Sentencing Persons Convicted of Minor Offences in Ghana: Reducing Judicial Over-Reliance on Imprisonment

This thesis argues that there is overuse of imprisonment for minor offenders in Ghana. These are offenders whose punishments go up to 3 years of jail time, essentially offending mainly for reasons of material poverty. Statutory sentencing provisions have essentially limited judges to impose jail terms. It is argued that one way to decongest Ghana’s prisons is to consider the institutionalization of a regime of community service orders and probation, the administration of which would equip the offenders with income-earning skills while they also reform. Drawing on Kenya, a country that has achieved reasonable success in this reform effort, this thesis recommends that successful implementation of this scheme in Ghana must involve reorienting major criminal justice system actors: the police, judges and legal practitioners. Given its community-based social structure, it is argued that the prospect of successful implementation of the scheme is enhanced by conscientious incorporation of community and family support for its implementation

Financial statement misrepresentation : could investors detect it?

xi, 73 leaves ; 29 cm.The current study is designed to develop a model to improve investors’ ability to identify firms that engage in financial statement misrepresentation by carefully analyzing published financial reports. Earnings management literature indicates that financial statement information is not fully utilized by investors and that fundamental analysis provides useful information about a firm’s financial performance. The study examines accruals and the components that firms commonly use to violate GAAP in order to develop a probit regression model as an early detector of financial misrepresentation. The analysis consists of a matched-paired sample of 30 U.S. fraud firms and 30 non-fraud firms extracted from the GAO and Compustat databases. The results show that an investor who is comparing two firms from the same industry may use the lower Z score of the model and improve the chances of avoiding a fraud firm by at least 23%

Sentencing Persons Convicted of Minor Offences in Ghana: Reducing Judicial Over-Reliance on Imprisonment

This thesis argues that there is overuse of imprisonment for minor offenders in Ghana. These are offenders whose punishments go up to 3 years of jail time, essentially offending mainly for reasons of material poverty. Statutory sentencing provisions have essentially limited judges to impose jail terms. It is argued that one way to decongest Ghana’s prisons is to consider the institutionalization of a regime of community service orders and probation, the administration of which would equip the offenders with income-earning skills while they also reform. Drawing on Kenya, a country that has achieved reasonable success in this reform effort, this thesis recommends that successful implementation of this scheme in Ghana must involve reorienting major criminal justice system actors: the police, judges and legal practitioners. Given its community-based social structure, it is argued that the prospect of successful implementation of the scheme is enhanced by conscientious incorporation of community and family support for its implementation

Personal Information Management Strategies and Tactics used by Senior Engineers

This paper reports the results of an exploratory qualitative study of how senior engineers in a research laboratory environment do personal information management (PIM). Responsive, semi-structured interviews were conducted with four senior engineers. Thirteen themes in four groupings emerged. The four groupings are: organization and retrieval, un-organized aspects, information keeping and preservation, and use of specialized tools. Themes not seen in other studies are: writing to remember and reporting to retrieve, and personal handbooks. The themes are described in detail. Implications for the design of information systems and future work are discussed