Psychological Injury and Law: Special Issue Epilogue

To conclude the special series in the issue, which marks the end of the first volume of the journal, Psychological Injury and Law, the epilogue highlights its major goals and contributions. The special issue takes the field in more diverse directions. It demonstrates the multiple research and practice foci that are emerging in the field and its interdisciplinarity, from the law and forensics to practice and treatment. The field needs to view the person in context and not from one side or the other of the adversarial divide.     

What happens when a reform works? The need to study unanticipated consequences of mandatory processing of domestic violence

One of the primary facets of the sociology of law is concerned with the relationships between formal rules and regulations having the force of governmental social control and the values, norms and practices of those who enforce them (or not). This “law in action” perspective enables research to test out the differential impact on legal decisions of both formal and informal aspects of social control (Hawkins, 1992). One of the limitations of recent work on domestic violence is that it focuses too narrowly on one or two negative sanctions, e.g., arrest or restraining orders, to the exclusion of the other options and the mix of formal and informal decisions in the criminal justice system as a whole (Reiss, 1974). This research attempts through a close analysis of the workings of the Quincy, Massachusetts criminal justice system in response to domestic violence, to identify the consequences, unanticipated and anticipated, of decisions made in several domains (public, police, prosecutors, and courts) of the criminal justice system. This study uses in-depth interviews with batterers, victims and criminal justice agency and related personnel as well as agency policies, training materials and records to examine possible unintended consequences of aggressive intervention in cases of domestic violence. This study will explore the impact of the Quincy Domestic Violence Program, considered to be a national model, on the lives of victims and offenders who are treated by the court. We have selected the District Court at Quincy, Massachusetts as our research site. It has a well deserved national reputation treating abusers systematically from the initial intake by arresting officers through close supervision in probation.     

Use of the MMPI-2 to predict the employment continuation and performance ratings of recently hired police officers

The MMPI-2 is one of the most frequently employed instruments for the selection of police officers. Serafino and Serafino (1997) collected data which involved information about employment continuation and ratings by supervisors of 32 police officers who had recently been hired and who had been given the MMPI-2 during the hiring process. In this study, the Paranoia Obvious (Pa) and Paranoia Subtle (Ps) scales proved to be the significant. Pa Subtle correlated with removal whereas Pa Obvious correlated with rating. Higher scores on Pa Subtle correlated significantly with being removed from the job, whereas low scores on the Pa Obvious correlated with higher ratings of performance by supervisors. Discussion of the results involved the fact that Subtle Pa scores would suggest paranoid tendencies not easily detected during the interview. Since most high Pa Obvious individuals would have been eliminated in the hiring process, expression of this tendency was at a low level after being hired but if present resulted in low ratings. Significant predictors were noted to be very much a function of the type of criterion variable employed in the study.     

Psychological Injury and Law: Editorial on the Young and the Tested

In this editorial about our dynamic new journal and association, I describe how young professionals and students in both the mental health field and the legal profession can play a role in the association and how they can benefit from it and the journal. The association and journal are meant to serve the education and career aspirations of young people and, at the same time, we look forward to their contributions.     

Sad tales and happy tales: The politicization of delinquent life‐histories

Previous research has indicated that juvenile delinquents tend to highlight their dismal pasts and portray themselves as the victims of circumstances in order to elicit favorable responses from the various agents of social control. However, the present study, based on the life‐histories of two groups of Israeli delinquents, suggests that they sometimes engage in this particular kind of retrospective interpretation in order to bring about changes of a much more far‐reaching nature. Not only is it aimed at influencing the decision as to the appropriate agents of social contact; it also constitutes part of a wider struggle for political and cultural legitimacy.     

The attitudes of criminal justice workgroups toward intensive supervised probation

In spite of a growing body of literature on the attitudes of the public and selected groups toward crime and punishment, including communitybased corrections, intermediate sanctions, and intensive probation, very little is known about the attitudes of criminal justice workgroups toward intensive supervised probation. Understanding reactions to ISP by criminal justice workgroups is a requisite first step toward overcoming any obstacles or resistance to successful program implementation. This research reports on a survey of criminal justice workgroup attitudes toward ISP in Wyandotte County, Kansas.     

Book reviews

M.B. Hayne, The French Foreign Office and the Origins of the First World War 1898-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) £35. ISBN 019-820270-9.

Keith Hamilton, Bertie of Thame: Edwardian Ambassador (Woodbridge/Suffolk: Boydell Press 1990 (= Royal Historical Society Studies in History, No. 60)), ix + 436 pp. ISBN 0-86193-217X. £35.

Anita Inder Singh, The Limits of British Influence: South Asia and the Anglo-American Relationship, 1947-56 (Pinter, 1993) pp. 309. £45.

Robert H. Ferrell (ed.), Truman in the White House: The Diary of Eben A. Ayers (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991) $37.50. ISBN 0-8262-0790-1.

Robert Pearce (ed.), Patrick Gordon Walker: Political Diaries 1932-1971 (London: The Historians Press, 1991) £20. ISBN 1-872273-05 X.

Richard J. Aldrich (ed.), British Strategy and the Cold War, 1945-51 (London: Routledge, 1992) £40. ISBN 0-415-07851-2.

Timothy Garton Ash, In Europe's Name. Germany and the Divided Continent (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993) £25. ISBN 0-224-02054-4.