Recrafting Youth Risk Assessment: Developing the Modified Positive Achievement Change Tool for Iowa

ABSTRACT

Risk assessments have become prevalent in the juvenile justice field. Many of these tools are adopted off-the-shelf and not adapted to fit the characteristics of a jurisdiction’s justice-involved youth. We examined the Positive Achievement Change Tool (PACT) in Iowa. Although used widely, the PACT is relatively unmodified. We updated the tool via item selection and weighting, gender-specific models and multiple outcomes, developing the Modified Positive Achievement Change Tool (M-PACT) for Iowa. We identified an average predictive accuracy increase of 7%. Evidence of reduced racial disparity was also observed, and research implications outline the need to customize assessments to improve predictive accuracy.     

Why Migration Justice Still Requires Open Borders

I revisit themes from Against Borders: Why the World Needs Free Movement of People (2020) in dialogue with Gillian Brock's Justice of People on the Move (2020) and Sarah Song's Immigration and Democracy (2019). We share the conviction that current border regimes are deeply unjust but differ in what migration justice requires. Brock and Song continue to give states significant discretion to exclude people from entering and settling in their territories, whereas I contend that migration justice demands open borders. I reject the claim that state self-determination justifies migration restrictions. Central arguments for open borders highlight the role that restrictive border controls and the state category of ‘immigrant’ play in upholding racialised hierarchies and exploitative economic relations, as well as in inflicting violence against mobile people.     

Balancing securitisation and education in schools: teachers’ agency in implementing the Prevent duty

ABSTRACT

Since the introduction of the Prevent duty across the UK, schools have had to balance the need to fulfil their responsibilities under the duty – often understood to include monitoring and surveillance – with their ultimate purpose to educate their students. This positions teachers within a particular set of tensions about their own beliefs about education, their values, and their roles and relationships with young people and communities. This article draws on interviews with classroom teachers and members of school leadership teams from 10 schools, in order to compare how teachers have understood and responded to those tensions. The article will focus on the various ways in which teachers frame the policy, and the ways in which they exercise agency in their responses. Drawing on an ecological approach to theorising teacher agency our data reveals how teachers develop different responses to anti-extremism policy depending on their role; their school contexts; and their own beliefs. Whilst in some important regards the statutory Prevent duty has ‘closed down’ some options, nevertheless teachers exercise agency to interpret and enact policy and, when translating the policy into a curriculum context, also make ‘leaps’ of interpretation as concepts such as fundamental British values are turned into lessons.     

Acceptance of Conditional Suicide and Euthanasia among Adult Americans

ABSTRACT: Analysis of the attitudes of a 1977 cross-sectional sample of 1,530 American adults concerning euthanasia and suicide indicates that sex, age, and education are significant variables. Males, those who are younger and those who are better educated, are more likely to approve of euthanasia and suicide when a person has an incurable disease. Religious affiliation was not an important variable, although those who were frequent church-service attenders or who were high on religiosity were highly likely to reject euthanasia and suicide.