‘Initiation into drug use’ addendum: findings from the DUMA program

The age at which an individual first experiments with illicit drugs has been of significant interest to policymakers and practitioners, primarily because research has persistently shown a link between early juvenile onset of drug use and less favourable health and criminal justice outcomes in adulthood.   drug users who have regular contact with the criminal justice system typically commenced their drug use at earlier ages (Gaffney et al. 2010; Johnson 2001);  even within the drug-using offender population, those with a recent history of violent or prolific property offending typically commenced drug use and progressed to regular drug use earlier than those with no such history (Makkai & Payne 2003); and  the risk that an offender will progress to serious and frequent offending was highest when both drug use and offending first began at younger than average ages (Payne 2006).    Although there is broad agreement that early initiation into drug use and subsequent involvement in the criminal justice system are correlated, there still remains considerable debate regarding the direction of causality. Some suggest that early drug use can act as a gateway or ‘stepping stone’ to more significant drug use and other problem behaviours (Kandel, Yamaguchi & Chen 1992), while others argue that drug use does not cause criminal behaviour, but rather, there is a shared or common aetiology, such as low self control or high impulsivity (Gottfredson & Hirschi 1990)

Youth justice in Australia 2012-13

This report presents information on young people under youth justice supervision, both in the community and in detention, during 2012–13. It explores the characteristics of their supervision and recent trends. Data are reported for all states and territories except WA and the NT. National totals include estimates for all jurisdictions where possible. Around 6,300 young people under youth justice supervision on an average day On an average day in 2012–13 in Australia, there were around 6,300 young people aged 10 and older under youth justice supervision due to their involvement, or alleged involvement, in crime. This equates to a rate of 23.8 per 10,000, or about 1 in 420 young persons aged 10–17. A total of 12,880 young people were under supervison at some time during the year

Pathways through youth justice supervision: further analyses

The youth justice system manages children and young people who have committed, or allegedly committed, an offence. In Australia, youth justice is the responsibility of the states and territories, and each has its own legislation, policies and practices. However, the general processes by which young people are charged and sentenced, and the types of legal orders available to the courts, are similar. In Australia, young people can be charged with a criminal offence if they are aged 10 or older. The upper age limit for treatment as a young person under the law is 17 in all states and territories except Queensland, where the limit is 16. However, some young people aged 18 or older are also involved in the youth justice system (see ‘Technical notes’). A young person first enters the youth justice system when they are investigated by police for allegedly committing a crime. Legal action taken by police might include court actions (the laying of charges to be answered in court) and non-court actions (such as cautions, conferencing, or infringement notices). If the matter proceeds to court and the charge is proven, the court may hand down any of a number of orders, either supervised or unsupervised. This report looks at the complete youth justice supervision history of 24,102 young people in Australia, who experienced supervision, both in the community and in detention, between 1 July 2000 and 30 June 2014 when they were aged 10–17. More than one-third (37%) of young people experienced the most common pathway of sentenced community-based supervision only. Young people spent a median of 303 days (about 10 months) under supervision in total, and completed a median of 2 periods of supervision. About 11% of young people had a pathway that was considered ‘extensive’, and these young people accounted for about one-third (32%) of the total days of supervision and nearly half (45%) of all supervision periods

Counting the costs of crime in Australia: a 2011 estimate

This report estimates the costs of crime for the calendar year 2011. Executive summary This report seeks to estimate how much crime costs the Australian economy by calculating the number of crimes that come to the attention of the authorities and, using crime victimisation survey data, the number of crimes that are not recorded officially. A dollar figure is then calculated for each estimated crime event and an indication given of the total cost of each specific crime type in terms of actual loss, intangible losses, loss of output caused through the criminal conduct and other related costs such as medical expenses, where relevant. Added to these costs are the costs of preventing and responding to crime in the community including the costs of maintaining the criminal justice system agencies of police, prosecution, courts and correctional agencies, as well as a proportion of the costs of Australian and state and territory government agencies that have crime-related functions. Finally, a deduction is made for the value of property recovered in the case of property crime, as well as the amount of funds recovered from criminals under federal, state and territory proceeds of crime legislation. More detailed information about how each of these estimates was derived is provided in the main body of the report. Official attention paid to specific crime types, particularly drug-related crime and organised crime, affects both the reporting rate and also the cost of policing and correctional responses. In this sense, individual crime type costs and prevention and response costs are not mutually exclusive. Arguably, as individual crime types attract more attention, reporting rates increase and prevention and control of the crimes in question are seen as being deserving of increased resource

Strategies for the successful implementation of disinfecting port protectors to reduce CLABSI in a large tertiary care teaching hospital

Disinfecting port protectors are a supplement to the central line–associated bloodstream infection prevention bundle as an optional recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Despite evidence of effectiveness, few centers have successfully reported systematic, sustained implementation of these devices. In this article, we discuss a successful implementation in a large tertiary care teaching hospital, using an evidence-based, multidisciplinary approach

POTs: Protective Optimization Technologies

Algorithmic fairness aims to address the economic, moral, social, and political impact that digital systems have on populations through solutions that can be applied by service providers. Fairness frameworks do so, in part, by mapping these problems to a narrow definition and assuming the service providers can be trusted to deploy countermeasures. Not surprisingly, these decisions limit fairness frameworks' ability to capture a variety of harms caused by systems. We characterize fairness limitations using concepts from requirements engineering and from social sciences. We show that the focus on algorithms' inputs and outputs misses harms that arise from systems interacting with the world; that the focus on bias and discrimination omits broader harms on populations and their environments; and that relying on service providers excludes scenarios where they are not cooperative or intentionally adversarial. We propose Protective Optimization Technologies (POTs). POTs provide means for affected parties to address the negative impacts of systems in the environment, expanding avenues for political contestation. POTs intervene from outside the system, do not require service providers to cooperate, and can serve to correct, shift, or expose harms that systems impose on populations and their environments. We illustrate the potential and limitations of POTs in two case studies: countering road congestion caused by traffic-beating applications, and recalibrating credit scoring for loan applicants.Comment: Appears in Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT* 2020). Bogdan Kulynych and Rebekah Overdorf contributed equally to this work. Version v1/v2 by Seda G\"urses, Rebekah Overdorf, and Ero Balsa was presented at HotPETS 2018 and at PiMLAI 201

LSST Science Book, Version 2.0

A survey that can cover the sky in optical bands over wide fields to faint magnitudes with a fast cadence will enable many of the exciting science opportunities of the next decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will have an effective aperture of 6.7 meters and an imaging camera with field of view of 9.6 deg^2, and will be devoted to a ten-year imaging survey over 20,000 deg^2 south of +15 deg. Each pointing will be imaged 2000 times with fifteen second exposures in six broad bands from 0.35 to 1.1 microns, to a total point-source depth of r~27.5. The LSST Science Book describes the basic parameters of the LSST hardware, software, and observing plans. The book discusses educational and outreach opportunities, then goes on to describe a broad range of science that LSST will revolutionize: mapping the inner and outer Solar System, stellar populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, the structure of the Milky Way disk and halo and other objects in the Local Volume, transient and variable objects both at low and high redshift, and the properties of normal and active galaxies at low and high redshift. It then turns to far-field cosmological topics, exploring properties of supernovae to z~1, strong and weak lensing, the large-scale distribution of galaxies and baryon oscillations, and how these different probes may be combined to constrain cosmological models and the physics of dark energy.Comment: 596 pages. Also available at full resolution at http://www.lsst.org/lsst/sciboo

LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie

Intended Consequences Statement in Conservation Science and Practice

As the biodiversity crisis accelerates, the stakes are higher for threatened plants and animals. Rebuilding the health of our planet will require addressing underlying threats at many scales, including habitat loss and climate change. Conservation interventions such as habitat protection, management, restoration, predator control, trans location, genetic rescue, and biological control have the potential to help threatened or endangered species avert extinction. These existing, well-tested methods can be complemented and augmented by more frequent and faster adoption of new technologies, such as powerful new genetic tools. In addition, synthetic biology might offer solutions to currently intractable conservation problems. We believe that conservation needs to be bold and clear-eyed in this moment of great urgency