Pregnant Women Inmates: Evaluating Their Rights and Identifying Opportunities for Improvements in Their Treatment

Pregnant women incarcerated at the time of our nation\u27s founding faced the prospect of giving birth in their cells alone and a considerable likelihood that their infants would die. This is somewhat unsurprising. At this time infant mortality rates were high. Given the pace of advances in the treatment of pregnant women since that time, one might expect that the experience of pregnant women incarcerated in today\u27s correctional facilities would have improved as it has for their peers on the outside. That, however, would be an unrealistic assumption. In addition to facing decidedly substandard environments in some facilities - inappropriate accommodations, widespread exposure to disease and unsanitary conditions, among other challenges - pregnant women sometimes still risk the possibility of giving birth without assistance. Such was the case of Louwanna Yeager. Ms. Yeager, upon going into labor in May 1987, was informed by guards that she would have to wait because no medical staff members were available to help her. The birthing process is not one amenable to being put on hold and, as such, Ms. Yeager gave birth three hours later on a thin mat outside of the door of the clinic in the jail. Ms. Yeager\u27s horrifying experience and those of her peers at the Kern County Jail led to a lawsuit that changed conditions for pregnant and post-partum women at the facility. Pregnant women incarcerated in correctional facilities that have been the subject of litigation have seen an improvement in the conditions they experience. However, most of these facilities would not have made these changes without the threat of litigation. Thus, those pregnant women incarcerated in facilities that have evaded legal scrutiny may still face conditions not much improved than those endured by Ms. Yeager and others like her. This article illustrates the challenges faced by pregnant women incarcerated in correctional facilities, their rights, and ways in which change for these women can be effected as well as programs that have provided clear improvements for their care. The treatment of pregnant inmates merits special attention - especially in the competition for scarce correctional resources - because of the particular complications for these women and their infants which can result from improper care

Relationships Among Specific Types of Trait Mindfulness, Need for Cognitive Closure, and Affect

Mindfulness has a multitude of benefits including, but not limited to, increasing one’s positive affect, decreasing stress, lowering blood pressure, protecting against depression and reducing chronic pain. The pre-existing literature on mindfulness unanimously suggests that mindfulness relies on self-regulating functions to improve overall well-being but lacks information regarding which specific emotion-regulating characteristics may play a role in determining mindfulness tendencies. The present research investigated whether or not an individual’s trait mindfulness is correlated with one’s need for cognitive closure (NFC) and how these measures relate to positive and negative affect. A total of 328 participants, recruited from the University of Arkansas SONA study pool, completed an online survey questionnaire in which they were evaluated on three measures: trait mindfulness, NFC, and positive and negative affect. Participants presented lower negative affect (NA) when utilizing high levels of mindfulness acceptance, suggesting a negative correlation between NA and mindfulness acceptance. Additionally, those low in NFC utilize higher levels of mindfulness acceptance while those high in NFC were found to use higher levels of attentional mindfulness. These results suggest that certain individuals, based on fixed cognitive traits, may be more or less likely to utilize certain components of mindfulness

Pregnant Women Inmates: Evaluating Their Rights and Identifying Opportunities for Improvements in Their Treatment

Pregnant women incarcerated at the time of our nation\u27s founding faced the prospect of giving birth in their cells alone and a considerable likelihood that their infants would die. This is somewhat unsurprising. At this time infant mortality rates were high. Given the pace of advances in the treatment of pregnant women since that time, one might expect that the experience of pregnant women incarcerated in today\u27s correctional facilities would have improved as it has for their peers on the outside. That, however, would be an unrealistic assumption. In addition to facing decidedly substandard environments in some facilities - inappropriate accommodations, widespread exposure to disease and unsanitary conditions, among other challenges - pregnant women sometimes still risk the possibility of giving birth without assistance. Such was the case of Louwanna Yeager. Ms. Yeager, upon going into labor in May 1987, was informed by guards that she would have to wait because no medical staff members were available to help her. The birthing process is not one amenable to being put on hold and, as such, Ms. Yeager gave birth three hours later on a thin mat outside of the door of the clinic in the jail. Ms. Yeager\u27s horrifying experience and those of her peers at the Kern County Jail led to a lawsuit that changed conditions for pregnant and post-partum women at the facility. Pregnant women incarcerated in correctional facilities that have been the subject of litigation have seen an improvement in the conditions they experience. However, most of these facilities would not have made these changes without the threat of litigation. Thus, those pregnant women incarcerated in facilities that have evaded legal scrutiny may still face conditions not much improved than those endured by Ms. Yeager and others like her. This article illustrates the challenges faced by pregnant women incarcerated in correctional facilities, their rights, and ways in which change for these women can be effected as well as programs that have provided clear improvements for their care. The treatment of pregnant inmates merits special attention - especially in the competition for scarce correctional resources - because of the particular complications for these women and their infants which can result from improper care

Barriers to Becoming Lake People: Social Equity and Environmental Justice in Muskegon Lake South Shoreline Access

In Winter 2018, eleven students in the GVSU course ENS 401: Environmental Problem Solv-ing played the role of consultants for community partner Viability Lab, LLC, which had de-veloped a grant application titled ShoreLiveCity. A central feature of the ShoreLiveCity project was to improve social equity and environmental justice in access to the Muskegon Lake south shoreline. Historically, such access has been severely restricted for residents in the nearby Nel-son and Nims neighborhoods. ShoreLiveCity proposed to use the Circles of Sustainability planning and implementation framework (2018) to improve access along approximately 500 yards of publicly owned shoreline adjacent to the neighborhoods. The students and instructor K. Parker followed a design thinking process to approach the problem. They researched the history of the shoreline and the lake to understand the his-torical reasons for restricted shoreline access. They toured the site. They met with residents at two public meetings to gather information about the neighborhoods and about residents’ ex-periences with the shoreline and lake. They researched existing literature on ways to measure social equity/environmental justice. Approximately one month before the end of the class, they met with the community partner to present preliminary findings and possible solutions. Based on feedback from this presentation, they finalized their recommendations and pre-sented these to the community partner at the end of the course

Teasing Apart Encoding and Retrieval Interference in Sentence Comprehension: Evidence from Agreement Attraction

This study investigates interference effects in sentence processing. A parade case involves agreement attraction, where the processing of a number mismatch between a verb and its subject is eased by a number-matching lure (*The keytarget to the cabinetslure were rusty), relative to sentences where neither noun matches the verb (*The key to the cabinet were rusty). Existing accounts claim that this effect reflects error-prone retrieval or misrepresentation of the target. Recently, a third account has been proposed which claims that the contrast between the two configurations reflects increased difficulty in the second sentence due to feature overwriting in the encoding (both nouns are singular). We provide results from two self-paced reading experiments that isolate the effects of feature overwriting and attraction by manipulating the presence of an agreement cue. Results showed a larger difference within the configurations with a cue, which suggest that attraction cannot be reduced to feature overwriting

Loss-of-Function ROX1 Mutations Suppress the Fluconazole Susceptibility of upc2AΔ Mutation in Candida glabrata, Implicating Additional Positive Regulators of Ergosterol Biosynthesis

wo of the major classes of antifungal drugs in clinical use target ergosterol biosynthesis. Despite its importance, our understanding of the transcriptional regulation of ergosterol biosynthesis genes in pathogenic fungi is essentially limited to the role of hypoxia and sterol-stress-induced transcription factors such as Upc2 and Upc2A as well as homologs of sterol response element binding (SREB) factors. To identify additional regulators of ergosterol biosynthesis in Candida glabrata, an important human fungal pathogen with reduced susceptibility to ergosterol biosynthesis inhibitors relative to other Candida spp., we used a serial passaging strategy to isolate suppressors of the fluconazole hypersusceptibility of a upc2AΔ deletion mutant. This led to the identification of loss-of-function mutations in two genes: ROX1, the homolog of a hypoxia gene transcriptional suppressor in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and CST6, a transcription factor that is involved in the regulation of carbon dioxide response in C. glabrata. Here, we describe a detailed analysis of the genetic interaction of ROX1 and UPC2A. In the presence of fluconazole, loss of Rox1 function restores ERG11 expression to the upc2AΔ mutant and inhibits the expression of ERG3 and ERG6, leading to increased levels of ergosterol and decreased levels of the toxic sterol 14α methyl-ergosta-8,24(28)-dien-3β, 6α-diol, relative to the upc2AΔ mutant. Our observations establish that Rox1 is a negative regulator of ERG gene biosynthesis and indicate that a least one additional positive transcriptional regulator of ERG gene biosynthesis must be present in C. glabrata

Health Care for Women Inmates: Issues, Perceptions and Policy Considerations

Rapidly increasing numbers of women incarcerated in the United States have created an overwhelming need for appropriate health services for these inmates despite limited resources. This article outlines the key health care issues associated with women inmates. We begin by examining the challenges posed by this population of inmates. Additionally, we investigate the provision of health care to these women and then evaluate the perceptions of that care from the perspective of the women and their care providers. We conclude with a discussion of policy-relevant considerations and suggest that realism should be the underlying premise of any health-related policy for women inmates. Specifically, we suggest that education and the treatment of communicable diseases become the most targeted health-related goals for women inmates, as it is inevitable that most of these women will eventually be released

Isavuconazole and voriconazole inhibition of sterol 14α-demethylases (CYP51) from Aspergillus fumigatus and Homo sapiens

We report here the first evaluation of isavuconazole for inhibition of A. fumigatus CYP51 and of sterol biosynthesis in the fungus. Voriconazole and isavuconazole both bound tightly to recombinant AfCYP51A and AfCYP51B isolated in E. coli membranes. CYP51 reconstitution assays confirmed AfCYP51A and AfCYP51B in addition to three AfCYP51A mutants (G54W, L98H and M220K) were strongly inhibited by both triazoles. Voriconazole bound relatively weakly to purified HsCYP51 unlike isavuconazole, which bound tightly. However, isavuconazole was a relatively poor inhibitor of HsCYP51 activity with an IC50 value of 25 μM which was 55- to 120-fold greater than those observed for the A. fumigatus CYP51 enzymes, albeit not as poor an inhibitor of HsCYP51 as voriconazole which gave an IC50 value of 112 μM. Sterol analysis of triazole-treated A. fumigatus Af293 cells confirmed isavuconazole and voriconazole both inhibited cellular CYP51 activity with the accumulation of 14-methylated sterol substrates and depletion of ergosterol levels. Isavuconazole elicited a stronger perturbation of the sterol composition in Af293 than voriconazole at 0.0125 μg ml-1 indicating increased potency. However, complementation studies in Saccharomyces cerevisiae using strains containing AfCYP51A and AfCYP51B indicated isavuconazole to be equally as effective at inhibiting CYP51 activity as voriconazole. These in vitro studies suggest isavuconazole is an effective alternative to voriconazole as an antifungal agent against the target CYP51 in Aspergillus fumigatus

Personal digital archiving: An annotated bibliography for librarians and patrons

This project was in partial fulfillment of our LIS586: Digital Preservation class in the Fall semester of 2015. Our assignment was to create an annotated bibliography containing two reading lists for a public library that is trying to extend its service offerings to include advising patrons on how to preserve their personal digital materials. One list is for the librarian, the other for the patron. This is a legitimate resource for anyone wishing to find out more about or find a reliable reading list of sources about personal digital archiving.Ope