Proliferation of Punishment: The Centrality of Legal Fines and Fees in the Landscape of Contemporary Penology.

Decades of significant crime declines and recent reductions in the number of people confined in prisons and jails in the United States have been accompanied by the emergence of new, and the resurgence of old, forms of punishment. One of these resurgent forms is the assessment of fines, fees, and costs to those who encounter the criminal legal system. Legal financial obligations (LFOs) have become widespread across the United States and are levied for offenses from alleged traffic violations in some states to felony convictions in others.

Incomparable Punishments: How Economic Inequality Contributes to the Disparate Impact of Legal Fines and Fees.

Low-level misdemeanor and traffic violations draw tens of millions of people into local courts to pay fines and fees each year, generating billions of dollars in revenue. We examine how standardized legal fines and fees for low-level charges induce disparate treatment and result in disparate impact. Using a mixed-methods approach that incorporates administrative court records as well as interviews with criminal defendants from Texas, we find that although the majority of defendants readily pay for and conclude their case, African American, Latinx, and economically disadvantaged defendants spend disproportionate amounts of money and time resolving theirs.

What Is Wrong with Monetary Sanctions? Directions for Policy, Practice, and Research.

Monetary sanctions are an integral and increasingly debated feature of the American criminal legal system. Emerging research, including that featured in this volume, offers important insight into the law governing monetary sanctions, how they are levied, and how their imposition affects inequality. Monetary sanctions are assessed for a wide range of contacts with the criminal legal system ranging from felony convictions to alleged traffic violations with important variability in law and practice across states.

Making Sense of Misdemeanors: Fine Only Offenses in Convivial Court Rooms.

This paper investigates how the complexity of and everyday interactions within the criminal legal system sow confusion about the causes and consequences of low-level misdemeanor, or fine only, legal entanglements. Drawing on data from 62 interviews with people assessed legal debt and 240 hours of ethnographic observation in courtrooms, we describe inconsistencies between the design of the criminal legal system and the organization of defendants' lives that undermine the ability of defendants to satisfactorily or summarily resolve their legal cases. We also consider how interpersonal interactions within courts undermine the power of defendants to challenge legal authority, court norms, and established criminal legal processes.

Employment and Health Among Recently Incarcerated Men Before and After the Affordable Care Act (2009-2017).

To explore whether and how the Affordable Care Act (ACA) affects the relationship between employment and health insurance coverage, health care utilization, and health outcomes among recently incarcerated men aged 18 to 64 years in the United States. With data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), we used a difference-in-differences approach to compare changes in outcomes by employment status among recently incarcerated men. Uninsurance declined significantly among recently incarcerated men after ACA implementation.

Mass Incarceration and Racial Inequality.

Despite two decades of declining crime rates, the United States continues to incarcerate a historically and comparatively large segment of the population. Moreover, incarceration and other forms of criminal justice contact ranging from police stops to community supervision are disproportionately concentrated among African American and Latino men. Mass incarceration, and other ways in which the criminal justice system infiltrates the lives of families, has critical implications for inequality.

Cardiovascular Disease in Incarcerated Populations.

Currently, 2.2 million individuals are incarcerated, and more than 11 million have been released from U.S.

Lack of experience-based stratification in homing pigeon leadership hierarchies.

In societies that make collective decisions through leadership, a fundamental question concerns the individual attributes that allow certain group members to assume leadership roles over others. Homing pigeons form transitive leadership hierarchies during flock flights, where flock members are ranked according to the average time differences with which they lead or follow others' movement. Here, we test systematically whether leadership ranks in navigational hierarchies are correlated with prior experience of a homing task.

Speed Determines Leadership and Leadership Determines Learning during Pigeon Flocking.

A key question in collective behavior is how individual differences structure animal groups, affect the flow of information, and give some group members greater weight in decisions. Depending on what factors contribute to leadership, despotic decisions could either improve decision accuracy or interfere with swarm intelligence. The mechanisms behind leadership are therefore important for understanding its functional significance.

Interaction rules underlying group decisions in homing pigeons.

Travelling in groups gives animals opportunities to share route information by following cues from each other's movement. The outcome of group navigation will depend on how individuals respond to each other within a flock, school, swarm or herd. Despite the abundance of modelling studies, only recently have researchers developed techniques to determine the interaction rules among real animals.

Context-dependent hierarchies in pigeons.

Hierarchical organization is widespread in the societies of humans and other animals, both in social structure and in decision-making contexts. In the case of collective motion, the majority of case studies report that dominant individuals lead group movements, in agreement with the common conflation of the terms "dominance" and "leadership." From a theoretical perspective, if social relationships influence interactions during collective motion, then social structure could also affect leadership in large, swarm-like groups, such as fish shoals and bird flocks.

Not just passengers: pigeons, Columba livia, can learn homing routes while flying with a more experienced conspecific.

For animals that travel in groups, the directional choices of conspecifics are potentially a rich source of information for spatial learning. In this study, we investigate how the opportunity to follow a locally experienced demonstrator affects route learning by pigeons over repeated homing flights. This test of social influences on navigation takes advantage of the individually distinctive routes that pigeons establish when trained alone.

The dominant 55 kDa allergen of the subtropical Bahia grass (Paspalum notatum) pollen is a group 13 pollen allergen, Pas n 13.

Bahia grass, Paspalum notatum, is an important pollen allergen source with a long season of pollination and wide distribution in subtropical and temperate regions. We aimed to characterize the 55 kDa allergen of Bahia grass pollen (BaGP) and ascertain its clinical importance. BaGP extract was separated by 2D-PAGE and immunoblotted with serum IgE of a grass pollen-allergic patient.

Employment gains and wage declines: the erosion of black women's relative wages since 1980.

Public policy initiatives in the 1950s and 1960s, including Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity law, helped mitigate explicit discrimination in pay, and the expansion of higher education and training programs have advanced the employment fortunes of many American women. By the early 1980s, some scholars proclaimed near equity in pay between black and white women, particularly among young and highly skilled workers. More recent policy initiatives and labor market conditions have been arguably less progressive for black women's employment and earnings: through the 1980s, 1990s, and the first half of the 2000s, the wage gap between black and white women widened considerably.

Using Mutual Information to Discover Temporal Patterns in Gene Expression Data.

Finding relations among gene expressions involves the definition of the similarity between experimental data. A simplest similarity measure is the Correlation Coefficient. It is able to identify linear dependences only; moreover, is sensitive to experimental errors.

Development of a pharmacist-managed lipid clinic.

Objective: To describe the development of a pharmacist-managed lipid clinic within a primary care medical clinic and review its results after approximately 12 months of operation.

Methods: A pharmacist-managed lipid clinic was developed at Naval Medical Center San Diego. Administrative background, treatment algorithm development, operational issues, clinical activities, and barriers to the clinic are discussed.

Longer episodes of community residential care reduce substance abuse patients' readmission rates.

Objective: The study focuses on whether substance abuse patients who enter a community residential facility (CRF) after discharge from inpatient care obtain more outpatient mental health care and have lower readmission rates than comparable patients discharged directly to the community.

Method: A national sample of substance abuse patients (N = 5,176; 99% men) referred to CRFs after inpatient substance abuse care is compared to a matched sample of patients (N = 5,176; 99% men) discharged to the community.

Results: Compared with controls, CRF patients were more likely to obtain outpatient mental health aftercare and obtained more intensive care.

Characteristics and outcomes of three models of community residential care for abuse patients.

Three models of transitional residential community care for substance abuse patients are defined on the basis of the differential provision of health and treatment services: a psychosocial model, a supportive rehabilitation model, and an intensive treatment model. Facilities that provided a high level of on-site health and treatment services were categorized as following an intensive treatment model; these facilities had the strongest emphasis on medical, dual diagnosis, and family treatment orientations. These facilities also had clearer policies and provided their residents more opportunities to participate in setting policies; however, staff were not more accepting of patient impairment or problem behavior.

Lactulose in trimethylaminuria, the fish-odour syndrome.

We have measured the urinary excretion of trimethylamine in two sisters with trimethylaminuria (the fish-odour syndrome). On a restricted diet the patients still excreted increased quantities of trimethylamine, and this did not alter following a fourteen-day course of lactulose. Dietary provocation produced a rise in urinary trimethylamine which was abolished by fourteen days' pretreatment with lactulose.

Interference by naproxen in the urinary 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid assay is due to a metabolite, desmethylnaproxen.

Interference by naproxen in the spectrophotometric assay for urinary 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid has been investigated. Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry demonstrated that ingestion of naproxen was associated with the production of four urinary components, unchanged drug and three metabolites, the major one being desmethylnaproxen. Unlike naproxen, this metabolite reacted in the spectrophotometric assay giving a product with the same absorption spectrum as that observed in urine samples obtained after naproxen ingestion.

The analysis of thiodiglycollic acid by selected ion monitoring.

A selected ion monitoring assay for thiodiglycollic acid in urine is described. Urine samples are analysed by combined gas chromatography-mass spectrometry as their dibutyl esters using pimelic acid as an internal standard. Rapid analysis was achieved by the simplification of sample preparation.

Avoidable accumulation of potentially toxic levels of benzothiazoles in babies receiving intravenous therapy.

Large amounts of a compound of exogenous origin were present in the serum of premature babies receiving prolonged intravenous therapy. This compound, identified as 2-(carboxymethylthio)benzothiazole (CMB) is derived from oxidation of 2-(hydroxyethylthio)benzothiazole which is leached out of rubber components of intravenous administration sets and syringes. Serum concentrations of CMB after prolonged exposure can exceed 500 mumol/l; concentrations over 35 mumol/l were observed in 91 babies over a period of twenty-seven months.