The Future of the Public Service Workforce: A Dialogue

It has been widely suggested that public service delivery of the future will be different to that of today. Added to this, we are currently witnessing significant changes in terms of the nature of work. Taken together these developments signal that we will see transformation in terms of the role of public servants and the public service workforce. Against this background, this paper presents a dialogue on the future of the public service workforce between Helen Dickinson and Helen Sullivan of the Melbourne School of Government, University of Melbourne and Graeme Head, New South Wales Public Service Commissioner. This paper offers insights from academics actively engaged in teaching the future public service workforce and a public service commissioner actively working to make a reality of a vision of the future.     

Gender and Publication Patterns: Female Authorship Is Increasing,But Is There Gender Parity?

Women's authorship has historically been underrepresented in criminal justice publications. The current study updates previous research by examining the authorship patterns of articles published in 8 criminological journals spanning 2007 to 2013. Women's representation increased from earlier rates but remained below that of their male contemporaries. This growth corresponded with general trends of increasing coauthorship, suggesting that the recent gains in women's representation do not indicate decreases in gender disparities. Men also were more likely to have sole-authored articles and be lead authors in papers coauthored by men and women. In addition, the vast majority of articles included at least 1 male author, and far fewer included a female giving men a larger visual presence. Gender representation also varied considerably between mainstream/traditional journals and 2 gender-specialized journals.     

Comparative proportionality review: A nationwide examination of reversed death sentences

A required part of the appellate review of death sentences in many capital punishment jurisdictions is comparative proportionality review. This procedure requires the court to compare the death sentence under review with sentences in similar cases to determine whether it is excessive. This article examines those death sentences from across the country that have been reversed on comparative proportionality grounds. Relatively few death sentences have been reversed on these grounds, and the number of reversals is decreasing. The reviews that reverse sentences infrequently compare only to other death sentences, commonly use a method that requires more than a mere common aggravating factor for selecting comparison cases, and rarely use the frequency method of comparative proportionality review.     

Method of payment and the cesarean birth rate in a hospital in northeast Brazil

This paper examines factors associated with the cesarean birth rate, including medical condition and method of payment, in the largest maternity hospital of Fortaleza, Brazil. Data were collected on 5996 women who delivered at the Maternidade Escola Assis Chateaubriand from October 1980 to July 1981. All women were classified according to how they paid for their care: private (financed at least part of their care with own funds), insured (federal or state), or indigent. Private patients were found to be far more likely than patients in the other two groups to have cesarean deliveries, due primarily to the high percentage of private patients recorded as having prolonged or obstructed labor, combined with a high rate of prior cesarean sections. From this data, it appears likely that financial incentives did play a role in physician decisions on whether to perform cesarean deliveries.     

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.