Probation Officers’ Perceptions of Supervising Probationers with Mental Illness in Rural and Urban Settings

As part of a larger study of probation workload and workforce challenges in one southeastern state, this study reports the results from a statewide survey of probation officers’ experiences supervising probationers with mental illness. A total of 615 officers responded to closed- and open-ended questions about the challenges and barriers to supervising offenders with mental illness, and the responses of officers from rural versus urban settings were compared. Officers reported that probationers with mental illness are difficult to supervise and supervision challenges are exacerbated by a scarcity of mental health and substance abuse treatment resources, limited social support, and a lack of employment opportunities for this population of probationers. Officers report unique and similar challenges across rural and urban settings. This study contributes to our understanding of the challenges of supervising probationers with mental illness and informs practice, policy and research at the interface of the criminal justice and mental health systems.     

Media and the politics of belonging: Sudanese Australians,letters to the editor and the new integrationism

Nolan, Burgin, Farquharson and Marjoribanks focus on media as a significant site through which a politics of belonging is played out, focusing particularly on coverage of Sudanese Australians. To this end, they analyse letters to the editor that concern Sudanese Australians in three Victorian newspapers in 2007, a highly significant year in which this group became the focus of significant levels of (predominantly negative) media coverage. Through textual and thematic analysis, the authors demonstrate how such letters worked to reiterate and extend a politics of ‘integrationism’ that, without entirely departing from Australia's commitment to multiculturalism, has rearticulated the latter along neo-assimilationist lines. In doing so, they show how, in many letters, Sudanese Australians are problematized for their failure or refusal to ‘integrate’ in ways that involve an explicit or implicit process of racialization. In the process, the article also critically considers the important role performed by media in the politics of belonging, particularly through their reiteration and contestation of the politics of race and multiculturalism in Australia. Rather than simply a matter of reproducing a hegemonic politics, it shows how such processes, despite the marked limitations of their framing within a ‘race debate’, also serve to demonstrate significant fault lines in the politics of belonging.     

Congress, health care, and congressional caucuses: an examination of the Diabetes Caucus

Caucuses have become a critical feature of the congressional landscape, yet are neglected in the literature on health-policy making in Congress. The principal goal of the article is to use the Diabetes Caucus as a case study to highlight this significant yet underappreciated political actor in the health-policy realm in Congress. The exploration, which draws on information gathered from thirty-two interviews with members of the Diabetes Caucus and their staff, will contribute to an increased understanding of both Congress's operations in the health area and the potential impact of caucuses on health-policy making. The article emphasizes particular characteristics relating to the membership and objectives of the Diabetes Caucus. In addition, the study stresses that the group had the requisite political momentum to achieve legislative successes when a policy window opened in the 105th Congress because it served much like, in the terminology of John Kingdon, a "policy entrepreneur".     

Influences shaping members' decision making: Congressional voting on the Persian Gulf War

In this paper I examine what influences members viewed as shaping their voting decisions on U.S. strategy in the Persian Gulf in January 1991. Rather than focusing on predictors of votes and the outcomes of members' decision-making processes (the yea or nay votes as in roll-call analyses), I focus on the predominant considerations that members perceived as swaying voting choices. More specifically, drawing on data gathered from interviews with 365 congressional staff people, I show that three influences in particular stand out as significant in the decision-making process on this crisis policy: members' own policy views, supportive constituents, and (for certain groups of members) the president. Thus, while the analysis confirms, in part, the conventional view of legislators' personal policy assessments as the critical influence on foreign and defense policy votes, it also underscores that this influence does not operate in a vacuum.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1993 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.     

White Women,Anti-Imperialist Feminism and the Story of Race within the US Women's Liberation Movement

ABSTRACT

Histories are re-writing what Sherna Berger Gluck famously called the ‘master historical narrative’ of the US WLM, especially in historicizing the efforts of feminists of colour. This paper echoes this by exploring how white feminists embraced racial justice politics, particularly during the early 1970s, when it is often assumed that white feminists failed to enact racial justice. In historicizing the efforts of white anti-imperialist feminists in greater Boston, I maintain that the ‘master historical narrative’ wrote not only black, Chicana and multiracial feminisms out of history, but that it skewed our understanding of the race politics of white, US feminists.