Assessing treatment readiness in violent offenders

Although violent offenders are widely considered to be difficult to engage in therapeutic change, few methods of assessing treatment readiness currently exist. In this article the validation of a brief self-report measure designed to assess treatment readiness in offenders who have been referred to violent offender treatment programs is described. The measure, which is an adaptation of a general measure of treatment readiness developed in a previous work, displayed acceptable levels of convergent and discriminant validity and was able to successfully predict treatment engagement in violent offender treatment. These results suggest that the measure has utility in the assessment of treatment readiness in violent offenders.     

Death Caused by Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis (Lyell Syndrome)

Abstract: Toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN) is characterized by fever, scalded appearance of the skin, and epidermolysis associated to blister formation and exfoliation, and it is caused by hypersensitivity reaction to a drug. The authors report two cases of death as a result of TEN; both referred to old aged women treated with a polytherapy including allopurinol. Both patients displayed erythematous skin lesions similar to scald burns and epidermolysis at the face, chest, and abdomen and died shortly after hospitalization. Autopsy findings and histological examinations revealed epidermal necrolysis and confirmed the clinical diagnosis. A strict time‐correlation between allopurinol administration and symptoms was evidenced. Because of its iatrogenic origin, TEN often arises suspicions of medical liability; however, because of its unpredictable nature, the occurrence of this syndrome cannot be ascribed to the medical staff whose main task is the rapid diagnosis and the correct management.     

Psycholegal Assessment of Co-occurring Chronic Pain and Schizophrenia Post-MVC: Analysis of Causation Using Two Case Examples

The key aspect of any psycholegal assessment is the analysis of causation, which requires consideration of important legal constructs such as the but for test, material contribution test, thin skull, and crumbling skull. An analysis of causation can be especially helpful in determining overall liability when evaluating the impact of two major co-occurring conditions. This paper focuses on the utility of conducting an analysis of causation using two case examples in which chronic pain and schizophrenia co-occurred following a motor vehicle collision (MVC). Collision-related injuries often lead to the development of chronic pain and could result in permanent and serious impairment and disability. Schizophrenia is a rare psychological occurrence in the collision context and is associated with its own unique and overwhelming physical, psychological, and cognitive challenges. In the psycholegal context, evaluating the impact of two major co-occurring conditions can be problematic and lead to conceptual challenges. In the two cases presented, some assessors attributed nearly all post-collision changes to schizophrenia as if it were pre-existing or in a latent state and failed to assess or even consider the contribution of MVC-related sequelae to the onset of schizophrenia. As part of addressing these conceptual challenges, we present a model of psycholegal assessment that takes into account the pre-, peri- and post-MVC variables that best explain the occurrence of these two conditions. The model also allows the assessor to determine the current and future needs of injured persons, the permanent physical, psychological, and cognitive sequelae that impact quality of life and/or work, and prognosis for the near and distant future.     

Violence Prevention and Targeting the Elusive Gang Member

Who do violence preventers target to achieve violence prevention? This fundamental question of selection is typically associated with law enforcement, yet gang labeling is critical in another context: nonprofit violence prevention. Eighteen months of fieldwork in a gang outreach organization find that (a) workers operationalize gang violence prevention as social service provision, but (b) services are only offered to those deemed “ready” for life changes. Readiness is an unwritten eligibility criteria leveraged as a rhetorical tool to focus recruitment on clients who demonstrate complicity. It is reaffirmed through external pressures to document program effectiveness; organizational‐level concerns for efficient resource allocation; the subpopulation of clients who actually want services; and workers’ own fears of “getting played”—losing face from free‐riding clients interested in street worker perks, but not formal services. While core gang members may be most at‐risk, their very centrality may deter, rather than justify, providing them services.     

Illuminating the health and safety of luminol

Luminol is a reagent that is used to enhance areas of non-visible bloodstaining and it is one of the most sensitive of such reagents available to the forensic scientist. However, its use, particularly within the UK and some other European countries, has been limited, predominantly due to concerns about the health and safety of the reagent. This paper reviews the literature currently available regarding the health and safety of luminol, and in the authors' view demonstrates that there are no significant health and safety concerns with the preparation of luminol solution and its application at the crime scene or in the laboratory, providing suitable precautions are taken.     

In the Service of Power: The Global Political Economy of Citizenship and Human Rights

This article investigates how the idea of universal human rights has been co-opted by the prevailing (neo)liberal consensus in support of processes associated with capitalist globalization. So-called “civil and political” rights form the core of (neo)liberal values upon which free market, laissez-faire economics are based, but the idealism of the dichotomy of first and second generation rights is profoundly ideological. Through an examination of the idea of the international citizen, it is argued that the attempt to introduce a duty to promote the widest possible social good falls far short of an obligation to respond to claims for alternative conceptions of “economic and social” rights; far less alternative models of social affairs. Drawing on empirical evidence from Africa, the article contends that the dominance of (neo)liberal rights is integral to the emerging (neo)liberal constitution of the global order effected in the name of “human rights”, “democratization”, “citizenship”, “good governance” and “civil society”.

Never in the recent past have the founding principles of universal rights been so instrumentalized in the service of power, to such an extent that … in the opening years of the twentieth-century, we can speak of a veritable apogee of hegemony and an unprecedented crystallization of the hatreds that it arouses. (Bessis, 2003 Bessis, S. 2003. Western Supremacy: The Triumph of an Idea?, London: Zed.  [Google Scholar])