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CRIMINAL JUSTICE

CRIMINAL JUSTICE-CRIMINAL LAW-PROCDEDURE-SENTENCING-COURTS

Posts in Social Sciences
Introduction to the Special Issue

By Joan E. Durrant, PhD

One of Britain’s colonial legacies is the common law defence available to adults who corporally punish children. Canada inherited this defence, which became codified in 1892 as Section 43 of the Criminal Code. The aim of this Special Issue is to examine Canada's law alongside those of other former members of the British Empire that have abolished their defences - Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The first three papers in this issue will place Canada's law within its global, historical and colonial contexts. The next three papers tell the stories of how Ireland, Scotland and Wales overcame the same challenges faced in Canada to ultimately provide equal protection for children.

Department of Community Health Sciences

Max Rady College of Medicine, 7p,

Exploring the pattern of mental health support-seeking behaviour and related barriers among women experiencing intimate partner violence in urban slums of Bangladesh

By Kamrun Nahar Koly ,Jobaida Saba,Trisha Mallick,Fahmida Rashid,Juliet Watson,Barbara Barbosa Neves

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a recognised global public health concern, substantially impacting women's well-being. While there is growing research on how IPV victim-survivors seek mental health support in the Global North, it remains understudied in the Global South, particularly for those residing in slums in low-income countries like Bangladesh. Through interviews and group discussions with different stakeholders, this study explored the mental healthcare-seeking behaviour of victim-survivors of IPV residing in urban slums, barriers to service utilisation, and recommendations to strengthen care pathways. Stakeholders perceived IPV as normalised in slums, indicating sociocultural norms and interpersonal causes as significant contributors to mental health issues and events of IPV. Seeking healthcare and moral support for IPV from local dispensaries and informal sources was common; however, IPV victim-survivors had no knowledge about mental-health-related services. Low mental health literacy and lack of financial support prevented them from seeking the necessary care. Social stigma regarding accessing mental healthcare, coupled with the absence of professional service providers and community-based services, represent critical systemic challenges. Recommendations included promoting community-level awareness of IPV and mental health issues, increasing mental healthcare services, training health workers, and fostering positive masculinities in community-based interventions. Stakeholders emphasised the need to adopt culturally relevant interventions for tackling IPV and improving mental healthcare pathways, especially for the low-income population of Bangladesh

. PLOS Glob Public Health 5(5),

Assessing the Impact of Utah's Reclassification of Drug Possession

By Brian Elderbroom, Leah Sakala, and Ammar Khalid

Utah adopted criminal justice reform legislation (H.B. 348) in 2015 to curb prison population growth and invest in behavioral health treatment, including reclassifying first and second drug possession convictions from felonies to misdemeanors. Our analysis finds that Utah successfully reduced the number of felony drug possession convictions, with a 71 percent drop between 2014 and 2018. Additionally, people spent a combined 105,011 fewer days in prison for drug possession in the two years following reform than in the two years before. Furthermore, reconviction and imprisonment rates for people with drug possession convictions were low prior to the policy reform and remained unchanged afterwards. However, Utah’s prison population is again growing, arrests for drug possession are rising despite declining arrests overall, and prison admissions for possession with intent to distribute offenses are increasing. This brief offers recommendations that Utah policymakers can consider to build on prior reforms, address additional prison population growth, and continue to invest in more effective public safety solutions.

Washington DC: The Urban Institute, 2020. 19p.

Looted Cultural Objects

By Elena A. Baylis

In the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, museums are in possession of cultural objects that were unethically taken from their countries and communities of origin under the auspices of colonialism. For many years, the art world considered such holdings unexceptional. Now, a longstanding movement to decolonize museums is gaining momentum, and some museums are reconsidering their collections. Presently, whether to return such looted foreign cultural objects is typically a voluntary choice, not a legal obligation. Modern treaties and statutes protecting cultural property apply only prospectively, to items stolen or illegally exported after their effective dates. But while the United States does not have a law concerning looted cultural objects taken from formerly colonized peoples overseas, it does have a statute governing the repatriation of Native American cultural items and human remains. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act requires museums to return designated Native American cultural objects to their communities-even if they were obtained before the law went into effect. This statute offers a valuable case study for repatriating cultural objects taken from other formerly colonized peoples.

, 124 Columbia Law Review Forum 183 (2024), 39p.

Liberty Against Government: The Rise, Flowering and Decline of a Famous Juridical Concept

By Corwin,Edward S

L^he history of American liberty is far more complicated than most people would at first blush have imagined. Indeed, until Professor Corwin, out of a lifetime of study devoted to American public law, distilled into a volume of modest compass the essential ingredients of American liberty, there was, to my knowledge, no one book to which the citizen might turn to learn its fascinating story. The story starts, as do so many of the great things of life, with the Greeks and the Romans. The wisdom of the political philosophers, ancient and modem, in their search for the foundations of human liberty is presented in its relation to the crucial events of English and American political experience, particularly such great documents as Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, the federal Constitution and our State constitutions.

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1948, 222p.

Judgment By Peers

Barnbay C. Keeney

This monograph originated as a dissertation prepared under the patient and understanding direction of Professor Charles H. McIlwain at Harvard University. Although I had (and still have) the temerity to challenge his views on judgment by peers and institutions connected with it, the influence of his teaching and scholarship are apparent throughout.

For the fellowships that made my studies possible, I am deeply grateful to the Department of History at Harvard University, and to the donors of the funds for those fellowships. Unfortunately, the Sheldon Traveling Fellowship that was to have enabled me to search for unpublished documents was of little use for this purpose because of the outbreak of the European war in 1939, and I have had to depend almost entirely on published material. After the war, a John Simon Guggenheim Post-Service Fellowship enabled me to complete and revise this work in 1945-46.

Had the great work of Marc Bloch (La Societe jeodale, 2 vols., Paris, 1939-1940), as well as the studies of Sanchez-Albornoz (En torno a los origenes del jeudalismo, Mendoza, 1942) been available when I was preparing the first section, I should have been spared much labor.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, HARVARD HISTORICAL MONOGRAPHS, 1952, 198p.