Making and Breaking Family Life: Adoption, the State, and Human Rights

This article explores the extent to which the state's duties and responsibilities in the context of adoption are framed and reinforced by a rights-based discourse. It argues that the human rights paradigm plays an invaluable role in the pre-adoption process by identifying and imposing ever more exacting obligations on the state - obligations which are currently not being fully met by the Adoption and Children Act 2002. The application of a rights-based discourse to the post-adoption context proves, however, to be considerably more problematic. Indeed, it is argued that rather than extend and strengthen the state's responsibilities towards the child and the adopted family, liberal rights-based doctrine tends towards a more traditional model of adoption in which a minimalist state and the privacy, autonomy, and self-sufficiency of the new adoptive family are further entrenched. It is thus concluded that a human rights analysis provides no secure basis for challenging the Adoption and Children Act's rather limited provisions on post-adoption support.     

Employment,privatization, and managerial choice: Does contracting out reduce public sector employment?

We examine the effects of governments' use of alternative service provision on public employment using panel data from a nationally representative sample of local governments. We model the effects of alternative service provision on the size of the public workforce and hypothesize that alternative provision jointly impacts both full‐ and part‐time employment. We find evidence of an inter‐relationship between these employment types. Our results from seemingly unrelated and 3SLS regressions indicate that full‐time employment in the public sector declines when additional services are provided by for‐profit providers, while part‐time employment increases. The net employment effect in the public sector is negative when government services are moved to the for‐profit sector. These combined effects result in a compositional shift toward more part‐time public sector employment. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Attachment Models in Incarcerated Sex Offenders: A Preliminary Italian Study Using the Adult Attachment Interview

A group of sex offenders (clinical group: n = 19) was compared to a nonclinical sample matched by age, years of education, and gender (control group A: n = 19) to verify a higher incidence of insecure attachment models among sex offenders. In addition, we tested whether sex offenders were characterized by specific childhood experiences, compared to control adults (control group B: n = 19) with the same secure/insecure attachment classification. Results showed significant differences between offenders and control adults on both the AAI continuous score and the distribution of the two-way attachment classifications. Furthermore, sex offenders reported more intense experiences of rejection by the father figure and abuse in the family context during early childhood compared to not offenders subjects with the same attachment classification.     

Spain: No Country for the Populist Radical Right?

Although there is growing research interest in populist radical right (PRR) parties in Western Europe, little attention has been paid to the case of Spain – a country where these parties are almost non-existent or irrelevant from an electoral and political point of view. In a nutshell, we maintain that in contemporary Spain there is real demand for PRR parties, but three supply-side factors are impeding their electoral breakthrough and persistence: the cleavage structure of the country, the strategy of competition of the mainstream right and the electoral system. At the same time, we postulate that at least in the case of Spain the Great Recession has not improved the electoral odds of the PRR as such but rather facilitated the emergence of leftist populist forces.     

The problems of liminal states,line drawing,and false dichotomies

This commentary focuses on the tenuous line between health and disease and the conflicting characterizations of genetic predisposition that sometimes place it on one side of that line, and sometimes on the other. For example, GINA uses the line between health and disease to distinguish between, respectively, the healthy (including, those with genetic predispositions), who are shielded from discrimination, and those with ‘manifested illness,’ who are not. At the same time, some have argued that the Americans with Disabilities Act protects individuals with genetic predispositions, relying on a label akin to disability, as opposed to health, to characterize this group. Similarly, courts have described genetic predisposition as a disease of sorts to justify insurance payment for medical intervention. Attempts to fit genetic predisposition neatly into the binary world of health or illness can be problematic because this dichotomy doesn''t capture the complex continuum between those states. Some individuals reside in yet another ‘liminal’ state when they develop mild symptoms or biomarkers, placing them somewhere between genetic predisposition and actual disease manifestation. As a result, they may be unprotected under existing frameworks. Liminal states are therefore problematic not only with respect to insurance reimbursement, but in other areas as well.     

DIFFERENT EXPRESSIONS OF THERAPEUTIC JURISPRUDENCE IN THE SPANISH CRIMINAL PROSECUTION

The postulates of what is known as Therapeutic Jurisprudence seek to guide to a more humane, reinvigorating and resocializingjustice, and in the Spanish Legal System we can find different manifestations of itself. This paper aims to examine some of the manifestations of Therapeutic Jurisprudence in the Spanish criminal prosecution： adults and minors criminal mediation, the plea bargaining of the criminal offender and the attenuated pre-trial custody.