Investigating the awareness of virtual and augmented realities as a criminal justice response to the plight of awaiting-trial inmates in Ebonyi State,Nigeria

Crime, Law and Social Change - Despite the reforms in the Nigerian Criminal Justice System (NCJS), the treatment of inmates still falls below standard, with the vast majority of them on awaiting...     

Transportation Challenges for Urban Students With Disabilities: Parent Perspectives

This qualitative study explored parent perspectives of the transportation difficulties students with disabilities experienced getting to and around school. Participants were parents of predominantly African American and Latino/a high school youth with disabilities from low income neighborhoods. Content analysis of 14 meetings with 5 to 12 parents sponsored by the school district revealed five primary themes concerning transportation: the role of aides, exclusion from school programming, scheduling problems, equipment problems, and physical safety issues. Findings are discussed in regard to students' social and emotional experiences at school. Implications for school policy include improving the integration of transportation within inclusion best practice models. Incorporating parent perspectives can help school administrators and staff enrich the quality of inclusive, socially just education for students with disabilities.     

DO GROUP DYNAMICS INFLUENCE SOCIAL CAPITAL GAINS AMONG MICROFINANCE CLIENTS? EVIDENCE FROM A RANDOMIZED EXPERIMENT IN URBAN INDIA

As an intrinsic part of the classic microfinance model, group meetings are intended to employ social capital to ensure timely repayment. Recent research suggests that more frequent meetings can increase social capital among first‐time clients. Using randomized variation in group meeting frequency for 174 microfinance groups in India, we demonstrate that social capital gains associated with more frequent meetings continue to accrue across multiple lending cycles. However, these effects are reduced when group members differ in their borrowing history. In addition, clients who start with low levels of empowerment report higher social capital gains when matched with similar clients. We discuss how current microfinance policy debates overlook the creation of social capital, including through repayment meeting frequency, and we encourage regulators to undertake a holistic understanding of microfinance's impacts.     

Partisanship, Trade Policy, and Globalization: Is There a Left–Right Divide on Trade Policy?

Are there noticeable differences among political parties in a country over their trade policy positions? Do left parties advocate different trade policies than right parties? In the advanced industrial countries where labor tends to be scarce, are left parties more protectionist than right ones, which represent capital owners? Political institutions within these democratic countries may affect the role of partisanship. We also investigate whether increasing globalization has led to more or less partisan polarization over trade policy. We examine 25 developed countries from 1945 to 1998 to see how their parties have competed over trade policy. Controlling for various factors, partisanship matters. Right parties consistently take more free trade stances than do left ones. Globalization and other international forces have also shaped both the nature and the extent of the domestic debate over exposure to international trade.     

CONCEPTUALIZING VISITATION RESISTANCE AND REFUSAL IN THE CONTEXT OF PARENTAL CONFLICT,SEPARATION, AND DIVORCE

A child's visitation resistance and refusal (VRR) in the context of parental separation, divorce, and post‐divorce litigation must not prematurely be interpreted as evidence of alienation, a conclusion which can be as detrimental to the family system as it is ill founded. The present article proposes a child‐centered, developmentally informed heuristic with which forensic evaluators might begin to more uniformly approach the potential causes of and remedies for VRR. An attachment‐based, step‐wise decision tree is described together with an overview of the remedies presently believed most appropriate to each. Recommendations for empirical study of the multiple convergent dynamics which determine VRR and establishment of corresponding interventions follow.