Training multi-disciplinary teams to work with sex offenders: Effects on staff attitudes

Abstract

A recent British Prison Service initiative has focused on providing sex offender programmes facilitated by multi-disciplinary teams of staff. A three week long training programme was designed to provide staff with the necessary knowledge, skills and experience to facilitate these structured treatment groups. Following the training, staff indicated they were more confident in their ability to provide treatment and showed a greater belief that treatment could be successful. In addition, they showed significantly more positive attitudes towards sexual offenders and to offenders in general. However, participants did not indicate undue concern about working in a sensitive treatment area. This pattern continued at six month follow-up, indicating that the training changed attitudes as expected, and that the training was seen by participants as adequately preparing them to undertake provision of a structured sex offender treatment programme in a secure setting.     

The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership Under Pressure by Arjen Boin,Paul 't Hart,Eric Stern,and Bengt Sundelius

ABSTRACT

The article addresses two principal questions: how public management reforms develop in a context of high government turnover, and how, under these circumstances, features of the specific area of public management policy affect the dynamics of the reform and in particular its “technical feasibility.” The research questions are addressed through the case study of the Italian administrative context between 1992 and 2007, a period marked by tumultuous government turnovers. The article presents reforms in two policy areas of public management: civil service reform and innovation, over a three-period time span covering 15 years. The brief duration of political leadership represents a threat to the approval and implementation of policy interventions irrespective of the political salience of the issue and the need for legal enactment. Therefore, the success of a public management reform process in an unstable political context characterized by frequent government turnovers depends on meeting certain conditions for successful policy entrepreneurship: the a priori expertise of policy entrepreneurs, their ability to repackage the issue, keep a community of practice alive, and maneuver the dynamics of the legal process. However, implementation, being a less visible phase, suffers from greater discontinuity as “maintenance activities” necessary for the success of reform are disregarded. Thus, the consideration of the temporal dimension of the policy cycle and the area-specific effects on public management reform dynamics exerted by diverse levels of political salience and legal enactment represent the main contributions of this work to the theories on public management policy change.     

Forensic Epidemiologic and Biomechanical Analysis of a Pelvic Cavity Blowout Injury Associated with Ejection from a Personal Watercraft (Jet‐Ski)

Jet‐propelled personal watercraft (PWC) or jet‐skis have become increasingly popular. The means of propulsion of PWC, which is a jet of water forced out of small nozzle at the rear of the craft, combined with a high risk of falling off of the seat and into close proximity with the water jet stream, raise the potential for a unique type of injury mechanism. The most serious injuries associated with PWC falls are those that occur when the perineum passes in close proximity to the jet nozzle and the high‐pressure water stream enters the vaginal or rectal orifice. We describe the forensic investigation into a case of an anovaginal “blowout” injury in a passenger who was ejected from the rear seat position of a PWC and subsequently suffered life‐threatening injuries to the pelvic organs. The investigation included a biomechanical analysis of the injury mechanism, a summary of prior published reports of internal pelvic injuries resulting from PWC falls as well as other water sports and activities, and a comparison of the severity of the injuries resulting from differing mechanisms using the New Injury Severity Score (NISS). The mean (±standard deviation [SD]) NISS values for reported PWC injuries [not including the NISS of 38 in this case study] were 11.2 (±9.5), while the mean value for reported water‐skiing falls was half that of the PWC group at 5.6 (±5.2). It was concluded that the analyzed injuries were unique to a PWC ejection versus other previously described non‐PWC‐associated water sport injuries. It is recommended that PWC manufacturers help consumers understand the potential risks to passengers with highly visible warnings and reduce injury risk with revised seat design, and/or passenger seat “deadman” switches.     

Theoretical and operational challenges of “high-reliability organizations”: air-traffic control and aircraft carriers

This is an empirical and theoretical examination of high reliability organizations. The empirical referents are the U.S. Navy's nuclear aircraft carriers and the air traffic control system of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. Three modes of organizational behavior are observed ranging from routine or bureaucratic to high-tempo to emergency. Each mode has distinctive authority patterns, communications pathways and leadership perspectives.

Since 1984, an interdisciplinary group of scholars at Berkeley has been involved in making observations of and theorizing about “high reliability organizations” (HROs), which operate technical systems that are very beneficial, costly, and hazardous. Major operational errors in these organizations are likely to produce catastrophic consequences; therefore, HROs take on the dual goals of sustaining delivery at maximum capacity and operating in nearly error-free fashion. They are so effective that the probability of serious error is very low.

Other kinds of organizations systematically use trial-and-error learning. HROs, however, have less confidence in this process for conducting hazardous operations, because their next error may be their last trial.

This paper draws on experience with two of the Navy's nuclear aircraft carriers and the Federal Aviation Administration's air-traffic control system. Current theories derive primarily from studies of “failure-tolerant,” trial-and-error operating bureaucracies. Is this literature a sure guide to HROs? Do the phenomena challenge contemporary thinking about complex organizations? “High-reliability” operations reveal a range of theoretical (and operational) surprises. The remainder of this discussion explores a single dimension of this theoretical arena.     

Signaling Alliance Commitments: Hand‐Tying and Sunk Costs in Extended Nuclear Deterrence

How can states signal their alliance commitments? Although scholars have developed sophisticated theoretical models of costly signaling in international relations, we know little about which specific policies leaders can implement to signal their commitments. This article addresses this question with respect to the extended deterrent effects of nuclear weapons. Can nuclear states deter attacks against their friends by simply announcing their defense commitments? Or must they deploy nuclear weapons on a protégé's territory before an alliance is seen as credible? Using a new dataset on foreign nuclear deployments from 1950 to 2000, our analysis reveals two main findings. First, formal alliances with nuclear states appear to carry significant deterrence benefits. Second, however, stationing nuclear weapons on a protégé's territory does not bolster these effects. The analysis yields new insights about the dynamics of “hand‐tying” and “sunk cost” signals in international politics.     

Problem Drinking, Unemployment, and Intimate Partner Violence among a Sample of Construction Industry Workers and their Partners

The purpose of this study is to determine the contribution of male unemployment and each partner’s problem drinking to risk for male-to-female partner violence (MFPV) and female-to-male partner violence (FMPV) among a sample of construction industry workers and their spouses/partners. Participants in the sample (n = 848 couples) completed cross-sectional health behavior surveys. Multivariate logistic regression models of MFPV and FMPV, with adjustment for demographic and psychosocial variables, were developed. Approximately 20% of couples reported MFPV, and 24% reported FMPV. Results indicated that couples in which the male was a problem drinker, and in which the male worker reported being currently unemployed, were at risk for MFPV. Number of months unemployed by the male worker was significantly associated with FMPV, but problem drinking was not associated with this outcome. Male and female impulsivity were significantly associated with risk for MFPV and FMPV, and the male’s report of adverse childhood events was associated with increased likelihood of MFPV. There was no evidence for the effects of unemployment being moderated (exacerbated) by problem drinking. Workplace-based prevention efforts may be a feasible and important strategy to reduce problem drinking and partner violence among high-risk occupational groups.     

Hands-on Killing of Intimate Partners as a Function of Sex and Relationship Status/State

Guided by evolutionary psychology and a situational perspective on violence, we generated three hypotheses to investigate whether the percentage of intimate partner homicides by beating, a hands-on homicide method, varies with the victim-offender relationship. We tested these hypotheses with a national database that includes incident-level information on over 50,000 intimate partner homicides. Results indicate that: (1) men are more likely than women to kill a partner by beating, and (2) men are more likely to kill their partners by beating when the relationship is dating or non-marital cohabiting (versus legal marriage). We argue that the lack of commitment in these non-marital relationships may produce greater jealousy in men, driving the perpetrator to kill his victim in a more violent manner (i.e., beating), relative to men who kill their wives.     

Filicide-suicide in Chicago, 1870-1930

Filicide (the killing of a child by a parent) followed by the offender's suicide is a tragic but, fortunately, rare event. The contexts and circumstances surrounding filicide-suicide may provide insight into parental psychology. The authors test several hypotheses about filicide-suicide using a database including incident-level information on 11,018 Chicago homicides during 1870-1930. The results provide some support for the hypothesis of differential risk of suicide following filicide by genetic parents and stepparents and replicate previous research indicating that filicides with multiple victims are more likely to end in the offender's suicide than are filicides with a single victim; parents are more likely to commit suicide following the filicide of an older child than of a younger child; and older parents, relative to younger parents, are more likely to commit suicide following filicide. The discussion situates these results within the existing literature and highlights important directions for future research.