Effectiveness of modified therapeutic community treatment within a medium-secure service for personality-disordered offenders

There is debate as to whether secure hospital treatment for offenders with personality disorder can be effective relative to criminal justice interventions. This study examines the evidence for long-term treatment of such offenders in hospital within in a modified therapeutic community model including accredited offending behaviour programmes. A panel sample of 47 patients were followed up on measures of violence risk (HCR-20, VRS) and symptom severity (SCL90-R). Intention-to-treat analysis with reliability thresholds showed significant positive change between assessment and discharge in both violence risk (VRS) and symptoms (SCL90-R) indicating a positive treatment effect. Threshold effects for treatment effectiveness seemed to occur at 1?year of treatment for risk and 3?years for symptom reduction.     

CHINA RESPONDS

Imagine the U.S.Government shutting down almost all forms of public transportation,a substantial number of international airline flights,all schools and many businesses during the period between Thanksgiving through the end of the Christmas season and beyond.That is what is currently going on in Wuhan,the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak,with what has become possibly the largest quarantine in human history.     

The Reliability of Pattern Classification in Bloodstain Pattern Analysis,Part 1: Bloodstain Patterns on Rigid Non‐absorbent Surfaces

This study was designed to produce the first baseline measure of reliability in bloodstain pattern classification. A panel of experienced bloodstain pattern analysts examined over 400 spatter patterns on three rigid non‐absorbent surfaces. The patterns varied in spatter type and extent. A case summary accompanied each pattern that either contained neutral information, information to suggest the correct pattern (i.e., was positively biasing), or information to suggest an incorrect pattern (i.e., was negatively biasing). Across the variables under examination, 13% of classifications were erroneous. Generally speaking, where the pattern was more difficult to recognize (e.g., limited staining extent or a patterned substrate), analysts became more conservative in their judgment, opting to be inconclusive. Incorrect classifications increased as a function of the negatively biasing contextual information. The implications of the findings for practice are discussed.     

Covering Legal Mobilization: A Bottom‐Up Analysis of Wards Cove v. Atonio

We develop a political history of Wards Cove v. Atonio (1989) to show how Robert Cover's concepts of jurisgenesis and jurispathy can enrich the legal mobilization framework for understanding law and social change. We illustrate the value of the hybrid theory by recovering the Wards Cove workers’ own understanding of the role of litigation in their struggle for workplace rights. The cannery worker plaintiffs exemplified Cover's dual logic by articulating aspirational narratives of social justice and by critically rebuking the Supreme Court's ruling as the “death throe” for progressive minority workers’ rights advocacy. The cannery workers’ story also highlights the importance of integrating legal mobilization scholars’ focus on extrajudicial political engagement into Cover's judge‐centered analysis. Our aim is to forge a theoretical bridge between Cover's provocative arguments about law and the analytical tradition of social science scholarship on the politics of legal mobilization.     

Uneven local implementation of federal policy after disaster: Policy conflict and goal ambiguity

As climate change continues to increase both the frequency and intensity of environmental hazards and disasters, the need for a cohesive national mitigation policy grows. As the environmental federalism scholarship indicates, the inherent tension in federal, state, and local policy implementation highlights that despite a national need, environmental quality is a local public good. To complicate matters, there is disagreement about the optimal level of decision-making regarding the adoption and implementation of environmental policy. This study addresses this gap by considering the role of policy ambiguity and conflict in policy implementation. The analysis relies on primary qualitative data collected from open-ended interviews with 22 local government officials in 12 municipalities following Hurricane Harvey. Through the lens of policy ambiguity and conflict, we find confirmatory support for the idea that policies with less ambiguous goals are more likely to be implemented. Furthermore, we find that policy conflict arises when local governments perceive there is little for the community to gain by implementing the federal program. Thus, the level of protection afforded to citizens varies greatly between communities and is influenced heavily by politics. This research supports the Ambiguity-Conflict Model of policy implementation, an oft-cited but rarely tested theoretical framework for assessing the intergovernmental politics of policy implementation. It also demonstrates the barriers to local implementation of federal environmental policy in a nested system of government.