Comparing Recidivism of Sexual and Nonsexual Offenders: The Role of Humanist, Spiritual, and Religious Involvement.

Some research has considered whether faith-informed programs help persons with a previous incarceration navigate a life away from crime. Few studies considered whether offense category moderates this relationship. Building upon studies that found a strong association between a prior sexual conviction and participation in religion in prison, we assess whether time spent in humanist, spiritual, and religious (HSR) programs in prison is associated with reconviction, separately for persons convicted of a sex offense and any other offense. Our results revealed that a higher level of participation in HSR programs was associated with a lower likelihood and rate of reconviction; however, this effect was more pronounced for persons with a prior sexual conviction. Supplementary analyses revealed that the use of religion in an extrinsic manner was beneficial, suggesting this group may look to religion to gain social support and overcome rejection and loneliness. Extrinsic religiosity among other groups, however, was associated with an increased risk of reconviction.

Reduced Trauma Symptoms and Perceived Stress in Male Prison Inmates through the Transcendental Meditation Program: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

CONTEXT: Trauma events are four times more prevalent in inmates than in the general public and are associated with increased recidivism and other mental and physical health issues. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the effects of Transcendental Meditation (TM) on trauma symptoms in male inmates. DESIGN: One hundred eighty-one inmates with a moderate- to high-risk criminal profile were randomly assigned to either the TM program or to a usual care control group. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The Trauma Symptom Checklist and the Perceived Stress Scale were administered at baseline and four-month posttest. RESULTS: Significant reductions in total trauma symptoms, anxiety, depression, dissociation, and sleep disturbance subscales, and perceived stress in the TM group were found compared with controls (all p values < 0.001). The high-trauma subgroup analysis further showed a higher magnitude of effects in the TM group compared with controls on all outcomes, with Cohen effect sizes ranging from 0.67 to 0.89. CONCLUSION: Results are consistent with those of prior studies of the TM program in other populations and its effects on trauma symptoms and perceived stress.

Identification of pneumonia and influenza deaths using the Death Certificate Pipeline.

BACKGROUND: Death records are a rich source of data, which can be used to assist with public surveillance and/or decision support. However, to use this type of data for such purposes it has to be transformed into a coded format to make it computable. Because the cause of death in the certificates is reported as free text, encoding the data is currently the single largest barrier of using death certificates for surveillance. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to demonstrate the feasibility of using a pipeline, composed of a detection rule and a natural language processor, for the real time encoding of death certificates using the identification of pneumonia and influenza cases as an example and demonstrating that its accuracy is comparable to existing methods. RESULTS: A Death Certificates Pipeline (DCP) was developed to automatically code death certificates and identify pneumonia and influenza cases. The pipeline used MetaMap to code death certificates from the Utah Department of Health for the year 2008. The output of MetaMap was then accessed by detection rules which flagged pneumonia and influenza cases based on the Centers of Disease and Control and Prevention (CDC) case definition. The output from the DCP was compared with the current method used by the CDC and with a keyword search. Recall, precision, positive predictive value and F-measure with respect to the CDC method were calculated for the two other methods considered here. The two different techniques compared here with the CDC method showed the following recall/ precision results: DCP: 0.998/0.98 and keyword searching: 0.96/0.96. The F-measure were 0.99 and 0.96 respectively (DCP and keyword searching). Both the keyword and the DCP can run in interactive form with modest computer resources, but DCP showed superior performance. CONCLUSION: The pipeline proposed here for coding death certificates and the detection of cases is feasible and can be extended to other conditions. This method provides an alternative that allows for coding free-text death certificates in real time that may increase its utilization not only in the public health domain but also for biomedical researchers and developers. TRIAL REGISTRATION: This study did not involved any clinical trials.