The Court's Role in Promoting Comprehensive Justice for Pregnant Drug and Alcohol Users

Drug use during pregnancy is an important social and medical issue. Legislatures and courts have offered a variety of responses, ranging from imprisonment to comprehensive service programs that are rehabilitative in nature. This article discusses the prevalence and effects of prenatal drug use, followed by a presentation of the scope of legal responses and treatment options. Some courts do not provide outreach services for drug‐offending mothers, while others may offer a limited range of services. In contrast, a comprehensive justice approach would provide a wide range of health, employment, and social programs for the offender. This approach is based on philosophies of restorative justice, therapeutic jurisprudence, and procedural justice. Such a theory‐based comprehensive justice program ultimately benefits mothers, children, and the community. Considerations are offered for judges who seek to implement a comprehensive justice approach to address this important problem.     

Lessons from the Gang Lu Murders

This paper offers a critical review and reflection of the 1991 University of Iowa shootings. Gang Lu, a disgruntled Iowa graduate student, was initially angered over perceived slights he was receiving from his academic department. When he felt that his concerns were left unanswered by the University, he decided to seek revenge on those whom he felt were responsible. In doing so, he murdered five individuals and paralyzed another before taking his own life. This paper seeks to reflect on these shootings twenty years after the occurrence and to offer a discussion of some of the larger societal themes raised by this tragedy.     

Identification of group affinity from cross-sectional contours of the human midfacial skeleton using digital morphometrics and 3D laser scanning technology

Identifying group affinity from human crania is a long-standing problem in forensic and physical anthropology. Many craniofacial differences used in forensic skeletal identification are difficult to quantify, although certain measurements of the midfacial skeleton have shown high predictive value for group classifications. This study presents a new method for analyzing midfacial shape variation between different geographic groups. Three-dimensional laser scan models of 90 crania from three populations were used to obtain cross-sectional midfacial contours defined by three standard craniometric landmarks. Elliptic Fourier transforms of the contours were used to extract Fourier coefficients for statistical analysis. After cross-validation, discriminant functions based on the Fourier coefficients provided an average of 86% correct classifications for crania from the three groups. The high rate of accuracy of this method indicates its usefulness for identifying group affinities among human skeletal remains and demonstrates the advantages of digital 3D model-based analysis in forensic research.     

Children's experiences of domestic violence: developing an integrated response from police and child protection services

Police notifications of incidents of domestic violence to child protection services constitute an acknowledgement of the harm that domestic violence inflicts on children. However, these notifications represent a substantial demand on child welfare services and the outcomes for children and victims of domestic violence have been questioned. This paper presents findings from the first UK study to examine these notifications in depth and examines the interface between the police and child protection services in responding to domestic violence incidents. The research reports on police interventions in 251 incidents of domestic violence involving children; the communication of information to child protection services and the subsequent filtering and service response. Social workers found that notifications conveyed little information on children's experiences of domestic violence. Forty per cent of families notified had had no previous contact with child protection services in that area, but those cases most likely to receive social work assessment or intervention were those where the case was already open. Notifications triggered a new social work intervention in only 5% of cases. The study also identified a range of innovative approaches for improving the co-ordination of police and child protective services in relation to children's exposure to domestic violence. Arrangements that maximized opportunities for police and social workers to share agency information appeared to offer the best option for achieving informed decisions about the appropriate level of service response to children and families experiencing domestic violence.     

Encryption and the loss of patient data

Fast‐paced IT advances have made it increasingly possible and useful for firms to collect data on their customers on an unprecedented scale. One downside of this is that firms can experience negative publicity and financial damage if their data are breached. This is particularly the case in the medical sector, where we find empirical evidence that increased digitization of patient data is associated with more data breaches. The encryption of customer data is often presented as a potential solution, because encryption acts as a disincentive for potential malicious hackers, and can minimize the risk of breached data being put to malicious use. However, encryption both requires careful data management policies to be successful and does not ward off the insider threat. Indeed, we find no empirical evidence of a decrease in publicized instances of data loss associated with the use of encryption. Instead, there are actually increases in the cases of publicized data loss due to internal fraud or loss of computer equipment. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

An Underappreciated Dimension of Human Trafficking: Battered and Trafficked Women and Public Policy

Both domestic violence and trafficking in humans pose serious problems worldwide. However, there are differences in the ways in which battered immigrant women and trafficked immigrant women are responded to by governmental agencies in Greece and in the USA. Trafficking in humans has been securitized, that is, framed as an issue linked to international security risk. As such, countries that do not take legal action to stop human trafficking could face US sanctions such as loss of United States military and economic assistance. Under significant international pressure, Greece, since 2002, passed a law that criminalized trafficking in humans and took necessary steps for providing protection and assistance to trafficked victims. Nevertheless, domestic violence and battered women remain silent in Greek society, and the availability of services to victims of domestic violence has eroded. We argue that, due to different issue framing of victims of trafficking and battered women, the connection of trafficking in humans to national security fosters different legal protection outcomes. The comparison of battered immigrant women and trafficked victims between Greece and the USA reveals significant differences in protection of battered immigrant women in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) area. This article elucidates why there are public policy differences within OECD states that all grant a priority to prevention of human trafficking.     

Unsafe sex: do feelings matter?

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships among self-efficacy for condom use during distress (SE-Condom Distress), self-efficacy related to general HIV prevention skills (SE-HIV), and HIV risk behaviors, attitudes, and knowledge. Two hundred and twenty two adolescents with psychiatric disorders between 13 and 18 years-old participated. Participants completed measures related to HIV Self-Efficacy, HIV Attitudes, and Sexual Behaviors. Self-efficacy for condom use during distress (SE-Condom Distress) was significantly associated with more HIV protective behaviors. Controlling for observed covariates, SE-Condom Distress was the only variable significantly associated with consistent condom use in a multiple logistic regression (OR=2.43). Self-efficacy regarding condom use during affective arousal is closely associated with HIV-related attitudes and behaviors. Clinicians need to be alert to subtle signs of distress as adolescents contemplate safer sexual behavior.