The idea of punishment in international human rights discourse: A conceptual and historical critique

The idea of punishment is typically framed in human rights and legal scholarship in terms of the principle of legality, the due process, and the prohibition of certain forms of punishment deemed cruel, inhuman and degrading. This study seeks to shift the focus towards deeper penological questions of what the State can justifiably punish, how, and why. It probes how international human rights discourse relates to these questions. Using inter-disciplinary discourse analysis, the study exposes certain paradoxes that underpin the ‘International Bill of Human Rights’, academic commentaries, and the global human rights monitoring regime in relation to the idea of punishment. Drawing on archival material, the study demonstrates that the international penal discourse produced during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – under the influence of positivist criminology, socialism, and Christian-Quaker spirituality – laid greater emphasis on offender rehabilitation, and was more attentive to the social context of crime than is the case with modern human rights discourse. The study argues that this discourse, owing to its theoretical kinship with Kantian philosophy, embodies a paradoxical commitment to human dignity on the one hand, and retributive punishment on the other. Further, it sustains the split between criminal justice and social justice, which results in a sociologically ill-informed understanding of punishment. Human rights discourse plays a paradoxical role vis-à-vis the punitive power of the State as it seeks to counter criminalisation in some areas and backs longer prison sentences in others. The underlying priorities, this study suggests, have been shaped by a number of historical circumstances. These include the experience of the Holocaust, the assault on the rehabilitative ideal and the emergence of identity politics in the 1970s, and the global spread of neoliberalism and the revival of the ‘Nuremburg spirit’ in the 1990s. In conclusion, the study endorses the importance of human rights in countering the abuse of power. However, it also signposts the relevance of other moral vocabularies, such as social justice and reconciliation, against the backdrop of conceptual shortcomings in classical penal theory as well as the doctrine of human rights, and the overwhelmingly negative impact of imprisonment on offenders, their families, and the society at large

Motherhood and the absence of maternal support: an exploration amongst Asian women

Aim: Only few existing studies focus on Motherhood and the absence of maternal support. This research investigated the life experiences of Asian women who had given birth to their first-born child at a time when they did not have maternal support. Design: Baby clinics were targeted and Health Visitors selected candidates that fulfilled the criteria to participate in the research. Ten participants comprising of Asian women were recruited and participated in an interview about their experience of giving birth to their first child at a time when they were not in contact with their maternal family. Method: Interviews were transcribed, analysed and categorised using the qualitative method of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). A meeting was set up for the participants to review the transcripts and the data was coded into themes. Key findings: Results highlighted four themes which emerged that affected the wellbeing of the mother and baby. The first theme was the cultural expectation of support and these findings were of significant interest from the viewpoint of inbuilt parental relationships and the way they develop as well as the discovery of feelings of inadequacy arising because of communication difficulties. The second theme was the newness of being supported by their husband which was a new experience for them and questioned their role as a mother and their ideas about the assumed responsibilities for women in an Asian culture. The third theme was the emotional and physical impact of having a baby which was an area that appeared to be out of their awareness and came as a surprise to them in the aftermath of the baby’s arrival. The fourth theme was pre and post-natal experiences of having a baby in the NHS and this identified a number of strategic changes which could be implemented to identify women at risk due to the absence of maternal support. Conclusion: The potential significance of my results, which considered Asian women in this context, indicates that the NHS could adopt preventative measures to ensure these women are identified as vulnerable and do not continue to fall short of maternity services. In order for professionals to ‘signpost’ their patients appropriately they need to be skilled up to understand the needs of these women. This research highlights the need for women from other cultures to be able to expect a level of understanding from Healthcare professionals in relation to their specific situations and to have an awareness of the particular difficulties that women face when they do not have maternal support

Association Rules Mining Based Clinical Observations

Healthcare institutes enrich the repository of patients' disease related information in an increasing manner which could have been more useful by carrying out relational analysis. Data mining algorithms are proven to be quite useful in exploring useful correlations from larger data repositories. In this paper we have implemented Association Rules mining based a novel idea for finding co-occurrences of diseases carried by a patient using the healthcare repository. We have developed a system-prototype for Clinical State Correlation Prediction (CSCP) which extracts data from patients' healthcare database, transforms the OLTP data into a Data Warehouse by generating association rules. The CSCP system helps reveal relations among the diseases. The CSCP system predicts the correlation(s) among primary disease (the disease for which the patient visits the doctor) and secondary disease/s (which is/are other associated disease/s carried by the same patient having the primary disease).Comment: 5 pages, MEDINFO 2010, C. Safran et al. (Eds.), IOS Pres

Advanced composite combustor structural concepts program

An analytical study was conducted to assess the feasibility of and benefits derived from the use of high temperature composite materials in aircraft turbine engine combustor liners. The study included a survey and screening of the properties of three candidate composite materials including tungsten reinforced superalloys, carbon-carbon and silicon carbide (SiC) fibers reinforcing a ceramic matrix of lithium aluminosilicate (LAS). The SiC-LAS material was selected as offering the greatest near term potential primarily on the basis of high temperature capability. A limited experimental investigation was conducted to quantify some of the more critical mechanical properties of the SiC-LAS composite having a multidirection 0/45/-45/90 deg fiber orientation favored for the combustor linear application. Rigorous cyclic thermal tests demonstrated that SiC-LAS was extremely resistant to the thermal fatigue mechanisms that usually limit the life of metallic combustor liners. A thermal design study led to the definition of a composite liner concept that incorporated film cooled SiC-LAS shingles mounted on a Hastelloy X shell. With coolant fluxes consistent with the most advanced metallic liner technology, the calculated hot surface temperatures of the shingles were within the apparent near term capability of the material. Structural analyses indicated that the stresses in the composite panels were low, primarily because of the low coefficient of expansion of the material and it was concluded that the dominant failure mode of the liner would be an as yet unidentified deterioration of the composite from prolonged exposure to high temperature. An economic study, based on a medium thrust size commercial aircraft engine, indicated that the SiC-LAS combustor liner would weigh 22.8N (11.27 lb) less and cost less to manufacture than advanced metallic liner concepts intended for use in the late 1980's

Steam gasification of rapeseed, wood, sewage sludge and miscanthus biochars for the production of a hydrogen-rich syngas

Steam gasification of biochars has emerged as a promising method for generating syngas that is rich in hydrogen. In this study four biochars formed via intermediate pyrolysis (wood pellet, sewage sludge, rapeseed and miscanthus) were gasified in a quartz tubular reactor using steam. The dynamic behaviour of the process and effects of temperature, steam flow and particle size were studied. The results show that increases in both steam flow and temperature significantly increase the dry gas yield and carbon conversion, but hydrogen volume fraction decreases at higher temperatures whilst particle size has little effect on gaseous composition. The highest volume fraction of hydrogen, 58.7%, was obtained at 750 °C from the rapeseed biochar

Surrogate Assisted Optimisation for Travelling Thief Problems

The travelling thief problem (TTP) is a multi-component optimisation problem involving two interdependent NP-hard components: the travelling salesman problem (TSP) and the knapsack problem (KP). Recent state-of-the-art TTP solvers modify the underlying TSP and KP solutions in an iterative and interleaved fashion. The TSP solution (cyclic tour) is typically changed in a deterministic way, while changes to the KP solution typically involve a random search, effectively resulting in a quasi-meandering exploration of the TTP solution space. Once a plateau is reached, the iterative search of the TTP solution space is restarted by using a new initial TSP tour. We propose to make the search more efficient through an adaptive surrogate model (based on a customised form of Support Vector Regression) that learns the characteristics of initial TSP tours that lead to good TTP solutions. The model is used to filter out non-promising initial TSP tours, in effect reducing the amount of time spent to find a good TTP solution. Experiments on a broad range of benchmark TTP instances indicate that the proposed approach filters out a considerable number of non-promising initial tours, at the cost of omitting only a small number of the best TTP solutions

Authors' reply to Colquhoun and Buchinsky

No abstract available