Silent Sentences: The Procedural Tragedy of the Bureau of Prisons\u27 Sentence Computation Policy

The Bureau of Prisons has systematically lengthened sentences—at times doubling them—for prisoners subject to federal and state sentences for the same conduct. This phenomenon does not stem from any expressed intent on the part of federal or state judges, defense attorneys, the prosecution, or a plea deal. Instead, it arises through silence at a prisoner’s federal sentencing on a key issue: whether the federal sentence is consecutive to or concurrent with a yet-to-beimposed state sentence. For those facing both a federal sentence and a yet-to-beimposed state sentence for the same conduct, perhaps no other aspect of sentencing has a greater impact. If a federal sentence is to run concurrently with a state sentence, the time a prisoner spends in custody is credited towards both terms of imprisonment. Conversely, if a sentence is set to run consecutively, the service of one sentence hinges on the completion of the other. Years of additional lost liberty hang in the balance. Yet if a federal judge omits a few words at sentencing about the interaction between the federal and yet-tobe-imposed state sentence, the Bureau of Prisons seizes unlimited and unreviewable discretion to make the sentences consecutive. The scope of this discretion is breathtaking. The Bureau of Prisons can unilaterally add to a term of imprisonment even where the state judge explicitly provides for concurrency, or when the prosecution acknowledges the sentences should run concurrently. Once the error comes to light, neither the prisoner nor the sentencing federal judge have the means to rectify it. Instead, the length of imprisonment is solely left to the administrative halls of the same agency, the Department of Justice, that conducts the prosecution. While this realization has startled and dismayed several courts that encounter the issue, the procedural mechanism for administrative imprisonment and its consequences remain largely unexplored. This Note documents the procedural tragedy of this sentence computation mechanism and delves into its tangible repercussions for those ensnared within its Kafka-esque framework. Leveraging developments in sentencing law, this Note contends that the inclusion of five simple words to 18 U.S.C. § 3584(a) is all that stands between what can be decades of arbitrary imprisonment and freedom for many. However, in the absence of such reform, this Note concludes with a plea for awareness of the issue among stakeholders in the criminal justice system to avoid this tragic fate

Creating Killers: Stalin\u27s Great Purge and the Red Army\u27s Fate in the Great Patriotic War

This history of the Red Army as an institution is frequently described in terms of its proximity to the Stalinist purges. Especially in wartime, the strategic deployment of terror begs the question of whether it was an effective motivational technique compared to other methods of non-coercive motivation such as propaganda or awards of medals. Examining various case studies and memoirs, it becomes clear that terror tended to reduce morale and group cohesion, while positive motivators were far more effective at ensuring an effective fighting force. When the Red Army soldiers feared being caught in the net of terror, they were less likely to trust their comrades, and more likely to act in self, rather than group, interests. As terror decreased, activity such as desertion or voluntary capture declined across all fronts. Soldiers worked far more effectively as a unit, with increased confidence in decisions by high command. This result strongly contests the frame that Soviet soldiers acted as a scared collective, willing to sacrifice themselves out of fear. Rather, Soviet soldiers performed at their best when they trusted in their fellow soldiers and believed the other side was more barbaric than their own

Cost Analysis and Policy Implications of a Pediatric Palliative Care Program

ContextIn 2010, California launched Partners for Children (PFC), a pediatric palliative care pilot program offering hospice-like services for children eligible for full-scope Medicaid delivered concurrently with curative care, regardless of the child's life expectancy.ObjectivesWe assessed the change from before PFC enrollment to the enrolled period in 1) health care costs per enrollee per month (PEPM), 2) costs by service type and diagnosis category, and 3) health care utilization (days of inpatient care and length of hospital stay).MethodsA pre-post analysis compared enrollees' health care costs and utilization up to 24 months before enrollment with their costs during participation in the pilot, from January 2010 through December 2012. Analyses were conducted using paid Medicaid claims and program enrollment data.ResultsThe average PEPM health care costs of program enrollees decreased by $3331 from before their participation in PFC to the enrolled period, driven by a reduction in inpatient costs of$4897 PEPM. PFC enrollees experienced a nearly 50% reduction in the average number of inpatient days per month, from 4.2 to 2.3. Average length of stay per hospitalization dropped from an average of 16.7 days before enrollment to 6.5 days while in the program.ConclusionThrough the provision of home-based therapeutic services, 24/7 access to medical advice, and enhanced, personally tailored care coordination, PFC demonstrated an effective way to reduce costs for children with life-limiting conditions by moving from costly inpatient care to more coordinated and less expensive outpatient care. PFC's home-based care strategy is a cost-effective model for pediatric palliative care elsewhere

American Gut: an Open Platform for Citizen Science Microbiome Research

McDonald D, Hyde E, Debelius JW, et al. American Gut: an Open Platform for Citizen Science Microbiome Research. mSystems. 2018;3(3):e00031-18

Patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models in basic and translational breast cancer research

Patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models of a growing spectrum of cancers are rapidly supplanting long-established traditional cell lines as preferred models for conducting basic and translational preclinical research. In breast cancer, to complement the now curated collection of approximately 45 long-established human breast cancer cell lines, a newly formed consortium of academic laboratories, currently from Europe, Australia, and North America, herein summarizes data on over 500 stably transplantable PDX models representing all three clinical subtypes of breast cancer (ER+, HER2+, and "Triple-negative" (TNBC)). Many of these models are well-characterized with respect to genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic features, metastatic behavior, and treatment response to a variety of standard-of-care and experimental therapeutics. These stably transplantable PDX lines are generally available for dissemination to laboratories conducting translational research, and contact information for each collection is provided. This review summarizes current experiences related to PDX generation across participating groups, efforts to develop data standards for annotation and dissemination of patient clinical information that does not compromise patient privacy, efforts to develop complementary data standards for annotation of PDX characteristics and biology, and progress toward "credentialing" of PDX models as surrogates to represent individual patients for use in preclinical and co-clinical translational research. In addition, this review highlights important unresolved questions, as well as current limitations, that have hampered more efficient generation of PDX lines and more rapid adoption of PDX use in translational breast cancer research

On the progenitor of the Type IIb supernova 2016gkg

We present a detection in pre-explosion Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging of a point source consistent with being the progenitor star of the Type IIb supernova (SN IIb) 2016gkg. Post-explosion imaging from the Keck adaptive optics system was used to perform relative astrometry between the Keck and HST imaging. We identify a single point source in the HST images coincident with the SN position to 0.89σ. The HST photometry is consistent with the progenitor star being an A0 Ia star with T = 9500 K and log (L/L⊙) = 5.15. We find that the SN 2016gkg progenitor star appears more consistent with binary than single-star evolutionary models. In addition, early-time light-curve data from SN 2016gkg revealed a rapid rise in luminosity within ~0.4 d of non-detection limits, consistent with models of the cooling phase after shock break-out. We use these data to determine an explosion date of 2016 September 20.15 and progenitor-star radius of log (R/R⊙) = 2.41, which agrees with photometry from the progenitor star. Our findings are also consistent with detections of other SNe IIb progenitor stars, although more luminous and bluer than most other examples

Cost Analysis and Policy Implications of a Pediatric Palliative Care Program.

ContextIn 2010, California launched Partners for Children (PFC), a pediatric palliative care pilot program offering hospice-like services for children eligible for full-scope Medicaid delivered concurrently with curative care, regardless of the child's life expectancy.ObjectivesWe assessed the change from before PFC enrollment to the enrolled period in 1) health care costs per enrollee per month (PEPM), 2) costs by service type and diagnosis category, and 3) health care utilization (days of inpatient care and length of hospital stay).MethodsA pre-post analysis compared enrollees' health care costs and utilization up to 24 months before enrollment with their costs during participation in the pilot, from January 2010 through December 2012. Analyses were conducted using paid Medicaid claims and program enrollment data.ResultsThe average PEPM health care costs of program enrollees decreased by $3331 from before their participation in PFC to the enrolled period, driven by a reduction in inpatient costs of$4897 PEPM. PFC enrollees experienced a nearly 50% reduction in the average number of inpatient days per month, from 4.2 to 2.3. Average length of stay per hospitalization dropped from an average of 16.7 days before enrollment to 6.5 days while in the program.ConclusionThrough the provision of home-based therapeutic services, 24/7 access to medical advice, and enhanced, personally tailored care coordination, PFC demonstrated an effective way to reduce costs for children with life-limiting conditions by moving from costly inpatient care to more coordinated and less expensive outpatient care. PFC's home-based care strategy is a cost-effective model for pediatric palliative care elsewhere