Mental Health and Educational Experiences Among Black Youth: A Latent Class Analysis

Disproportionately lower educational achievement, coupled with higher grade retention, suspensions, expulsions, and lower school bonding make educational success among Black adolescents a major public health concern. Mental health is a key developmental factor related to educational outcomes among adolescents; however, traditional models of mental health focus on absence of dysfunction as a way to conceptualize mental health. The dual-factor model of mental health incorporates indicators of both subjective wellbeing and psychopathology, supporting more recent research that both are needed to comprehensively assess mental health. This study applied the dual-factor model to measure mental health using the National Survey of American Life—Adolescent Supplement (NSAL-A), a representative cross-sectional survey. The sample included 1170 Black adolescents (52% female; mean age 15). Latent class analysis was conducted with positive indicators of subjective wellbeing (emotional, psychological, and social) as well as measures of psychopathology. Four mental health groups were identified, based on having high or low subjective wellbeing and high or low psychopathology. Accordingly, associations between mental health groups and educational outcomes were investigated. Significant associations were observed in school bonding, suspensions, and grade retention, with the positive mental health group (high subjective wellbeing, low psychopathology) experiencing more beneficial outcomes. The results support a strong association between school bonding and better mental health and have implications for a more comprehensive view of mental health in interventions targeting improved educational experiences and mental health among Black adolescents.     

Book Review: Considering Social Justice: A Review of David Miller's Principles of Social Justice

Miller's volume is a useful, thorough, and innovating overview of the subject of social justice. It inspires three lines of critical response. The first involves the symbiotic role of philosophy and empirical inquiry in the analysis of justice. The second involves the qualities of opportunity that ought to underlie justice. Finally, there are a few lessons regarding the status of justice in the overall evaluation of society that can be learned from the case of the United States, which has an anomalously bad record with respect to distributive justice. The centrality of politics is one of the implications of the analysis.     

For Stuart Hall

Samuel Beckett, one of Stuart Hall's favourite writers, once observed that the purpose of art was to leave a ‘stain upon the silence’. So too with Stuart's life and work. His cultural and political interventions were not about silence. Rather, through the exhilarating cadences in his voice, and the warm embrace of his laughter and chuckle, he used the power of the spoken word to turn heads, capture yearnings and suggest possibilities that could, with the right politics, be reconfigured into probabilities. His work was insurgent and redemptive; the intertwining of both provided the strategic base for thinking that a better world was possible.     

Multiagency Coordination and Response: Case Study of the July 2005 London Bombings1

On July 7, 2005, terrorists carried out a series of bombings in London's underground subway system and transportation network. Fifty‐two people were killed and more than 700 were injured. The authors of this study interviewed key staff from London agencies to evaluate the response to the London attacks and analyzed the responses using the General Coordination Model defined in prior research (Eyerman and Strom, 2005). Results indicate that the London coordination regime, which is characterized by a high level of preplanning, joint exercises, and regular improvement through constant use, minimized the effect of common barriers to multiagency response. Successful elements of the London response included the rapid recognition and declaration of a major incident; a successful command and control system that involved all key agencies and which was implemented quickly following the bombings; limited disagreement across agencies on roles and responsibilities; and, delivery of a single, unified media message.     

Local Government Policy Evolution in New Zealand: Radical Reform and the Ex Post Emergence of Consensus or Rival Advocacy Coalitions

Between 1984 and 1993 New Zealand reformers followed a top-down strategy designed to minimize the opportunity for resistors to affect the reform process and preclude the ex post emergence of a stable alignment of rival advocacy coalitions. The evolution of the local government policy debate since the implementation of radical reform in 1989 suggests that these strategic goals may be more difficult to achieve than at first thought. The quest to make local government more efficient and democratic by making it more accountable has given way to a 'minimalist-activist' controversy over the comparative institutional advantage of local authorities and the role of trust in their relations with central government that has the potential to contribute to the eclipse of the post-reform consensus and the emergence of a 'advocacy coalition structure'.     

‘Paedophile Hunters’, Criminal Procedure,and Fundamental Human Rights

‘Paedophile hunters’ have attracted global media attention. The limited literature on paedophile hunters, which documents their emergence in contemporary liberal democracies, pays scant attention to how their use of intrusive investigative methods may threaten the procedural rights of suspects and undermine the integrity of the criminal justice system. This article fills this normative ‘gap’ in the literature. It draws upon media coverage, criminal procedure jurisprudence, and criminological scholarship to analyse the regulation of paedophile hunting in English and Welsh law. The article suggests that domestic law does not afford adequate protection to due process and the fundamental human rights of those falling under the paedophile hunter's purview. Unless paedophile hunting is constrained by a narrower and more robustly enforced regulatory regime, it should not be permitted, let alone encouraged, in contemporary liberal democracies.