An assessment of sexual health risk behaviors among female youth in juvenile detention

This study investigated the association between risky sexual behavior and drug use among female youth sentenced to a regional juvenile detention center. Preincarceration behavioral health risk data were collected from a modified version of the Youth Risk Behaviors Surveillance Survey completed by respondents. Almost all of the 105 participants had been detained before their current sentence, more than half of them were sexually active before the age of 13, and 70% had smoked marijuana or drank alcohol by age 14. A regression analysis was conducted to determine if preincarceration sexual health risk behaviors were significant enough to predict continued risk behaviors related to pregnancy, disease prevention, and substance use. Findings indicate that youth detention-based prevention programs should emphasize sexual and drug-risk reduction strategies as a means to reduce risky behaviors for this population.     

External Pressures and Internal Dynamics in the Institutionalization of Performance-Based Budgeting: An Endless Process?

The well-known practice of performance-based budgeting (PBB) is a relevant component of the New Public Management (NPM) reform agenda and has become widespread, with varying approaches and results across countries. However, its variation within specific countries has remained largely unexplored. This study analyzes three organizations operating within the same context—three ministries in Italy—to contribute to a new understanding of PBB variation by illustrating why the same PBB practice can or cannot be implemented and internalized similarly across these organizations and thus become (or not) fully institutionalized. The study adopts and enriches the institutional approach by extending beyond isomorphic convergence toward PBB and explaining practice variation, linking the interactions between external pressures and internal dynamics at the organizational level to PBB institutionalization. The empirical analysis shows how a lack of alignment between external pressures and internal dynamics contributes to an unfinished and apparently endless process of institutionalization.     

Containing Environmentalism: Risk,Rationality, and Value in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez

This article revisits regulatory debates about environmental valuation following the Exxon Valdez oil spill to argue that the spill can be seen as a constitutive moment in the rise of neoliberalism. I show that rationalizing environmental values was not simply about applying market rationality to the natural world, but entailed reexamining the nature of that rationality itself and its relevance to social behavior. I then trace the reverberations of these debates beyond the realm of environmental policy, highlighting an underappreciated legacy of the Valdez: the first credit default swap, executed in response to an unprecedented punitive fine leveled against Exxon. Illuminating the linked histories of environmental valuation, corporate environmentalism, and financialization through that event, I argue that environmental valuation is a political problem through which neoliberal strategies for the governance of life (both human and nonhuman) have been forged.     

Whole-person health and development: two South Indian initiatives

ABSTRACT

In responding to the 2016 reformulation of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, the development community’s efforts are focused on a sweep of initiatives aiming to promote whole-society, sustainable development. The ambition of the SDGs is inspiring, but also daunting, and does not always sit easily within national models of economic development. This viewpoint profiles two organisations in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, that have decades of experience in whole-person development among scheduled tribes and disability communities. Both organisations serve as timely examples of ongoing holistic, whole-person health and development in the context of new ideals and economic realities.     

The Effect of Unions and Organized Civil Society on Social Policy: Pension and Health Reforms in Argentina and Brazil, 1988–2008

This article shows how modified European power resources theories can be applied to Latin America to explain differences in the depth of policy reforms. It innovates on previous work on Latin American social policy by particularly examining the effect of unions and other civil society groups on the process of structural reforms (or lack thereof) in the health and pension sectors in Argentina and Brazil. Through a most similar system design, this analysis shows that the strength and support (or opposition) of organized civil society groups is a crucial condition to account for the enactment (or failure) of a given broad policy reform.     

Narratives of family,community and waged work: Latvian European volunteer worker women in post-war Britain

In the mid to late 1940s displaced people in camps in Germany were recruited by the British Government to work in industries in which labour market shortages were severe. This article looks at the recruitment of women who were originally from Latvia for domestic work in hospitals, other institutions and private households and as textile workers. The author argues that as well as reconstructing a sense of belonging to Latvia through the creation of imagined communities in exile, waged work was also a significant part of these women's lives. The author explores the ways in which different types of work influenced the future lives of EVW (European Volunteer Worker) women, both as workers and as members of locally based networks, and discusses the connections between employment and home/community life in the social construction of identity among Latvian women in Britain. The article draws on recent oral testimonies of twenty-five women who came to Britain under the Balt Cygnet and Westward Ho schemes between 1946 and 1949, have lived in this country since then and are now retired.     

Coming of age under Hitler and Stalin: the everyday life of adolescent girls in occupied Latvia

This article explores the possibility of the continuation of everyday life in occupied Europe through a case study of the lives of twenty‐five adolescent girls and young women living in Latvia between 1939 and 1944. Late adolescence is the period in which young women are struggling to establish some degree of independence, especially through leaving the parental home and entering the labour market. These transitions are the conventional markers of adulthood in modern societies. The article explores how occupation by the Soviet Union and the Third Reich affected daily life and the speed and nature of the transition to adulthood.     

A Political Science of Punishment: Francis Lieber and the Discipline of American Prisons

This article examines the history of political science in relation to the history of the prison. It considers how theories of the state in political science have assumed that proper states should punish with prisons, and traces these ideas to the work of Francis Lieber, the first academic political scientist in the USA. Because his ideas about prison reform were central to his conceptualization of the discipline as a science of punishment, his theory of the state is an understudied part of the history of mass incarceration. Lieber argued that the state had a moral duty to punish its citizens with the prison, and an obligation to manage the risks of democracy through the prison's principles of scientific certainty, less eligibility, and disciplinary solitude. By examining the life and work of Francis Lieber, this article offers new ways of thinking about political science's past, and its status as part of the history of the American prison.     

The impact of child support enforcement policy on nonmarital childbearing

The interaction of welfare and child support regulations has created a situation in which child support policy's incentives that discourage unwed fatherhood tend to be stronger than its incentives that encourage unwed motherhood. This suggests that more stringent child support enforcement creates incentives that reduce the likelihood of nonmarital childbearing, particularly among women with a significant chance of needing public assistance in the event of a nonmarital birth and their male partners. We investigate this hypothesis with a sample of women from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, to which we add information on state child support enforcement. We examine childbearing behavior between the ages of 15 and 44 before marriage and during periods of non‐marriage following divorce or widowhood. The estimates indicate that women living in states with more effective child support enforcement are less likely to bear children when unmarried, especially if they are young, never‐married, or black. The findings suggest that improved child support enforcement may be a potent intervention for reducing nonmarital childbearing. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.