Comment and analysis: The crisis of criminal justice in South Africa

In 2017, I delivered a lecture at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) aimed at confronting a controversial and often overlooked crisis in the criminal justice system – the minimum sentencing regime. While writing that lecture, which forms the basis of this article, I originally entitled it ‘Crisis? What Crisis? Why Criminal Justice is Failing All in South Africa’. Shortly after that, the tragedy of Uyinene Mrwetyana’s death hit South Africa. The anguish of a vulnerable woman at the very University where the lecture was to be delivered having her life brutally ended, in unspeakably nightmarish moments, by the exertion over her of ghastly destructive male dominance, shocked us all to the core. It elicited a national outpouring of grief and rage – and, rightfully, a new demand for answers from our criminal justice system. A whimsical title no longer seemed appropriate. Things are too deadly – deathly – serious

The crisis of criminal justice in South Africa

This article builds on two lectures (delivered in 2017 and 2019 at the University of the Western Cape and the University of Cape Town respectively) that addressed a a controversial and often overlooked crisis in the criminal justice system – the minimum sentencing regime.  The paper argues that minimum sentences are no response at all to curbing crime in South Africa and to making our people safe. The minimum sentencing regime is a misdirected, hugely costly and above all ineffective way of punishing criminals and dealing with crime. It has been an extravagant mistake of science, understanding, and policy and social response. The article summarises some of the arguments and considers why we are still stuck with minimum sentences when they are demonstrably useless and counterproductive. The author argues that the reasons lie in our broken history, in incoherent decision-making in our present political leadership, institutional incompetence, and the fact that minimum sentences themselves, through their false promise, divert us from finding more efficient solutions.   &nbsp

Community hospitals – the place of local service provision in a modernising NHS: an integrative thematic literature review

Background: Recent developments within the United Kingdom's (UK) health care system have reawakened interest in community hospitals (CHs) and their role in the provision of health care. This integrative literature review sought to identify and assess the current evidence base for CHs. Methods: A range of electronic reference databases were searched from January 1984 to either December 2004 or February 2005: Medline, Embase, Web of Knowledge, BNI, CINAHL, HMIC, ASSIA, PsychInfo, SIGLE, Dissertation Abstracts, Cochrane Library, Kings Fund website, using both keywords and text words. Thematic analysis identified recurrent themes across the literature; narrative analyses were written for each theme, identifying unifying concepts and discrepant issues. Results: The search strategy identified over 16,000 international references. We included papers of any study design focussing on hospitals in which care was led principally by general practitioners or nurses. Papers from developing countries were excluded. A review of titles revealed 641 potentially relevant references; abstract appraisal identified 161 references for review. During data extraction, a further 48 papers were excluded, leaving 113 papers in the final review. The most common methodological approaches were cross-sectional/descriptive studies, commentaries and expert opinion. There were few experimental studies, systematic reviews, economic studies or studies that reported on longer-term outcomes. The key themes identified were origin and location of CHs; their place in the continuum of care; services provided; effectiveness, efficiency and equity of CHs; and views of patients and staff. In general, there was a lack of robust evidence for the role of CHs, which is partly due to the ad hoc nature of their development and lack of clear strategic vision for their future. Evidence for the effectiveness and efficiency of the services provided was limited. Most people admitted to CHs appeared to be older, suggesting that admittance to CHs was age-related rather than condition-related. Conclusion: Overall the literature surveyed was long on opinion and short of robust studies on CHs. While lack of evidence on CHs does not imply lack of effect, there is an urgent need to develop a research agenda that addresses the key issues of health care delivery in the CH setting

Policies for replacing long-term indwelling urinary catheters in adults

We would also like to thank the foll owing Cochrane Incontinence editorial base staff members for their help and support with this re-view: Cathryn Glazener, Sheila Wallace, Mandy Fader, Peter Her-bison and Suzanne Macdonald. The review authors are grateful to Toby Lasseron for his advice. The review authors are thankful to Dr Beverly Priefer for responding to our query about Priefer 1982. Policies for replacing long‐term indwelling urinary catheters in adults, Protocol, Fergus PM Cooper, Cameron Edwin Alexander, Sanjay Sinha, Muhammad Imran Omar; https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD011115; 14 May 2014Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Hydraulic separation

Before beginning a discussion of the various experiments performed with the hydraulic separators in the Laboratory of the S. of M., a brief statement as to the principle upon which their working depends, and their functions in the dressing of ores should be given. The crude ore when first delivered from the mine is usually not of sufficient richness to be economically handled by the smelters; it therefore becomes necessary to eliminate as far as possible that part of the ore which is of no material value, and among the various forms of apparatus now in use for this purpose the hydraulic separator plays a very important part. When ores are concentrated by any means whatsoever there are always two chief factors that enter into the problem, viz: specific gravity and the relative size of the particles --page 1

Uniformity in association schemes and coherent configurations: cometric Q-antipodal schemes and linked systems

Inspired by some intriguing examples, we study uniform association schemes and uniform coherent configurations, including cometric Q-antipodal association schemes. After a review of imprimitivity, we show that an imprimitive association scheme is uniform if and only if it is dismantlable, and we cast these schemes in the broader context of certain --- uniform --- coherent configurations. We also give a third characterization of uniform schemes in terms of the Krein parameters, and derive information on the primitive idempotents of such a scheme. In the second half of the paper, we apply these results to cometric association schemes. We show that each such scheme is uniform if and only if it is Q-antipodal, and derive results on the parameters of the subschemes and dismantled schemes of cometric Q-antipodal schemes. We revisit the correspondence between uniform indecomposable three-class schemes and linked systems of symmetric designs, and show that these are cometric Q-antipodal. We obtain a characterization of cometric Q-antipodal four-class schemes in terms of only a few parameters, and show that any strongly regular graph with a ("non-exceptional") strongly regular decomposition gives rise to such a scheme. Hemisystems in generalized quadrangles provide interesting examples of such decompositions. We finish with a short discussion of five-class schemes as well as a list of all feasible parameter sets for cometric Q-antipodal four-class schemes with at most six fibres and fibre size at most 2000, and describe the known examples. Most of these examples are related to groups, codes, and geometries.Comment: 42 pages, 1 figure, 1 table. Published version, minor revisions, April 201

Western Australian readings

When Churchlands College of Advanced Education opened in February, 1972 the first students undertook a short course in West Australian history, with particular emphasis on discovery, settlement and the gold boom of the 1890\u27s. The course has gradually expanded and Western Australian Readings is an attempt to compile a limited collection of source material to which students can refer