Are effective drug courts an urban phenomenon?: considering their impact on recidivism among a nonmetropolitan adult sample in Washington State

Drug courts represent a significant development in criminal justice during the past 15 years, and a small but growing literature suggests they are effective in reducing drug use and criminal behavior. Most of these studies evaluate the effects of drug courts in urban areas, however. This study adds to this literature by considering the effects of this intermediate sanction among adult offenders in a small, nonmetropolitan county of northwest Washington. Using a retrospective comparison group of matched control participants, these results show that the prevalence and incidence of rearrest is significantly lower among drug court graduates than probationers. These differences in recidivism persist even when the age, race, gender, and number of days at risk in the community are statistically controlled. Among those who did recidivate, drug court graduates did not significantly differ from controls in duration to first arrest and arrest incidence. Policy implications are discussed.     

Is it ‘Fake News’? Intelligence Community expertise and news dissemination as measurements for media reliability

Self-communication platforms have generated a myriad of outlets and news producers that represent a challenge for modern societies. Therefore, it is relevant to explore new measurements that can help understand whether a specific outlet disseminating news could be considered reliable or not. This study is based on the expertise from the U.S. Intelligence Community to offer a statistical model that replicates the reliability measurements based on intelligence expertise. The results suggest that a classification algorithm could be useful to measure news media reliability. Additionally, different variables were identified to predict perceptions of media reliability.     

REVIEWS

Readings in Faith and Suspicion

Jean Radford, Dorothy Richardson, Harvester Wheatsheaf, £9.95 pbk.

Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars, Routledge, £10.99 pbk.

Philosophical Passions

Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, Rout‐ledge, £35 hbk, £9.99 pbk.

Margaret Whitford (ed.), The Irigaray Reader, Blackwell, £12.95.

Contested Sites

Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (eds), Conflicts in Feminism, Routledge, $49.50 hbk, $15.95 pbk.

Writing Victorian Women and Victorian Women Writing

Christina Crosby, The Ends of History: Victorians and ‘The Woman Question’, Routledge, $49.95 hbk, $14.95 pbk, £10.99 pbk.

Anita Levy, Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832–1898, Princeton University Press, $35 hbk, $9.95 pbk.

Thais E. Morgan (ed.), Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power, Rutgers University Press, $38 hbk, $15 pbk.

Ann Russo and Cheris Kramarae (eds), The Radical Women's Press of the 1850s, Routledge, $35.