USING STATE LEGAL NEEDS STUDIES TO INCREASE ACCESS TO JUSTICE FOR LOW‐INCOME FAMILIES

State legal needs studies quantify and classify the legal problems faced by low‐income families, which is crucial to obtaining and allocating resources. Providers and courts perceive a greater need for family law help than do low‐income households, an important disparity to examine. State legal needs of the poor studies are most valuable when they provide insights into how families' legal needs are or are not being met, allowing for more informed and effective recommendations and action. These measurements of the justice gap go beyond mere recitations of statistics and are useful in increasing access to justice for families.     

Opting Out: The Role of Identity,Capital, and Agency in Prison Visitation

An emerging body of research suggests that prison visitation has implications for better understanding inmate institutional and post-release behavior, but not all inmates receive visits. The goal of the current study is to document barriers to visitation from the inmate perspective and describe the perspectives of those who receive very few or no visits. We also describe how inmate perceptions of visits impacts the way one does time and negotiates subsequent visitation. Using data from qualitative interviews, we find evidence that inmates make willful decisions when negotiating prison visits that are guided by one’s sense of self and further colored by the perceived social and economic strain on families. Our results challenge the perception of a universally positive visitation experience, and introduce the role of inmate choice in selecting into and out of prison visits.     

Gender differences in the evaluation of aggravating and mitigating circumstances: the mediating role of attributional complexity*

At the penalty phase of a capital trial, jurors endorse and weigh aggravators and mitigators. The purpose of the current studies was to examine how gender differences in attributional complexity relate to endorsements of aggravators and mitigators. In Study 1, undergraduate participants read definitions of aggravators and mitigators and rated the extent to which circumstances were aggravating or mitigating. In Study 2, a death qualified community sample read a trial summary, rated the extent to which aggravators and mitigators were present in the case, reported whether mitigators outweighed aggravators, and rendered a sentence. Results indicated that gender differences in mitigator endorsement were mediated by attributional complexity, and that gender differences in sentencing decisions were serially mediated by attributional complexity, mitigator endorsement, and aggravator and mitigator weighing.     

Rewriting and remembering Romanian communism: some controversial issues

This article examines the dynamic relationship between the two major dimensions of memory and justice in the context of post-communist countries: truth-telling and retroactive justice. This interdependent and uneasy relationship is illustrated by recent attempts at constructing a new historical narrative of the communist past in Romania in the wake of the de-secretization of the files of both the Communist Party and the communist secret police (Securitate). A systematic analysis of the activity of institutions that have been directly involved in research and public education about the recent past – the National Archives, the National Council for the Study of Securitate's Archives, and the Institute for the Investigation of Crimes of Communism – is undertaken. The work of these three institutional actors shows a direct relationship between truth-telling in its various forms (access to archives, opening the files and exhumations) and any subsequent retroactive justice and restitution. The main argument of the paper is that while deep-seated dichotomies between former communist and anti-communists in addressing the past still persist, a more nuanced way of seeing the regime that explores the ambiguous line that divides outright repression from cooptation is emerging.     

Communication strategy for community development: a case study of the Heifer project – South Africa

ABSTRACT

The objective of this qualitative pilot study was to develop a model to be used by a development agency in formulating communication strategy for community development, providing direction to development communication (DC) specialists/facilitators to play a more strategic role in the development process. Based on the findings of a literature study on communication strategy for development, as well as a case study on The Heifer Project – South Africa, the researchers suggest that an existing model for developing corporate communication strategy (Steyn 2000a) can be used for this purpose.

A major insight that emerged from the study was that the existing model for developing corporate communication strategy might also be applied in another context (with slight adaptations in terminology), namely to formulate ‘corporate’ communication strategy for the community/action group involved in the development project – more aptly to be called ‘development’ communication strategy. Such a strategy would make the participatory approach to development, and especially the participatory communication approach, even more ‘participatory’, since the strategic information on issues and stakeholders will be provided by the community and its designated communicator(s) themselves.     

Criminal Recidivism Among Juvenile Offenders: Testing the Incremental and Predictive Validity of Three Measures of Psychopathic Features

We studied the predictive, comparative, and incremental validity of three measures of psychopathic features (Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version [PCL:YV]; Antisocial Process Screening Device [APSD]; Childhood Psychopathy Scale [CPS]) vis-à-vis criminal recidivism among 83 delinquent youth within a truly prospective design. Bivariate and multivariate analyses (Cox proportional hazard analyses) showed that of the three measures, the CPS was most consistently related to most types of recidivism in comparison to the other measures. However, incremental validity analyses demonstrated that all of the predictive effects for the measures of psychopathic features disappeared after conceptually relevant covariates (i.e., substance use, conduct disorder, young age, past property crime) were included in multivariate predictive models. Implications for the limits of these measures in applied juvenile justice assessment are discussed.     

The Relationship Between Psychopathic Personality Features and Malingering Symptoms of Major Mental Illness

This study examined the relationship between psychopathy and malingering in a subsample of male prison inmates (n = 55) participating in a larger study of the clinical utility of various assessment measures in correctional settings. Participants' capacity to feign major mental illness successfully was evaluated using standard cutoff scores for the detection of malingering on a variety of instruments, including the Structured Inventory of Malingered Symptomatology (SIMS; G. P. Smith & G. O. Burger, 1997), the Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms (SIRS; R. Rogers, R. M. Bagby, & S. E. Dickens, 1992), and the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; L. Morey, 1991). Psychopathic traits were assessed via the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI; S.O. Lilienfeld & B. P. Andrews, 1996). Correlations between the malingering indices and the PPI were low (–.14 to .14) and not statistically significant. These findings fail to support the clinical intuition that individuals with higher levels of psychopathy are likely to be more adept at malingering.