Collaborative behavioral management: integration and intensification of parole and outpatient addiction treatment services in the Step’n Out study

Integration of community parole and addiction treatment holds promise for optimizing the participation of drug-involved parolees in re-entry services, but intensification of services might yield greater rates of technical violations. Collaborative behavioral management (CBM) integrates the roles of parole officers and treatment counselors to provide role induction counseling, contract for pro-social behavior, and to deliver contingent reinforcement of behaviors consistent with contracted objectives. Attendance at both parole and addiction treatment are specifically reinforced. The Step’n Out study of the Criminal Justice–Drug Abuse Treatment Studies (CJ-DATS) randomly allocated 486 drug-involved parolees to either collaborative behavioral management or traditional parole with 3-month and 9-month follow-up. Bivariate and multivariate regression models found that, in the first 3 months, the CBM group had more parole sessions, face-to-face parole sessions, days on which parole and treatment occurred on the same day, treatment utilization and individual counseling, without an increase in parole violations. We conclude that CBM integrated parole and treatment as planned, and intensified parolees’ utilization of these services, without increasing violations.     

Fidelity and adherence at the transition point: Theoretically driven experiments

Experiments test ‘new’ ideas about interventions that might produce better outcomes. Re-entry requires that the intervention should be offered at the transition point (from prison to community) and in the community. In general, the experiment requires the researchers to differentiate the ‘new’ approach from usual practice. The answer lies in the design and measures of the experiment. It is important to make sure that the intervention will be designed and implemented in such a manner that makes it operationally different from traditional services. Each experiment must include measures to determine the content and dosage of the new intervention as well as the traditional practice. This special edition is devoted to examining how these issues are handled in four different experiments, as well as comments from members of a Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) on the efforts to monitor studies. Together, the articles point to the need to measure the fidelity and adherence of new innovations.     

Zur Bedeutung „transnationalen Sozialkapitals“: Sind Grenzgebiete Laboratorien sozialer Integration in Europa?

The article focuses on transnational relations in border regions. Social capital theory assumes that in border regions special opportunity structures exist for the social integration of the population of old and new member states of the European Union based on the specific possibilities for cross-border cooperation. Border regions may be seen as “laboratories of social integration”. The article discusses whether “transnational social capital” actually develops and to what extent it adds to the social integration of the regions and of Europe. Representative survey data from the German-Polish, German-Czech, and German-French border regions – gathered on both sides of the border – serve as the basis of the analysis. Results show that currently – especially on the old outer borders of the EU – the accumulated transnational social capital adds very little to social integration at the regional and European level.     

Yassir Arafat

Development Theory and the Three Worlds. by Bjorn Hittne, London: Longman. 1990. 296pp.

Eurocentrism. by Samir Amin, London: Zed Books. 1989. 157pp.

Communist Agriculture: farming in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. edited by Karl‐Eugen Wädekin, London: Routledge. 1990. 131pp. £25.00hb

The Informal Economy: studies in advanced and less developed countries. edited by Alejandro Portes, Manual Castells and Lauren A Benton, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1989. 327pp. £12.00pb

The Next Generation: lives of Third World children. by Judith Ennew and Brian Milne, London: Zed. 1990. 226pp. £7.95pb

Ethnicity in World Politics. Third World Quarterly 11 (4), October 1989

Uprooting Poverty: the South African challenge. by Francis Wilson and Mamphele Ramphele, London: W W Norton. 1989. 400pp. £18.95hb

Yours for the Union: class and community struggles in South Africa. by Baruch Hirson, London: Zed. 1989. 230pp     

Regieren unter den Bedingungen des institutionellen Pluralismus: ein deutsch-amerikanischer Vergleich

Within the discipline of comparative politics, Western democracies have been categorized according to the number of veto-players or ‘co-governing actors’ governments face when pursuing their programmes. Often, potential veto-players have been treated as rather static factors with a focus on their maximum veto potential. In this article, devoted to studying the conditions of governing in the United States and Germany, veto-players are explicitly considered as dynamic actors, which allows much more realistic assessments of the conditions of governing in highly power-sharing systems. In fact, under certain conditions some veto-players may ease rather than complicate the task of governing. Moreover, the fundamental difference between parliamentarism and presidentialism is being highligthed as a key variable shaping the functioning of seemingly similar institutional arrangements in liberal democracies.     

CJDATS CO-OCCURRING DISORDERS SCREENING INSTRUMENT (CODSI) FOR MENTAL DISORDERS (MD): A Validation Study

Three standardized screening instruments-the Global Appraisal of Individual Needs Short Screener (GSS), the Mini-International Neuropsychiatric Interview-Modified (MINI-M), and the Mental Health Screening Form (MHSF)-were compared to two shorter instruments, the 6-item Co-Occurring Disorders Screening Instrument for Mental Disorders (CODSI-MD) and the 3-item CODSI for Severe Mental Disorders (CODSI-SMD) for use with offenders in prison substance-abuse treatment programs. Results showed that the CODSI screening instruments were comparable to the longer instruments in overall accuracy and that all of the instruments performed reasonably well. The CODSI instruments showed sufficient value to justify their use in prison substance-abuse treatment programs and to warrant validation testing in other criminal justice populations and settings.     

Globale Ungleichheit: Weltgesellschaftliche Perspektiven

A common claim made by world system theory and world society theory is that the observable differences in the world system or the world society are to be considered as consequences of the structure of the overall system. This claim is tested by considering the current research on global income inequality. One finding of this research is that the individual share in global income is predominantly determined by where an individual lives. While it is difficult for Luhmann’s theory of world society to account for this observation, from the point of view of world system theory this observation can be interpreted as a result of globally effective profit interests which exploit the political segmentation of the globe. Nevertheless, this interpretation also has to be questioned. On the one hand, there are strong indications that the economic development and the distribution of income are strongly determined by national factors that cannot easily be interpreted as consequences of global forces. On the other hand, world system theory has not succeeded in establishing the mechanisms by which structures of global exploitation operate. It is argued that these findings do not invalidate a world societal perspective on global inequality, but only invalidate the stronger claim that global structures are necessarily determined by global forces. Rather, national structures are still shaping global structures to a high degree.