Delinquently

A former Lowell police officer has been found guilty of intimidating a bookie into forgiving his gambling debt.

Pointing to declines in self-reported criminality across waves of the National Youth Survey, several researchers have concluded that "testing effects" may render longitudinal self-report data unreliable. This article argues that the issue remains unsettled on two accounts. First, alternative explanations for the declines have not been fully addressed. These include matters of scale construction, item-specific age—crime curves, and selective attrition. Second, previous research tends to conflate two types of testing effects explanations: panel fatigue and changing content validity. Each of these five explanations has different implications and is explored in the present article. Through this series of analyses, the author concludes that the declines stem from item-specific issues, namely, the inclusion of early-peaking offenses in the scales and the changing content validity of some survey items. Implications are discussed with respect to how criminologists operationalize key constructs such as crime and deviance and how we study the age—crime relationship.

A variety of approaches for addressing drug use and drug-related crime among the nearly 5 million offenders on community supervision in the United States has been tried and evaluated, but questions remain about which policies or programs are most effective. The authors use a large data set to assess the impact of residential and nonresidential drug treatment on recidivism. Propensity score matching is used to establish equivalent treatment and comparison groups and to enable comparisons of treatment type. Survival analysis is used to determine the extent to which each treatment modality and numerous covariates were associated with time until recidivism. Compared to those receiving no treatment, those receiving nonresidential treatment took longer to fail or recidivate. However, those receiving residential treatment did not differ from those who received no treatment in time to failure. In the treatment-only model, nonresidential treatment participants took longer to fail than their matched residential treatment counterparts.

At around 8:40 p.m. a man driving a Chevrolet Blazer was stopped at a stop sign at the intersection of 90th Street and Avalon Boulevard.  Detectives said that the Chevy recklessly drove into the intersection and crashed into a Toyota Corolla travelling north on Avalon Boulevard.

The driver of the Corolla lost control of the vehicle, causing the vehicle to travel in the opposite lane of oncoming traffic and collided with a Chevy Yukon and a green unknown model Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV).  “The SUV was not at fault but left the scene,” Detective Jimmy Render said.

According to investigators, the baby was in the Corolla with her father but was not in the required child safety seat.  The baby girl was ejected onto the roadway.  She was rushed to a local hospital with life-threatening injuries and died a short time later.

No other drivers or passengers were injured.

Newly released FBI files show agents across the country and at the highest level of the agency investigated "Deep Throat" - the 1972 porn movie, not the shadowy Watergate figure - in a vain attempt to roll back what became a cultural shift toward more permissive entertainment.

An ambulance had also responded to the location of the incident, which was in the 17000 block of Saticoy Street in the Sun Valley area of Los Angeles.  Sometime during the evening of the attack, before police arrived, the victim was struck in the head with a bottle in what appears to be an attempted robbery.  A follow-up investigation indicated the suspect was 22-year-old Juan Carlos Huezo, a known member of a local street gang, who was arrested yesterday evening.

Though the victim underwent surgery after being transported to a local hospital, he died from his injuries yesterday afternoon.  Identification of the victim will be released by the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office after his family has been notified.

Well, it's been a month or so since the rather surprising announcement by Genworth Financial that they were going to close down their structured annuity division at the end of August, and thus removing a couple of the great names of the settlement industry, First Colony Life and Mayflower Life, from the roster of markets.

In the emails and phone calls i've had with various industry people, brokers, company reps, etc, there we a couple of major themes that ran through their observations.

1. The announcement totally came out of the blue. Typically you can see some of this coming, either as a result of an investment downgrade, merger, business reversal or a prolonged period of poor pricing. None of those were the case with Genworth as their pricing had been reasonably competitive, their financial's were strong and they had come out of their spin off from GE Capital with generally very good reviews.

 2. People are were expecting some contraction of the market, but Genworth was not a name anyone tossed out as a likely candidate to stop writing structures. With Genworth making a very strong push on the variable and fixed annuity business it would have seemed to be a natural to keep the structured annuity side running, but clearly the management at Genworth didn't like their margins, or more likely the prospects for growth, and decided it was better off placing it's resources elsewhere.

3. Genworth's withdrawal high lighted the issue that is facing our industry, and that is that we are not on a plateau, but we are in fact contracting. With each quarter it become more and more apparent that other financial vehicles such as trusts, variable annuities, mutual funds, banks, etc, are capturing most of the cash in settlements. If the only growth a life market can get is from cannibalizing premium from other markets, that's not a healthy allocation of resources and will eventually lead to a life company taking a hard look at their reasons for staying in a market.

As I have told others, I wasn't surprised a market decided to leave, but I was surprised it was Genworth. I still expect before year end we will have at least one more announcement regarding a market leaving. The Companies still writing settlement annuties are:

Allstate Life, American General, Aviva, Fidelity & Guarantee, Hartford Life, John Hancock, Liberty Life, Mass Mutual Life, Met Life, NY Life, Pacific Life, Prudential, Symetra and Travelers. Which one will decide to pull out next is pretty much anyone's guess.

It's been over two weeks now since the Murphy vs IRS decision was handed down by the Federal Appeals court, in which opinion Judge Ginsburg offered a sweeping repudiation of the theory that all litigation proceeds that aren't directly tied to physical injury or sickness are income, and therefore, taxable. The general reaction of tax professionals and court watchers is that the Murphy decision will be contested to the Supreme Court and eventually overturned, but I personally don't think it is a guarantee at all that it would be reversed.

However, my larger concern, and the theme of this particular post is to discuss my belief that the "settlement industry" is once again failing to seize the day and aggressively agree with this stunning decision and line up on the side of the broken and beaten in society, at least from a tax stand point.

Lets look at the facts. Murphy v IRS is largely a philosophical shift away from the concept that all proceeds from litigation that aren't directly tied to personal physical injury or sickness should be taxable. It is a repudiation of the Treasury and Big Government theory that because you were molested, because you were defamed, because you were wrongfully imprisoned you some how "earned income" for the return of your human capital that an award in those areas implies. I, and others in our business, have been troubled for a long time that there exists a gross inequity in that someone who is raped and beaten obtains a tax free award under section 104(a)(2) but that someone who is systematically molested, abused and traumatize mentally and emotionally over a period of years was in a position where there award was taxable.

Judge Ginsburg in his decision for the court largely attacked and swept away the techno/tax law babble that supported that flimsy argument and went to the heart of what is equitable and just. It is what Judges are supposed to do and he did it masterfully. My concern is that the fall out of this, if you read the blogs and news commentary on it, is that all the "tax and lobby guys", who typically have all the warmth, humor and joy of a rock, are upset that the Judge messed with their precious tax code in such a dramatic way, and as a matter of policy and protecting their turf, they want to see it reversed, "just because".

I think it would be a great PR and general business move if the Settlement Industry in the form of NSSTA, the SSP and the Life Insurance industry got their lobbyists out, went up to Congress and made it absolutely clear that we as an industry are choosing to side with molestation victims, wrongfully jailed prisoners, people who have been defamed and abused and ask to have the code amended permanently to correct this injustice and not leave it in the hands of the courts. Congress has the power to make this permanent, and I think it would be a bold and powerful statement by NSSTA and SSP to come out and proclaim our belief that the prior position was wrong and that we agree with Judge Ginsburg.

To often we are seen as the bad guys, the money changers in the Temple, who debate how many angel dance on the head of a pin, instead of looking after the broken, abused and beaten among us. Lets hope this doesn't turn into another "policy debate" but instead is seen as a chance to lead and demonstrate our firm belief in taking care of those who can't take care of themselves, or at the very least, not supporting those who would tax human suffering as income.  

Researchers have shown that criminal opportunity significantly predicts school-based adolescent victimization. However, little is known about the extent to which opportunity for school-based victimization might be gendered. In this study, the authors drew from criminal opportunity and feminist research and extended the principle of homogamy to explore how gender interacts with opportunity and school-based victimization. Data collected from 2001 to 2004 from 10,522 students in 111 middle and high schools throughout Kentucky were used to examine whether indicators of criminal opportunity placed students, particularly girls, at heightened risk for school-based theft and physical assault victimization. The results of gender-specific hierarchical logistic regression models indicated that measures of criminal opportunity were significantly related to theft and assault for both sexes. Equality-of-coefficient tests supported gendered effects for some opportunity indicators, with differences indicating that the effects of risk and protective factors for victimization were heightened for girls.

« Older Entries

Newer Entries »