The Shackling of Incarcerated Pregnant Women: A Human Rights Violation Committed Regularly in the United States

The international human rights community has repeatedly expressed concern about the shackling of pregnant women deprived of their liberty in the United States. The federal government has adopted an anti-shackling policy and some states have passed laws or policies restricting shackling. Despite these positive developments, shackling of women prisoners continues to occur in violation of U.S. and international law.Shackling pregnant women increases the substantial medical risks of childbirth. Shackling of pregnant women is a harmful, painful, and demeaning practice that is rarely necessary to preserve safety. Most female prisoners are non-violent offenders, and women who are pregnant, in labor, or in postpartum recovery are especially low flight and safety risks.Both international law and U.S. constitutional law prohibit shackling during certain stages of pregnancy, childbirth, and post-partum recovery. Article 10 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (the "ICCPR") guarantees that persons deprived of their liberty be treated with dignity and respect. Article 7 prohibits torture, or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. The Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits cruel or unusual punishments, which some Federal courts have interpreted to prohibit the shackling of pregnant prisoners during childbirth.While the U.S. federal government has adopted an anti-shackling policy that applies to federal prisons and 24 states have adopted policies limiting (to varying degrees) shackling of pregnant prisoners, legislation enacted by state legislatures is preferable to the adoption of an administrative policy by the executive. Indeed, 18 state legislatures in the United States have in fact passed legislation restricting shackling, but many such laws contain broad exceptions or are not adequately implemented.We recommend that the UN Human Rights Committee (the "Committee") that monitors compliance with the ICCPR ask and encourage the United States to 1) enact a federal law banning the practice of shackling prisoners during pregnancy, covering, at a minimum, the third trimester, transport to medical facilities, labor, delivery and postpartum recovery, 2) take appropriate measures to ensure that those 32 states that do not have anti-shackling laws to enact comprehensive laws, including training of correctional officers, 3) to review existing state anti-shackling laws and policies to ensure that they are comprehensive and fully-implemented, and 4) to conduct an empirical study to determine the scope of shackling in U.S. prisons and to understand why the practice of shackling pregnant women persists

Remember me, remember us, remember Korea

행사명 : U.S.-Korea Academic Symposiu

Diquarkyonic matter: quarks, diquarks and baryons

In this work, we investigate the color-spin interaction of a quark, a diquark and a baryon with their surrounding baryons and/or quark matter. We extend our previous work by increasing the maximum number of surrounding baryons to 5 and additionally consider all possible diquark probes that are immersed in such surroundings. This is accomplished by classifying all possible flavor and spin states of the resulting multiquark configuration in both the flavor SU(2) and SU(3) symmetric cases. We also discuss the three-body confinement potential and show that this does not contribute to the outcome. Furthermore, we find that a quark becomes more stable than a baryon when the number of surrounding baryons is three or more. Finally, when we consider the internal color-spin factor of a probe, our results show that the effects of the color-spin interaction of a multiquark configuration is consistent with the so-called diquarkyonic configuration.Comment: 24 page

Constraints on the broad line region from regularized linear inversion: Velocity-delay maps for five nearby active galactic nuclei

Reverberation mapping probes the structure of the broad emission-line region (BLR) in active galactic nuclei (AGN). The kinematics of the BLR gas can be used to measure the mass of the central supermassive black hole. The main uncertainty affecting black hole mass determinations is the structure of the BLR. We present a new method for reverberation mapping based on regularized linear inversion (RLI) that includes modelling of the AGN continuum light curves. This enables fast calculation of velocity-resolved response maps to constrain BLR structure. RLI allows for negative response, such as when some areas of the BLR respond in inverse proportion to a change in ionizing continuum luminosity. We present time delays, integrated response functions, and velocity-delay maps for the $\rm{H}\,\beta$ broad emission line in five nearby AGN, as well as for $\rm{H}\,\alpha$ and $\rm{H}\,\gamma$ in Arp 151, using data from the Lick AGN Monitoring Project 2008. We find indications of prompt response in three of the objects (Arp 151, NGC 5548 and SBS 1116+583A) with additional prompt response in the red wing of $\rm{H}\,\beta$. In SBS 1116+583A we find evidence for a multimodal broad prompt response followed by a second narrow response at 10 days. We find no clear indications of negative response. The results are complementary to, and consistent with, other methods such as cross correlation, maximum entropy and dynamical modelling. Regularized linear inversion with continuum light curve modelling provides a fast, complementary method for velocity-resolved reverberation mapping and is suitable for use on large datasets.Comment: 20 pages, 13 figures, accepted to MNRA