Considering the Need for Empirically Grounded Drug Court Screening Mechanisms

A primary threat to the operative effectiveness of drug courts is high failure rates. Empirically supported screening devices could aid drug court administrators in maximizing resources, either through client selection or by helping to target problem clients in need of specialized assistance. Drawing from South Carolina county-level drug court records, success rates for participants with particular background characteristics were examined to identify correlations contributing to drug court success. Risk factors for drug court members were identified using chi-square and discriminant function analysis. Recidivism, crack as drug of choice, existence of criminality before drug use, and prior drug treatment were significantly related to drug court failure. These variables, as well as social stability variables, are argued to be vital elements in screening mechanisms.

Does biology underlie the oldest profession? Prostitution and sex disparities in john behavior

This study considers a biosocial explanation of why johns, the purchasers of commercial sex exchanges, are almost exclusively male. Trivers's theory of parental investment and sexual selection predicts that differential parental investment by biological sex will lead to divergent sex-based reproductive instincts. The sex bearing the larger parental investment will tend to be choosier whereas the sex bearing the lesser investment will tend to be relatively indiscriminate and competitive for access to sexual resources. We hypothesized that men are more likely than women to offer objects of value in exchange for access to sexual resources. Using self-reports of sex-purchasing from Add Health data (N = 14,544), we found that maleness was a robust predictor of john behavior even after controlling for well-known criminogenic risk factors.