How Many Americans Are Unnecessarily Incarcerated?

While mass incarceration has emerged as an urgent national issue to be addressed, the reforms currently offered are dwarfed by the scale of the problem. The country needs bolder solutions.How can we significantly cut the prison population while still keeping the country safe? This report puts forth one answer to that question. Our path forward is not offered as the only answer or as an absolute. Rather, it is meant to provide a starting point for a broader discussion about how the country can rethink and revamp the outdated sentencing edifice of the last four decades. This report is the product of three years of research conducted by one of the nation's leading criminologists, experienced criminal justice lawyers, and statistical researchers. First, we conducted an in-depth examination of the federal and state criminal codes, as well as the convictions and sentences of the nationwide prison population (1.46 million prisoners serving time for 370 different crime categories) to estimate how many people are currently incarcerated without a sufficient public safety rationale. We find that alternatives to incarceration are more effective and just penalties for many lower-level crimes. We also find that prison sentences can safely be shortened for a discrete set of more serious crimes. Second, based on these findings, we propose a new, alternative framework for sentencing grounded in the science of public safety and rehabilitation.Many have argued that regimented sentencing laws should be eliminated and replaced with broad judicial discretion. Others counter that this would reinstate a system wherein judges are free to deliver vastly divergent sentences for the same crime, potentially exacerbating racial disparities and perpetuating the tradition of harsh sentences.This report proposes a new solution, building on these past proposals. We advocate that today's sentencing laws should change to provide default sentences that are proportional to the specific crime committed and in line with social science research, instead of based on conjecture. These defaults should mandate sentences of alternatives to incarceration for lower-level crimes. For some other crimes that warrant incarceration, they should mandate shorter sentences. Judges should have discretion to depart from these defaults in special circumstances, such as a defendant's criminal history, mental health or addiction issues, or specifics of the crime committed. This approach is grounded in the premise that the first principle of 21st century sentencing should be to protect public safety, and that sentences should levy the most effective, proportional, and cost-efficient sanction to achieve that goal. It aims to create more uniform sentences and reduce disparities, while preserving judicial discretion when needed. Our proposed sentencing defaults for each crime weigh four factors:Seriousness: Murder, for instance, should be treated as a far graver crime than writing a bad check.Victim Impact: If a person has been harmed in the commission of a crime, especially physically, weight toward a more serious sentence.Intent: If the actor knowingly and deliberately violated the law, a more severe sanction may be appropriate.Recidivism: Those more likely to reoffend may need more intervention. Our findings and recommendations, determined by applying the four factors above to the prison population, are detailed below. (The rationale for these factors and our full methodology is described in Appendix A.

Impact of America\u27s Choice on Student Performance in Duval County, Florida

This study, conducted by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE), reports on the impact of the America\u27s Choice school design on student standardized test performance in Duval County, Florida. We present the results of the first two years of the impact of America\u27s Choice in Duval County in elementary and middle schools in writing, reading, and mathematics using test data from 1999-2001. To detect the effects of America\u27s Choice on student learning, we compared the gains in performance of students in America\u27s Choice schools to those of students in other schools in the district. We employed two statistical techniques in order to make the comparisons as fair as possible. First, we controlled for a variety of student and school demographic characteristics, including prior student achievement, in order to isolate the influences of America\u27s Choice on student learning during a one-to-two year period. Second, we used a statistical method called multi-level modeling that allowed us to appropriately model the fact that students are nested within schools and to take into account the fact that we were looking for the effect of a school-level reform effort using individual-level student data

The distribution and effect of non-native earthworms on soil structure in northern Michigan

General EcologyUnderstanding the change in abundance of exotic earthworms and their effect on soil structure is crucial in assessing their influence on different microhabitats. Studies comparing the effect of earthworm species on environments in northern Michigan remain limited. To address this, we conducted experiments in plots of different soil compositions to survey the abundance and distribution of earthworms. Four earthworm species have been found in present-day microhabitats of northern Michigan: Lumbricus rubellus, Lumbricus terrestris, Dendrobaena octaedra and Aporrectodea spp. We found that there were significantly more earthworms in nutrient rich soils than in sandy soil environments. In addition, a thick O-A horizon mixture correlated with greater earthworm abundance. This study will allow for greater understanding of the influence and abundance of non-native earthworms in different microhabitats.https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143547/1/Callaghan_Mitchinson_Ruiz_Whitcher_2017.PD

The Impact of America\u27s Choice on Student Performance in Duval County, Florida

The America\u27s Choice School Design is a K-12 comprehensive school reform model designed by the National Center on Education and the Economy. America\u27s Choice focuses on raising academic achievement by providing a rigorous standards-based curriculum and safety net for all students. The goal of America\u27s Choice is to make sure that all but the most severely handicapped students reach an internationally benchmarked standard of achievement in English/language arts and mathematics by the time that they graduate

We may have read - but the reality!' Narrating Baptist missions in Bengal, 1800-1855.

This project examines the ways in which missionary periodicals served as a vehicle for ideas about India in the first half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on Baptist missions in Bengal, it traces the parallel themes of 'the family' and 'the heathen' in published missionaries' accounts and explores how they served pragmatic and rhetorical functions throughout the period. By reconstructing these narratives and following these themes over time, we can get a better sense of the role they played in developing the connections between missionaries and converts, metropole and periphery. Beginning with the establishment of the Serampore mission in 1800, 1 utilize the parallel stories of the 'Serampore mission family' and two families of converts to show how these concepts underpinned the structure and organization of the mission and were incorporated into the missionaries' narratives. As the years progressed, these themes-often closely interrelated-assumed more rhetorical value as missionaries became more conscious of the role of their own narratives in generating support among their home audiences, especially women and children. From Serampore 1 broaden the perspective from individuals to communities. With the establishment of 'Christian villages' for converts and the development of what I call 'spotlight' mission stations, many missionaries became keenly aware of the central role of their narratives in the maintenance and extension of missions. From communities 1 shift to institutions, examining the increasingly rhetorical nature of these themes in connection with the Baptists' schools in Calcutta. The study ends with the 1855 conference of Baptist missionaries in Bengal, which represented a turning point in both management and narration as both became more centralized, and as these themes had fully evolved from structural to rhetorical

119— The Role of Post-Encoding Retrieval on Cognitive and Neural Representations of Spatial Environments

Spatial memory is an important ability for navigating around one’s surrounding environment. However, due to the challenges of developing experimental paradigms that utilize large scale, real-world environments, little research has analyzed, in detail, the development of cognitive maps over time. Past research in rodents has shown that hippocampal place-cells replay during periods of quiet wakefulness, suggesting that mental replay of recent spatial experiences is tied to the development of cognitive maps. In humans, we hypothesize that the development of cognitive maps could therefore be manipulated by having participants selectively recall recent navigational experiences. We analyzed the development of cognitive maps for novel, real-world spatial environments in two groups, a spatial sequencing group (SSG) and rote-retrieval group (RRG), over a period of 2 weeks using Google Street View software. After navigating through the environment, participants’ spatial memories were tested with either rote retrieval or spatial sequencing recognition tests. Our preliminary results suggest the RRG was more successful navigating previously learned routes than the SSG with more practice on the trained routes, whereas the SSG may have developed some ability to discover shortcuts by being encouraged to think more broadly about the routes they were learning, and not rely on memorization

Does fall risk education tailored by motivation increase fall risk identification and fall prevention behaviors in community-dwelling older adults when compared to fall risk education tailored by authenticity?

To determine whether multimedia fall prevention education using different instructional strategies increases older adults’ ability to identify fall risks and implement fall prevention behaviors into their daily activities

Screening large-scale association study data: exploiting interactions using random forests

BACKGROUND: Genome-wide association studies for complex diseases will produce genotypes on hundreds of thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). A logical first approach to dealing with massive numbers of SNPs is to use some test to screen the SNPs, retaining only those that meet some criterion for futher study. For example, SNPs can be ranked by p-value, and those with the lowest p-values retained. When SNPs have large interaction effects but small marginal effects in a population, they are unlikely to be retained when univariate tests are used for screening. However, model-based screens that pre-specify interactions are impractical for data sets with thousands of SNPs. Random forest analysis is an alternative method that produces a single measure of importance for each predictor variable that takes into account interactions among variables without requiring model specification. Interactions increase the importance for the individual interacting variables, making them more likely to be given high importance relative to other variables. We test the performance of random forests as a screening procedure to identify small numbers of risk-associated SNPs from among large numbers of unassociated SNPs using complex disease models with up to 32 loci, incorporating both genetic heterogeneity and multi-locus interaction. RESULTS: Keeping other factors constant, if risk SNPs interact, the random forest importance measure significantly outperforms the Fisher Exact test as a screening tool. As the number of interacting SNPs increases, the improvement in performance of random forest analysis relative to Fisher Exact test for screening also increases. Random forests perform similarly to the univariate Fisher Exact test as a screening tool when SNPs in the analysis do not interact. CONCLUSIONS: In the context of large-scale genetic association studies where unknown interactions exist among true risk-associated SNPs or SNPs and environmental covariates, screening SNPs using random forest analyses can significantly reduce the number of SNPs that need to be retained for further study compared to standard univariate screening methods

Multidirectional hopping exercise improved balance and ankle plantarflexion strength in community-dwelling older men [Abstract]

Multidirectional hopping exercise improved balance and ankle plantarflexion strength in community-dwelling older men [Abstract