Justice involvement among homeless individuals with mental illnesses: Are self-report and administrative measures comparable?

Individuals with mental illnesses who experience homelessness have frequent interactions with the criminal justice system. Correctly measuring this involvement is essential to develop and evaluate the efficacy of intervention programs. Criminal justice involvement is typically assessed through administrative records or self-reported accounts. The aims of this study are to: 1) assess agreement between self-report and administrative data related to court appearances, and 2) identify individual characteristics that affect discrepancies between sources. Participants were 468 homeless persons with mental illness from the Montreal site of the At Home/Chez Soi randomized controlled trial, in Canada. Self-reported data was collected through an interviewer-administered questionnaire. Administrative data was collected through provincial and municipal court databases. Overall, agreement was good. Discrepancies were more common among those with a diagnosis of mood disorder with psychotic features, and those with a criminal history. Increased age and interviewer’s perception of sincerity and interest increased likelihood of concordance. Generally, high agreement between self-report and administrative data suggests that either source can provide reliable information. Further work to understand predictors of discrepancies could further enhance the quality of data collected through these different sources.     

Accounting for Uncertainty in Heteroscedasticity in Nonlinear Regression

Toxicologists and pharmacologists often describe toxicity of a chemical using parameters of a nonlinear regression model. Thus estimation of parameters of a nonlinear regression model is an important problem. The estimates of the parameters and their uncertainty estimates depend upon the underlying error variance structure in the model. Typically, a priori the researcher would not know if the error variances are homoscedastic (i.e., constant across dose) or if they are heteroscedastic (i.e., the variance is a function of dose). Motivated by this concern, in this paper we introduce an estimation procedure based on preliminary test which selects an appropriate estimation procedure accounting for the underlying error variance structure. Since outliers and influential observations are common in toxicological data, the proposed methodology uses M-estimators. The asymptotic properties of the preliminary test estimator are investigated; in particular its asymptotic covariance matrix is derived. The performance of the proposed estimator is compared with several standard estimators using simulation studies. The proposed methodology is also illustrated using a data set obtained from the National Toxicology Program.     

The structure and vulnerability of a drug trafficking collaboration network

Prior research has established that collaboration networks exhibit heavy-tailed degree distributions, assortative degree mixing, and large clustering coefficients. Using court record data, we assess these properties in a collaboration network among heroin traffickers. Consistent with prior research, we find an exponential degree distribution and strong local clustering. However, the traffickers mix dissortatively by degree rather than assortatively. Using a graph sampling method, we show that a consequence of dissortative mixing is that targeted vertex removals have a greater impact on the connectivity and cohesion of the trafficking network. We also note the importance of degree mixing for characterizing and identifying topological weaknesses.     

A Five-Decision Testing Procedure to Infer the Value of a Unidimensional Parameter

ABSTRACT

A statistical test can be seen as a procedure to produce a decision based on observed data, where some decisions consist of rejecting a hypothesis (yielding a significant result) and some do not, and where one controls the probability to make a wrong rejection at some prespecified significance level. Whereas traditional hypothesis testing involves only two possible decisions (to reject or not a null hypothesis), Kaiser’s directional two-sided test as well as the more recently introduced testing procedure of Jones and Tukey, each equivalent to running two one-sided tests, involve three possible decisions to infer the value of a unidimensional parameter. The latter procedure assumes that a point null hypothesis is impossible (e.g., that two treatments cannot have exactly the same effect), allowing a gain of statistical power. There are, however, situations where a point hypothesis is indeed plausible, for example, when considering hypotheses derived from Einstein’s theories. In this article, we introduce a five-decision rule testing procedure, equivalent to running a traditional two-sided test in addition to two one-sided tests, which combines the advantages of the testing procedures of Kaiser (no assumption on a point hypothesis being impossible) and Jones and Tukey (higher power), allowing for a nonnegligible (typically 20%) reduction of the sample size needed to reach a given statistical power to get a significant result, compared to the traditional approach.     

论刑事审后程序

刑事审后程序是指除审判监督程序外刑事判决生效后一系列程序的总称,包括刑事执行程序、被害人的权利保障程序以及刑罚被执行完毕人员的前科消灭程序等内容。刑事诉讼法学界除了对作为刑事审后程序重要内容的刑事执行程序研究较为充分外,还没有人对刑事审后程序作过系统的专门研究。对刑事审后程序进行系统的理论研究,特别是建立和完善被害人损害赔偿制度和被害人国家补偿制度,建立刑罚被执行完毕人员前科消灭的法律制度,不仅有助于完善我国刑事诉讼法,也有助于社会主义和谐社会的构建。     

降低刑事责任年龄否定论

降低刑事责任年龄的提议主要立足于三个命题:“犯罪低龄化”现象严重,降低刑事责任年龄是解决“低龄犯罪人”问题的应然手段,低龄未成年人已具备相当的辨认、控制能力。通过对实证数据与相关论据的收集分析,前两个命题得到证伪,第三个命题无法证明,由此可以否定降低刑事责任年龄观点的合理性依据。从我国历史与近代刑事责任年龄设定的发展历程来看,调整年龄节点的主张从未停止,援用的理由相差无几,经历过多次变动与论证后延续至今,具备符合我国社会发展实践的合理性与稳定性。从我国的义务教育设置与年龄之间的对应关系出发,刑事责任年龄确定的基准点应以义务教育的结束为合理节点,采取“从高到低”的刑事责任年龄设定逻辑。综合上述理由,兼顾少年司法“教育为主、惩罚为辅”刑事政策导向,最终得出当前的刑事责任年龄设置合理,不需降低的结论。     

An improved cluster two-stage randomized response model

In this paper, Abdelfatah and Mazloum's (2015) two-stage randomized response model is extended to unequal probability sampling and stratified unequal probability sampling, both with and without replacement. The extended models result in more efficient estimators than Lee et al.'s (2014) estimators of the proportion of the population having a sensitive attribute.     

Shall we follow the money? Anti-mafia policies and electoral competition

Building upon the evidence that the mafia increases the degree of vote concentration, we use data on regional elections in Sicily to estimate the impact of anti-mafia policies on electoral competition. We find robust evidence that the reassignment for social purposes of property and assets seized to the mafia reduces the degree of electoral concentration. This result supports the hypothesis that policies that create social value, such as the reallocation to social-driven organizations, are more effective than those targeted to public and political institutions.     

论我国量刑程序模式的选择

量刑程序与定罪程序一样是刑事审判环节,具有独立性与依附性特征,而我国立法层面的量刑程序几乎是空白。我国在现有的司法环境下实行相对独立的量刑程序符合国际司法潮流,这一程序也没有增加各诉讼参加人的负担,较易操作落实,且有相关的配套程序和实践基础,因此具有可行性。但在实践中应注意一些问题,如要清晰控辩审三方在量刑程序中的定位,使社会调查报告机制走向制度化、专业化,判决书中应对量刑的依据和理由进行阐述等。     

Multiple comparisons of exponential location parameters with a control based on doubly censored sample under heteroscedasticity

In this article, a one-sample procedure for multiple comparisons of exponential location parameters with a control under heteroscedasticity is proposed. The observations are obtained by doubly censored samples. A one-sided and two-sided confidence intervals are used to perform such multiple comparisons. Statistical tables of critical values and an example of comparing four drugs in treating leukemia are provided.