Substituting new forms of collaboration and management for hierarchical, bureaucratic chains of command cannot and should not mean abandoning traditional commitments to the public values of liberty, equality, and fairness. Public actors have an obligation to meet the standards for government behavior that grow out of those values and are incorporated in public law. As Donald Kettl has observed, the government ?is not just another principal dealing with another agent.? Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the ongoing scandal over the abuse of prison inmates in Iraq.
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Category Archives: Academic Papers
Moral Opprobrium, Social Capital, and Funding for Mental Health Care:
We examine the effect of blame attribution and community cohesiveness (as proxied by community size) on public attitudes towards responsibility for mental health care. Data for this study were taken from the MacArthur Mental Health Module of the 1996 General Social Survey.
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The Poor You Have Always With You
The philosopher Santayana warned that those who do not know their own history are doomed to repeat it. That admonition is especially pertinent to discussions of social welfare in Indiana, where assistance programs reflect historic attitudes about poverty and service delivery is largely a product of the state?s political culture. In Indiana, as elsewhere, supporters of social welfare programs and the critics of those programs are still arguing about policies dating to 1349, when England enacted the Statute of Laborers, prohibiting alms, or charity, for those who had the ability to work–that is, to "sturdy beggars." This first attempt to deal with what we would later call welfare was not about providing assistance; it was about forcing people to work.
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Accountability and the New Governance
It is a central tenet of democratic regimes that the state must be accountable to its citizens. In the United States, in particular, contracting out complicates that accountability in a number of ways (Gilmore & Jensen 1998), and raises thorny issues both for the agency charged with responsibility for providing the public good or service, and for the private or non-profit contractor.
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Legal Aspects of High Risk Interventions
As Kennedy and Mohr have noted (2001), the treatment of children by mental health professionals?particularly in an institutional setting?implicates three sets of important, and frequently competing, interests. The first of these is the parental interest in preserving family autonomy: minimizing state interference in decisions made about what constitutes the best interests of their children, and their right to transmit to those children their particular personal and cultural values. The second is the state?s interest in protecting the child, preventing or controlling antisocial behavior, and, in furtherance of those goals, providing a system of mental-health care. Finally, there are the child?s own interests in ?being cared for, loved, and helped to become an autonomous individual with the rights and privileges of an adult? (Hopcroft, 1995).
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