Framing morality policy issues: state legislative debates on abortion restrictions

Policy Sciences - Scholars of “morality policies” have often assumed a signature characteristic of such policies is that advocates will frame them as clashes between fundamental moral...     

Setting the Regulatory Agenda: Statutory Deadlines,Delay, and Responsiveness

Congress imposes statutory deadlines in an attempt to influence agency regulatory agendas, but agencies regularly fail to meet them. What explains agency responsiveness to statutory deadlines? Taking a transaction cost politics approach, the authors develop a theory of responsiveness to deadlines centered on political feasibility to explain how agency managers map rulemaking onto calendar and political time. This theory is tested on all unique rules with statutory deadlines published in the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions between 1995 and 2012. The argument and findings about the timing and ultimate promulgation of rules have implications that reorient the study of the regulatory agenda from legal and political into more managerial terms.     

Chemical enhancement of footwear impressions in blood on fabric — Part 2: Peroxidase reagents

This study investigates the optimisation of peroxidase based enhancement techniques for footwear impressions made in blood on various fabric surfaces. Four different haem reagents: leuco crystal violet (LCV), leuco malachite green (LMG), fluorescein and luminol were used to enhance the blood contaminated impressions.The enhancement techniques in this study were used successfully to enhance the impressions in blood on light coloured surfaces, however, only fluorescent and/or chemiluminescent techniques allowed visualisation on dark coloured fabrics, denim and leather. Luminol was the only technique to enhance footwear impressions made in blood on all the fabrics investigated in this study.     

Community-level HIV prevention for persons with severe mental illness living in supportive housing programs: a pilot intervention study

Individuals with severe mental illness (SMI) are at risk for HIV/AIDS. Despite the availability of supportive community programs for those with SMI, there have been no published evaluations of community-level HIV prevention trials among this population. A pilot intervention trial was conducted to determine the feasibility of such an intervention in supportive housing programs (SHPs). A multi-component community-level trial was implemented in two SHPs with a total of 28 residents. Participants completed assessments at three time points: prior to the intervention (baseline), following skills training (post-assessment), and following the 4-month community intervention (follow- up). Results demonstrated significant improvements in psychosocial risk factors at both post- and follow-up assessments, with indications of sexual behavior change at follow-up. The community-level intervention appeared to reduce the risk of HIV among persons with SMI living in SHPs, and supports the importance of conducting larger scale intervention trials.