Subway Train‐Related Fatalities in New York City: Accident versus Suicide*

Abstract: We examined the characteristics of subway train‐related fatalities in New York City between Jan. 1, 2003 and May 31, 2007 in order to determine which factors are useful in differentiating accident from suicide. Subway train‐related deaths with homicide and undetermined manners also are included. During this period, there were 211 subway train‐related fatalities. The manners of death were: suicide (n = 111), accident (n = 76), undetermined (n = 20), and homicide (n = 4). The causes of death were blunt trauma (n = 206) and electrocution (n = 5). Torso transection and extremity amputation were more frequent in suicides. Antidepressant medications were more frequently detected in suicides, whereas cocaine and ethanol were more frequent in accidents. However, autopsy findings should be weighed in the context of the entire evaluation along with other circumstantial and investigative findings. In unwitnessed deaths where additional information is unavailable or discrepant, the most appropriate manner of death usually is undetermined.     

Juvenile attitudes towards the police: The importance of subcultural involvement and community ties

Citizens' attitudes toward police have been examined in a variety of contexts during the past several decades. Additionally, the importance of juveniles' attitudes towards the police has received considerable attention during the past decade. The current article examines attitudes toward police from a large, multi-site study of sixth to ninth grade youths. Three specific questions were examined: (1) What is the influence of police contact (generally and by different types of contact) on juvenile attitudes toward the police? (2) How does involvement in delinquent subcultures affect these attitudes? (3) How do community contexts and ties influence juvenile attitudes toward the police? Results suggested that community ties and involvement in delinquent subcultures substantially mediate the influence of police contact on juveniles' attitudes toward the police.     

Maturity in Adolescent and Young Adult Offenders: The Role of Cognitive Control

This study examined the role of cognitive control in explaining the psychosocial maturity of adolescent (n = 43) and young adult male (n = 40) offenders. We separated psychosocial maturity into prosocial and criminal components, which were statistically unrelated and were explained by different variables. Individuals with higher levels of prosocial maturity were older, had better proactive cognitive control, and had better short-term memory than those with lower levels of prosocial maturity. Individuals with higher levels of criminal maturity were older and had better reactive cognitive control than those with lower levels of criminal maturity. We discuss the implications of these findings with regard to juvenile justice policy and practice.     

Seclusion: The perspective of nurses

Knowledge of how nurses experience the process of secluding a patient can be useful in improving the quality of patient care and in the prevention of work related stress in nurses. This study describes personal experiences of nurses throughout the seclusion process. The emotions which came to surface in semi-structured interviews with 8 nurses were categorized in three main themes (Tension, Trust and Power) and a stress response curve was identified in the seclusion process, with specific feelings in each phase. Feelings denied in former studies such as feeling superior, anger and disgust were found in the interviews in this study.     

Comparing NOMINATE and IDEAL: Points of Difference and Monte Carlo Tests

Empirical models of spatial voting allow us to infer legislators' locations in an abstract policy or ideological space using their roll‐call votes. Over the past 25 years, these models have provided new insights about the U.S. Congress, and legislative behavior more generally. There are now a number of alternative models, estimators, and software packages that researchers can use to recover latent issue or ideological spaces from voting data. These different tools usually produce substantively similar estimates, but important differences also arise. We investigated the sources of observed differences between two leading methods, NOMINATE and IDEAL. Using data from the 1994 to 1997 Supreme Court and the 109th Senate, we determined that while some observed differences in the estimates produced by each model stem from fundamental differences in the models' underlying behavioral assumptions, others arise from arbitrary differences in implementation. Our Monte Carlo experiments revealed that neither model has a clear advantage over the other in the recovery of legislator locations or roll‐call midpoints in either large or small legislatures.     

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms,Relationship Adjustment,and Relationship Aggression in a Sample of Female Flood Victims

This study tested a model examining the interrelationships among posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, intimate relationship adjustment, and intimate relationship aggression in a sample of 205 adult female flood victims. At the bivariate level, higher PTSD symptoms were associated with higher physical and psychological aggression victimization, poorer relationship adjustment, and higher physical and psychological aggression perpetration. Results from structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses indicated that relationship aggression victimization influenced aggression perpetration directly, and in the case of physical aggression, indirectly through its relationship with PTSD symptoms and relationship adjustment. The influence of PTSD symptoms on physical aggression perpetration was fully explained by poorer relationship adjustment. These findings extend prior work from other traumatized populations documenting associations between variables reflecting PTSD symptomatology and indices of relationship functioning, and indicate a need for further investigation in this area of inquiry. This research was supported in part by a grant to Patricia A. Resick from the National Institute of Mental Health (1-R01-MH55542).     

Restricting loans of money to Hong Kong civil servants: social censure or violation of human rights?

Obtaining a loan is an individual’s private business and such a right should be free from interference. However, if Government officers obtain a loan from undesirable persons, they may be lured into committing an act which they would not otherwise have done but for the favours having been shown by the lenders. Section 3 of Hong Kong’s Prevention of Bribery Ordinance attempts to limit such behaviour of Government officers. Since the power of this provision is draconian, it may possibly violate human rights. This paper attempts to use a Social Censure perspective to explain why this provision was put in place in the 1970s and why it was not repealed in the 1990s in line with the rise of human rights standards in Hong Kong. It argues that the then British colonial government used a high-hand legal code to fight against corruption in the civil service to win its legitimacy in face of the rise of Red China in the 1970s. A review of twenty-one Section 3 cases suggests that most of the loans were not distributed for mere friendship but involved a wide range of culpability. Thus the coercion generated by Section 3 was approved by the masses, resulting in the reinforcement of a draconian but efficient legal provision in the service of the colonial administration.     

Mortgage fraud: A risk factor analysis of affected communities

Mortgage fraud is a fast-growing form of white-collar crime that has received much press coverage in the United States of America. Mortgage fraud has an adverse effect on individual homeowners, communities, and many indirect victims of the crime. While past research has focused on the personal motivating factors behind the commission of white-collar crime, this particular article reviews several facets of the crime itself and explores the potential neighbourhood risk factors that help attract the crime. From a national perspective, mortgage fraud seems to occur more frequently in neighbourhoods that have low socioeconomic indicators. These associations become even more pronounced when the degree of fraud occurrences within the community is factored in as a variable. Upon disaggregating the data according to region, the fraud indicator variables also display differing trend levels, perhaps indicating that as mortgage fraud practices begin to mature within an area, its community dynamics tend to change as well. The article concludes with recommendations for policymakers, community organizations, and law enforcement officials as to how to address mortgage fraud once it appears within a community, and also addresses future avenues of research for what is largely an untapped area of financial crime research.     

Bad guys: Why the public supports punishing white-collar offenders

Until the latter part of the 1960s, the American public was inattentive to the problem of crime in the upperworld. Due to a confluence of events (e.g., Watergate affair, Vietnam War, civil rights movement), concern about this lawlessness rose precipitously in the 1970s. Public attention toward and willingness to punish white-collar crime has persisted into the twenty-first century. We argue, however, that due to a series of recent scandals (e.g., Enron, WorldCom), public opinion about upperworld offenders has been transformed qualitatively. High-profile offenders are now seen not as respected community citizens but as “bad guys” whose crimes reflect inordinate greed and a disturbing lack of concern for victims. This typification is conducive to the prosecution of white-collar offenders but may have the unanticipated consequence of deflecting attention away from structural sources of corporate illegal enterprises.