Long- and short-term risk factors in the prediction of inpatient suicide: review of the literature

The prediction of suicide remains a major challenge for health care professionals in inpatient settings. A clearer identification of factors specific to inpatient suicide is required to improve both practice and research within this area. This paper provides an overview of the inpatient suicide literature to date focusing on two particularly salient themes: Long term and short term prediction of suicide. Since the concept of short-term suicide risk dominates clinical practice, issues in relation to dynamic risk factors are emphasized.     

PTSD compromises battered women's future safety

Intimate partner violence continues to be a social crisis that results in a complex array of physical and mental health problems. Although resources to counteract the effects of the violence are sometimes available, the posttrauma sequelae may prevent access by those in need. Using the Chicago Women's Health Risk Study, a naturalistic longitudinal study of 320 abused women, the current study examined the impact of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression on battered women's safety at follow-up. Participants completed both a baseline and follow-up interview, including data on abuse experiences. Results suggest symptoms of PTSD predict severity of violence at follow-up over the impact of help-seeking behaviors, perceived helpfulness of these behaviors, and social support. Implications of results are discussed.     

The Illusion of Resistance: Commodification and Reification of Neoliberalism and the State

While protests and acts of resistance are central to democracy and the potential for social change, what is often ignored is the usurping of resistance through commodification and consumption. Here we argue that it is important to remember that even acts of resistance, such as we have witnessed since the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States, that speak out against inequality and social harm are commodified and consumed within the spectacular domination of the State and capital, making resistance part and parcel of the neoliberal system that commoditizes in totality.     

Response to Lindsay,Mansour, Beaudry,Leach and Bertrand's Sequential lineup presentation: Patterns and policy

This paper is a response to the earlier paper by Lindsay, Mansour, Beaudry, Leach and Bertrand (2009). We argue that eyewitness research is an important public good and that high‐quality in research and policy formulations offered to the public interest is required to maintain our standing of trust. We argue that even though sequential lineups have been successfully codified in some jurisdictions as the exclusive eyewitness identification procedure, the claim of sequential superiority is built upon errors in the research process and that the evidence of reduced false identification with sequential lineups is completely offset by reductions in correct identifications. We reject the idea that the loss of correct identifications can be dismissed as guessing on the basis that this is speculative and that there is no published empirical support for the idea. We reject the idea that false identifications are necessarily more valuable for society to reduce than are correct identifications to achieve. Improvements in eyewitness identification are important, and interesting lines of investigation are available. It is questionable whether the sequential lineup is important among them.     

The Normality of Political Administration and State Violence: Casuistry,Law, and Drones

Large unmanned aerial vehicles (i.e., drones) equipped with missiles and bombs or battle-equipped have progressively become the newest wave in “warfare.” We argue that the use of drones for targeted assassinations is merely a new technological tool for state violence that is increasingly becoming a regular exercise of the US power in the construction and reification of the broader social geopolitical order. Further, it is through law, domestic and international, that state violence, wars and the use of drones for targeted assassinations are legitimated and are a normality, and continuation of, the political management of the state. Taken with the core of humanitarian law that legitimates war and state violence, we suggest that the use of drones can be interpreted within the body of legislation, political discourse, and laws that serve to normalize and legitimize their use: no different than such processes that occurred with the technological advances that offered military tanks, aerial bombing, projectile missiles or even nuclear and chemical weapons.     

The effectiveness of relapse prevention training in a group of incarcerated child molesters

Abstract

A sample of child molesters participating in the U.K. prison sex offender treatment programme (SOTP) were required to complete a relapse prevention questionnaire before and after treatment. Results indicated that there were significant improvements in both awareness of risk situations and coping strategies, as measured by this instrument, through treatment. Nine months after the end of treatment most agreed to complete the questionnaire again. Those who had shown significant changes in terms of reduction of pro-offending attitudes through treatment maintained their RP skills. Men whose attitudes had not changed, although evidencing good RP skills at the end of treatment, were found to have lost these. This was most noticeable among men who had been released into the community and who had undergone a relatively short amount of therapy on the original SOTP (80 hours). These results indicate that RP training is only really useful where individuals have genuinely changed through treatment; and that the RP training should only be undertaken as part of an extensive treatment programme covering all areas of offending behaviour.     

Deaths Involving Methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) in Upper East Tennessee

Two deaths involving 3, 4‐methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) are reported. MDPV is a synthetic cathinone stimulant found in “bath salts” with neurological and cardiovascular toxicity. Biological specimens were analyzed for MDPV by GC/MS and LC/MS. A White man was found dead with signs of nausea and vomiting after repeatedly abusing bath salts during a weekend binge. Femoral venous blood and urine had MDPV concentrations of 39 ng/mL and 760 ng/mL. The second fatality was a White man with a history of drug and bath salt abuse found dead at a scene in total disarray after exhibiting fits of anger and psychotic behavior. Femoral venous blood and urine had MDPV concentrations of 130 ng/mL and 3800 ng/mL. The blood and urine MDPV concentrations are within the reported recreational concentration ranges (blood 24–241 ng/mL and urine 34–3900 ng/mL). Both decedents’ deaths were attributed to relevant natural causes in a setting of MDPV abuse.     

Secure pathways for women in the UK: lessons from the women’s enhanced medium secure services (WEMSS) pilots

Abstract

Women’s enhanced medium secure services (WEMSS) is a model of care aimed at providing a more appropriate level of security for women and, in so doing, reducing the number of women in high secure psychiatric services. In 2007, three Department of Health commissioned WEMSS pilots became operational. This study compared the clinical outcomes of women in WEMSS with control women in six standard medium secure services and one high secure service matched on key clinical and risk characteristics, in order to examine their pathways of care. Our findings confirm that the WEMSS pilots were successful in transitioning women from high secure services who had previously been thought unsuitable for medium secure services. However, WEMSS showed no additional clinical benefit, suggesting that these women could be cared for equally well within standard medium secure services. We make recommendations about WEMSS and the future shape of women’s secure care in England.     

Overlooked and Overshadowed: The Case of Burundi

In east-central Africa, nestled between Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda is Burundi. From the onset of independence in 1961, Burundi has had a history of internal armed conflicts, ethnic tensions and civil unrest in the form of crimes against humanity, massive and systematic rape, and other gross human rights violations that have resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. Nonetheless, there has been relatively little attention paid to these types of crimes by criminologists. Political discourse and subsequent media reports suggest that the cause of the violence in Burundi is rooted in reappearing ethnic tensions between two ethnic groups. Yet, the origins and continued enactment of the conflict is far more complex. In this paper, the authors draw upon the extant state crime literature to both conceptually frame, and theoretically illuminate, the crimes against humanity and other gross human rights violations that have occurred.