Postcranial Sex Estimation Criteria for Mexican Hispanics

Population-specific reference data are necessary for sex estimation in forensic anthropological practice. Currently, there are no population-specific data for Hispanics equivalent to data available for American Blacks and Whites. Individuals of Mexican origin represent the largest group of Hispanics in the United States (Spradley and Jantz. 2011. J Forensic Sci;56:289). This paper presents new population-specific sex estimation criteria for postcranial measurements for Mexican Hispanics. Metric data come from positively identified border-crossing fatalities at the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner and documented cemetery collections curated at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán. Stepwise variable selection procedures and discriminant function analyses were utilized to generate classification functions for postcrania. Sectioning points were also created for select measurements. Both the cross-validated classification rates and sectioning points achieved accuracy rates as high as 95% and 92%, respectively. These new criteria will improve sex estimation for US Mexico border crossers and Hispanics in the US.     

Bystander Intervention,Bullying, and Victimization: A Multilevel Analysis of New Zealand High Schools

This study examines the association between schools and student bullying behaviors and victimization among a nationally representative sample (N = 9,107) of New Zealand high school students. In particular, the study sought to explore the role of characteristics of schools and school culture with respect to bystander behavior, while controlling for individual student factors related to victimization and bullying behaviors. Results indicated that a total of 6% of students report being bullied weekly or more often and 5% of students reported bullying other students at least weekly. Results of multilevel analyses suggested that schools characterized by students taking action to stop bullying were associated with less victimization and less reported bullying among students. In contrast, in schools where students reported teachers take action to stop bullying, there was no decline in victimization or bullying. Overall, these findings support whole-school approaches that aid students to take action to stop bullying.     

Does the Charter Form Improve the Fiscal Health of Counties?

The public administration literature has paid attention to the relationship between the structure of a government and its ability to provide public services, reflected by its fiscal health. Although this literature has provided a useful understanding of government structures, it has largely ignored the charter form of government. As a formal written document that grants counties the power of self‐governance, a charter frees the county from state control. Included in this freedom is the ability to establish its own tax policies and services. In this article, the effects of charter adoption on fiscal health are tested using Florida county data from 1980 to 2012. The results show that the presence of a charter can improve the fiscal health of a county, which, in turn, can affect overall service provision.     

Preclinical Assessment of Safety and Efficacy of Fluorescent Dye for Detecting Dermal Injuries (the injuries were both abrasions and incision) in a Murine Model

Objective documentation of tears and abrasions to the external genitalia after sexual assault is an important part of the forensic examination. A 1% aqueous solution of toluidine blue (TB) dye is often used to highlight injury, but the dye can be difficult to see on dark skin. We evaluated a fluorescent dye for detecting injuries on all skin colors in a relevant preclinical murine model. We compared the ability of trained, blinded observers to detect unstained wounds and wounds stained with 1% fluorescein sodium (FL) and with TB. We also evaluated the cutaneous wound healing response after application of both dyes. The no‐dye group had significantly fewer (p < 0.05) true‐positive identifications compared to all the dye groups. No differences in effectiveness were detected between dye treatments. All groups exhibited statistically similar healing rates. These findings support the evaluation of fluorescein sodium in a future clinical study with human subjects.     

Managing Victim Confrontation: Auto Theft and Informal Sanction Threats

Objectives. This paper explores how offenders manage the prospect of victim confrontation during auto theft. Methods. Data were drawn from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 35 active offenders recruited from the streets of a large Midwestern US city using snowball sampling methods. Results. Two contextual domains figured prominently in the offenders’ decision-making calculus: The area around the target and the target itself. The first galvanized the offenders’ attention to, and management of, informal social control. The second enjoined offenders to balance speed and stealth in breaching the target. Conclusions. Victim confrontation is an informal sanction that is distinct from both retaliation and traditional extralegal sanctions. The rarity with which it occurs in auto theft is likely due to confrontation avoidance measures offenders adopt at the front end of the offense and during the enactment process itself. The conceptual implications of victim confrontation in crime are explored in relation to the following five areas: (1) sanction celerity and present orientation; (2) sanction certainty and ambiguity aversion; (3) sanction interdependence; (4) violence avoidance; and (5) directions for future research.     

Economic and Sociological Correlates of Suicides: Multilevel Analysis of the Time Series Data in the United Kingdom

For the effects of social integration on suicides, there have been different and even contradictive conclusions. In this study, the selected economic and social risks of suicide for different age groups and genders in the United Kingdom were identified and the effects were estimated by the multilevel time series analyses. To our knowledge, there exist no previous studies that estimated a dynamic model of suicides on the time series data together with multilevel analysis and autoregressive distributed lags. The investigation indicated that unemployment rate, inflation rate, and divorce rate are all significantly and positively related to the national suicide rates in the United Kingdom from 1981 to 2011. Furthermore, the suicide rates of almost all groups above 40 years are significantly associated with the risk factors of unemployment and inflation rate, in comparison with the younger groups.     

Can General Strain Theory Help Us Understand Violent Behaviors Among People with Mental Illnesses?

Recent work suggests that violence among people with mental illnesses is not simply due to the symptoms and comorbidities that define mental illness. We further this work by examining the extent to which strains or stressors explain the link between mental illness and violence. Specifically, we apply general strain theory (GST) to a longitudinal sample of adults with mental illnesses to investigate the lagged effects on violence of several strain measures, while controlling for mental illness symptoms, substance abuse, past violence, and other key variables. Parental drug abuse from childhood and stressful life events across the life course predict violence in adulthood. In a prospective model, relationship strain from an earlier time period significantly predicts changes in later self-reported violence. The results shed light on the ability of criminological frameworks to explain violence among people with mental illnesses.     

The Role of Suggestibility in Personal Injury Claims

Interrogative suggestibility and other psychological vulnerabilities are often assessed in the forensic criminal context in disputed confession cases. Such an assessment may also be relevant in disputing the validity of a confession by a plaintiff in a tort claim. This paper will outline the relevancy of suggestibility in the personal injury context, the reasons why an individual may falsely confess, how interrogative techniques may increase the likelihood of a false confession, false confession and suggestibility research, and methodology to be used in assessing vulnerability to falsely confessing.     

Science Use in Regulatory Impact Analysis: The Effects of Political Attention and Controversy

Scholars, policy makers, and research sponsors have long sought to understand the conditions under which scientific research is used in the policy‐making process. Recent research has identified a resource that can be used to trace the use of science across time and many policy domains. U.S. federal agencies are mandated by executive order to justify all economically significant regulations by regulatory impact analyses (RIAs), in which they present evidence of the scientific underpinnings and consequences of the proposed rule. To gain new insight into when and how regulators invoke science in their policy justifications, we ask: does the political attention and controversy surrounding a regulation affect the extent to which science is utilized in RIAs? We examine scientific citation activity in all 101 economically significant RIAs from 2008 to 2012 and evaluate the effects of attention—from the public, policy elites, and the media—on the degree of science use in RIAs. Our main finding is that regulators draw more heavily on scientific research when justifying rules subject to a high degree of attention from outside actors. These findings suggest that scientific research plays an important role in the justification of regulations, especially those that are highly salient to the public and other policy actors.     

The Prison Boom and the Decline of American Citizenship

The US imprisonment rate increased fivefold in the three decades from 1975 to 2005. Growth in the scale of criminal punishment was linked partly to a more punitive politics that repudiated the goal of rehabilitation, and partly to the collapse of economic opportunity for young unskilled men in inner cities. The growth of the penal system produced extraordinary rates of incarceration among recent cohorts of young black men with little schooling. We can understand the growth of incarceration to produce and erosion of citizenship among young black men, weakening the web of mutual obligation that defines full membership in American society.