Using the Referral Decision Scale to Screen Mentally Ill Jail Detainees: Validity and Implementation Issues

The prevalence of serious mental illnesses in jail populations is significantly greater than in the general population. Identifying individuals who warrant psychiatric evaluations is important and benefits correctional staff as well as detainees. One widely used screening instrument intended for this task is the Referral Decision Scale (RDS). This paper reviews the development and validation of the RDS. Using data from a multisite study which assessed postrelease outcomes for detainees with mental illness, various types of validity are addressed. The results confirm that the RDS has some inherent characteristics that seriously limit its practical application as a screening instrument for use by correctional staff.     

Citizen response to regional integration in the Americas: The cases of Costa Rica and El Salvador

This study examines public opinion in Costa Rica and El Salvador regarding regional integration in Central America. Recent efforts at regional integration as well as the response of the governments of the above countries to those efforts are reviewed. Public opinion toward regional integration is significantly more positive but less structured in El Salvador than in Costa Rica. Differences in the international and domestic contexts help to explain the differential responses in these two countries. Likewise, contextual factors help to account for differences between Central American and European publics in attitudes toward regional integration. Charles L. Davis is associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky. His interests are Latin American politics and comparative political behavior. Matthew J. Gabel is assistant professor of political science at the University of Kentucky. His interests are European politics and the politics of regional integration. Kenneth M. Coleman is a former professor at the University of Kentucky, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and the University of New Mexico. His interests are Latin American politics and public opinion.     

Inca, Sailor, Soldier, King: Gregor MacGregor and the Early Nineteenth‐Century Caribbean

This article examines the recruiting practices, political propositions and changing identities of the Scottish adventurer Gregor MacGregor in the early nineteenth‐century Caribbean. Based on original archival research and revision of the existing secondary literature, it seeks to understand why he has consistently been judged as a failure, and why neither Scotland nor any of the countries MacGregor worked in have wanted to claim him as their own hero. After an introduction providing biographical details and some historical context for the Caribbean in the period 1811–1830, the article looks in detail at what have been seen to be his successes and failures in the Caribbean region. It asks to what extent questions of ethnicity or masculinity have affected the way contemporaries and historians viewed MacGregor and his actions. In conclusion, it suggests that although he was a soldier and a sailor, and he was declared both an Inca and a King, his career was deemed a failure by both contemporaries and historians in Scotland, South America and the Caribbean. The main explanation for this negative assessment is that his ambitions continually fell foul of the interests of various Caribbean elites and of the distinctive historical circumstances of the region.¹     

DIVORCE AND THE FAMILY COURT: WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT DOMESTIC VIOLENCE?

Approximately 50% of couples who have separated report being victims of violence and/or emotional abuse by their former intimate partners. Family courts can make an important contribution toward reducing the number of intimate partners who report being victims of domestic violence and abuse during and following their participation in divorce proceedings in three ways. First, increase opportunities for participation in nonadversarial procedures. Second, implement mandatory assessment/screening for domestic violence using field‐tested instruments that link subscores on sets of items (e.g., control motivated violence, conflict instigated violence/abuse, substance abuse associated violence/abuse) with appropriate community‐based treatments and/or resources. Third, educate family court judges, lawyers, mediators, and other court personnel in the dynamics of domestic violence generally, as well as the dynamics associated with separation/divorce.     

Reproducing a Fit Citizenry: Dependency, Eugenics, and the Law of Marriage in the United States, 1860-1920

Between the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, American state legislatures enacted a series of new laws that delineated a class of citizens who were deemed ineligible to participate in the institution of marriage. Scholars have characterized this development as evidence that lawmakers had lost faith in a laissez-faire approach to nuptial governance, and thus transformed marriage into an object of public regulation. This essay argues that behind the ostensible nuptial privatism of the mid-nineteenth century lay a self-conscious policy of judicial governance. Judges invoked the language of nuptial privacy and the common law of contract strategically to advance their vision of moral and economic discipline. The new marital prohibitions thus represented, the essay argues, not the expansion of the state's police power into the previously private realm of domestic relations, but rather a critical transformation in how nuptial reformers and lawmakers understood the relationship between marriage and the well-being of the polity.
Fueled by growing concerns about pauperism, the racial character of the urban proletariat, and the collapse of the economically independent single-male-breadwinner household, the changing form of nuptial governance signaled a thoroughgoing intellectual and strategic reorientation from an understanding of marriage as forming economically and morally viable households – the fundamental units of society – to an understanding of marriage as a largely procreative institution, as the literal source of the citizenry. This reconceptualization of marriage underwrote a strategy of nuptial governance that mobilized marriage as a strategy in the state's regulation of social reproduction.