Military Veteran Offenders: Making sense of developments in the debate to inform service delivery

In a 2008 report by the National Association for Probation Officers it was estimated that in excess of 20,000 ex-service personnel were serving a sentence in either prison or the community. Since this report, we have witnessed a steady growth in research, literature and knowledge exchange seeking to make sense of veterans' offending. This paper provides a brief overview of the key development of this debate since the recognition of the 'problem' of ex-military personnel in prison. Our discussion problematizes focussing solely on offending by suggesting that the quality of transition is in fact contingent on a more complex interplay of social, cultural and economic participation-linked factors. We propose that by considering the complexities of transition, veterans' offending is more appropriately positioned amongst wider structural challenges faced on return to civilian society. This approach informs the limited recent empirical work in this area, which has been slow to filter into mainstream criminal justice practice. It is our contention that veterans' contact with the criminal justice system needs to be understood within the broader explanatory frameworks of diversity and social inclusion. This paper makes specific recommendations, based on new developments in the veteran-offender debate, to inform service delivery to this cohort in the criminal justice system

A mechanistic model linking insect (Hydropsychidae) silk nets to incipient sediment motion in gravel‐bedded streams

Plants and animals affect stream morphodynamics across a range of scales, yet including biological traits of organisms in geomorphic process models remains a fundamental challenge. For example, laboratory experiments have shown that silk nets built by caddisfly larvae (Trichoptera: Hydropsychidae) can increase the shear stress required to initiate bed motion by more than a factor of 2. The contributions of specific biological traits are not well understood, however. Here we develop a theoretical model for the effects of insect nets on the threshold of sediment motion, τ * crit , that accounts for the mechanical properties, geometry, and vertical distribution of insect silk, as well as interactions between insect species. To parameterize the model, we measure the tensile strength, diameter, and number of silk threads in nets built by two common species of caddisfly, Arctopsyche californica and Ceratopsyche oslari . We compare model predictions with new measurements of τ * crit in experiments where we varied grain size and caddisfly species composition. The model is consistent with experimental results for single species, which show that the increase in τ * crit above the abiotic control peaks at 40–70% for 10–22 mm sediments and declines with increasing grain size. For the polyculture experiments, however, the model underpredicts the measured increase in τ * crit when two caddisfly species are present in sediments of larger grain sizes. Overall, the model helps explain why the presence of caddisfly silk can substantially increase the forces needed to initiate sediment motion in gravel‐bedded streams and also illustrates the challenge of parameterizing the behavior of multiple interacting species in a physical model. Key Points Caddisfly silk nets are incorporated into a model of incipient sediment motion Silk nets increase critical shear stress in gravel‐bedded streams Species‐specific silk and behaviors control the range of grain sizes affectedPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109329/1/jgrf20303.pd

Relational legacies impacting on veteran transition from military to civilian life: trajectories of acquisition, loss and re-formulation of a sense of belonging

The veteran cohort has been inextricably linked in the general public's mind by media generated perceptions of high risk and fear of crime, echoed in wider contemporary debates linking issues of place, social identity, social exclusion (Pain 2000) and a loss of belonging in wider communities (Walklate 1998). Despite the growing interest in the longer term outcomes of transition from military to civilian life from policy-makers, practitioners and academics, few qualitative studies explore the social and relational impacts of this transitional experience on those who have experienced it. Tensions and frustrations expressed by ex-forces personnel, engaging in addictions services with a history of engagement in the criminal justice sector, are explored through the lens of belongingness, loss and related citizenship frameworks to expose temporal impacts on the acquisition, loss and reformulation of a sense of belonging across the life course. The relevance of a significant loss of belonging in the transition from military to civilian life is useful, given the widely accepted damaging consequences of having this need thwarted. This paper concludes that a broader understanding of this largely disenfranchised grief (Doka, 2002) can enable more informed reflexive opportunities to facilitate a valued military veteran citizenship status and thereby contribute to the formulation of current policy debates concerning the veteran question

Boxicity of graphs on surfaces

The boxicity of a graph $G=(V,E)$ is the least integer $k$ for which there exist $k$ interval graphs $G_i=(V,E_i)$, $1 \le i \le k$, such that $E=E_1 \cap ... \cap E_k$. Scheinerman proved in 1984 that outerplanar graphs have boxicity at most two and Thomassen proved in 1986 that planar graphs have boxicity at most three. In this note we prove that the boxicity of toroidal graphs is at most 7, and that the boxicity of graphs embeddable in a surface $\Sigma$ of genus $g$ is at most $5g+3$. This result yields improved bounds on the dimension of the adjacency poset of graphs on surfaces.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figure

How Does Restored Habitat For Chinook Salmon ( Oncorhynchus Tshawytscha ) In The Merced River In California Compare With Other Chinook Streams?

The amount of time and money spent on restoring rivers for declining populations of salmon has grown substantially in recent decades. But despite the infusion of resources, many studies suggest that salmon populations are continuing to decline, leading some to question the effectiveness of restoration efforts. Here we examine whether a particular form of salmon restoration—channel reconfiguration with gravel augmentation—generates physical and biological habitat that is comparable with other streams that support salmon. We compared a suite of habitat features known to influence the various life stages of Chinook salmon in a restoration project in California's Merced River with 19 other streams that also support Chinook that we surveyed in the same geographic region. Our survey showed that riffle habitats in the restored site of the Merced River have flow discharge and depth, substrate and food web characteristics that cannot be distinguished from other streams that support Chinook, suggesting that these factors are unlikely to be bottlenecks to salmon recovery in the Merced. However, compared with other streams in the region, the Merced has minimal riparian cover, fewer undercut banks, less woody debris and higher water temperatures, suggesting that these factors might limit salmon recovery. After identifying aspects in the Merced that differ from other streams, we used principal components analysis to correlate salmon densities to independent axes of environmental variation measured during our survey. These analyses suggested that salmon densities tend to be greatest in streams that have more undercut banks and woody debris and lower water temperatures. These are the same environmental factors that appear to be missing from the Merced River restoration effort. Collectively, our results narrow the set of candidate factors that may limit salmon recovery in channel reconfiguration restoration efforts. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/97512/1/rra1604.pd

The Amateur Sky Survey Mark III Project

The Amateur Sky Survey (TASS) is a loose confederation of amateur and professional astronomers. We describe the design and construction of our Mark III system, a set of wide-field drift-scan CCD cameras which monitor the celestial equator down to thirteenth magnitude in several passbands. We explain the methods by which images are gathered, processed, and reduced into lists of stellar positions and magnitudes. Over the period October, 1996, to November, 1998, we compiled a large database of photometric measurements. One of our results is the "tenxcat" catalog, which contains measurements on the standard Johnson-Cousins system for 367,241 stars; it contains links to the light curves of these stars as well.Comment: 20 pages, including 4 figures; additional JPEG files for Figures 1, 2. Submitted to PAS

On EPR paradox, Bell's inequalities and experiments which prove nothing

This article shows that the there is no paradox. Violation of Bell's inequalities should not be identified with a proof of non locality in quantum mechanics. A number of past experiments is reviewed, and it is concluded that the experimental results should be re-evaluated. The results of the experiments with atomic cascade are shown not to contradict the local realism. The article points out flaws in the experiments with down-converted photons. The experiments with neutron interferometer on measuring the "contextuality" and Bell-like inequalities are analyzed, and it is shown that the experimental results can be explained without such notions. Alternative experiment is proposed to prove the validity of local realism.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figures. I edited a little the text and abstract I corrected equations (49) and (50

Pregnancy and childbirth in English prisons : institutional ignominy and the pains of imprisonment

© 2020 The Authors. Sociology of Health & Illness published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Foundation for SHIL.With a prison population of approximately 9000 women in England, it is estimated that approximately 600 pregnancies and 100 births occur annually. Despite an extensive literature on the sociology of reproduction, pregnancy and childbirth among women prisoners is under‐researched. This article reports an ethnographic study in three English prisons undertaken in 2015‐2016, including interviews with 22 prisoners, six women released from prison and 10 staff members. Pregnant prisoners experience numerous additional difficulties in prison including the ambiguous status of a pregnant prisoner, physical aspects of pregnancy and the degradation of the handcuffed or chained prisoner during visits to the more public setting of hospital. This article draws on Erving Goffman's concepts of closed institutions, dramaturgy and mortification of self, Crewe et al.'s work on the gendered pains of imprisonment and Crawley's notion of ‘institutional thoughtlessness’, and proposes a new concept of institutional ignominy to understand the embodied situation of the pregnant prisoner.Peer reviewe

Interplay between telecommunications and face-to-face interactions - a study using mobile phone data

In this study we analyze one year of anonymized telecommunications data for over one million customers from a large European cellphone operator, and we investigate the relationship between people's calls and their physical location. We discover that more than 90% of users who have called each other have also shared the same space (cell tower), even if they live far apart. Moreover, we find that close to 70% of users who call each other frequently (at least once per month on average) have shared the same space at the same time - an instance that we call co-location. Co-locations appear indicative of coordination calls, which occur just before face-to-face meetings. Their number is highly predictable based on the amount of calls between two users and the distance between their home locations - suggesting a new way to quantify the interplay between telecommunications and face-to-face interactions