A Test of Generalizability of the Social Development Model Across Gender and Income Groups with Longitudinal Data from the Elementary School Developmental Period

The social development model (SDM) is a theory of behavior that has proven useful in explaining the etiology of delinquency, violence, and substance use among adolescents as well as early antisocial behavior among pre-adolescents. A further test of the model is its generalizability across population groups. A section of the SDM representing prosocial influences in the etiology of problem behavior was compared for boys and girls and for children from low- and non low-income families using three waves of child, parent and teacher survey data on a sample of 851 elementary school students. Multiple group structural equation modeling was used to assess differences across groups in both measurement of model constructs and hypothesized structural paths between constructs. The results indicate overall similarity in the reliability of measurement models and validity of structural models.     

General systems theory and criminal justice

Criminal justice agencies are organized sequentially — “output” from one agency is “input” to the next — but most scholars argue that criminal justice is not a system in a theoretical sense. In this article, it is argued that general systems theory (GST) reveals important insights into criminal justice structures and functions. Specifically, it is argued that the criminal justice system processes “cases” rather than people, and that the common goal of criminal justice processing is to “close cases so that they stay closed.” It also is argued that processing capacity progressively declines, in that at each system point the subsequent agency cannot input as many cases as the previous agency can output. Each agency therefore experiences “backward pressure” to close cases in order to reduce input to the next agency. Overall, this article highlights that criminal justice agents and agencies are best understood as operating in the context of the larger whole, thus it is concluded that criminal justice is a system in the sense of general systems theory.     

Surveillance of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) antibodies in medicolegal autopsies in Finland--monitoring early changes in HIV-seropositivity among risk groups and average population.

In order to cooperate with voluntary screening programs aimed at the surveillance of the HIV epidemic in Finland, we have studied medicolegal autopsies for HIV antibodies since 1986 using an enzyme immunoassay on postmortem sera. The investigation covered 47.4% and 39.2%, respectively, of all deaths under the age of 65 years in the metropolitan areas of Helsinki and Turku--two cities on the densely populated southern coast of Finland from which most HIV infections have thus far been detected. Nine HIV-positive cases (0.12%) were detected among the 7305 medicolegal autopsies tested in 1986 to 1990. This figure is higher than the prevalence of 0.01 to 0.03% in voluntary screening programs for the general population would suggest. Seven of our cases had previously tested positive, and two were previously unknown cases, indicating that people at high risk are clustered in the medicolegal autopsy series. Of the six cases in an early stage of infection, three committed suicide suggesting the importance of HIV-screening in suicide cases in tracing symptomless HIV carriers. Five of the cases were detected in 1990, a year when the number of new HIV infections had more than doubled compared to the previous two years. This suggests that testing of medicolegal autopsies as surrogate tests for the population gives useful information even in low-prevalence areas like Finland. Such testing has none of the ethical problems of many other back-up surveys, and may be particularly sensitive to early changes in epidemiology.