Landmark reforms

After more than one hundred years, the future of a unified Probation Service looks bleak in the face of current proposals by the Ministry of Justice to open up the market for rehabilitation services to new providers from the private, voluntary and community sectors.     

Oil Scarcity Ideology in US Foreign Policy, 1908–97

Over the past century peak oil forecasts have had a profound influence on US foreign policy. Unquestioned acceptance of these forecasts, all of which proved wrong, repeatedly led policymakers to assume that rival powers sought to seize dwindling supplies or that disaffected exporter states would decline to sell. Perennial expectation of impending scarcity elevated the perceived importance of foreign oil, especially from the Middle East (ME). In response, increasingly aggressive US policies were adopted to secure ME oil. I call belief in an oil scarcity imperative for aggressive policy oil scarcity ideology. Policymakers’ concerns over oil's availability were repeatedly challenged by market information, which was always ignored. Recurring pessimism over future supply during times of high price was always followed by oversupply and low price, yet aggressive polices to secure supply were never reassessed after scarcity failed to materialize. Scarcity ideology's exemption from scrutiny drove a policy ratchet: US–ME policy could become more aggressive, but not less.     

Political Reliability and the Chinese Bar Exam

This article uses the case of contemporary China to explore an understudied type of political socialization: the bar exam. Content analysis of 3,996 exam questions from 2002–2014 shows a turning point in the mid‐2000s, when the test became explicitly political. The newly political exam is now a site of political learning where tomorrow's lawyers, judges, and prosecutors perform loyalty by exchanging politically correct answers for points. Viewed from this perspective, the Chinese bar exam has much in common with demands for public displays of correct behaviour in other authoritarian states. This adds a fresh, political layer to our understanding of whose interests bar exams serve, and why they take the form they do.     

Fiery tongues and mystical motivations: glossolalia in a forensic population is associated with mania and sexual/religious delusions

Comparisons are made between a nonrandom sample of 18 glossolalists and 130 non-glossolalists admitted to a maximum-security forensic hospital. The glossolalic mentally disordered offender exhibited a predominance of diagnoses in the manic spectrum, and was typically psychotic. The delusions, hallucinations, and crimes were predominately of a religious and sexual nature. Glossolalist perpetrators tended to be female. We review the extant research on glossolalia in both normal and clinical samples. and integrate our findings, the first study of glossolalia in a forensic setting.     

The Present Moment as a Critical Moment

Like a musical interlude, the present moment hovers between becoming the past and progressing into the future. Critical moments, for the author, are moments in which the parties are fully in the present or the "now," caught in a pivotal space where any action, or even inaction, will change the destiny of the situation and the actors themselves. It is a transformative journey, taken together, that starts with moment of suspense, and traverses a landscape of emotion and intention where a world of change becomes possible.     

A shortened child behavior checklist for delinquency studies

This study examines the reduction of the number of items in the scales of the Child Behavior Checklist, while maintaining the reliability and predictability of its original scales. For that purpose, the original scales were replicated with data from the Pittsburgh Youth Study. New, abbreviated scales were constructed using the most potent items. This process yielded trimmed scales that were highly correlated with the full scales and that still reflect the original meanings of the scales. Further, there was no loss of reliability or predictability with the trimmed as opposed to the full scales. The results were replicated in an analysis with identical variables from the Rochester Youth Development Study. This replication produced equally high reliabilities with similar levels of prediction of delinquent behavior.We would like to thank Terence P. Thornberry for helpful comments and advice on early drafts of this paper.