The Rabble in the Suburbs: An Examination of Jail Reentry in a Non-Metropolitan County

The rabble was a term first used by Irwin (1985) to describe the detached individuals that are incarcerated in America’s jails. These individuals are not overly violent or malicious, rather these are the people that the rest of society would rather not have on their streets. Irwin’s (1985) work was completed in San Francisco in the late 1970s and early 1980s. However, since then there has been very little replication of his work. This study examines a more contemporary jail population to see if Irwin’s analysis is still relevant. Moreover, this study examines a jail population in a non-urban area. Much of the reentry literature has examined individuals returning from prison in urban areas. While the research indicates that the majority of individuals return to urban areas, a fair number of individuals are never arrested or incarcerated in urban areas. Thus, it is important to better understand how recidivism from jail operates in a non-urban area. This study takes a mixed-methods approach in uncovering how this kind of recidivism operates as well as who is incarcerated in a non-urban jail. The quantitative portion of this study examined data from the Pretrial Services Screening Report (PSSR) , which provides information on the barriers to reentry (mental and physical health issues, alcohol and substance abuse, education, housing, veteran status) and factors that are associated with desistance from crime (marriage, employment, parenthood). By combining both desistance factors and barriers to reentry, this study helps us better understand why individuals recidivate as well as how they avoid further involvement with the criminal justice system. Also, within the quantitative portion, will be a replication of Irwin’s (1985) typology. However, this typology was constructed using hierarchical cluster analysis, instead of interviews with incarcerated individuals. For the qualitative portion, the grounded theory methodology was used to construct a theoretical framework for understanding jail reentry in a non-urban area. This analysis was conducted by interviewing the security and administrative staff (correctional officers, command staff, case managers, and jail screeners) at the Waukesha County Jail. Much of the reentry literature has interviewed inmates in understanding their reentry experience. While this is valuable information, the decision to interview correctional staff was made because of their experiences with individuals incarcerated at their facility, specifically the individuals who have cycled in and out of the jail. Interview participants were asked questions surrounding what kinds of offenders are in jail, the issues these individuals face, and why they come back. With these two approaches, the results were used to triangulate the answers to the major research questions – who is in a non-urban jail and why they come back? Results suggest that young, male individuals, with a prior record, and whose initial charge was a property offense were most likely to reoffend. However, the reasons for recidivism differ by location. It is clear that individuals in urban and non-urban areas differ in terms of barriers to reentry and desistance factors. This study also highlights why using a mixed methods study allows the researcher to develop more detailed conclusions and a deeper understanding of the problem at hand. The combination of descriptive statistics, logistic regression, cluster analysis, and in-depth interviews allowed the researcher to better understand not only who was in jail but why some individuals come back. Irwin’s (1985) analysis revealed that the jail is a warehouse for San Francisco’s underclass. The primary goal of this study was to examine if jails in the suburbs are housing the underclass and how recidivism operates for this offender population. Essentially, this study was looking for (and found) the rabble in the suburbs

Processes of local alcohol policy-making in England: Does the theory of policy transfer provide useful insights into public health decision-making?

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Recent years have seen a rise in new and innovative policies to reduce alcohol consumption and related harm in England, which can be implemented by local, as opposed to national, policy-makers. The aim of this paper is to explore the processes that underpin the adoption of these alcohol policies within local authorities. In particular, it aims to assess whether the concept of policy transfer (i.e. a process through which knowledge about policies in one place is used in the development of policies in another time or place) provides a useful model for understanding local alcohol policy-making. METHODS: Qualitative data generated through in-depth interviews and focus groups from five case study sites across England were used to explore stakeholder experiences of alcohol policy transfer between local authorities. The purposive sample of policy actors included representatives from the police, trading standards, public health, licensing, and commissioning. Thematic analysis was used inductively to identify key features in the data. RESULTS: Themes from the policy transfer literature identified in the data were: policy copying, emulating, hybridization, and inspiration. Participants described a multitude of ways in which learning was shared between places, ranging from formal academic evaluation to opportunistic conversations in informal settings. Participants also described facilitators and constraints to policy transfer, such as the historical policy context and the local cultural, economic, and bureaucratic context, which influenced whether or not a policy that was perceived to work in one place might be transferred successfully to another context. CONCLUSIONS: Theories of policy transfer provide a promising framework for characterising processes of local alcohol policy-making in England, extending beyond debates regarding evidence-informed policy to account for a much wider range of considerations. Applying a policy transfer lens enables us to move beyond simple (but still important) questions of what is supported by 'robust' research evidence by paying greater attention to how policy making is carried out in practice and the multiple methods by which policies diffuse across jurisdictions

Genetic association study of childhood aggression across raters, instruments, and age

Childhood aggressive behavior (AGG) has a substantial heritability of around 50%. Here we present a genome-wide association metaanalysis (GWAMA) of childhood AGG, in which all phenotype measures across childhood ages from multiple assessors were included. We analyzed phenotype assessments for a total of 328 935 observations from 87 485 children aged between 1.5 and 18 years, while accounting for sample overlap. We also meta-analyzed within subsets of the data, i.e., within rater, instrument and age. SNP-heritability for the overall meta-analysis AGGoverall was 3.31% (SE= 0.0038). We found no genome-wide significant SNPs for AGGoverall. The gene-based analysis returned three significant genes: ST3GAL3 (P= 1.6E-06), PCDH7 (P= 2.0E-06), and IPO13 (P= 2.5E-06). All three genes have previously been associated with educational traits. Polygenic scores based on our GWAMA significantly predicted aggression in a holdout sample of children (variance explained = 0.44%) and in retrospectively assessed childhood aggression (variance explained = 0.20%). Genetic correlations rg among rater-specific assessment of AGG ranged from rg= 0.46 between self- and teacher-assessment to rg= 0.81 between mother- and teacher-assessment. We obtained moderate-to-strong rgs with selected phenotypes from multiple domains, but hardly with any of the classical biomarkers thought to be associated with AGG. Significant genetic correlations were observed with most psychiatric and psychological traits (range |rg|: 0.19-1.00), except for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Aggression had a negative genetic correlation (rg=∼-0.5) with cognitive traits and age at first birth. Aggression was strongly genetically correlated with smoking phenotypes (range |rg| : 0.46-0.60). The genetic correlations between aggression and psychiatric disorders were weaker for teacher-reported AGG than for mother- and self-reported AGG. The current GWAMA of childhood aggression provides a powerful tool to interrogate the rater-specific genetic etiology of AGG.</p

Helping Others as a Response to Reconcile a Criminal Past:The Role of the Wounded Healer in Prisoner Reentry Programs

Anecdotal evidence suggests that many of the staff members working for prisoner reentry programs are formerly incarcerated persons. Moreover, criminologists have written that the strengths-based role of the “wounded healer” or “professional ex-” is exemplified by released prisoners who desist from a deviant career by replacing it with an occupation as a paraprofessional, lay therapist, or counselor. Despite these observations, there is a paucity of research about formerly incarcerated persons employed by agencies that provide reentry-related programming. This study begins to fill this gap by examining whether, how, and why the staff members of prisoner reentry programs differ from the clients. Characteristics of formerly incarcerated persons thought to be related to desistance and reconciling a criminal past such as overcoming stigma, prosocial attitudes and beliefs, active coping strategies, psychological well-being, and satisfaction with life are examined. Findings support the notion that the wounded healer or professional ex- role is related to desistance and can potentially transform formerly incarcerated persons from being part of “the problem” into part of “the solution” to reduce crime and recidivism. </jats:p

Feature Mining Paradigms for Scientific Data

Numerical simulation is replacing experimentation as a means to gain insight into complex physical phenomena. Analyzing the data produced by such simulations is extremely challenging, given the enormous sizes of the datasets involved. In order to make e#cient progress, analyzing such data must advance from current techniques that only visualize static images of the data, to novel techniques that can mine, track, and visualize the important features in the data. In this paper, we present our research on a unified framework that addresses this critical challenge in two science domains: computational fluid dynamics and molecular dynamics. We o#er a systematic approach to detect the significant features in both domains, characterize and track them, and formulate hypotheses with regard to their complex evolution. Our framework includes two paradigms for feature mining, and the choice of one over the other, for a given application, can be determined based on local or global influence of relevant features in the data

La couleur de la métamorphose : représentations et fonctions de la couleur chez Ovide et dans l'Ovide moralisé du XIVe siècle

Si les études consacrées à l' Ovide moralisé sont maintenant nombreuses et portent sur des sujets divers comme les différents types de métamorphoses, le système de moralisation, le lien établi entre le récit de la métamorphose et la glose, etc. il faut néanmoins constater que la thématique de la couleur reste le parant pauvre de la recherche dans cette œuvre. Pourquoi ? Peut-être parce qu'il est difficile d'appréhender un système différent du nôtre ou parce que les couleurs ne sautent pas de manière évidente aux yeux du lecteur. Les couleurs sont pourtant omniprésentes dans l'Ovide moralisé. Si pour nombre d'entre elles il s'agit de mentions déjà présentes dans l'hypotexte ovidien, il est intéressant d'étudier la palette utilisée par l'auteur du XIVe siècle. Quel terme emploie-t-il pour désigner telle ou telle couleur ? De quelle manière transpose-t-il le système de couleurs latin à celui du monde médiéval ? Surtout quel sens produit le recours aux couleurs puisque, s'il n'hésite pas à supprimer des occurrences de couleur, il en ajoute également

Genetic association study of childhood aggression across raters, instruments, and age

Childhood aggressive behavior (AGG) has a substantial heritability of around 50%. Here we present a genome-wide association metaanalysis (GWAMA) of childhood AGG, in which all phenotype measures across childhood ages from multiple assessors were included. We analyzed phenotype assessments for a total of 328 935 observations from 87 485 children aged between 1.5 and 18 years, while accounting for sample overlap. We also meta-analyzed within subsets of the data, i.e., within rater, instrument and age. SNP-heritability for the overall meta-analysis (AGGoverall) was 3.31% (SE= 0.0038). We found no genome-wide significant SNPs for AGG(overall). The gene-based analysis returned three significant genes: ST3GAL3 (P= 1.6E-06), PCDH7 (P= 2.0E-06), and IPO13 (P= 2.5E-06). All three genes have previously been associated with educational traits. Polygenic scores based on our GWAMA significantly predicted aggression in a holdout sample of children (variance explained = 0.44%) and in retrospectively assessed childhood aggression (variance explained = 0.20%). Genetic correlations (rg) among rater-specific assessment of AGG ranged from r(g)= 0.46 between self- and teacher-assessment to r(g)d= 0.81 between mother- and teacher-assessment. We obtained moderate-to-strong rgs with selected phenotypes from multiple domains, but hardly with any of the classical biomarkers thought to be associated with AGG. Significant genetic correlations were observed with most psychiatric and psychological traits (range r(g): 0.19-1.00), except for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Aggression had a negative genetic correlation (r(g)=-0.5) with cognitive traits and age at first birth. Aggression was strongly genetically correlated with smoking phenotypes (range |r(g)| : 0.46-0.60). The genetic correlations between aggression and psychiatric disorders were weaker for teacher-reported AGG than for mother- and self-reported AGG. The current GWAMA of childhood aggression provides a powerful tool to interrogate the rater-specific genetic etiology of AGG.Peer reviewe