Ex-offender employment programs and recidivism: A meta-analysis

One consequence of the tremendous growth in the number of persons under supervision of the criminal justice system, whether incarcerated, on parole, or on probation, is the effect of this criminal history on finding and keeping a job. Ex-offenders, especially those recently released from prison, face substantial barriers to many types of legal employment; nonetheless, stable employment is one of the best predictors of post-release success. Thus, policy-makers concerned about high recidivism rates face an obvious need to improve the employment prospects of ex-offenders. Over the last 25 years, many programs that were designed to increase employment (and, by so doing, reduce recidivism) among ex-offenders have been implemented and evaluated. [Wilson, D. B., Gallagher, C. A., Coggeshall, M. B. & MacKenzie, D. L. (1999). Corrections Management Quarterly 3(4), 8–18; Wilson, D. B., Gallagher, C. A. & MacKenzie, D. L. (2000). Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 37(4), 347–368] conducted a quantitative synthesis and meta-analysis of 33 evaluations of educational, vocational, and work programs for persons in correctional facilities. To date, however, the evaluation literature on employment programs for those with a criminal record who are not in custody has not been systematically reviewed. This paper presents the results of a quantitative meta-analysis of eight random assignment studies of such programs, using the Campbell Collaboration methodology. The results indicate that this group of community employment programs for ex-offenders did not reduce recidivism; however, the experimental design research on this question is small and does not include some of the promising community employment programs that have emerged in the last decade.     

高等职业教育国际比较研究的文献述评

目前,我国已有许多高等职业教育国际比较研究的文献,包括高等教育的法制建设、财政制度、管理体制等问题,涉及的国别也很多。而这些研究大都是从一个或几个方面入手探讨一个或几个国家高等职业教育问题,略显片面,应从更广泛的角度进行系统考察。总结国内现有研究成果的缺失,既可以为今后的研究提供借鉴,也能在一定程度上减少由于研究角度不同给政策制定部门带来困扰和误导;在国际比较研究中加强关注、考察世界各国在高等职业教育的制度和政策,有助于解决国内高等职业教育的现实问题,也可为其提供更多的实证依据和政策建设。     

中日两国女学交流起点新探--以成濑仁藏《女子教育论》的著译流传为中心

十九、二十世纪之交,日本教育家成濑仁藏完成并出版《女子教育论》,掀起了日本女子高等教育的革新运动。不久,该书被中国学人译成中文,推动了中国女子教育近代化的起步。该书的著译、流传,凸显了美国-日本-中国的女子教育传播格局。但是,该书曾形成的中日女学交流起点的作用,竟然在其后的历史进程中被两国学界同时淡忘。文章尝试将历史考证方法和跨国视角相结合,在重新唤醒这段历史记忆的基础上,重建面向未来的两国女学发展脉络。     

妇女/性别研究主流化问题刍议--从女性文学研究进入高校学科体系谈起

尽管包括女性文学在内的妇女/性别研究在高校教学体系中的推进是成功的,但仍面临着一个重大瓶颈困境,即学科设置和社科规划与之不配套。如何解决两者的矛盾将影响到女性/性别研究的合法性与合理性。因此,社科规划与学科体制关系到女性/性别研究的生存与可持续发展。     

引领全国青年工作的理论研究--中国青年政治学院主办九届研讨会记述

把青年工作作为一门科学来研究,最早可追溯到20世纪50年代中央团校的团课教学,引领全国青年工作理论研究的作用,则始于20世纪80年代。在中央团校的基础上于1985年建立的中国青年政治学院,共举办9届全国青年工作理论研讨会,不断强化了这一引领工作,确立了中国青年政治学院在这一学术领域的引领地位。     

中国妇女学学科建设中的两次飞跃及启示

中国的妇女学在近20年的发展过程中,经过几代学人的艰辛探索和实践,实现了从理论到实践、再从传统的妇女学到妇女—社会性别学的两次历史性飞跃。它昭示了妇女学的建设既要批判借鉴西方的妇女学,又要力图使之本土化。而如何将妇女学本土化将是中国妇女学面临的长期任务。     

中国传统安全研究十年进展

总体国家安全观提出十年来,中国的传统安全研究取得了显著进步。从研究议题看,中国的传统安全研究主要聚焦地区冲突,领土争端,联盟政治与伙伴关系,核安全、太空战略与网络安全,安全秩序等重要议题。在理论研究上,中国传统安全研究在宏观理论和中层理论方面都有大的提升。总的来看,中国传统安全研究在过去十年研究水平和国际化水平不断提升,中国学者发展了一些安全理论,在国际学术界产生了重要影响。在研究方法、人才梯队和学术共同体建设上,中国传统安全研究也取得了进步。不过,中国传统安全研究也面临着一些挑战：一方面,目前理论创新仍落后于中国的外交实践,难以满足构建中国自主知识体系的要求;另一方面,中国传统安全研究也面临学科碎片化和产出泡沫化的问题。展望未来,中国传统安全研究需紧扣中国和世界面临的重大战略问题,重视对中国经验的提炼和总结,通过基础理论创新为中华民族伟大复兴提供智力支撑。     

Refugee youth in settlement,schooling, and social action: reviewing current research through a transnational lens

How do refugee youth engage in peacebuilding, civic participation, and social action through their educational experiences? This article draws from transnational frameworks, specifically Ajrun Appadurai’s notion of ‘imagined worlds’ with an emphasis on ethnoscapes as a framework through which to review literature on refugee young peoples’ involvement in peacebuilding, participation, and social action in schools, focusing particularly on experiences from countries of settlement outside of refugee camps. This study examines current literature on refugee youth schooling and social engagement along three main themes: the student, the school, and the wider society. Each section considers the implications of the scholarly literature in a transnational framework, identifying what transnational flows (i.e. people, capital, ideas, media, technology, etc.) and what imagined worlds are reflected in the literature. In conducting this analysis, I aim to dislodge peacebuilding education from spatially fixed contexts of ‘fragility’ that assigns a nation-state as the primary reference point of peace and conflict, to instead examine the transnational nature both of conflict and of the agency that displaced youth can mobilize to transform conflict through peacebuilding.     

Vladimir Iowa Lenin,Part 1: A Bolshevik Studies American Agriculture

A busy year for Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1917 also marked the publication of his study of American agriculture. The report reads as more than a historical curiosity, offering insights, however era-bounded, on a variety of topics of substantive and epistemological interest today. Lenin writes of the history of American agriculture, its dynamic regionalism, and its sector-specific class conflicts. Along the way, despite his obvious structural tendencies, we meet an anti-foundational author who, while upbraiding bourgeois economists for their expedient technicism, often in scathing terms, also warns that sweeping conclusions about the sizes of farm and capitalization are problematic in the face of historically dependent and contradictory trends. Here, in the first of the paper’s two parts, we begin to place Lenin’s project in the broader stream of critical agrarian studies, including the classic contrast with agricultural economist Alexander Chayanov, but also the diseconomies of modern agriculture, the biological limits on industrializing food production, and Stalin’s “dekulakization” campaign. Our aims here are more than academic. The exploration is framed by the roles the structure of agriculture and its impacts on its participants play in political change, from elections to revolution.     

Trading in the secretive commodity

Over the past century and a half, a handful of transnational corporations have built fortunes trading commodity crops such as corn, soy and wheat. Graded and standardized, these commodities are considered uniform and therefore fungible; information about their origins need not accompany them to market. But in recent years major food brands, as part of broader ‘sustainable sourcing’ commitments, have begun to ask about the places and practices that produce these crops. Their inquiries have exposed the limits of the commodity traders’ supposedly unrivalled market intelligence. They also raise questions about how the advent of agricultural grades and standards made knowledge of crop origins seem unnecessary in certain commodity supply chains, and about how those supply chains might henceforth change, now that lack of such knowledge has become a liability.