Prisons and Drugs: A global review of incarceration, drug use and drug services. Report 12

Prisons play an important role in drug policy. They are used to punish people who break drug laws and they also hold a large number of people who have experience of drug use and drug problems. They therefore have an important part to play in attempts to reduce the harm caused by drugs. Imprisonment itself can be seen as one type of harm, as it causes problems for prisoners and their families and creates a large financial burden for taxpayers. Theseharms and costs are difficult to calculate, but there is little evidence that large scale imprisonment of drug offenders has had the desired results in deterring drug use or reducing drug problems (Bewley- Taylor, Trace, & Stevens, 2005). In this paper, we examine the international prevalence of drug users, drug use and related problems in prisons and we report on the problems that are related to the issue of drugs in prison. We go on to examine the international guidelines and effective responses that have been developed in this area in the last decade. The paper is a review of the literature, based on a search of bibliographic databases, including Medline, PubMed, ISI as well as EMBASE and contacts with researchers and practitioners in the field up to January 2007

Flux quanta driven by high-density currents in low-impurity V3Si and LuNi2B2C: free flux flow and flux-core size effect

High density direct currents (DC) are used to drive flux quanta via the Lorentz force towards a highly ordered "free flux flow" (FFF) dynamic state, made possible by the weak-pinning environment of high-quality, single-crystal samples of two low-Tc superconducting compounds, V3Si and LuNi2B2C. We report the effect of the magnetic field-dependent fluxon core size on flux flow resistivity rho_f. Much progress has been made in minimizing the technical challenges associated with the use of high currents. Attainment of a FFF phase is indicated by the saturation at highest currents of flux-flow dissipation levels that are well below the normal state resistance and have field-dependent values. The field dependence of the corresponding rho_f is shown to be consistent with a prediction based on a model for the decrease of flux core size at higher fields in weak-coupling BCS s-wave materials.Comment: More empirical treatment of the magnetoresistive correction of V3Si data by additional measurement and analysis (involving two new coauthors, Favreau and Henderson). End result is the same, making for a stronger manuscrip

The acquisition of Sign Language: The impact of phonetic complexity on phonology

Research into the effect of phonetic complexity on phonological acquisition has a long history in spoken languages. This paper considers the effect of phonetics on phonological development in a signed language. We report on an experiment in which nonword-repetition methodology was adapted so as to examine in a systematic way how phonetic complexity in two phonological parameters of signed languages — handshape and movement — affects the perception and articulation of signs. Ninety-one Deaf children aged 3–11 acquiring British Sign Language (BSL) and 46 hearing nonsigners aged 6–11 repeated a set of 40 nonsense signs. For Deaf children, repetition accuracy improved with age, correlated with wider BSL abilities, and was lowest for signs that were phonetically complex. Repetition accuracy was correlated with fine motor skills for the youngest children. Despite their lower repetition accuracy, the hearing group were similarly affected by phonetic complexity, suggesting that common visual and motoric factors are at play when processing linguistic information in the visuo-gestural modality

Building an Assessment Use Argument for sign language: the BSL Nonsense Sign Repetition Test

In this article, we adapt a concept designed to structure language testing more effectively, the Assessment Use Argument (AUA), as a framework for the development and/or use of sign language assessments for deaf children who are taught in a sign bilingual education setting. By drawing on data from a recent investigation of deaf children's nonsense sign repetition skills in British Sign Language, we demonstrate the steps of implementing the AUA in practical test design, development and use. This approach provides us with a framework which clearly states the competing values and which stakeholders hold these values. As such, it offers a useful foundation for test-designers, as well as for practitioners in sign bilingual education, for the interpretation of test scores and the consequences of their use

Sentence Repetition in Deaf Children with Specific Language Impairment in British Sign Language

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) perform poorly on sentence repetition tasks across different spoken languages, but until now, this methodology has not been investigated in children who have SLI in a signed language. Users of a natural sign language encode different sentence meanings through their choice of signs and by altering the sequence and inflections of these signs. Grammatical information is expressed through movement and configurational changes of the hands and face. The visual modality thus influences how grammatical morphology and syntax are instantiated. How would language impairment impact on the acquisition of these types of linguistic devices in child signers? We investigated sentence repetition skills in a group of 11 deaf children who display SLI in British Sign Language (BSL) and 11 deaf controls with no language impairment who were matched for age and years of BSL exposure. The SLI group was significantly less accurate on an overall accuracy score, and they repeated lexical items, overall sentence meaning, sign order, facial expressions, and verb morphological structures significantly less accurately than controls. This pattern of language deficits is consistent with the characterization of SLI in spoken languages even though expression is in a different modality. We conclude that explanations of SLI, and of poor sentence repetition by children with this disorder, must be able to account for both the spoken and signed modalities

Segmentation of British Sign Language (BSL): Mind the gap!

This study asks how users of British Sign Language (BSL) recognize individual signs in connected sign sequences. We examined whether this is achieved through modality-specific or modality-general segmentation procedures. A modality-specific feature of signed languages is that, during continuous signing, there are salient transitions between sign locations. We used the sign-spotting task to ask if and how BSL signers use these transitions in segmentation. A total of 96 real BSL signs were preceded by nonsense signs which were produced in either the target location or another location (with a small or large transition). Half of the transitions were within the same major body area (e.g., head) and half were across body areas (e.g., chest to hand). Deaf adult BSL users (a group of natives and early learners, and a group of late learners) spotted target signs best when there was a minimal transition and worst when there was a large transition. When location changes were present, both groups performed better when transitions were to a different body area than when they were within the same area. These findings suggest that transitions do not provide explicit sign-boundary cues in a modality-specific fashion. Instead, we argue that smaller transitions help recognition in a modality-general way by limiting lexical search to signs within location neighbourhoods, and that transitions across body areas also aid segmentation in a modality-general way, by providing a phonotactic cue to a sign boundary. We propose that sign segmentation is based on modality-general procedures which are core language-processing mechanisms