The Validity of Self-Reported Criminal Arrest History Among Clients of a Psychiatric Probation and Parole Service

Self-report data have consistently demonstrated acceptable reliability and validity in prior studies by exhibiting high correlations with other criterion related measures of criminal frequency and arrest history. Mental health factors and substance abuse factors are suspected to affect the quality and accuracy of self-reported data. This analysis sought to examine the impact of major mental illness and substance abuse factors on the validity of self-reported criminal history data as given by clients of a psychiatric probation and parole service. After controlling for socio-demographic variables, the number of officially recorded arrests, high number of lifetime hospitalizations and overall years spent in jail significantly explained the number of self-reported arrests. The predominance of the official record in explaining self-reported arrest history suggests that self-reported arrest history data given by a psychiatric offender population is as valid as that given by general offender populations. Substance abuse factors and mental illness factors did not affect the quality and accuracy of self-reported arrest history

The Limits of Citizenship: Rights of Prisoners and ex-Prisoners in USA

Contrary to popular beliefs and commonly held rhetoric, rights are not naturally given to people/residents/citizens. Very few, if any, rights are inherently granted by virtue of being born a human being. Although the authors of the Bill of Rights (in the USA) as well as the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights want us to believe that these rights are innate, in fact they were fought for and only barely achieved. At any given time, there are counter forces that actively push to minimize and reverse rights that were gained after long and hard struggles. For example, in the United States the “sacred” right for privacy was vastly violated with the signature and support of President George W. Bush soon after the attack of September 11, 2001 was carried out within the boundaries of the country. This is but one example where rights are not guaranteed forever and are only in place so long as there are enough people actively fighting to keep them and, if possible, to expand them. My argument, though my data are mostly US-based, is that the rights of prisoners and ex-prisoners are an excellent measure and estimate for the strength of human rights in a given society. The more punitive and exclusionary are the policies towards prisoners and ex-prisoners, the less protected are the rights of citizens in general. The more a society excludes prisoners and ex-prisoners, the more ready it is to limit the rights of other members of that society. I would welcome a comparative study of this topic to assess which societies treat prisoners and ex-prisoners more humanly and which in a more exclusionary manner

First Observation of the Submillimeter Polarization Spectrum in a Translucent Molecular Cloud

Polarized emission from aligned dust is a crucial tool for studies of magnetism in the ISM, but a troublesome contaminant for studies of cosmic microwave background polarization. In each case, an understanding of the significance of the polarization signal requires well-calibrated physical models of dust grains. Despite decades of progress in theory and observation, polarized dust models remain largely underconstrained. During its 2012 flight, the balloon-borne telescope BLASTPol obtained simultaneous broadband polarimetric maps of a translucent molecular cloud at 250, 350, and 500 μm. Combining these data with polarimetry from the Planck 850 μm band, we have produced a submillimeter polarization spectrum, the first for a cloud of this type. We find the polarization degree to be largely constant across the four bands. This result introduces a new observable with the potential to place strong empirical constraints on ISM dust polarization models in a previously inaccessible density regime. Compared to models by Draine & Fraisse, our result disfavors two of their models for which all polarization arises due only to aligned silicate grains. By creating simple models for polarized emission in a translucent cloud, we verify that extinction within the cloud should have only a small effect on the polarization spectrum shape, compared to the diffuse ISM. Thus, we expect the measured polarization spectrum to be a valid check on diffuse ISM dust models. The general flatness of the observed polarization spectrum suggests a challenge to models where temperature and alignment degree are strongly correlated across major dust components