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The purpose of this paper is to explore supposed inevitable personal decline for long-term prisoners, particularly those serving a sentence of life without parole.

Using the prison records of a life without parole sentenced prisoner.

Findings suggest that prisoner deterioration is not inevitable in a whole life prison sentence.

Findings are based on one account, of a female prisoner.

Distinct services and support are required for those with a natural life prison sentence.

To date, there is limited research of prisoners serving life without parole, particularly the mental health implications of denying a prisoner future parole.

Query-based summarization approaches might not be able to provide summaries compatible with the user’s information need, as they mostly rely on a limited source of information, usually represented as a single query by the user. This issue becomes even more challenging when dealing with scientific documents, as they contain more specific subject-related terms, while the user may not be able to express his/her specific information need in a query with limited terms. This study aims to propose an interactive multi-document text summarization approach that generates an eligible summary that is more compatible with the user’s information need. This approach allows the user to interactively specify the composition of a multi-document summary.

This approach exploits the user’s opinion in two stages. The initial query is refined by user-selected keywords/keyphrases and complete sentences extracted from the set of retrieved documents. It is followed by a novel method for sentence expansion using the genetic algorithm, and ranking the final set of sentences using the maximal marginal relevance method. Basically, for implementation, the Web of Science data set in the artificial intelligence (AI) category is considered.

The proposed approach receives feedback from the user in terms of favorable keywords and sentences. The feedback eventually improves the summary as the end. To assess the performance of the proposed system, this paper has asked 45 users who were graduate students in the field of AI to fill out a questionnaire. The quality of the final summary has been also evaluated from the user’s perspective and information redundancy. It has been investigated that the proposed approach leads to higher degrees of user satisfaction compared to the ones with no or only one step of the interaction.

The interactive summarization approach goes beyond the initial user’s query, while it includes the user’s preferred keywords/keyphrases and sentences through a systematic interaction. With respect to these interactions, the system gives the user a more clear idea of the information he/she is looking for and consequently adjusting the final result to the ultimate information need. Such interaction allows the summarization system to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the user’s information needs while expanding context-based knowledge and guiding the user toward his/her information journey.

Some countries prohibit the imposition of life imprisonment on women but allow it for men for the same offence (e.g. Albania, Azerbaijan, Russia and Belarus). In Khamtokhu and Aksenchik v. Russia (2017) the European Court of Human Rights rejected the claim that it was discriminatory to punish two Russian men convicted of murder to life imprisonment. Other than a handful of legal commentaries there have been no in-depth analyses of the case, in particular on the dangers of using gender stereotyping to limit life imprisonment. To address this gap, this chapter draws on criminological works on the gendered experience of life imprisonment, legal analyses of perpetual incarceration under human rights law and ECHR case law on gender stereotyping and on life imprisonment. This study critically discusses the Court’s assessment of gender stereotypes in the context of life imprisonment and considers whether its approach constitutes any improvement for women. In so doing, it illuminates how well-intended efforts to curtail some extreme forms of penal practices such as perpetual incarceration may have unintended and perverse consequences for women specifically and the landscape of punishment more generally.

The purpose of this paper is to review the development of restorative justice in Ireland since the publication of the Final Report of the National Commission on Restorative Justice in 2009. It argues that although the development of restorative justice in Ireland has progressed slowly, it has also progressed steadily. There are still obstacles in the path of developing a restorative justice framework on a national level for both adult and young offenders, however, all signs indicate that these obstacles can and will be overcome in the future.

The research for this paper was primarily a review of the very limited literature on restorative justice in Ireland.

The development of restorative justice in Ireland has undergone slow and steady progress over the last decade. While a great deal of work is still needed before restorative justice can be rolled out nationally, the progress that has been made suggests that there is a real future for restorative justice in Ireland.

Statistics on restorative justice in Ireland are very limited and referral numbers are still lower than what they should be.

Any research on restorative justice in Ireland will highlight the fact that more research and analysis is needed, especially in terms of measuring recidivism of offenders who take part in restorative practices.

This paper adds to the growing literature on restorative justice in Ireland.

Children of recent refugees and immigrants are the fastest growing student population in the US public education system. Thus, it is imperative to create research-based pedagogies that value linguistic diversity, provide academic and social–emotional support and embrace life experiences that are often vastly different from those of the teachers and typical students. The goal of this study was to examine the effects of an instructional model designed to address specific academic and social–emotional competencies of linguistically and culturally diverse students on the writing of eight and nine-year-old students (n = 10) enrolled in an afterschool programme serving students from refugee families. The model of explicit writing instruction implemented in the study included culturally responsive literature, mindfulness practices, and differentiation in teaching genre-specific text structure and academic vocabulary. Pre- and post-test personal essays were scored for holistic quality of writing and use of academic vocabulary. The findings indicate that explicit and differentiated instruction in both writing organisation and vocabulary use was effective in increasing the holistic quality of students' personal writing and their ability to integrate academic vocabulary appropriately and meaningfully in independent writing. Implications for culturally responsive instruction for refugee students are discussed.

This paper, aims to contribute to the wider project of understanding the production of knowledge about crime and justice and, “to cultivate and sustain a reflexive awareness about the conditions under which such knowledge is (or is not) produced” (Loader and Sparks, 2012, p. 6). In reviewing the core issues and concerns about crime and control from the 1980s as articulated in these research dissertations, the authors seek to be self-reflexive about academic criminology as a field of enquiry in Hong Kong.

In this research, 209 dissertations, completed between 1988 and 2015, are categorized on the basis of the main subject or theme of investigation carried out by each of the research paper.

This discussion is among the first and few attempts to look at the development of criminology in the Hong Kong China region and draws from the unique perspectives of practitioners – those working on the front lines – in their attempts to understand crime and its control with a criminological imagination.

This paper employs new methods to evaluate the availability of multistate series–parallel systems, in which a number of similar components are available in each subsystem.

In this paper, polynomial distribution function (PDF) is combined with universal generating function (UGF) and recursive algorithm (RA) methods to evaluate the availability of multistate series–parallel systems. To achieve this goal, the PDF is initially used to determine the performance rates and the probabilities corresponding to the performance states of the similar components in a subsystem. The obtained results are used to evaluate the system availability via the UGF and RA methods.

It is shown that the combined UGF and PDF (UGF-PDF) and also the combined RA and PDF (RA-PDF) methods require less computational time than did the UGF and RA methods, respectively.

In the UGF and RA methods, there is no difference in system availability evaluation time when considering similar or different components in each subsystem. But the proposed methods in this article do not have this restrictions; therefore, these methods can be used to evaluate system availability in optimal redundancy allocation problems. As a result, using these methods reduces the optimization time of those problems.

The purpose of his paper is to present a teaching methodology for improving the understanding of ethical decision making. This pedagogical approach is applicable in college courses and in corporate training programs.

Participants are asked to analyze a set of eight ethical dilemmas with differing situational contingencies and to choose from among alternatives for handling the dilemma. Group discussion then focuses on a comparison of participants' choices relative to their personal ethical orientations as measured by a standardized self‐report instrument.

The experiences of the authors with this methodology indicates that participants are able to gain a better understanding of the factors, both individual and situational, that frame an ethical dilemma. This methodology can also show how individuals can be influenced to make unethical choices based on the presence of certain contextual factors.

This paper describes a novel instructional approach for improving the understanding of the factors that frame and influence ethical decision making. This approach is innovative in that it uses vignettes describing real‐life ethical dilemmas in conjunction with an assessment of individual differences in ethical orientation.

Criminal law has dramatically expanded since the 1970s. Despite popular and academic attention to overcriminalization in the United States, empirical research on how court actors and, in particular, prosecutors, use the legal tools associated with overcriminalization is scarce. In this chapter, we describe three forms of overcriminalization that, in theory, have created new tools for prosecutors: the criminalization of new behaviors, mandatory minimum sentencing statutes, and the internal expansion of criminal laws. We then use a unique dataset of felony filings and dispositions in Florida from 1995 to 2015 to test a series of hypotheses examining how overcriminalization influences prosecutorial practices given three changes to the political economy during this time: the decline in violent and property crime, the Great Recession, and a growing call for criminal justice reform. We find that prosecutors have been unconstrained by declining crime rates. Yet, rather than rely on new criminal statutes or mandatory minimum sentence laws, they maintained their caseloads by increasing their filing rates for traditional violent, property and drug offenses. At the same time, the data demonstrate nonviolent other offenses are the top charge in almost 20% of the felony caseload between 2005 and 2015. Our findings also suggest that, despite reform rhetoric, filing and conviction rates decreased due to the Recession, not changes in the law. We discuss the implications of these findings for criminal justice reform.