Download or read book Making Reform Work written by Robert Zemsky and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-11 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making Reform Work is a practical narrative of ideas that begins by describing who is saying what about American higher educationùwho's angry, who's disappointed, and why. Most of the pleas for changing American colleges and universities that originate outside the academy are lamentations on a small number of too often repeated themes. The critique from within the academy focuses on issues principally involving money and the power of the market to change colleges and universities. Sandwiched between these perspectives is a public that still has faith in an enterprise that it really doesn't understand. Robert Zemsky, one of a select group of scholars who participated in Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings's 2005 Commission on the Future of Higher Education, signed off on the commission's report with reluctance. In Making Reform Work he presents the ideas he believes should have come from that group to forge a practical agenda for change. Zemsky argues that improving higher education will require enlisting faculty leadership, on the one hand, and, on the other, a strategy for changing the higher education system writ large. Directing his attention from what can't be done to what can be done, Zemsky provides numerous suggestions. These include a renewed effort to help students' performance in high schools and a stronger focus on the science of active learning, not just teaching methods. He concludes by suggesting a series of dislodging eventsùfor example, making a three-year baccalaureate the standard undergraduate degree, congressional rethinking of student aid in the wake of the loan scandal, and a change in the rules governing endowmentsùthat could break the gridlock that today holds higher education reform captive. Making Reform Work offers three rules for successful college and university transformation: don't vilify, don't play games, and come to the table with a well-thought-out strategy rather than a sharply worded lamentation.

Download or read book Reform in the Making written by Ann Chih Lin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2002-06-10 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is it time to give up on rehabilitating criminals? Record numbers of Americans are going to prison, and most of them will eventually return to society with a high chance of becoming repeat offenders. But a decision to abandon rehabilitation programs now would be premature warns Ann Chih Lin, who finds that little attention has been given to how these programs are actually implemented and why they tend to fail. In Reform in the Making, she not only supplies much-needed information on the process of program implementation but she also considers its social context, the daily realities faced by prison staff and inmates. By offering an in-depth look at common rehabilitation programs currently in operation--education, job training, and drug treatment--and examining how they are used or misused, Lin offers a practical approach to understanding their high failure rate and how the situation could be improved. Based on extensive observation and over 350 interviews with staff and prisoners in five medium-security male prisons, the book contrasts successfully implemented programs with subverted, abandoned, or neglected programs (those which staff reject or which do not teach prisoners anything useful). Lin explains that staff and prisoners have little patience with programs aimed at long-range goals when they must face the ongoing, immediate challenge of surviving prison life. Finding incentives to make both sides participate fully in rehabilitation is among the book's many contributions to improving prison policy.

Download or read book The Limits of Institutional Reform in Development written by Matt Andrews and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-11 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Developing countries commonly adopt reforms to improve their governments yet they usually fail to produce more functional and effective governments. Andrews argues that reforms often fail to make governments better because they are introduced as signals to gain short-term support. These signals introduce unrealistic best practices that do not fit developing country contexts and are not considered relevant by implementing agents. The result is a set of new forms that do not function. However, there are realistic solutions emerging from institutional reforms in some developing countries. Lessons from these experiences suggest that reform limits, although challenging to adopt, can be overcome by focusing change on problem solving through an incremental process that involves multiple agents.

Download or read book The Meaning of Life written by Marc Mauer and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2018-12-11 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I can think of no authors more qualified to research the complex impact of life sentences than Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis. They have the expertise to track down the information that all citizens need to know and the skills to translate that research into accessible and powerful prose." —Heather Ann Thompson, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Blood in the Water From the author of the classic Race to Incarcerate, a forceful and necessary argument for eliminating life sentences, including profiles of six people directly impacted by life sentences by formerly incarcerated author Kerry Myers Most Western democracies have few or no people serving life sentences, yet here in the United States more than 200,000 people are sentenced to such prison terms. Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis of The Sentencing Project argue that there is no practical or moral justification for a sentence longer than twenty years. Harsher sentences have been shown to have little effect on crime rates, since people "age out" of crime—meaning that we're spending a fortune on geriatric care for older prisoners who pose little threat to public safety. Extreme punishment for serious crime also has an inflationary effect on sentences across the spectrum, helping to account for severe mandatory minimums and other harsh punishments. A thoughtful and stirring call to action, The Meaning of Life also features moving profiles of a half dozen people affected by life sentences, written by former "lifer" and award-winning writer Kerry Myers. The book will tie in to a campaign spearheaded by The Sentencing Project and offers a much-needed road map to a more humane criminal justice system.

Download or read book Health Systems Improvement Across the Globe written by Jeffrey Braithwaite and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-08-07 with total page 621 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following on from 2015’s Healthcare Reform, Quality and Safety: Perspectives, Participants, Partnerships and Prospects in 30 Countries, this book encompasses a global perspective on healthcare while shifting the focus from reform to showcasing success stories of healthcare systems worldwide. It provides explanations of why various facets of healthcare systems work well in different contexts and offers the reader alternative models for consideration. The book features contributions from 60 countries, going much further than the common practice of focusing on affluent Western nations, to provide a comprehensive exploration of the success of healthcare systems globally. The majority of literature on health-sector improvement attempts to address the problems within systems, relating the errors that can and do occur, for example, and offering solutions and preventative strategies. This book of country case studies will approach the enhancement of health systems, patient safety and the quality of care in a new and innovative way, comprehensively surveying and synthesizing the success stories of healthcare systems around the world, utilizing Hollnagel’s Safety-II approach to acknowledge the importance of exploring what goes right, what works well, and why it works. These success stories may include reference to macro, meso or micro levels of healthcare systems, various sectors (e.g., aged care, acute care or primary care), or specific programs or projects. Health System Improvement Across the Globe: Success Stories from 60 Countries is unprecedented in terms of both reach and positive emphasis, and as such will be instrumental in changing ways of thinking about and guiding health-sector improvement.

Download or read book Reforming Juvenile Justice written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2013-05-22 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adolescence is a distinct, yet transient, period of development between childhood and adulthood characterized by increased experimentation and risk-taking, a tendency to discount long-term consequences, and heightened sensitivity to peers and other social influences. A key function of adolescence is developing an integrated sense of self, including individualization, separation from parents, and personal identity. Experimentation and novelty-seeking behavior, such as alcohol and drug use, unsafe sex, and reckless driving, are thought to serve a number of adaptive functions despite their risks. Research indicates that for most youth, the period of risky experimentation does not extend beyond adolescence, ceasing as identity becomes settled with maturity. Much adolescent involvement in criminal activity is part of the normal developmental process of identity formation and most adolescents will mature out of these tendencies. Evidence of significant changes in brain structure and function during adolescence strongly suggests that these cognitive tendencies characteristic of adolescents are associated with biological immaturity of the brain and with an imbalance among developing brain systems. This imbalance model implies dual systems: one involved in cognitive and behavioral control and one involved in socio-emotional processes. Accordingly adolescents lack mature capacity for self-regulations because the brain system that influences pleasure-seeking and emotional reactivity develops more rapidly than the brain system that supports self-control. This knowledge of adolescent development has underscored important differences between adults and adolescents with direct bearing on the design and operation of the justice system, raising doubts about the core assumptions driving the criminalization of juvenile justice policy in the late decades of the 20th century. It was in this context that the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) asked the National Research Council to convene a committee to conduct a study of juvenile justice reform. The goal of Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach was to review recent advances in behavioral and neuroscience research and draw out the implications of this knowledge for juvenile justice reform, to assess the new generation of reform activities occurring in the United States, and to assess the performance of OJJDP in carrying out its statutory mission as well as its potential role in supporting scientifically based reform efforts.

Download or read book Prisoners of Politics written by Rachel Elise Barkow and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A CounterPunch Best Book of the Year A Lone Star Policy Institute Recommended Book “If you care, as I do, about disrupting the perverse politics of criminal justice, there is no better place to start than Prisoners of Politics.” —James Forman, Jr., author of Locking Up Our Own The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The social consequences of this fact—recycling people who commit crimes through an overwhelmed system and creating a growing class of permanently criminalized citizens—are devastating. A leading criminal justice reformer who has successfully rewritten sentencing guidelines, Rachel Barkow argues that we would be safer, and have fewer people in prison, if we relied more on expertise and evidence and worried less about being “tough on crime.” A groundbreaking work that is transforming our national conversation on crime and punishment, Prisoners of Politics shows how problematic it is to base criminal justice policy on the whims of the electorate and argues for an overdue shift that could upend our prison problem and make America a more equitable society. “A critically important exploration of the political dynamics that have made us one of the most punitive societies in human history. A must-read by one of our most thoughtful scholars of crime and punishment.” —Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy “Barkow’s analysis suggests that it is not enough to slash police budgets if we want to ensure lasting reform. We also need to find ways to insulate the process from political winds.” —David Cole, New York Review of Books “A cogent and provocative argument about how to achieve true institutional reform and fix our broken system.” —Emily Bazelon, author of Charged

Download or read book The Senate written by Daniel Wirls and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2021-09-23 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this lively analysis, Daniel Wirls examines the Senate in relation to our other institutions of government and the constitutional system as a whole, exposing the role of the "world’s greatest deliberative body" in undermining effective government and maintaining white supremacy in America. As Wirls argues, from the founding era onward, the Senate constructed for itself an exceptional role in the American system of government that has no firm basis in the Constitution. This self-proclaimed exceptional status is part and parcel of the Senate’s problematic role in the governmental process over the past two centuries, a role shaped primarily by the combination of equal representation among states and the filibuster, which set up the Senate’s clash with modern democracy and effective government and has contributed to the contemporary underrepresentation of minority members. As he explains, the Senate’s architecture, self-conception, and resulting behavior distort rather than complement democratic governance and explain the current gridlock in Washington, D.C. If constitutional changes to our institutions are necessary for better governance, then how should the Senate be altered to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem? This book provides one answer.

Download or read book Implementing Regulatory Reform Building the Case Through Results Proceedings of the Meeting of the Group on Regulatory Policy OECD Paris December 2007 written by OECD and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2008-08-01 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report discusses some of the major challenges for implementing regulatory reform, from a political perspective. It draws on the experience and evidence from OECD countries when building the case through results and developing strategies for ...

Download or read book To Reform the World written by Guy Fiti Sinclair and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how international organizations (IOs) have expanded their powers over time without formally amending their founding treaties. IOs intervene in military, financial, economic, political, social, and cultural affairs, and increasingly take on roles not explicitly assigned to them by law. Sinclair contends that this 'mission creep' has allowed IOs to intervene internationally in a way that has allowed them to recast institutions within and interactions among states, societies, and peoples on a broadly Western, liberal model. Adopting a historical and interdisciplinary, socio-legal approach, Sinclair supports this claim through detailed investigations of historical episodes involving three very different organizations: the International Labour Organization in the interwar period; the United Nations in the two decades following the Second World War; and the World Bank from the 1950s through to the 1990s. The book draws on a wide range of original institutional and archival materials, bringing to light little-known aspects of each organization's activities, identifying continuities in the ideas and practices of international governance across the twentieth century, and speaking to a range of pressing theoretical questions in present-day international law and international relations.

Download or read book Citizen Action and National Policy Reform written by John Gaventa and published by Zed Books. This book was released on 2010-04-08 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does citizen activism win changes in national policy? Which factors help to make myriad efforts by diverse actors add up to reform? What is needed to overcome setbacks, and to consolidate the smaller victories? These questions need answers. Aid agencies have invested heavily in supporting civil society organizations as change agents in fledgling and established democracies alike. Evidence gathered by donors, NGOs and academics demonstrates how advocacy and campaigning can reconfigure power relations and transform governance structures at the local and global levels. In the rush to go global or stay local, however, the national policy sphere was recently neglected. Today, there is growing recognition of the key role of champions of change inside national governments, and the potential of their engagement with citizen activists outside. These advances demand a better understanding of how national and local actors can combine approaches to simultaneously work the levers of change, and how their successes relate to actors and institutions at the international level. This book brings together eight studies of successful cases of citizen activism for national policy changes in South Africa, Morocco, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Turkey, India and the Philippines. They detail the dynamics and strategies that have led to the introduction, change or effective implementation of policies responding to a range of rights deficits. Drawing on influential social science theory about how political and social change occurs, the book brings new empirical insights to bear on it, both challenging and enriching current understandings.

Download or read book Good Government and Law written by J. Faundez and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-27 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The provision of legal technical assistance has in recent years become a major concern for international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, and for Western-based bilateral donor agencies. This book offers critical perspectives for the evaluation of legal technical assistance projects and contains proposals for action and research. Five chapters offer general perspectives on law, state and civil society and the remaining six case studies on themes such as economic regulation, agrarian reform, representation of women and access to justice.

Download or read book Courting Death written by Carol S. Steiker and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-07 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before constitutional regulation -- The Supreme Court steps in -- The invisibility of race in the constitutional revolution -- Between the Supreme Court and the states -- The failures of regulation -- An unsustainable system? -- Recurring patterns in constitutional regulation -- The future of the American death penalty -- Life after death

Download or read book Rehabilitating Lochner written by David E. Bernstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-05-15 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this timely reevaluation of an infamous Supreme Court decision, David E. Bernstein provides a compelling survey of the history and background of Lochner v. New York. This 1905 decision invalidated state laws limiting work hours and became the leading case contending that novel economic regulations were unconstitutional. Sure to be controversial, Rehabilitating Lochner argues that the decision was well grounded in precedent—and that modern constitutional jurisprudence owes at least as much to the limited-government ideas of Lochner proponents as to the more expansive vision of its Progressive opponents. Tracing the influence of this decision through subsequent battles over segregation laws, sex discrimination, civil liberties, and more, Rehabilitating Lochner argues not only that the court acted reasonably in Lochner, but that Lochner and like-minded cases have been widely misunderstood and unfairly maligned ever since.

Download or read book Unemployment Insurance Reform written by David E. Balducchi and published by W.E. Upjohn Institute. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Unemployment Insurance (UI) system is a lasting piece of the Social Security Act which was enacted in 1935. But like most things that are over 80 years old, it occasionally needs maintenance to keep it operating smoothly while keeping up with the changing demands placed upon it. However, the UI system has been ignored by policymakers for decades and, say the authors, it is broken, out of date, and badly in need of repair. Stephen A. Wandner pulls together a group of UI researchers, each with decades of experience, who describe the weaknesses in the current system and propose policy reforms that they say would modernize the system and prepare us for the next recession.

Download or read book Making Reform Happen Lessons from OECD Countries written by OECD and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2010-05-26 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays analyses the reform experiences of the 30 OECD countries in nine major policy domains in order to identify lessons, pitfalls and strategies that may help foster policy reform in the future.

Download or read book Prison by Any Other Name written by Maya Schenwar and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a new afterword from the authors, the critically praised indictment of widely embraced “alternatives to incarceration” Electronic monitoring. Locked-down drug treatment centers. House arrest. Mandated psychiatric treatment. Data driven surveillance. Extended probation. These are some of the key alternatives held up as cost effective substitutes for jails and prisons. But in a searing, “cogent critique” (Library Journal), Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law reveal that many of these so-called reforms actually weave in new strands of punishment and control, bringing new populations who would not otherwise have been subject to imprisonment under physical control by the state. Whether readers are seasoned abolitionists or are newly interested in sensible alternatives to retrograde policing and criminal justice policies and approaches, this highly praised book offers “a wealth of critical insights” that will help readers “tread carefully through the dizzying terrain of a world turned upside down” and “make sense of what should take the place of mass incarceration” (The Brooklyn Rail). With a foreword by Michelle Alexander, Prison by Any Other Name exposes how a kinder narrative of reform is effectively obscuring an agenda of social control, challenging us to question the ways we replicate the status quo when pursuing change, and offering a bolder vision for truly alternative justice practices.