Reconsidering the relationship between alcohol and lethal violence

Prior event-based research regarding the relationship between alcohol and violence suffers from important limitations, including the absence of a comparison group, an inappropriate comparison group, or a comparison group that could be considered appropriate but does not control for potential confounders. To overcome such limitations, we use a matched pair design. Drawing on interviews with men imprisoned for an aggravated assault or homicide committed in response to a conflict with another man, we examine matched pairs of violent and nonviolent conflicts nested within respondents. The results suggest that guns mediate the relationship between alcohol and lethal male-male violence.     

The Effects of Tenure on Staff Apathy and Treatment Orientation: A Comparison of Respondent Characteristics and Environmental Factors

Because inmate rehabilitation efforts are influenced by prison staff, Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections recently began collecting survey data from corrections staff about their attitudes and beliefs for treatment programming. The present analysis focused on staff tenure, or length of time employed in a corrections field, and its effects on support for inmate rehabilitation. Overall, findings from bivariate analyses clearly showed that staff with 16 years or more of service expressed less apathy and demonstrated a treatment orientation perspective toward inmate rehabilitation. Findings from multivariate analyses showed that respondent characteristics including tenure and job category were stronger predictors of staff apathy and a treatment orientation perspective than were environmental factors associated with the prisons. Policy implications will be discussed.     

Just My Cup of Tea!

正I recently played a modern-day hostess for a black tea commercial in Beijing.As an American,it was a great opportunity to learn more about China’s traditional beverage,which I have come to occasionally enjoy alongside my habitual coffee fix.We filmed the commercial in a Western-style hotel on the northeast outskirts of Beijing.     

Civil Legal Aid and Domestic Violence: a Review of the Literature and Promising Directions

This note summarizes extant research on civil legal aid, which includes provision of legal services for indigent and low-income individuals, and its applications for DV and IPV victims, and concludes with suggestions for improving service delivery and research in the field. Results of searches of online databases for peer-reviewed and non-peer reviewed articles, reports, analyses, and evaluations of civil legal aid in the United States were analyzed and critically assessed. Civil legal aid is a promising but underfunded and underexplored avenue for responding to and reducing domestic violence (DV), intimate partner violence (IPV), and their devastating effects. Providing civil counsel in divorce, custody, and protective order proceedings can significantly improve outcomes for DV and IPV victims and their children as well as serve as a cost-effective strategy for reducing violence and generating positive social returns.     

The Intersection of Religion,Race, Class,and Ethnicity in Community Conflict

This brief essay explores some ways of defining what we need to know — but don't — about conflict within and between communities where there are strong identity differences based on religion, culture, gender, and race. Its particular focus is on the role that religion and religious leaders play in attempting to resolve identity-based conflict.     

Networks of regulatory agencies as regional public goods: Improving infrastructure performance

Networks of sectoral regulatory agencies provide regional public goods (RPGs). In developed and developing countries, the telecommunications, energy, and water sectors have been re-structured (frequently liberalized) and reformed over the past two decades. Often with seed money from international organizations and donor countries, regulatory leaders at newly created commissions sought to learn from neighboring countries. Regional networks provided vehicles for sharing data and best-practice techniques, developing studies, providing training, distributing regulatory materials, and organizing meetings. Three properties of publicness of RPGs influence the provision of RPGs: non-rivalry of benefits, non-excludability of non-payers, and the aggregation technology. External donor funding and the mix of characteristics have influenced the pattern of network activities.