Restructuring Justice: Moving Towards Gender-Responsive Programming and Alternatives to Incarceration for Non-Violent Female Offenders

The United States¿ Federal and State laws differentiate between acceptable (or, legal) and unacceptable (illegal) behavior by prescribing restrictive punishment to citizens and/or groups that violate these established rules. These regulations are written to treat every person equally and to fairly serve justice; furthermore, the sanctions placed on offenders seek to reform illegal behavior through limitations on freedoms and rehabilitative programs. Despite the effort to treat all offenders fairly regardless of social identity categories (e.g., sex, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, age, ability, and gender and sexual orientation) and to humanely eliminate illegal behavior, the American penal system perpetuates de facto discrimination against a multitude of peoples. Furthermore, soaring recidivism rates caused by unsuccessful re-entry of incarcerated offenders puts economic stress on Federal and State budgets. For these reasons, offenders, policy-makers, and law-abiding citizens should all have a vested interest in reforming the prison system. This thesis focuses on the failure of the United States corrections system to adequately address the gender-specific needs of non-violent female offenders. Several factors contribute to the gender-specific discrimination that women experience in the criminal justice system: 1) Trends in female criminality that skew women¿s crime towards drug-related crimes, prostitution, and property offenses; 2) Mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes that are disproportionate to the crime committed; 3) So-called ¿gender-neutral¿ educational, vocational, substance abuse, and mental health programming that intends to equally rehabilitate men and women, but in fact favors men; and 4) The isolating nature of prison structures that inhibits smooth re-entry into society. I argue that a shift in the placement and treatment of non-violent female offenders is necessary for effective rehabilitation and for reducing recidivism rates. The first component of this shift is the design and implementation of gender- responsive treatment (GRT) rather than gender-neutral approaches in rehabilitative programming. The second shift is the utilization of alternatives to incarceration, which provide both more humane treatment of offenders and smoother reintegration to society. Drawing on recent scholarship, information from prison advocacy organizations, and research with men in an alternative program, I provide a critical analysis of current policies and alternative programs, and suggest several proposals for future gender- responsive programs in prisons and in place of incarceration. I argue that the expansion of gender-responsive programming and alternatives to incarceration respond to the marginalization of female offenders, address concerns about the financial sustainability of the United States criminal justice system, and tackle high recidivism rates.

A Stellar Census of the Tucana-Horologium Moving Group

We report the selection and spectroscopic confirmation of 129 new late-type (SpT = K3-M6) members of the Tucana-Horologium moving group, a nearby (d similar to 40 pc), young (tau similar to 40 Myr) population of comoving stars. We also report observations for 13 of the 17 known Tuc-Hor members in this spectral type range, and that 62 additional candidates are likely to be unassociated field stars; the confirmation frequency for new candidates is therefore 129/191 = 67%. We have used radial velocities, Ha emission, and Li-6708 absorption to distinguish between contaminants and bona fide members. Our expanded census of Tuc-Hor increases the known population by a factor of similar to 3 in total and by a factor of similar to 8 for members with SpT >= K3, but even so, the K-M dwarf population of Tuc-Hor is still markedly incomplete. Our expanded census allows for a much more detailed study of Tuc-Hor than was previously feasible. The spatial distribution of members appears to trace a two-dimensional sheet, with a broad distribution in X and Y, but a very narrow distribution (+/- 5 pc) in Z. The corresponding velocity distribution is very small, with a scatter of +/- 1.1 km s(-1) about the mean UVW velocity for stars spanning the entire 50 pc extent of Tuc-Hor. We also show that the isochronal age (tau similar to 20-30 Myr) and the lithium depletion boundary age (tau similar to 40 Myr) disagree, following the trend in other pre-main-sequence populations for isochrones to yield systematically younger ages. The H alpha emission line strength follows a trend of increasing equivalent width with later spectral type, as is seen for young clusters. We find that moving group members have been depleted of measurable lithium for spectral types of K7.0-M4.5. None of our targets have significant infrared excesses in the WISE W3 band, yielding an upper limit on warm debris disks of F < 0.7%. Finally, our purely kinematic and color-magnitude selection procedure allows us to test the efficiency and completeness for activity-based selection of young stars. We find that 60% of K-M dwarfs in Tuc-Hor do not have ROSAT counterparts and would have been omitted in X-ray-selected samples. In contrast, GALEX UV-selected samples using a previously suggested criterion for youth achieve completeness of 77% and purity of 78%, and we suggest new SpT-dependent selection criteria that will yield > 95% completeness for tau similar to 40 Myr populations with GALEX data available.

Effects of Landscape Segregation on Livelihood Vulnerability: Moving From Extensive Shifting Cultivation to Rotational Agriculture and Natural Forests in Northern Laos

This study investigates four decades of socio-economic and environmental change in a shifting cultivation landscape in the northern uplands of Laos. Historical changes in land cover and land use were analyzed using a chronological series of remote sensing data. Impacts of landscape change on local livelihoods were investigated in seven villages through interviews with various stakeholders. The study reveals that the complex mosaics of agriculture and forest patches observed in the study area have long constituted key assets for the resilience of local livelihood systems in the face of environmental and socio-economic risks. However, over the past 20 years, a process of segregating agricultural and forest spaces has increased the vulnerability of local land users. This process is a direct outcome of policies aimed at increasing national forest cover, eradicating shifting cultivation and fostering the emergence of more intensive and commercial agricultural practices. We argue that agriculture-forest segregation should be buffered in such a way that a diversity of livelihood opportunities and economic development pathways can be maintained.

Capturing How Objects Flow At Runtime

Most of today's dynamic analysis approaches are based on method traces. However, in the case of object-orientation understanding program execution by analyzing method traces is complicated because the behavior of a program depends on the sharing and the transfer of object references (aliasing). We argue that trace-based dynamic analysis is at a too low level of abstraction for object-oriented systems. We propose a new approach that captures the life cycle of objects by explicitly taking into account object aliasing and how aliases propagate during the execution of the program. In this paper, we present in detail our new meta-model and discuss future tracks opened by it.