Reimagining the Juvenile Detention System

This group proposed to improve the juvenile detention system through policy as well as through change in the design of detention centers. Team members agreed to redesign the system in order to avoid dehumanizing adolescents and to introduce them to a new kind of community environment. The design of the prison will be based on a set of concentric circles. The inner circle will be the most restrictive in terms of freedoms and privileges. As the adolescent gains skills and trust, they move from the inner circle to the outer circles. The outer circles allow for more freedom and trust, physically demonstrated through the opening of the prison space into individual houses. With this increased trust and freedom, adolescents will also take on more responsibilities and become effective members of the prison community–working in the community garden for example

Different in different ways: A network-analysis approach to voice and prosody in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Speakers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are commonly reported to have atypical voice and prosody that impact impression formation. While human raters are highly accurate in distinguishing between ASD and neurotypical (NT) speakers, there is little consensus on which specific acoustic features differentiate these groups, suggesting the presence of multiple prosodic profiles. To investigate this possibility, we modelled the speech from a selection of speakers (N = 30), with and without ASD, as a network of nodes defined by acoustic features, and used a community-detection algorithm to identify clusters of speakers who were acoustically similar. Analyses suggested three clusters: one primarily composed of speakers with ASD, one of mostly NT speakers, and one comprised of an even mixture of ASD and NT speakers. Human raters are highly reliable at distinguishing speakers with and without ASD based on perceptual voice and prosodic cues. Our results suggest that community-detection methods using a network approach may complement commonly employed human ratings to improve our understanding of the intonation profiles in ASD