Prediction of adolescent sexual reoffending: A meta-analysis of the J-SOAP-II, ERASOR, J-SORRAT-II, and Static-99

Several risk assessment tools, including the Juvenile Sex Offender Assessment Protocol-II (Prentky & Righthand, 2003), the Estimate of Risk of Adolescent Sexual Offense Recidivism (Worling & Curwen, 2001), the Juvenile Sexual Offense Recidivism Risk Assessment Tool-II (Epperson, Ralston, Fowers, DeWitt, & Gore, 2006), and the Static-99 (Hanson & Thornton, 1999), have been used to assess reoffense risk among adolescents who have committed sexual offenses. Given that research on these tools has yielded somewhat mixed results, we empirically synthesized 33 published and unpublished studies involving 6,196 male adolescents who had committed a sexual offense. We conducted two separate meta-analyses, first with correlations and then with areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUCs). Total scores on each of the tools significantly predicted sexual reoffending, with aggregated correlations ranging from .12 to .20 and aggregated AUC scores ranging from .64 to .67. However, in many cases heterogeneity across studies was moderate to high. There were no significant differences between tools, and although the Static-99 was developed for adults, it achieved similar results as the adolescent tools. Results are compared to other meta-analyses of risk tools used in the area of violence risk assessment and in other fields. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Procedural justice, routine encounters and citizen perceptions of police: main findings from the Queensland Community Engagement Trial (QCET)

Objectives

To test, under randomized field trial conditions, the impact of police using the principles of procedural justice during routine encounters with citizens on attitudes towards drink-driving, perceptions of compliance, and their satisfaction with the police.

Methods

We conducted the first randomized field trial??the ??Queensland Community Engagement Trial?? (QCET)??to test the impact of police engaging with citizens by operationalizing the key ingredients of procedural justice (neutrality, citizen participation, respect, and trustworthy motives) in a short, high-volume police?Ccitizen encounter. We randomly allocated 60 roadside Random Breath Testing (RBT) operations to control (business-as-usual) and experimental (procedural justice) conditions. Driver surveys were used to measure the key outcomes: attitudes towards drinking and driving, satisfaction with police and perceptions of compliance.

Results

Citizen perceptions of the encounter revealed that the experimental treatment was delivered as planned. We also found significant differences between the experimental and control groups on all key outcome measures: drivers who received the experimental RBT encounter were 1.24 times more likely to report that their views on drinking and driving had changed than the control group; experimental respondents reported small but higher levels of compliance (d?=?.07) and satisfaction (d?=?.18) with police during the encounter than did their control group counterparts.

Conclusions

Our results show that the way citizens perceive the police can be influenced by the way in which police interact with citizens during routine encounters, and demonstrate the positive benefits of police using the principles of procedural justice. Our study was limited by the use of paper-only surveys and low response rate. We also recognize that the experiment setting (RBT road blocks) is limiting and non-reflective of the wider set of routine police?Ccitizen encounters. Future research should be undertaken, using experimental methods, to replicate our field operationalization of procedural justice in different types of police?Ccitizen encounters.     

Prescribing engagement in environmental risk assessment for gene drive technology

Gene drive technology is a nascent biotechnology with the potential to purposefully alter or eliminate a species. There have been broad calls for engagement to inform gene drive governance. Over the past seven years, the gene drive community has been developing risk assessment guidelines to determine what form future gene drive risk assessments take, including whether and how they involve engagement. To explore who is developing these guidelines and how engagement in risk assessment is being prescribed, we conduct a document analysis of gene drive risk assessment guideline documents from 2014 to 2020. We found that a narrow set of organizations have developed 10 key guideline documents and that with only one exception the documents prescribe a narrow, vague, or completely absent role for engagement in gene drive risk assessment. Without substantively prescribed engagement in guidelines, the relevance, rigor, and trustworthiness of gene drive risk assessment and governance will suffer.     

How Movement Strength Matters: Social Movement Strength and the Implementation of Ethnodevelopment Policy in Ecuador and Peru

Why has Ecuador been much more successful at implementing participatory policy than Peru despite the similarity between the two countries’ policies and despite their similarly low state capacity? To answer this question, this article draws on insights from implementation literature that point to factors such as incentives written into policy, the commitment of administrations and bureaucratic agencies, and few veto points in the chain of implementation. While this article does not challenge such findings, it suggests that we must look further back in the causal chain to understand what brings such facilitating conditions about. Through an examination of ethnodevelopment policy in Ecuador and Peru, I find that the strength of social movements is most responsible for creating the conditions that foster implementation. Neither civil society nor the state alone can bring about successful participatory policy implementation. Rather, strong social movements can make the state comply with its own laws.     

Debt Restructuring and Notions of Fairness

This article examines concern for fairness in the way in which loss is distributed when a company or financial institution facing financial difficulties is restructured. It shows how this concern is often grounded in loose notions of fairness, or generalisations from one situation to another, rather than in detailed analysis. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, it builds an analytical frame for the fairness debate in debt restructuring. It shows why rigour is important in identifying fairness concerns, in weighing them against other considerations, and in applying concerns which arise in one scenario to another, and illustrates the types of policy mistake or policy incoherence which can arise if this is not done.     

Fatal pyomyositis: a report of 8 autopsy cases

Pyomyositis is an acute bacterial infection manifesting as pyemic abscess formation in the skeletal muscles. We examined 8 autopsy cases (seven males, one female; age range 21-75 years) of fatal nontropical pyomyositis to better describe individual case characteristics and pathologic features of this rare disease. The pathogen most frequently involved was Staphylococcus aureus. In most cases, there were several abscesses and multiple sites involved. The trunk, shoulder girdle, and thigh muscles were most frequently affected and involvement of multiple sites was a common finding. In 6 cases, a recent trauma had occurred to the anatomic location where the pyemic abscesses were found. Three deceased were known as intravenous drug abusers. Except for the presence of pyomyositis, liver diseases such as cirrhosis in 3 cases, and a fatty liver in 2 cases were the most frequent autopsy findings. Death was due to sepsis in all cases. Because pyomyositis may develop in association with intravenous catheterization in the clinical setting, the question whether pyomyositis was caused by an infected or improperly placed indwelling intravenous catheter may be of forensic importance in the light of alleged medical malpractice. According to our observations, severe underlying illnesses seem not always necessary for fatal outcome of pyomyositis. Because a detailed dissection of superficial as well as deep skeletal muscles during autopsy is a prerequisite for the diagnosis, the disease may be overlooked when this essential step is not performed.     

Can Saying Something Make It So? The Nature Of Seditious Harm

In this paper, I redress an analytic deficit in debates about sedition by providing an explanatorily account of the relation between speech and action using speech act theory as developed by J.L. Austin. The specific focus will be on speech acts advocating violence against the state, in the form of religious sermons preaching violent jihad or glorifying acts of terrorism. This philosophical account will have legal consequences for how we classify speech acts deemed to be dangerous, or to cause harm. It also suggests that because speech can constitute action or conduct in certain circumstances, sedition laws, in principle, might be defensible, but not in their current form.     

Public Experiences of Police Violence and Corruption in Contemporary Russia: A Case of Predatory Policing?

“Predatory policing” occurs where police officers mainly use their authority to advance their own material interests rather than to fight crime or protect the interests of elites. These practices have the potential to seriously compromise the public's trust in the police and other legal institutions, such as courts. Using data from six surveys and nine focus groups conducted in Russia, we address four empirical questions: (1) How widespread are public encounters with police violence and police corruption in Russia? (2) To what extent does exposure to these two forms of police misconduct vary by social and economic characteristics? (3) How do Russians perceive the police, the courts, and the use of violent methods by the police? (4) How, if at all, do experiences of police misconduct affect these perceptions? Our results suggest that Russia conforms to a model of predatory policing. Despite substantial differences in its law enforcement institutions and cultural norms regarding the law, Russia resembles the United States in that direct experiences of police abuse reduce confidence in the police and in the legal system more generally. The prevalence of predatory policing in Russia has undermined Russia's democratic transition, which should call attention to the indispensable role of the police and other public institutions in the success of democratic reforms.