized belligerents too. The latest codifications of the international law relating to piracy, principally those deriving from the 1958 Geneva Convention on the High Seas, are patently defective. A new formulation is proposed, with a commentary that, among other things, points out how international criminal law and universal jurisdiction can be coordinated with the generally accepted international law of armed conflict to clarify what is currently a chaotic legal situation.     

Psychotic Domestic Murder: Neuropsychological Differences Between Homicidal and Nonhomicidal Schizophrenic Men

There is substantial evidence that individuals with schizophrenia are at increased risk for violent criminal behavior and an even higher risk for committing murder, relative to the general population. Neuropsychological features of seven schizophrenic men who murdered family members were compared to neuropsychological features of seven schizophrenic men with no history of violence, criminal offenses or antisocial behavior. The two groups were matched for age, education, race, gender, handedness, and diagnosis, and had similar psychotic symptom profiles and substance abuse histories. The schizophrenic murderers demonstrated significantly worse neuropsychological impairment, involving executive dysfunction and memory dysfunction, relative to nonviolent schizophrenic men. Implications include: (1) specific neuropsychological deficits may increase the likelihood of some schizophrenic men to murder family members due to an impaired capacity to inhibit impulsive violent aggression; (2) neuropsychological status of schizophrenic defendants who commit domestic homicide should be considered by the trier-of-fact when they are tried for murder.