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The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) has the responsibility for overseeing the preparation of future physician specialists and subspecialists to serve the American public. To ensure ACGME's ability to adapt and sustain its accreditation activities in a future marked by significant uncertainty, its administration and board of directors embarked on a planning process that would frame its strategic actions in support of this responsibility. We describe the scenario planning process, and report key insights that resulted from it. We also discuss in greater depth a subset of those insights, which challenge certain conventional truths, call for new collaborative directions for the ACGME, and reaffirm the importance of professionalism in service of the public across all future scenarios evaluated.

This research compared the recidivism rates of groups of releasees from privately and publicly operated prisons. The study consisted of 198 male releasees from two private facilities in Florida who were precision matched with releasees from public prisons. Recidivism over one year was measured in alternative ways. The private prison group had lower rates of recidivism. Those released from private prisons who reoffended committed less serious subsequent offenses than did their public prison counterparts. The two groups were similar in how long it took for rearrest or for the first recidivism event to occur.

Scenario planning has taught a few organizations to be “learning planners.” That is, to identify the crucial uncertainties of the future and learn to formulate robust goals and strategies that will be advantageous in a variety of futures. It is a planning method that systematically analyses the uncertainties of the future and, in the process, complements and reinforces a company's efforts to become a learning organization.

By no later than the 1960's, the United States began to witness fundamental philosophical and structural changes in dominant understandings of the proper role of government as a provider of essential public services. Earlier times found much support for the view that the obligation of government was three-fold: (1) to identify the types of services which were essential to the health, safety, and welfare of the public; (2) to mandate by statute that identified services be provided; and (3) to identify-and often to create-the public agencies by means of which mandated services would be provided. Experience, however, suggested that government often failed to serve the public interest when it attempted to shoulder this broad set of responsibilities. In particular, experience suggested that such important goals as accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness often were not served by government being cast in the role of service provider. With increasing frequency, critics began to suggest that government agencies which provided essential public services often assigned a higher priority to serving agency interests than to serving the public interest, that the creation of non-competitive governmental monopolies in a broad array of service areas resulted in bureaucratic organizations within which few incentives for productivity or for quality could be found, and that it was highly probable that the private sector could provide better services at a lower cost.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has developed an automated system for separating Xe from air and can detect the following radioxenon isotopes, 131mXe, 133mXe, 133Xe, and 135Xe. This report details the techniques used to generate the various radioxenon isotopes that are used for the calibration of the detector as well as other isotopes that have the potential to interfere with the fission produced radioxenon isotopes. Fission production is covered first using highly enriched uranium followed by a description and results from an experiment to produce radioxenon isotopes from neutron activation of ambient xenon.

The impact of science and technology on the values, customs, institutions, and social arrangements of this society has been complex and widespread. This influence has been in all areas of life. It has been negative as well as positive. On the positive side, developments in alleviating human misery and suffering are phenomenal. Through advancements in scientific knowledge, the quality of living has been enhanced. Many of the once common life-threatening diseases have been eliminated. Technological advances in telecommunications and transportation place the world at the fingertips-a dial or a credit card allows access to aircraft that can travel faster than sound. Moreover, a cluster of medical, social, and psychological advances has extended human longevity significantly. Material gains or creature comforts are evident in all sections of the country, and they are visible in all of the various social, ethnic, and cultural groups. In today's households it is often difficult to see the negative side of technology. Ironically, the same technology that put material comforts and conveniences within reach of the masses also made

The article I wrote with Matthew J. Bronick for this journal in 1984 assessing the quality of doctoral programs in deviance, criminology, and criminal justice is criticized by Lawrence F. Travis in the present issue. The Travis critique focuses on two primary concerns. First, he raises a series of objections to the use of citation-based measures of the caliber of faculty, contending that assessments of quality ought to be qualitative in nature. Second, he criticizes our use of sociology-based doctoral programs as a standard of comparison for evaluating independent doctoral programs in criminology and criminal justice. Although Professor Travis makes some valid points regarding the limitations of all measures that social scientists have available to them currently, I remain convinced of the validity of my 1984 findings and am confident that citation-based measures remain a useful indicator of the quality of faculty research. I think that the comparison with sociology also remains valid; although criminology is developing rapidly as an independent field, the vast majority of active criminologists today were trained in sociology and retain ties to that discipline.

This study. based on an analysis of data obtained from a randomly selected sample of 239 inmates of a maximum security federal penetentiary, assesses the explanotory power and relative importance of variables related to prisonization in the previous literature. While support for hypotheses derived from the importation and deprivation models was found, our analysis. consistent with earlier research, reveals that the proportion of variance in prisonization which can be accounted for is not high. Still, our findings underline the necessity of moving toward an integration of existing theories of prisonization rother than attempting to view them as contradictory perspectives.

Research involving the social roles adopted by inmates is important. This article discusses the means of acquiring information on the type of position that an inmate has assumed and how this might aid those who are interested or involved in attempts to alter the attitudes and behavior of those inmates. The article's purpose is to examine both the extent to which this approach can discriminate between types of inmates and its potential as a predictor of other important aspects of adaptation to confinement.

An increasing amount of pressure has been directed toward juvenile court operations, much of which has focused on the hypothesized abuse of the broad discretionary decision-making power that has traditionally been vested in the court. In this paper, we attempt to examine the extent to which factors not directly associated with the nature of the alleged offense may alter the probability that a juvenile w.11 be referred for a formal hearing in the juvenile court, a step which many analysts feel may have the unintended function of promoting rather than inhibiting subsequent involvement in delinquent behavior. Based on an analysis of 346 cases, our findings show that a number of variables that are not of direct legal relevance do exert a significant influence on the dispositional process, but the magnitude of this influence is not as great as many have been led to expect given the orientation of some explanatory models, particularly those based on the propositions of the labeling school.

Of the growing number of criticisms directed at various facets of the juvenile justice system, none is more common than the contention that the informality of the juvenile court encourages discrimi...

While information regarding the doctoral programs in any discipline is of obvious and considerable relevance both to those in the discipline and to those seeking access to the best possible sites for graduate training, our knowledge about the quality of doctoral programs continues to be based on little more than speculation and highly ambiguous measures of institutional or departmental prestige. This study attempts to fill this gap for those who have special interests in the related fields of deviance, criminology, and criminal justice by ranking the thirty-six most significant doctoral programs in the nation by means of data derived from the Social Science Citation Index. Perhaps the most striking of our findings—and certainly to us the most distressing finding—is that those departments ranked by our measures as being the highest quality are consistently those which exist within the broader structure of departments of sociology. Given our firm conviction that the discipline of criminology is far, far more than that aspect of it which is closely related to issues of substantive significance to the field of sociology, we can only speculate that those in leadership positions in the growing number of independent schools or departments of criminology or criminal justice are not meeting their obligations to the discipline whose vitality and prospects depend so heavily on the quality of their judgment.

Numerous authorities have argued convincingly that what have been termed "status offenses" should be removed from the jurisdiction of the juvenile court. Perhaps the most cogent rationale that has been advanced in this regard flows directly from the statutory and procedural inequity that is clearly demonstrated by this vaguely defined set of offenses. Unfortunately, many advocates of reform have gone on to argue that a substantial body of empirical research has shown that (1) status offenders are not a significant threat to society because they have not been and generally will not become involved in more serious offenses and (2) any movement toward more serious involvement stems more from the stig matizing consequences of formal legal processing than from any other source. Such assertions are based on insufficient or nonexistent empirical evidence. Indeed, this analysis, based on an examination of the offense histories of a large sample of juveniles who appeared before one of two urban juvenile courts on one or more occasions during a five-year period, shows that many juveniles charged with status offenses have previously been charged with other types of offenses, that juveniles whose first court appearance involved a status offense are more likely to recidivate than those first charged with a misdemeanor or a felony, and that there is little or no evidence to support the contention that legal processing is associated with subsequent involvement in more serious delinquency. '

This research, based upon an analysis of data obtained from separate studies of three institutions for male offenders, treats variations in the impact of confinement as problematic and develops a model which conceptualizes prisonization as an independent variable that is likely to have both short- and long-term consequences. Our findings reveal that prisonization encourages opposition to the prison, a short-term consequence of confinement. These attitudes are likely to effectively block institutional rehabilitative efforts and to increase problems of social control for the organization. This, in turn, may inhibit successful reintegration into society upon release. Despite the ability of the model to predict attitudes which arguably encourage antisocial behavior, longitudinal data are clearly necessary to adequately test any model which attempts to predict post release behavior.

This study, essentially an extension of the recent work of Akers et al., represents an attempt to evaluate the utility of two theoretical paradigms in accounting for illicit drug use in a prison setting. Based on self-report data obtained from a sample of 273 adult felons who were confined in a medium security penitentiary, the analysis presented demonstrates that virtually all of those inmates who reported drug use within the prison had also used drugs prior to their confident. Thus, contrary to the implications of the “deprivation model,” but fully consistent with those of the “importation model” this particular pattern of prison behavior is clearly not a direct function of the conditions of confinement. Instead, while the structure of the prison may well influence the probability that those who have used drugs prod to con/unmet will continue to do so while in prison, drug use appears to be an example of a type of behavior within the prison which is best predicted by preprison socialization and experience.

Summary Despite much reliance on summated rating scales, little research has examined the consequences of relying on alternative item analysis strategies. All tend to be treated as though they were comparable even though the statistical methods on which each depends are very different. This analysis, based on data obtained from 3334 respondents who returned mailed questionnaires during the course of a large public opinion survey, addresses this issue by comparing the products of three traditional methods of item selection: t tests, item-to-scale correlations, and factor analysis. The findings demonstrate that the content of attitude measures is significantly affected by the item analysis method employed. Thus, these three methods are far from comparable. At the same time, an exploratory assessment of how well scales based on different item analysis methods perform as predictor variables did not identify major differences. Nevertheless, the results should alert researchers to the fact that item selection m...

Discriminant analysis of both observational and records data from two juvenile court systems is used to assess differences in the type and activities of the people involved in legal processing of status and nonstatus offenders. The analysis indicates that there are differences between the processing of the two categories of offenders; however, contrary to expectations, the most powerful discriminating variables (detention and petitioner) are not those related to the degree in which the justice system has implemented the formalities mandated by the Gault decision. It is concluded that statutory distinctions between legal categories of juveniles have virtually no relevance for the degree of formality with which these cases are processed by the courts.

Coefficients of absorption of visible radiation are determined for sea ice and snow as a function of porosity of the medium and wave-length of energy refracted into it. A comparison is made between the values derived and those obtained by other investigators under similar snow conditions. A difference in results suggests a significant rôle of crystal size and orientation in the absorption properties of sea ice and snow.

Dynamic characteristics of rotating drive trains in reversing hot mills are discussed. Linear reactions of a classical spring-mass mechanical system and nonlinear reactions of a mill drive train were studied by field tests and analytical computations. Meaningful approaches are offered by these studies to many mechanical problems which have been hitherto undefined.

This study, based on data obtained from a sample of 276 adult male felons confined in a maximum-security penitentiary, provides a test of the implications of a theoretical model that links levels of prisonization to the expected consequences of that process that appear to inhibit the attainment of any prosocial changes in the world-views of the inmates. In addition, the study provides a partial test of what have become defined as the importation and deprivation models of prisonization. The findings suggest that prisonization in the context of this maximum security institution does have negative consequences for both the prison organization and the long-term life chances of the inmates. Further, and of equal theoretical importance, the data show that the closed-system paradigm characteristic of the deprivation model is inadequate for explanations of either prisonization or the consequence of that process.

This report focuses on data obtained from 276 adult male felons who were inmates in a maximum-security penitentiary in 1971. The general intent of the larger study of which this essay is a part was to test the viability of two available explanations of the impact of confinement. One of these models, often referred to as the "deprivation model," provides a restrictive perspective by virtue of its unusually heavy emphasis on intra-institutional processes and influences. A more recent approach, the "importa tion model," accepts the importance of such intra-institutional variables, but also points to the importance of variables that originate outside the context of the prison and, in many cases, cannot be directly manipulated by correctional officials. The specific variables reported in this pa per include measures of social class of origin, social class of attainment, preprison involvement in criminality, extent of contact with the larger society during confinement, and the inmates' perceptions of their post-prison life-chances. These independent variables were correlated with a measure of prisonization. The findings provide evidence in sup port of the more inclusive conceptualization provided by the im portation model. The obvious implication is that overemphasis on intra-institutional factors will only prove to be misleading.

Investigation of ocean-bottom cores in polar regions has shown that strata lacking in skeletal remains of organisms are an indication of conditions during which a snow cover on sea ice prevented the transmission of short-wave radiation from atmosphere to sea water. The presence of organic remains, on the other hand, is indicative of ‘warm’ periods during which solar energy was available for photosynthesis by holophytic plankton. In this paper results of examination of two cores from the south edge of the Ross Sea are reported. The cores have been correlated with horizons dated by the carbon-14 method. The presence in the sediments of volcanic ash deposited by the wind at times when perennial sea ice blanketed the region is puzzling. Calculation of rates of penetration of sedimentary material under conditions of a cold environment discloses the mechanism of bottom sedimentation through sea ice with a snow cover. The evidence of the sediments indicates that the Ross Ice Shelf has not advanced materially beyond its present northerly limits during late Pleistocene and Recent time.

Measuring devices at farm turnouts on open channel irrigation systems are discussed under six general functional classifications; illustrations of each classification in use in different parts of world; future development is expected to provide new design incorporating desirable elements of several of these techniques.

Two theoretical models have emerged to account for variations in the response to imprisonment among inmate populations. One, the “deprivation model,” focuses attention on the pressures and deprivat...

Polar deep-sea cores provide material for a thermo-time scale. An Antarctic Ocean deep-sea core from the Ross Sea can be correlated with three others from the same area, dated by Urry and described by Hough (1950). All the cores showed several alternations of glacial marine sediment and of fine-grained sediment which is apparently non-glacial. Organic deposits, notably radiolarian tests, are associated with glacial marine horizons and are lacking in the non-glacial ones, thus providing a zoological criterion for correlation. This association of sediments suggests inhibition of solar energy during deposition of strata where organic remains are lacking. For the period of sedimentation represented by the core, a record of Pleistocene and recent thermal regimen is provided. Amelioration of climates over the past 6000 years is indicated in this record.