Short-Term Rehabilitation and Crim Prevention

Any program designed to reduce the rate of recidivism in the United States must be viewed as a valuable tool of crime prevention. It can be safely said that at least two-thirds of the crimes committed every year are committed by recidivists, for over the past decade approximately fifty to sixty per cent of all offenders have become repeaters. Thus the elimination of the recidivist in our society would result in a minimum reduction of thirty-three per cent in the number of crimes committed over a given period of time. The task of eliminating recidivism has been left to the process of criminal rehabilitation. We have perhaps overemphasized the humanitarian justifications for rehabilitative treatment while ignoring its more practical raison d\u27etre. As a consequence, our penological system has failed to take full advantage of rehabilitative therapy as a technique of crime prevention. Our rehabilitative efforts have been focused on the serious offender, the state or federal penitentiary inmate. These efforts have come too late to help such offenders, as the practical problems of rehabilitation have unduly increased in number and complexity. The offender\u27s psychological problems have strengthened their footholds and asocial habits have become ingrained. To make criminal rehabilitation an effective means of crime prevention we must reach the offender when he is more readily susceptible to rehabilitative therapy and before he has added unnecessarily to our crime rate. The achievement of this goal is the primary concern of this article. It is submitted that the recent accomplishments of our short-term institutions in the area of rehabilitative therapy indicate that more extensive treatment at that level is both justified and necessary in response to the problem of recidivism

Partisan Infighting Among House Republicans: Leaders, Factions, and Networks of Interests

Congressional parties are commonly regarded as highly unified legislative teams, but the Tea Party Caucus has revealed factional divisions with the Republican Party. Using annual ratings from 290 interest groups, we estimate the ideological locations of Republican legislators to map their party’s factional structure. We project a bipartite network of annual scores to relate interest groups by the similarity of their ratings and legislators by the similarity in which they have been rated. Cluster analysis identifies factions of moderate and extreme Republicans. Further investigation shows that Republican leaders withhold legislative rewards from both subgroups, but that moderates are denied disproportionately

Fox in the Henhouse: The Delegation of Regulatory and Privacy Enforcement to Big Tech

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has ordered tech giants to police the app developers that use their platforms, requiring them to remove apps that employ deceitful sales tactics or violate consumer privacy. Tech giants have often resisted FTC orders to police the companies on their platforms because policing takes significant resources and diminishes profits. But some firms, after paying modest fines for neglecting enforcement, have eventually complied with FTC demands, removing predatory apps and banning problematic developers. Other firms have continued to shirk enforcement obligations at the risk of escalating fines. What accounts for the differences? Using process tracing to track decisions by Apple and Facebook, we find that tech giants willingly police consumer fraud but not consumer privacy violations. Failures to police fraud leads to public complaints and negative press attention, while failures to police data breaches often go undetected by consumers, the media, and thus the FTC

Smoke-free legislation and hospitalizations for childhood asthma

<b>BACKGROUND:</b> Previous studies have shown that after the adoption of comprehensive smoke-free legislation, there is a reduction in respiratory symptoms among workers in bars. However, it is not known whether respiratory disease is also reduced among people who do not have occupational exposure to environmental tobacco smoke. The aim of our study was to determine whether the ban on smoking in public places in Scotland, which was initiated in March 2006, influenced the rate of hospital admissions for childhood asthma.<br></br> <b>METHODS:</b> Routine hospital administrative data were used to identify all hospital admissions for asthma in Scotland from January 2000 through October 2009 among children younger than 15 years of age. A negative binomial regression model was fitted, with adjustment for age group, sex, quintile of socioeconomic status, urban or rural residence, month, and year. Tests for interactions were also performed. <br></br> <b>RESULTS:</b> Before the legislation was implemented, admissions for asthma were increasing at a mean rate of 5.2% per year (95% confidence interval [CI], 3.9 to 6.6). After implementation of the legislation, there was a mean reduction in the rate of admissions of 18.2% per year relative to the rate on March 26, 2006 (95% CI, 14.7 to 21.8; P<0.001). The reduction was apparent among both preschool and school-age children. There were no significant interactions between hospital admissions for asthma and age group, sex, urban or rural residence, region, or quintile of socioeconomic status. <b>CONCLUSIONS:</b> In Scotland, passage of smoke-free legislation in 2006 was associated with a subsequent reduction in the rate of respiratory disease in populations other than those with occupational exposure to environmental tobacco smoke. (Funded by NHS Health Scotland.

Corporate Governance and Firm Performance: Analyzing the Social Capital of Corporate Insiders

This dissertation is concerned with how the social capital of corporate insiders is associated with the governance and performance of publicly listed small and medium- sized enterprises (SMEs) in Canada. The premise of social capital theory is that relationships matter and that network structures have implications for outcomes. Encouraging SME growth and performance is an important part of economic policy. In Canada, going public is one way innovative SMEs can access capital for growth. This research considers the network of relationships between directors, owners and senior officers in a public corporation – i.e. the social capital of corporate insiders – to better understand corporate governance. Family-run firms, large corporate ownership and professional relationships between directors have been the subject of numerous corporate governance studies. They can also be considered networks. In this research, I assume that these various networks act to unite corporate insiders into coalitions with similar interests. I consider the implications of social capital on firm performance in terms of effective control, director independence, CEO ownership, and family control of the firm. The hypotheses, generated from the theory of internal social capital of the firm, are tested using fixed and random effects regression models on a panel of Canadian industrial SMEs that had an initial public offering between 2000 and 2010. SME performance is measured by Tobin’s Q. I find support for the idea that the structure of social capital within the firm is related to corporate governance and associated with performance. My results indicate that having multiple coalitions in the firm, as well as more independent directors, are both positively associated with performance. There are also indirect effects related to the social capital of the firm. After controlling for the structure of social capital in the firm, CEO ownership is found to have no association with firm performance, except in a few cases where the CEO owns in excess of 40 percent of the firm. Once these cases are omitted from the sample there does not appear to be a significant relationship between CEO ownership and performance. These few cases suggest the role of CEO may be important to performance outcomes in highly controlled firms. Further case-study research into this finding may be merited. Finally, I find no evidence that family-run firms have valuations that differ from other firms. The theory of internal social capital of a firm contributes to the corporate gov- ernance literature by considering how the network of relationships within the firm affects outcomes. There are also useful methodological contributions from this re- search. Theoretically grounded network measures determine: (i) a scale of effective control of a firm when there are multiple coalitions of owners, and (ii) a way to iden- tify truly independent directors. Entrepreneurs, directors and managers will find this research useful because it outlines how the structure of relationships within an SME is associated with firm valuation

Genome‐wide association mapping of Hagberg falling number, protein content, test weight and grain yield in UK wheat

Association mapping using crop cultivars allows identification of genetic loci of direct relevance to breeding. Here, 150 U.K. wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) cultivars genotyped with 23,288 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were used for genome‐wide association studies (GWAS) using historical phenotypic data for grain protein content, Hagberg falling number (HFN), test weight, and grain yield. Power calculations indicated experimental design would enable detection of quantitative trait loci (QTL) explaining ≥20% of the variation (PVE) at a relatively high power of >80%, falling to 40% for detection of a SNP with an R(2) ≥ .5 with the same QTL. Genome‐wide association studies identified marker‐trait associations for all four traits. For HFN (h (2 )= .89), six QTL were identified, including a major locus on chromosome 7B explaining 49% PVE and reducing HFN by 44 s. For protein content (h (2 )= 0.86), 10 QTL were found on chromosomes 1A, 2A, 2B, 3A, 3B, and 6B, together explaining 48.9% PVE. For test weight, five QTL were identified (one on 1B and four on 3B; 26.3% PVE). Finally, 14 loci were identified for grain yield (h (2 )= 0.95) on eight chromosomes (1A, 2A, 2B, 2D, 3A, 5B, 6A, 6B; 68.1% PVE), of which five were located within 16 Mbp of genetic regions previously identified as under breeder selection in European wheat. Our study demonstrates the utility of exploiting historical crop datasets, identifying genomic targets for independent validation, and ultimately for wheat genetic improvement

Alzheimer disease genetic risk factor APOE e4, and cognitive abilities in 111,739 UK Biobank participants

Background: the apolipoprotein (APOE) e4 locus is a genetic risk factor for dementia. Carriers of the e4 allele may be more vulnerable to conditions that are independent risk factors for cognitive decline, such as cardiometabolic diseases. Objective: we tested whether any association with APOE e4 status on cognitive ability was larger in older ages or in those with cardiometabolic diseases. Subjects: UK Biobank includes over 500,000 middle- and older aged adults who have undergone detailed medical and cognitive phenotypic assessment. Around 150,000 currently have genetic data. We examined 111,739 participants with complete genetic and cognitive data. Methods: baseline cognitive data relating to information processing speed, memory and reasoning were used. We tested for interactions with age and with the presence versus absence of type 2 diabetes (T2D), coronary artery disease (CAD) and hypertension. Results: in several instances, APOE e4 dosage interacted with older age and disease presence to affect cognitive scores. When adjusted for potentially confounding variables, there was no APOE e4 effect on the outcome variables. Conclusions: future research in large independent cohorts should continue to investigate this important question, which has potential implications for aetiology related to dementia and cognitive impairment