Regionalized personnel development for criminal justice employees

The Dayton/Montgomery County Criminal Justice Center is a first attempt at systematic personnel development for an entire criminal justice system on a regional level. Through its work in training and education, communications, career pathing and development, and system change, the Center has promoted the idea of an improved, symbiotic relatioship among the major branches of the criminal justice system, and has acted as a catalyst for needed systemic change.     

Gender and cultural patterns of suicidal behavior: young Hindustani immigrant women in the Netherlands

Patterns of suicidal behavior vary among cultures and along gender. Young Hindustani immigrant women attempt suicide four times more often than young Dutch women. This article explores multi-disciplinary explanations for suicidal behavior in this group. The interconnection of Durkheimian concepts of social integration and regulation with ecological insights into family relations and psychological and psychiatric theories on individual distress are relevant. It is suggested that young Hindustani women who display suicidal behavior possess certain personality and cognitive constellations that are interlocked with specific parenting styles in stressful family environments. These families are embedded in a context of moral transformations resulting from migration to a Western culture and may be facing difficulties accompanying the transitional processes encountered in the West, particularly those regarding gender roles. Durkheimian fatalistic and anomic suicides elucidate this. The Hindustani women who appear most at risk are those facing contradictory norms and overregulation, which prevent them from developing autonomy.     

Battered women who kill their abusers: an examination of commonsense notions, cognitions, and judgments

It has been argued that battered women who kill their abusers represent a special class of defendants being unfairly treated in the legal system. As a result, commentators have argued for reforms to permit the judicial system to respond more fairly. Researchers have investigated the influences of these prescribed legal modifications and the possible influence of various demographic and psychological factors on legal reforms. However, social scientists have not yet asked some fundamental, psychological questions. Is the law consistent with what society believes is right and just? Is there a commonsense notion of justice in these cases? What factors constitute cognitive decision rules and influence judgments in cases of battered women who kill their abusers? This study uses a basic, psychological method to identify psychological factors that are important in judgments regarding battered women who kill and to better understand commonsense notions of justice in these cases.     

Federal Oversight, Local Control, and the Specter of "Resegregation" in Southern Schools

Analyzing data for the 100 largest districts in the South andBorder states, we ask whether there is evidence of "resegregation"of school districts and whether levels of segregation can belinked to judicial decisions. We distinguish segregation measuresbased on racial isolation from those based on racial imbalance.Only one measure of racial isolation suggests that districtsin these regions experienced resegregation between 1994 and2004, and changes in this measure appear to be driven largelyby the rising nonwhite percentage in the student populationrather than by district policies. Although we find no time trendin racial imbalance over this period, we find that variationsin racial imbalance across districts are nonetheless associatedwith judicial declarations of unitary status, suggesting thatsegregation in schools might have declined had it not been forthe actions of federal courts.     

Nonparticipation as Self-Censorship: Publicly Observable Political Activity in a Polarized Opinion Climate

In a polarized opinion climate, people may refrain from participating in publicly observable political activities that make them vulnerable to scrutiny and criticism by others who hold opinions that differ from their own. We took a dispositional approach to testing this claim by determining whether people who are relatively more influenced by the climate of opinion when choosing whether or not to voice an opinion, measured with the Willingness to Self-Censor scale [Hayes et al. International Journal of Public Opinion Research 17 (2005) 298], are also relatively less likely to engage in public political activities. In a poll of residents of the United States, we found that even after controlling for interest in politics, political ideology, ideological extremity, political efficacy, attention to political news, dispositional shyness, frequency of political discussion, and demographics, dispositional self-censors reported having engaged in relatively fewer public political activities over the prior 2 years compared to those less willing to censor their own opinion expression. These results are consistent with our interpretation of political participation as a social process that is governed in part by the social psychological implications of participation to the person. At a larger theoretical level, our findings connect the literature on opinion perceptions and opinion expression with research on political participation.