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Supermaxes across the United States detain thousands in long-term solitary confinement, under conditions of extreme sensory deprivation. Almost every state built a supermax between the late 1980s and the late 1990s. This chapter examines the role of federal prisoners’ rights litigation in the 1960s and 1970s in shaping the prisons, especially supermaxes, built in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States. This chapter uses a systematic analysis of federal court case law, as well as archival research and oral history interviews with key informants, including lawyers, experts, and correctional administrators, to explore the relationship between federal court litigation and prison building and designing. This chapter argues that federal conditions of confinement litigation in the 1960s and 1970s (1) had a direct role in shaping the supermax institutions built in the subsequent decades and (2) contributed to the resistance of these institutions to constitutional challenges. The history of litigation around supermaxes is an important and as-yet-unexplored aspect of the development of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence in the United States over the last half century.

Hazardous and radioactive wastes are routinely disposed of in shallow land disposal facilities at sites that have undergone environmental remediation. These residual contaminants, which remain on-site in these isolation facilities, continue to pose risks to humans and the environment and represent extremely long-term liabilities that require continuous management.

This paper draws upon the experiences generated from two federal programs established in response to the Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act (UMTRCA) of 1978 and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) of 1980. Operational issues arising at existing sites suggest that there is a need to better integrate the management functions at contaminant isolation facilities. To protect human health and safeguard the natural environment, more sustainable environmental protection systems are required for the long-term management of residual contaminants. A series of logic diagrams are introduced to improve the integration and management of remedial processes, engineered barriers and institutional controls. These institutional responsibilities need to be monitored and maintained by the appropriate site stewards to ensure continued system performance.

Does social-isolation deflate observed preferences for public goods? Using a voting referendum elicitation mechanism, List et al. (2004) document a 30% reduction in affirmative voting when votes are privately, rather than publicly, cast for a public good. We replicate this work and then add to the exercise by examining the role that group size plays in generating social-pressure bias – an extension we motivate with a structural model. Having replicated to the extent possible the List et al.’s consequential private and public treatments, we find that when group size is large (N = 60), social isolation reduces affirmative votes by roughly 30%, a result that does not carry over to the small-group (N = 30) session.

Under the authoritarian rule of Enver Hoxha, Albania pursued one of the more unusual variants of a planned economy, increasingly isolated from the rest of the socialist world. In this chapter, the authors consider the interplay between the Hoxha’s policy of economic isolationism and the economics produced in isolation. Several conclusions can be drawn. First, much like in other authoritarian regimes, economic theory did not drive economic policy; rather political ideology determined policy; economic theories were retroactively constructed and used as justification. Second, authoritarian-decreed economic theory (dogma) meant that the job of Albanian economists was distinctly different from what we observe elsewhere. Albanian economists played two roles – propaganda for regime positions and technical support for regime policies. Third, and most uniquely Albanian, economic and political isolation created an echo-chamber where theory was functionally irrelevant to policy-making or practice. Decreed economic theory was substantively empty, and new ideas were shut out. This had profound implications for Albania’s eventual transition to a market economy.

This chapter is an examination of the contribution of female musicianship to the Perth metal scene, particularly in relation to the positioning of women in frontier mythology and the ways in which we might read the gothic sublime in terms of women’s experiences. While it has been recognised that Australian metal music, in general, is tied to the colonial frontier narrative, Perth’s isolation produces a particular kind of frontier narrative which can be read in relation to the gothic sublime. In this chapter, the author examines three Perth metal bands which comprise female members: Claim the Throne (featuring Jess Millea on keys and vocals), Sanzu (featuring Fatima Curley on bass) and Deadspace (featuring Shelby Jansen on bass and vocals). The author will argue that there is a motif running through Perth bands that comprise female musicians that is tied to their positioning in the Western frontier narrative and its production in relation to the gothic sublime. To do so presents one kind of way to conceptualise a metal scene on the ‘Western Front’. The author emphasises that this is not a totalising conceptualisation, rather, it is one way to suggest how context might shape women’s experiences and, perhaps more importantly for this argument, the way in which women women’s experiences and historicity in relation to the legacy of ‘frontierswomen’ inflect metal music in this scene.

In Schelling’s “checkerboard” model of segregation, individuals’ moderately held preferences about the proportion of their neighbors who are similar versus dissimilar to them can, through an automatic and mathematical process, yield dramatic population-level segregative behaviors. The notion of such an automatic segregative process would seem to have implications for spatial dynamics when a group home for persons with disabilities is introduced into a community. This study sought to examine those implications alongside data in the research literature regarding community acceptance of group homes.

Using an agent-based modeling approach, computer simulations were constructed to apply Schelling’s model, as well as an alternative model, to community reaction to the introduction of group homes for persons with disabilities. Simulation conditions were set to roughly correspond to the proportion of group homes or other congregate living situations, as well as vacant dwellings, in a typical community in the United States.

The simulations predict that group homes will, to varying degrees, become spatially isolated within their communities. These predictions conflict with previous research findings that suggest minimal relocation of neighbors and rapid adjustment of communities to the presence of group homes.

Simulations of an automatic segregative process might offer a baseline or a “null hypothesis” of sorts, allowing us to more fully understand the extent of the social and socioeconomic forces that serve to moderate or override such an automatic process, allowing communities to adjust to group homes’ presence.

This paper investigates state auditors’ decisions regarding the isolation or projection of sample misstatements to underlying sample populations. Seventy-eight state auditors completed four treatment cases that incorporate the complete 2×2 manipulation of intentional/unintentional and systematic/non-systematic misstatements in different case scenarios, enabling a test of the independent variables both across and within case scenarios.

The results indicate that both across and within case scenarios, auditors tend to project systematic misstatements more often than they project non-systematic misstatements. However, the auditors’ isolation/projection decisions are generally not influenced by whether the sample misstatements are intentional or unintentional.