The barriers to effective access to justice encountered by litigants in person in private family matters post-LASPO

In February 2019, some six years after the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) removed legal aid from a wide range of civil and family matters, the Government released its Post Implementation Review of the impact of LASPO and accompanying action plan. Publication is at a time when governmental policy extolling the virtues of mediation and online dispute resolution has the potential to have a profound effect on family law process. Against this background and having regard to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the family justice system, this paper discusses the findings of the author's qualitative study on the experiences of litigants in person in civil and family courts. It suggests a typology of litigants in person, explains how and where litigants in person in child arrangements proceedings seek advice and the significant access to justice barriers arising from the compulsory requirement to attend a MIAM before commencing proceedings and attending the fact-finding stage without representation. Ultimately, the paper offers fresh evidence of the harsh realities of litigating without representation in the family court, which despite espousing an inquisitorial process, remains adversarial in character.

‘Cocooning' in prison during COVID-19: Findings from recent research in Ireland

The advent of COVID-19 prompted the enforced isolation of elderly and vulnerable populations around the world, for their own safety. For people in prison, these restrictions risked compounding the isolation and harm they experienced. At the same time, the pandemic created barriers to prison oversight when it was most needed to ensure that the state upheld the rights and wellbeing of those in custody. This article reports findings from a unique collaboration in Ireland between the Office of the Inspector of Prisons – a national prison oversight body – and academic criminologists. Early in the pandemic, they cooperated to hear the voices of people ‘cocooning' – isolated because of their advanced age or a medical vulnerability – in Irish prisons by providing journals to this cohort, analysing the data, and encouraging the Irish Prison Service to change practices accordingly. The findings indicated that ‘cocooners' were initially ambivalent about these new restrictions, both experiencing them as a punishment akin to solitary confinement, and understanding the goal of protection. As time passed, however, participants reported a drastic impact on their mental and physical health, and implications for their (already limited) agency and relationships with others, experienced more or less severely depending on staff and management practices. The paper also discusses the implications for prison practices during and following the pandemic, understanding isolation in the penological context, and collaboration between prison oversight bodies and academics.

The Game Analysis among Governments, the Public and Green Smart Supply Chain Enterprises in Necessity Purchase and Supply during COVID-19 Pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, panic buying, price inflation, and the pollution of production processes led to economic and social unrest. In response to the current situation, the current research takes less account of the subjective perception of public panic buying and the lack of reference to the reality of effective governance. First, this paper uses prospect theory to portray the public's perceived value of goods in panic buying and non-panic buying situations. Then, drawing on the experience of effective governance in China, a tripartite evolutionary game model of local government, the public and green smart supply chain enterprises is constructed under the reward and punishment mechanism of the central government. Then, this paper analyzes the strategic choices of each game player and the stability of the system equilibrium. The structure of the study suggests the following. (1) Improving local government subsidies and penalties, the cost of positive response and the probability of response can lead to an evolutionary direction where the public chooses not to panic buy and green smart supply chain enterprises choose to ensure a balance between supply and demand and increase pollution control in the production process. (2) Our study yields three effective combinations of evolutionary strategies, of which an ideal combination of evolutionary strategies exists. Non-ideal evolutionary strategy combinations can occur due to improper incentives and penalties of local governments and misallocation of limited resources. However, we find four paths that can transform the non-ideal evolutionary strategy combination into an ideal evolutionary strategy combination. (3) The central government's reward and punishment mechanism is an important tool to stabilize the tripartite strategy, but the central government cannot achieve effective governance by replacing incentives with punishment.

Conservative government penal policy 2015-2021: Austerity, outsourcing and punishment redux?

This book interrogates Conservative government penal policy for adult and young adult offenders in England and Wales between 2015 and 2021. Government penal policy is shown to have been often ineffective and costly, and to have revived efforts to push the system towards a disastrous combination of austerity, outsourcing and punishment that has exacerbated the penal crisis. This investigation has meant touching on topical debates dealing with the impact of resource scarcity on offenders' experiences of the penal system, the impact of an increasing emphasis on punishment on offenders' sense of justice and fairness, the balance struck between infection control and offender welfare during the government handling of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and why successive Conservative governments have intransigently pursued a penal policy that has proved crisis-exacerbating. The overall conclusion reached is that penal policy is too important to be left to governments alone and needs to be recalibrated by a one-off inquiry, complemented by an on-going advisory body capable of requiring governments to 'explain or change'. The book is distinctive in that it provides a critical review of penal policy change, whist combining this with insights derived from the sociological analysis of penal trends. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Documents on Democracy

In a country where every ninth person is suffering food shortage, a country where more than one million civilians have fled their homes and villages and have nowhere to live, a country where everyone has lost a family member or a friend to hunger, exposure, war, landmines, arbitrary killings, or the COVID pandemic the military did their utmost to exacerbate, we are all the victims of the military's crimes. There appears to be a parallel trend of an increased number and length of imprisonments occurring through criminal justice processes, suggesting that the focus of deprivation of liberty has shifted towards imprisonment, on purported grounds of counter-terrorism and counter-"extremism." The systems of arbitrary detention and related patterns of abuse in VETC and other detention facilities come against the backdrop of broader discrimination against members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim minorities based on perceived security threats emanating from individual members of these groups. The Government holds the primary duty to ensure that all laws and policies are brought into compliance with international human rights law and to promptly investigate any allegations of human rights violations, to ensure accountability for perpetrators and to provide redress to victims.

REFRAMING HATE

The concept and naming of "hate crime," and the adoption of special laws to address it, provoked controversy and raised fundamental questions when they were introduced in the 1980s. In the decades since, neither hate crime itself nor those hotly debated questions have abated. To the contrary, hate crime has increased in recent years-although the prominent target groups have shifted over time-and the debate over hate crime laws has reignited as well. The still-open questions range from the philosophical to the doctrinal to the pragmatic: What justifies the enhanced punishment that hate crime laws impose based on the perpetrator's motivation? Does that enhanced punishment infringe on the perpetrator's rights to freedom of belief and expression? How can we know or prove a perpetrator's motivation? And, most practical of all: Do hate crime laws work? This Essay proposes that we reframe our understanding of what we label as hate crimes. It argues that those crimes are not necessarily the acts of hate-filled extremists motivated by deeply held, fringe beliefs, but instead often reflect the broader, even mainstream, social environment that has marked some social groups as the expected or even acceptable targets for crime and violence. In turn, hate crimes themselves influence the social environment by reinforcing recognizable patterns of discrimination. The Essay maintains that we should broaden our understanding of the motivations for and effects of hate crimes and draws connections between hate crimes and seemingly disparate phenomena that have recently captured the nation's attention.

Cross-Theoretical Compliance: An Integrative Compliance Analysis of COVID-19 Mitigation Responses in Israel

To understand the question why people obey or break rules, different approaches have focused on different theories and subsets of variables. The present research develops a cross-theoretical approach that integrates these perspectives. We apply this in a survey of compliance with COVID-19 pandemic mitigation rules in Israel. The data reveal that compliance in this setting was shaped by a combination of variables originating from legitimacy, capacity, and opportunity theories (but not rational choice or social theories). This demonstrates the importance of moving beyond narrow theoretical perspectives of compliance, to a cross-theoretical understanding—in which different theoretical approaches are systematically integrated.

Guest editorial

[...]most individuals who are under correctional control serve time in the community on probation or parole. Because health care for older adults is exceedingly complex and costly when compared to younger adults, this large and growing older adult population under correctional control (prisons, jails, parole or probation) ought to sound an alarm through the public health and carceral fields. Service providers in community-based settings such as area agencies on aging, senior centers and leaders in long-term care are encouraged to prepare for an influx of elders with a criminal legal history and to examine current strengths and potential barriers in rising to the challenge of compassion in the wake of custody.

Nulla (altera) poena sine (altero) crimine. From the pandemic crisis to the crisis of fundamental rights to health and study of detained persons

Following the January 31, 2020 state of emergency resolution and the pandemic's progress, there has been a compression of the enjoyment and exercise of fundamental rights that, inevitably, has affected with greater vigor the weaker members of society, those who were previously suffering from restrictions on freedoms and limited access to rights. The author proposes a reflection on the relationship between the guarantee of fundamental rights and Covid-19 from the perspective of the inmate population in order to assess how rights and reeducation are linked and how much the pandemic has affected their relationship with the hope that the return to normalcy, means, also, the possibility of a rethinking of the guarantee of fundamental rights of inmates already in prisons and not only extramoenia. © 2023, Societa Editoriale Federalismi s.r.l.. All rights reserved.

10 Years of the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program-an Analysis of Heart Failure Outcomes in Medicare Fee-for-Service Patients

Background Heart failure (HF) is the leading cause of readmissions among Medicare beneficiaries. The Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) passed under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act began assessing financial penalties in October 2012 for hospitals with higher-than-expected readmissions for acute myocardial infarction, heart failure and pneumonia among fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries. Excess HF readmissions have been a dominant driver of HRRP penalties. Methods We obtained data on 30-day readmissions, observation stay rates and mortality rates from January 2006 to December 2021 from the CMS website. Mean, SD and temporal trends were analyzed for intervals before HRRP penalty implementation (January 2006 to September 2012) and after (October 2012 to December 2021). Results The 30-day HF readmission rate was 24.52% [0.48] before HRRP implementation and decreased to 22.35% [0.44] between October 2012 to December 2021, p<0.001. Observation stay rates increased from 1.14% [0.30] to 2.13% [0.23], p<0.001. Risk-adjusted mortality rates increased from 10.56% [0.44] to 11.25% [0.36], p<0.001. Temporal trend analysis showed mortality peaked after HRRP enactment but declined to pre-HRRP levels until an increase during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conclusion HRRP penalties led to reduced 30-day HF readmissions but had the unintended consequence of increased observation stays. Mortality peaked following HRRP penalty implementation and then decreased until 2020. [Formula presented]Copyright © 2023 American College of Cardiology Foundation

Weaponizing and resisting time: Race, gender and punishment

This dissertation explores time and imprisonment: I center the narratives of women, their understanding of the ordering of the clock, and experiences of time while they navigated the criminal justice system. I conducted ethnographic research with currently and formerly incarcerated women in and around upstate New York from February 2018 through February 2022. Discussions were centered around issues they were facing while on the inside and how we as advocates-though limited-could help. Interviews probed for how time was understood, passed, and even resisted inside jails and prisons. Women's time, especially poor women and women of color, are subject to greater levels of punishment, which can be seen through and in public and private spheres. I argue time is structurally and physically weaponized against the incarcerated women and their families. I simultaneously expose how time is used as a means of power and social control in, by, and through the government and the criminal justice system. I thus look at how the management of time is key to statecraft. The weaponization of time is at the discretion of the state and its actors-all of which was exacerbated by the looming COVID-19 pandemic. I also discuss how women negotiated, marked, and understood the time of imprisonment in both jail and prison spaces. Finally, I address how incarcerated people created means to combat these abuses of power-from what Scott (1985) called 'weapons of the weak' to organized and collective forms of resistance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

NASADAD update on Synar: Raising the age, and COVID‐19

The National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Directors (NASADAD) last week released an updated fact sheet for provisions of the Synar Amendment, including revisions made as a result of COVID‐19. The Synar Amendment, named for the late former Congressman Mike Synar (D‐Okla.), requires states to prohibit the sale or distribution of tobacco products to minors. The update, by NASADAD's Lacy Adams, noted the following events.

Pandemic Rule-Breakers, Moral Luck, and Blaming the Blameworthy.

This paper takes under consideration a piece by Roger Crisp in which he questions what the problem of moral luck can teach us about COVID-19 lockdown rule-breakers. Taking the position that although such rule-breakers might seem to be new examples of moral luck, Crisp ends up denying the existence of moral luck and argues that moral luck is an outdated notion in so far as it relies on other questionable aspects of morality, that is, retributivist punishment and blame. Although the author agrees with Crisp that pandemic rule-breaker cases are putative examples of resultant moral luck, he proposes that Crisp has misconstrued what moral luck is and the paper examines in detail what he sees as the numerous problems with Crisp's claims. The author concludes that Crisp's analysis of pandemic rule-breaking does not shed any new light on the moral luck debate, and the difficult questions of luck, moral responsibility, and desert are not so easily resolved.

Cross-Theoretical Compliance: An Integrative Compliance Analysis of COVID-19 Mitigation Responses in Israel

To understand the question why people obey or break rules, different approaches have focused on different theories and subsets of variables. The present research develops a cross-theoretical approach that integrates these perspectives. We apply this in a survey of compliance with COVID-19 pandemic mitigation rules in Israel. The data reveal that compliance in this setting was shaped by a combination of variables originating from legitimacy-, capacity-, and opportunity theories (but not rational choice or social theories). This demonstrates the importance of moving beyond narrow theoretical perspectives of compliance, to a cross-theoretical understanding-in which different theoretical approaches are systematically integrated.

Do mobile phone bans show that immigration detention is becoming more like prison?

The mobile phone enables people to be heard through walls of confinement. During the suspension of visits to immigration detention in the COVID-19 pandemic, mobile phones were a lifeline to family and friends. There is also a long history of people using phones to document and communicate their experience in Australian-run detention to the world. The Australian government's attempts to ban mobile phones in detention provide a lens, and in this paper, a case study, to explore whether immigration detention in Australia is becoming more like prison. I argue that while the official purpose for detention remains administrative not punitive, the proposed mobile phone bans reveal the changing function of detention in Australian border control. Mobile phone bans show how people in influential roles have reimagined the legal subject of detention from the "asylum seeker' to the "migrant criminal'. Proposals to ban mobile phones also convey a transformation in how immigration detention is legally conceived - from a civil space under the supervision of police and the general criminal law to a more segregated space ruled from within. Drawing on scholarship on law, crimmigration, and carcerality, this paper traces how mobile phone bans came to be regarded as the natural next step in detention law-making.

Weaponizing and resisting time: Race, gender and punishment

This dissertation explores time and imprisonment: I center the narratives of women, their understanding of the ordering of the clock, and experiences of time while they navigated the criminal justice system. I conducted ethnographic research with currently and formerly incarcerated women in and around upstate New York from February 2018 through February 2022. Discussions were centered around issues they were facing while on the inside and how we as advocates-though limited-could help. Interviews probed for how time was understood, passed, and even resisted inside jails and prisons. Women's time, especially poor women and women of color, are subject to greater levels of punishment, which can be seen through and in public and private spheres. I argue time is structurally and physically weaponized against the incarcerated women and their families. I simultaneously expose how time is used as a means of power and social control in, by, and through the government and the criminal justice system. I thus look at how the management of time is key to statecraft. The weaponization of time is at the discretion of the state and its actors-all of which was exacerbated by the looming COVID-19 pandemic. I also discuss how women negotiated, marked, and understood the time of imprisonment in both jail and prison spaces. Finally, I address how incarcerated people created means to combat these abuses of power-from what Scott (1985) called 'weapons of the weak' to organized and collective forms of resistance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Police officers' punitiveness in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic: the role of fear, attribution and self-legitimacy

Purpose The focus of this study is to examine Indian police officers' punitiveness toward violators of criminal sanctions attached to COVID-19 mitigation laws enacted by the Indian Penal Code. The authors draw from the conceptual frameworks and correlates typically employed in traditional crime and justice research and adapt them to the context of the pandemic. Additionally, the authors examine whether officers' punitive attitudes are related to their belief in self-legitimacy and their job assignment (civilian vs. armed personnel) in a country with inherited colonial policing legacies. Design/methodology/approach Data for the study came from 1,323 police officers in a northern state of India. Findings Findings suggest that officers with vicarious fear of COVID-19 infections (e.g. infection of family members) find the sanctions associated with the new laws harsh. Additionally, officers who subscribe to the classical attributions of offenders feel that the laws are not punitive enough. In contrast, those with deterministic views perceive the sanctions as excessively harsh. Findings also suggest that officers' self-legitimacy, and belief in the authority and responsibility vested in them, is a key predictor of their punitive attitudes. Finally, officers assigned to police lines are more punitive than those designated to patrol/traffic work. Research limitations/implications Data or prior research on officers' punitive attitudes toward other violations (non-COVID-19 violations) is unavailable for comparison with this study's findings. Originality/value No prior research has examined the relationship between police officers' perceptions of self-legitimacy, their belief in the authority vested in them by the state, their belief in their role as police officers and their relationship to their punitive attitudes.

Principle of Proportionality of Penalties for the Offence of Embezzlement. Ecuador Studios Caso

The Comprehensive Criminal Organic Code of Ecuador came into force in its entirety on August 10, 2014, and a part on February 10, 2014. In its regulations, criminal offenses are considered typical unlawful and guilty conduct, which is sanctioned in this Code, following in this sense the finalist theory. This research work is very important due to the situation that Ecuador is going through, both in these moments of the SARS-COV2 or COVID 19 pandemic, as well as due to the cases of corruption where a former vice president, ministers and collaborators have been sentenced of the previous government. In this investigation, the following research methods have been used: Inductive-Deductive, Analytical-Synthetic and HistoricalLogical. As research techniques, Observation and Bibliographic Review. The study was carried out based on the sanction of the crime of embezzlement and, above all, on the proportionality of the sentence, considering that the sentence must always be imposed according to the crime committed and the damage caused to the protected legal interest, in this case is public administration.