OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Travis county, the seat of Austin Texas, mental health courts manage the large case load of defendants with a mental illness. For those unable to afford their own defense, defendants in this court are assigned to either a public defender or a private indigent defense attorney drawn randomly from a large pool of private indigent defense attorneys. Public defenders are assigned defendants with lower functioning, and as a result, the county allocates two social workers for every one public defender. Private indigent defense attorneys, on the other hand, are paid a nominal fixed fee of $750 which is insufficient to hire a social worker. We estimate the causal effect of public defense on repeat offending and suicidality using a leniency design in which randomized assignment of pre-trial clinicians is an instrument for lawyer assignment. While we find no differences in repeat offending between public and private attorneys, we do find that public defenders reduce suicide attempts by 14% conditional on returning to jail compared to that of private indigent defense attorney.
Register here: forms.office.com/r/kAmjyuScCB
