2004 ASC Annual Meeting Abstracts
Meeting | Author Index | Title Index
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
A
A Cellular Automaton in RA/CA Crime Simulation
Cellular automata (CA) provide a general framework for spatial simulation. Various studies have applied CA in simulating forest fire, urban sprawl, transportation, etc. It is not until recently has CA been applied to crime simulation. A CA has four elements: a cell space, a state variable, a neighborhood template and a set of transition rules. This paper addresses main issues surrounding the design of a CA for simulating crime processes and events, with a focus on the state variable and transition rules. The overall reaction of people to crime events is represented as an abstract variable – tension, and tension is used as the state variable in the crime simulation model. The authors illustrate how the impact of a crime event can be modeled as a space-time process by implementing transition rules for spatial decay and temporal decay of the crime. This CA, tightly integrated with routine activities and agent based learning, serves as the foundation of a RA/CA crime simulation model, which has generated some plausible results for studying crime processes.
A Critique on the Use of Battered Woman Syndrome in Court
By far, Battered Woman Syndrome (BWS) has had a great impact in law as well as in popular culture. Although it can be helpful as a means to educate juries from a psychological perspective about why battered women do not leave their batterers or why they kill out of real belief of the imminent danger, it should not be the only answer and probably not the best one. Through a review of three influential cases which involve the use of expert testimony on BWS, Ibn-Tamas v. United States, Hess v. Macaskill and People v. Simpson, we can see that BWS falls short on scientific soundness grounds, yet for political reasons is included in courtroom. This is problematic because for one thing, it fails to meet the requirements for admission under the rules of evidence set by Daubert, for another thing, it can easily be misused to pathologies women or even to assist their batterers to fight against them. What we can do is unbind ourselves from just one theoretical perspective and welcome more knowledge and expertise into courtroom, such as sociological approach, and believe that the strongest will survive.
A First Try: The Innocence Commission for Virginia
The Innocence Commission for Virginia (ICVA) is only the third innocence commission in the U.S. and the first to be sponsored by non-governmental entities. This paper considers the rise, findings and effectiveness of the Commission, comparing its experience with that of the North Carolina and Connecticut innocence commissions, and analyzing what influence it may have within Virginia and across other states as they wrestle with the problem of erroneous convictions. (The author is Chair of the ICVA.)
A Pooled Time-Series Assessment of the Determinants of Police Strength in Large U.S. Cities
This paper considers the role of coercion in urban areas. We focus on law enforcement as the primary agency of social control used to conteract threats to the maintenance of order. Threat hypotheses are tested by examining the effects of economic inequality, unemployment and minority presence. A fixed-effects design is used to determine how these theoretical variables affect numbers of sworn police officers in U.S. cities in 1980 and 1990. After controlling for the effects of crime and disorder, the tax base, population size and segregation, economic inequality, unemployment and minority presence explain changes in police strength over time and across cities. These findings suggest that threats to stability due to increases in inequality and unemployment, as well as shifts in internal racial divisions translate into greater numbers of police. Such results support previous findings on the determinants of police strength, and indicate that threat theories play an integral role in our understanding of the use of coercion across U.S. cities.
A Qualitative Examination of the Juvenile Drug Court Treatment Process
Drug treatment courts have proliferated at a remarkable rate, to over 1000 drug court programs by May 2001 (Belenko, 2002). Literature has developed which shows drug courts to be generally effective for reducing recidivism and drug use (Belenko, 1999; 2001; Gottfredson, Najaka, & Kearley, 2003). However, research on juvenile drug court treatment has lagged behind its adult predecessor. Recent research efforts emphasize the need to understand the process components of drug court so this treatment model can be described and modified to improve effectiveness (Taxman, 1999; Goldkamp, White & Robinson, 2001). The current paper has three related objectives: 1) to describe how focus groups can be effectively used to study juvenile drug court treatment processes; 2) to present findings from a juvenile drug court in which this method was used; and 3) to interpret these findings through an empirically validated conceptual model that has been used to examine the treatment process components of community-based drug abuse treatment (Simpson, 2001). Implications for evaluation and treatment professions are discussed.
A Tale of Two Cities: Victims of Homicide in London and New York
The quantitative difference in homicide rates between the United States and England and Wales is oft-cited and well established. However, differences in the nature of homicide, in terms of who is being killed and by whom, in what circumstances, and by what method, are under-researched, yet such differences could help to shed some light on why it is that the United States suffers a level of homicide significantly higher than that of comparable nations. Using homicide data compiled for London by the Home Office from 1977 to 2001 and the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports 1976 to 1999, this paper will explore differences in homicide between the capital cities of both nations, London and New York, during the last quarter of the 20th century. These cities are comparable in terms of the size of their populations, they share common demographic characteristics, such as ethnic diversity, and they serve as nerve centres for the global economy. When comparing homicide data for two different countries, there are differences in what is recorded and how. Such differences between the New York and London data are significant and these will be highlited and discussed.
Action Research as a Tool for Advancing Practice and Knowledge
As problem solving has become a key component of policing and community prosecution, opportunities for action research have become increasingly common. Indeed, action research is a component of the Department of Justice’s Project Safe Neighborhoods, a national effort to reduce gun crime. Action research typically involves the collaboration of a researcher with practitioners to address real world problems. This paper discusses the strengths, as well as the challenges, of the action research approach for meeting the needs of practitioners to address tangible problems while at the same time meeting the goal of scholars to advance knowledge.
Adversary Trial and Plea Bargaining in Historical Perspective?
Drawing upon their recent review of scholarship on the adversary system and adjudication, the authors discuss the decline of the trial and the rise of the adversary process.
Affirmative Action for Experimental Research: Why Randomized Experiments Require and Should Receive Special Treatment
There is a broad agreement that randomized experimental studies provide a distinct advantage in making direct links between causes and effects in evaluation research. This has led some researchers and policy makers to define randomized field trials as the “gold standard” for evaluation studies. However, the federal government has supported relatively few randomized experiments in criminal justice, and there is evidence that this approach has not received increased amounts of government support over the last decade. This despite calls for increased experimental study from review panels and government agencies such as the GAO. In this presentation, I examine potential reasons for why the federal government has not invested greater resources in experimental research in criminal justice. I illustrate that randomized experiments, despite their advantage in linking causes and effects, are often at a disavantage in federal funding decision making. I argue that there must be a type of “affirmative action” for randomized experimental research if it is to become a more significant part the landscape of criminal justice evaluation.
Age Disparity in Criminal Court Sentencing
When offenders are prosecuted in criminal court for similar offenses, it is expected that they are sanctioned equally. Youths under age eighteen tried in criminal court are considered adults under state law, thus there are no legally relevant differences between youths and adults. Some statistics have demonstrated that individuals under the age of eighteen are being adjudicated and sentenced differently than individuals over the age of eighteen. When similarly situated youths and adults in criminal court do not receive the same disposition, it is imperative to learn what factors are contributing to the discrepancy. Prior research suggests that judicial decision makers often implement their own form of justice by individualizing sentences through extralegal factors. As a result, sentencing may reflect bias and inequity toward certain groups. This may explain why youths under eighteen are receiving different dispositions from adults eighteen and older. The purpose of the present research is to determine the factors that predict different sentencing outcomes for similarly situated youth and adults in criminal court. In order to investigate the disparities in sentencing, the present study utilizes 1998 data from 40 large urban jurisdictions in the country to examine youths and adults prosecuted for felony offenses in criminal court. It will specifically examine the relative impact of legal, extralegal and contextual factors on youth and adult sentences in criminal court. The findings predict which factors exert substantial systematic influence on judicial decisions that cause different sentences for youth and adults.
Agent Learning and Adaptation in a RA/CA Crime Simulation Model
Concern about crime displacement calls for better understanding of spatial learning and adaptation behaviors of criminals and victims. Recent advancements in the fields of spatial cognition and artificial intelligence allow us to build simulation models based on “intelligent” agents with capabilities in navigation, way finding, goal pursuing, learning and adaptation from past experiences. This paper examines the application of a multi-agent based model to simulate crime events. There are three types of agents in this model: criminals, targets and law enforcement agents. All agents are able to learn and adapt. The model has two main components. One simulates routine activities of the different agents; the other generates stochastic crime events as a results of the interactions among these agents during their daily routine activities. Through experimenting with rules and policies of individual agents’ adaptation and examining the resulting offending and victimization dynamics, we have a tool that has potential of helping us evaluate the effectiveness of crime prevention policies, as well as victim self-protection policies.
American Executions: Death Penalty Politics, European Anti-Americanism and American Anti-Europeanism
Although a peripheral part of the American criminal justice system, the implementation of capital punishment in the United States has become a powerful symbol in international politics. Despite the marked regional concentration of executions in the south and increasing successes on the part of abolitionist forces in the US since 2000, capital punishment augments aspects of US foreign policy that stoke ‘anti-Americanisms’, especially in Europe. Such sentiments have, in turn, prompted nationalist and traditionalist American politicians, scholars and even Supreme Court Justices to invoke capital punishment as a symbol of the problematised nature of international law and multilateral rules and institutions in the post-9/11 era. As such, the internationalisation of death penalty politics has both reflected and reinforced perceptions of a de-coupling of the transatlantic relationship between a Hobbesian American militarism and a Kantian and pacific Europe. This paper analyses the reciprocal politics of the death penalty in the contexts of Europe anti-Americanism and American anti-Europeanism and explores the extent to which the internationalisation of death penalty politics has more reinforced than challenged its constitutionality in the United States.
An Empirical Analysis of the Role of Mitigation in Capital Sentencing in North Carolina Before and After McKoy v. North Carolina (1990)
This study focuses on the influence of mitigating circumstances on death penalty sentencing outcomes before and after the McKoy v. North Carolina (1990) decision. In this decision, the Supreme Court decided that the jurors did not have to find mitigating circumstances unanimously. This research explores whether that decision had an impact on the role of mitigators as predictors of sentencing in capital cases. Results are reported based on a sample of North Carolina first-degree murder cases where the state sought the death penalty. Logistic regression is used to determine the importance of mitigating circumstances as predictors of jury decision-making in North Carolina before and after the McKoy decision, controlling for the variety of other factors that influence sentencing outcomes.
An Empirical Assessment of the Effect of Crime Salience on Attitudes Toward Crime, Welfare and Immigration
As previous research has noted, the expected relationship between crime salience and punitive attitudes toward crime is rather straightforward. It is reasonable to expect that those who are most fearful of crime, more concerned about crime, and who have been criminally victimized in the past will express more punitive sentiments toward crime and criminals. The relationship between crime salience and punitiveness toward welfare and immigration may not be so apparent. It is reasonable to assume that there are many who associate the issues of crime, welfare, and immigration with similar populations, namely inner city minorities. Crime has long been associated with those perceived as alien and dangerous “others.” Immigrants and the “undeserving poor,” for example, are often viewed as suffering from individual moral failings and as being disproportionately involved in criminal behavior. Using OLSand logistic regression, our study analyzes the relationship between crime salience and attitudes toward crime, welfare, and immigration for 2,250 Florida residents. The results of this study demonstrate that the influence of crime salience extends beyond attitudes toward crime.
An Evaluation of Intensive Supervision and Monitoring Schemes for Persistent Adult Offenders
This paper will examine Intensive Supervision and Monitoring (ISM) schemes for persistent adult offenders. These schemes involve partnerships between the police and probation services and provide intensive surveillance and supervision of offenders, offering fast access to services and support for rehabilitation, alongside swift action in the event of non-compliance. The presentation will explore the background to these schemes identified from a review of the literature. It will also discuss the methods and findings of a recent qualitative evaluation by the Home Office, which investigated staff and offender attitudes towards and experiences of ISM schemes. The quantitative part of the evaluation aims to establish if these schemes are effective in reducing re-offending and criminogenic needs. Although this evaluation will not be published until early 2005, the methodological challenges and the effect of these on answering the research questions will be examined.
Analysis of Police Stops and Searchers: City of Erie, Pennsylvania
In May or 2001, the City of Erie approached the Mercyhurst College Civic Institute to assist with the design and analysis of a study on racial profiling that the city had agreed to conduct. The analysis was based on over 2000 police-initiated stops of motorists and pedestrians occurring between september 1, 2001, and February 28, 2002. During the period studied, minority motorists and pedestrians were significantly more likely to be stopped than were non-minority motorists and pedestrians. Since the conclusion of the study, the Erie City Police Department has taken modest steps to rectify the issues highlighted in the study by increasing the level of diversity training.
Apparent Child Sex Offender Clustering: A Look at Levels of Socio-Economic Registered Perpetrators
During a previous research project, the authors of this work noticed an apparent clustering of registered child sexual offenders as reflected by street addresses. The following research seeks to determine whether or not this effect is real or apparent. If this correlation exists, does it further relate to income levels of the neighborhood as established by the 2000 U.S. Census data? Since child sexual offenders are known to be present in every income strata, this finding would support a long standing Criminological hypothesis that those without financial resources are more likely to be convicted (and registered as offenders) than wealthier offenders. Mapping of registered sexual offenders and corresponding income level by census block comparison are of the Chicago, IL, Metroplex region.
Assessing the Issue of Arbitrariness in Capital Sentencing in North Carolina: Are the Effects of Legally Relevant Variables Racially Invariant?
This study uses sentencing data on 828 capital cases processed in North Carolina between 1978 and 2001. Logistic regression on race-specific models is used to assess the variable effects of aggravating and mitigating circumstances on capital sentencing outcomes (death vs. life), with an emphasis on the role that race plays in shaping the submission and acceptance of these factors. Implications of the results are discussed.
B
Badfellas: Movie Psychos, Popular Culture, and Law
It is difficult to make meaningful observations about the legal messages of movies featuring psychopaths unless one first creates a category with coherent criteria for exclusion and inclusion. A useful definitional basis can be found in clinical psychologists’ description of the psychopath as an unusually self-centered person who lacks a conscience. Analysis of about twenty movies whose protagonists meet this definition shows that psychopath films constitute a distinct genre, with its own stock characters and predictable themes. These movies are basically concerned with control–its loss and restoration. On the level of legal discourse, the theme of control plays out in demonstrations of the need for law. But these films are deeply skeptical about the ability of law to provide protection against the lawlessness that the psychopath embodies. Popular culture seems to mistrust law even while acknowledging a desperate need for it.
Before the War
Before the war, or so said Merleau-Ponty in Sens et non-sens, politics was unthinkable. Politics appeared unthinkable, as a ‘statistical treatment of man’, and becuase there was no sense in treating by general rules those singular beings for whom each is for himself a world. In the perspective of the mind, Merleau-Ponty said, politics is impossible. To the mind’s eye/I, politics is a nonsense, a non-sens. It has no sense, it makes no sense. War, though, brought a duty to arrest and to judge that could not be left to others. Before the war, he wrote, policing and judging din’t concern us, and we never dreamed of ourselves having to do it. But before the war, in the face of war, confronted with the prospect of war, we really had to change our minds, to see that it was now our job to judge. What implications does this conjunction of war, crime and the political have for the maximum that ‘politics is the art of the impossible’? Through a reading of some texts on war by Freud, Merleau-Ponty and the Czech dissident Jan Patocka, this paper considers the sense, and the nonsense, of the political that becomes apparent before the war.
Binge Drinking: The Meanings, Motivations and Management of Contemporary Alcohol Consumption
Much is assumed about the ‘epidemic’ of ‘binge drinking’ or heavy sessional consumption in the UK and North America with considerable public anxiety and media coverage of young people’s alcohol consumption and alcohol-related disorder but with little empirical research to support the speculation. The aims of this study are to collect data in situ on contemporary levels of young adult sessional consumption in licensed leisure locations; to explore the motivations for and meanings behind the apparent desire for altered states of intoxication; and to consider the theoretical and policy implications of the observed consumption. How young people understand and negotiate the complexities of their desired state of intoxication, how they protect themselves when pleasure may result in harm, and the nature of the boundaries of the desired and achieved states of intoxication will be explored. Drawing on research in the fields of alcohol and drug studies, cultural criminology, cultural geography, and cultural studies, the findings will be considered in relation to the bounding of consumption and the influence of social inclusion and exclusion, gender, sexuality, social and sexual context. The study consists of six evenings’ fieldwork in three city centre night spots, each with a high density of licensed leisure venues with well populated pedestrianised areas of thoroughfares, and each with contrasting features in terms of design, music, dress codes, admission policies and customer base. A team of five researchers conducted interviews with 60-75 respondents per evening, with the collection of data on a total of 450+ respondents in May to August 2004. This paper will be the first public dissemination of findings.
Biting the Bullet: Understanding Gun Crime in Nottingham, England
Research exploring the nature of gun-related crime in England is sparse, albeit growing. This research explores patterns of gun-related crime in Nottingham, England, where gun-related crime has been slowly rising since 2000. Several police operations aimed at cracking down on the shootings have run since that time. However, despite the police response, the number of shootings continued to rise, including a very small number of gun-related fatalities. Recorded crime data revealed specific patterns of offences throughout the city. Data also showed that perceptions among professionals about “hot spots” of activity and levels of seriousness differ from actual recorded time.
Building a Course and Program in Homeland Security
This seminar provides strategies to address the challenges facing the creation of a Homeland Security curriculum. It pays particular attention to the application of criminological approaches to this interdisciplinary subject matter.
Burning Issues: Fire, Carnival and Crime
At the present time ‘arson’ is one of the fastest growing crime areas. Each week 2 people die in arson attacks whilst 17 schools suffer an arson attack of some sort. Over the last ten years arson attacks on buildings have risen 36% and vehicle arson has nearly trebled. Close to 200 cars are burnt everyday yet detection rates are only 8% compared with 24% for all other offences. The social cost of tranmatised lives is always difficult to measure but the monetary loss is 2.1 billion pounds a year. Yet fire figures generally are falling, so as we become a more safe society so the legal and illegal continuing carnival of fire continues to rise. This paper looks at the cultural celebration and meaning of fire in contemporary society in trying to understand the meaning and motivations for the festival of fire in everyday life. It brings to bear a cultural criminological approach to understanding ‘fire setting’ as a crime and endeavors to illuminate the connection between the ‘regulated’ society and the spontaneous dramas of the debris of carnival that is acted out not just at festivals of fire but everyday.
C
Campaign Contributions, Post-War Reconstruction Contracts, and State Crime
This paper examines the relationship between Federal-level election campaign contributions and the awarding of post-war reconstruction contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It presents a case-control study of contract awards and amounts on corporate recipients of post-war contracts as of December 18, 2003 (N=64) and a random sample of non-contract companies with the same SIC codes as the contractors. The analysis is situated in the context of existing theory and knowledge on state crime and thus provides a contribution to relatively limited knowledge of governmental crime and deviance.
Can Science Understand Justice?
This paper explores the limits of the use of the scientific method in the quest to gain an understanding of justice. It discusses both the limitations of the positivist methodology and the need to use other methods to gain an understanding of the concept of justice in Criminal Justice and Criminology. Justice is approached as an idea, a construction, that can not be achieved through the pursuit of concrete knowledge.
Can We Determine What Works? A Meta-Analysis of Research Methods Used to Evaluate Behavioral Health Interventions in Criminal Justice Settings
Purpose: A meta-analysis was conducted to assess the quality and rigor of intervention and evaluation research in the areas of policing, courts, diversion, and re-entry that target individuals with behavioral health issues. Method: Over 80 articles based on published intervention studies from the past decade were included in this meta-analysis. Content analysis was used to address the following questions: 1) What types of research methodologies are used? 2) What are the similarities and differences in research designs within and across content areas? 3) What are the challenges to isolating and measuring program outcomes? Results: Overall, there was a lack of standardization in how design and methodological issues were reported across studies and content areas. There was wide variation in the amount of details that were reported in discussions of design and methodological decisions in each article. It was difficult to compare intervention studies across content areas due to variations in the developmental stage of the research and the disciplinary orientation of the researchers across content areas. Finally, when we reviewed the research for reported: use of equivalent comparison groups; the presence of adequate statistical power; and assessment of program effect size. Few studies were using equivalent comparison groups, and only two provided enough details about the effect size to determine if the study had the power necessary to detect an effect. Implications: The methodological inconsistencies in these studies limit their applicability to policy debates about “what works”. The current emphasis on “evidence-based practice” makes it imperative for researchers to critically review the strengths and weaknesses of intervention research. This will allow for the development of research strategies capable of answering policy questions related to what works in criminal justice interventions.
Case Law on Sexual Harassment in Criminal Justice
The problem of sexual harassment in criminal justice agencies has received increased attention in recent years. To determine what behaviors meet the threshold requirement that a workplace is so permeated with sexual harassment to raise a Title VII claim, lower courts rely on the non-exclusive list of factors developed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Harris v. Forklift System (1993). These factors include: (1) the frequency of the discriminatory conduct; (2) its severity; (3) whether the conduct was physically threatening or humiliating, or a mere offensive utterance; (4) whether the conduct unreasonably interfered with plaintiff’s work; and (5) what psychological harm, if any, resulted. Exploring lower court opinions from the federal courts, this paper builds an analytical legal framework that results in a judicial decision-making model.
Charge Manipulation and Relevant Conduct in Federal Criminal Case Processing
Research on criminal sentencing has typically focused on judicial discretion, although a comparatively smaller literature exists on prosecutorial discretion. This paper focuses on extra-judicial discretion, particularly that of the prosecution and federal probation officer, in federal criminal case processing. In federal case processing (as with nearly all jurisdictions in the U.S.), prosecutors have discretion over the criminal charging decision, and they are also potentially free to negotiate charge reductions with the defense as part of a plea agreement. A peculiarity of federal sentencing, however, is the calculation of what the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines call “relevant conduct.” Relevant conduct incorporates factors such as the defendant’s role in the offense, the amounts of drugs seized or property lost, harm to the victim, and so on to determine a “final offense level” which, together with a criminal history score, determines the guideline range under which defendants will be sentenced. Formally, the calculation of relevant conduct, the final offense level, and the guideline scores are the province of federal probation officers as part of their presentence reports to the court, although in practice federal prosecutors can potentially have considerable influence in this process (defense attorneys have an opportunity to object to the contents of the presentence report as well). Charge manipulation and relevant conduct calculations provide an opportunity to examine important non-judicial decisions that can substantially influence federal sentencing. We frame our analysis under a theoretical perspective that emphasizes the embeddedness of focal concerns of criminal punishment in the context of court communities. We investigate charge manipulation and relevant conduct using retrospective case processing data from federal defendants sentenced in 1999. The data, made available by the Urban Institute, merge information from the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, Administrative Office of U.S. Courts, and the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Our key dependent variables are: 1) the difference in severity between arrest charges and conviction charges, or charge manipulation; and 2) the difference between the federal guidelines base offense level severity and the final offense level severity, or relevant conduct calculations. We use hierarchical linear modeling to analyz case- and offender-level influences, as well as interdistrict variation in charge manipulation and relevant conduct calculations.
Citizenship, Public Participation, Democracy and Modern Juries in Criminal Trials
The importance of ‘citizenship’ and ‘public involvement’ has been promoted in a number of settings in the UK over recent years. Paradoxically, however, a variety of processes have resulted in diminishing opportunities for citizens’ involvement in the jury trial. While there has been a great deal of discussion of the notion of ‘citizenship’, and most recently, the idea of ‘active citizenship’ (see Marinetto 2003) in sociology and social theory there have been only limited excursions into this territory by criminologists and those researching criminal justice. Some aspects of ‘community involvement’ in crime prevention, community safety and criminal justice have been given research attention, but there have been few attempts to centre the jury as a key site where ‘citizenship’ is forged and played out. This paper will examine how debates about citizenship, public involvement and ideas of ‘representativeness’ manifest themselves in the modern jury trial. The paper draws upon recent research carried out under the auspices of the Home Office’s Innovative Research Grant Scheme with people who have served as jurors in the English system.
Classifying Identity Theft Using a Problem-Oriented Approach
Millions of consumers become victims of identity theft every year. The key target for identity theft offenders is the personal and confidential information of individuals. This is acquired in various ways, such as scavenging through people’s garbage, stealing and redireting their mail, searching the Internet for personal information, or using occupational position to gain internal access to databases (Lease and Burke, 2000). Using Eck and Clarke’s (2003) classification of police problems, the paper defines and organizes identity theft by the behaviors of the participants and the environments or networks where they occur. Classifying identity theft into specific categories allows for a better understanding of this problem. A detailed classification benefits research, evaluation, and practice problems (Eck and Clarke, 2003). It allows for the development of common solutions for similar problems. The paper further describes how the typology can be applied and extended, and concludes by discussing the implications and utility of the identity theft classification scheme in aiding prevention efforts.
Collaboration Among Police and Prosecutors in Community Justice
The catchall phrase regarding crime in urban areas in the past was, “nobody cares” and the system is ineffective. Politicians were among the first to realize that this could be used to political avantage. Barry Goldwater used this method in the 1964 presidential election. He was the first to address crime as a national problem on a political platform (Gest, 2002, p.5). President Johnson recognized the political savvy of Goldwater and when elected into office developed the first national plan in three decades to improve the criminal justice system and decrease crime. The report was named The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society 1967, pp. 93-114). The Report urged citizens to become more involved in law enforcement. Yet, police continually failed to ask citizens about neighborhood problems that were most pressing to them. It was not until the work of Herman Goldstein Problem Oriented Policing (1979) and George Kelling and James Q. Wilson in Broken Windows Theory (1982) that the community justice paradigm began to take hold. The new paradigm emphasized cooperation between agents of the government and citizens in proactive problem solving an crime prevention. The literature is plentiful on the obstacles of implementation and potential benefits of community justice initiatives. However, one area where research is lacking is discussion on the reasons that collaboration between police, attorneys (both defense and prosecution) and citizens is important. This article is a literary analysis that brings together the benefits of collaboration between police, prosecutors, and citizens. The article traces the history of community prosecution, obstacles inherent to implementation, the benefits of collaboration, as well as ethical issues of community prosecution.
Collaboration in a Practice-Based Research Network
In 2000, the USC Department of Family Medicine formed the first Practice Based Research Network (LA Net) focused primarily on the reduction of health care disparities in Los Angeles. Practice based research networks are comprised of primary care practices. Networks are committed to researching and investigating community-based, patient population specific issues in primary care. Clinicians and staff have the familiarity and expertise to identify pertinent areas of research that can produce effective and immediate interventions in the care of their patients. Thus, research is practice-driven, instead of researcher-driven. We have completed our first network study and have two additional ones underway — one completely physician generated (on pediatric obesity and body image) and the other violence related (an evaluation of an AMA-published guide on youth violence prevention for practitioners). This paper summarizes lessons learned about building and maintaing a collaborative research network.
College Binge Drinking: An Empirical Test of Theories
Perhaps most influential in drawing public attention to the issue of binge drinking was a report released in December of 1994 by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health. In a nationally representative survey of college students, the College Alcohol Study reported that 80% of students drank during the school year and approximately 44% qualified as binge drinkers, defined as having 5 or more drinks in a row one or more times within a two week period. Despite the fact that a majority of students were under the legal drinking age, rates of alcohol consumption were highest among 18-21 year-olds. In the year following the release of the CAS findings, reports of binge drinking in major print media outlets increased eleven-fold. Because even students with no prior history of alcohol consumption will begin either drinking moderately or binge drinking after arriving at college, social scientists have long been interested in learning what factors help to explain this behavior. Among the theories presented in the extensive literature on college alcohol consumption and binge drinking are differential association, childhood socialization, and alcohol expectancy theory. While all of these perspectives focus on identifying factors that influence deviant behavior, such as binge drinking, each one posits different explanatory factors and causal relationships to account for deviant outcomes. This research study tests how well each theory explains binge drinking on U.S. college campuses. The alcohol expectancy and differential association models emerged as the more explanatory.
Comparative Studies: Difficulties, Pitfalls and Resistance
This paper will take as a given that cross-cultural and cross-national examinations of crime and criminal justice processes are important and valuable. Having said that, we nevertheless need to be alert and sensitive to a myriad of potential problems that can arise in conducting such examinations. Here I will explore just some of these issues and problems that surround comparative studies. The paper does not offer simple solutions to these problems — there are none. Instead, its intent is to challenge creative minds to think about and to propose their possible solution.
Conflicts of Interest: Research, Policy and Investments in the Criminal Justice-Industrial Complex
The journal Crime and Delinquency ran an article about how private prisons had lower recidivism rates, followed later by an article on how an author of the original piece had a position with the Corrections Corp of America, owned their stock and had received several million dollars as a consultant to the private prison. This presentation does not resolve issues raised in the heated exchange but uses the incident to explore the meaing and importance of conflict of interest. In contrast with a final rebuttal that tries to make a case against conflict of interest provisions in general and their inclusion in the ASC code of ethics, this paper uses contemporary examples like Enron to highlight the importance of such provisions and reviews judicial codes of ethics on the importance of avoiding even the appearance of conflicts. Drawing on well developed guidelines from fields like biotechnology and medicine, the paper highlights best practices and answers questions like whether stock ownership through a retirement account means there are conflicts in, say, purchasing decisions about Microsoft products. The conclusion reiterates the importance of conflict of interest provisions and argues that criminology needs to develop more sophisticated understanding of the issue as the criminal justice-industrial complex grows and justice increasingly becomes a for-profit venture.
Congruities and Differences Among Major Stakeholders’ Perceptions of Neighborhood Problems and the Contents of Community Policing
Community policing requires a collaborative partnership between the police and the community. This partnership requires a meeting of the minds among key actors. This paper explored the congruities and differences among the key stakeholders regarding problems in their neighborhoods and their perceived contents of community policing. Using different data collection methods, the perceptions of the police, neighborhood leaders, and the citizens regarding neighborhood problems and practices of community policing in the City of South Bend were comparatively analyzed. The data suggested that the different sectors had significantly different perceptions about the magnitude of problems in the neighborhoods. The results also suggest that different stakeholders have different perceptions about the contents of community policing.
Conservative State Building and the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968
The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 represented a wider political reaction against Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs and the “judicial activism” of the Warren Court. The authors of the Safe Streets Act hoped it would reverse the expansion of federal governmental capacities previously mobilized for the protection of the constitutional rights of criminal defendants. They hoped to restore local control over the apparatus of the various states’ incarceration systems. The subsequent implementation of the Act, however, facilitated the growth of federal state capacities, particularly Title III’s loose requirements for federal eavesdropping. Recent hisoriography on American state-building argues that it has continued despite the primacy of politically conservative rehetoric and cultural values in the last thirty years. My paper will connect to this literature, using the unintended consequences of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 as a case study.
Constructions of Justice in American Comics
American entertainment from television to the movies is replete with themes of justice. Comic books, an often overlooked medium, traditionally feature justice-related plots. Previous studies of comics have focused on superheroes who, in the absence of satisactory state responses to crime, mete out vigilante justice. Our study examines whether extralegal solutions to crime are a dominant theme in a broad cross-section of American comics in both superhero and non-superhero genres. To what extent do comics both reflect American notions of justice and shape them? We will discern patterns of justice in a content analysis of story arcs in comic monthlies and trade paperbacks. Our sample of 20 titles is drawn from the top 200 best-selling comic books released in December of 2003 and includes Justice League, Rose & Thorn, Wolverine, Punisher, The Losers, Batman, Wonder Woman and 100 Bullets, among others.
Corrections and Sentencing: A Focus on Future Benefit to its Members
As the youngest Division in the ASC with substantial membership, the Division on Corrections and Sentencing has focused on developing direction and potential benefit to its members. To date, the Division has developed infrastructure, negotiated for a journal, and focused on developing opportunities for its members. Now, the Division turns to strategically planning its future. The recent activities and future direction will be discussed.
Courtroom Workgroups: A Quantitative Description and Analysis of Their Effect on Sentencing
This study examined three aspects of courtroom workgroups over a 10-year period: proximity (i.e. the location of workgroup members’ offices in relation to one another), similarity (i.e. how familiar workgroup members are with one another), and stability( i.e. the number of years workgroup members have worked together in the same jurisdiction). These three quantitative measures were then used to investigate how proximal and distal contexts affected sentencing decisions in Pennsylvania before and after a statutory change. The data for this study includes sentencing information from the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing (PCS) for the years 1990-1994 and 1996-2000 and contextual information from the 2000 U.S. Census, the 2000 Uniform Crime Reports, and The Pennsylvania Manual (Commonwealth of Pennsylvania) for the years 1989-2000.
Crime, Media and Community: Grief and Virtual Engagement in Late Modernity
As media proliferate and become more integral to social existence, so too, it might be suggested, their role becomes more complex and contested. Media forms and representations are instrumental in the creation of deviant identities and the subsequent stigmatisation and demonisation of whole groups of individual. They are a driving force behind the nostalgically reactionary discourse that rails against the so-called ‘culture of permissiveness’, decrying the decline in respect and the loss of community. Yet they are also an important conduit for the celebration of diversity and the articulation and advancement of alternative discourses, counter-definitions and marginalised views and interests. Finally, they present opportunities to be social in new and novel ways. They offer a source of virtual collectivism and identity in an uncertain physical world; a source of imagined community. This paper begins to explore some of the interconnections between crime, culture and community as they are played out in old and new media.
Crime as Conformity: Youth Resistance and Peacemaking
The search for a comprehensive understanding of resistance has long eluded criminologists. Based on a three year study on the impact of the media on delinquency that incorporates cross sectional and longituinal analyses of 200 youths (incarcerated, street and high school) this paper examines the relationship between culture and crime in reference to resistance practices. Informed by critical social theory and peacemaking criminology, this paper links ideological-institutional-identity foci and their concomitant mediations/interconnections and contradictions. It is argued, first, that the normative emphasis on delinquency as resistance suffers from conceptual weaknesses regarding the interplay of ideology (modernity, liberalism and capitalism) and institutions (media, schooling, criminal justice). Second, the parochial politicization of delinquency defers to the arrogance of ignorance by refusing to inquire into the conditions that constitute the ideology-institution nexus; the differential impact of ideologies on resistances; differential impact of resistance on ideologies and the manner by which ideologies and institutions appropriate delinquency to attenuate prospects for praxis. Specifically, this paper asks the following questions: To what extent do ideologies form and inform delinquencies in relation to conflicting narratives of resistance? How and why do youths talk up narratives of regulation and resistance? How does culture hegemonize resistance? How does delinquency function to mediate relations, representations and recognition? Within the larger culture, the cultural commodity of crime is a complex form of social communication that diverts attention away from the political impact of predatory ideologies.
Crime Control and Governmentality
Problems concerning crime control and governmentality will be explained from perspectives of chaos/complexity.
Crime on the High Seas: The Senegalese Ferry Sinking and State Crime Victimization
The corporately owned mass media inundates us with exploratory narratives, sensationalistic coverage, and pacification writings designed to impede inquiry or knowledge of other states, cultures, international institutions, and “disasters”. Indeed, this is further exacerbated when potential news involves populations of the world that are not of “political interest” to the United States. Thus, it should not surprise us that there was scant media coverage on the world’s second largest maritime disaster, the sinking of the Senegal’s state run ferry, Lee Joola, killing 1863 passengers Not only did the U.S. media neglect covering Senegal’s tragedy of September 26, 2002, later reports on the criminal liability of the State of Senegal and the international society were generally omitted from the daily offerings of what was deemed sellable and newsworthy. So too, sociologists and criminologists have given limited attention to this atrocious state crime, thereby failing to recognize and/or acknowledge the Le Joola Ferry disaster was not just a monad that occfurred due to immediate conditions and decisions within Senegal. We contend that the sinking was a result of a much more complex set of historical, cultural, and economic conditions that set the stage for the state of Senegal to act in a way that caused more social injury and harm than just the vast death tolls that resulted from the Le Joola sinking. Furthermore, we suggest that this was not just a state crime, but that international society had, through acts of facilitation, aided and caused the socially injurious conditions surrounding the disaster.
Criminal Courts and Specialization: The German Experience
Differentiation of criminal courts along particular problem areas is not a new phenomenon. Seen from a historical perspective specialized criminal courts dealing with particular crime problems emerged long time ago in the forms of military courts and political crime courts. Some 40 years ago a new specialization era started when economic crime became a priority crime policy issue and criminal traffic offences developed into a mass phenomenon in industrialized countries. From the eighties on some systems introduced special courts for terrorist crime, drugs and domestic violence. Corresponding processes of differentiation can be observed on the side of police and prosecution services. In Germany, however, specialization was restricted to the establishment of economic crime courts some thirty years ago. Drug courts and domestic violence courts have never been political issues although stragies of ‘problem solving’ have been implemented with respect to drugs, drug addiction and domestic violence similar to those adopted in systems where drug courts and domestic violence courts have been established. The paper will discuss socio-legal issues related to judicial specialization as well as possible explanations for the apparent differences in responding to various social problems by way of establishing specialized judicial bodies.
Criminal Justice/Social Justice: Interpassivity Versus Interactivity
The concept, interpassivity, was originally developed for the discourse of contemporary art where it had a strategic value in criticizing the predominant notion of interactivity. For ritual theory, the concept of interpassivity can serve to clarify the idea that ritual came before myth; to the point out the critical value of this key thesis of the so-called “ritualists” (Robertson Smith, Wellhausen, Freud, Wittgenstein) without succumbing to the anti-ritualists conclusions that can be drawn. With the help of the concept of interpassivity, we can show what it means to insist on this thesis, and we can, then, insist on it without regarding cultures that have only rituals, but no myths, as primitive. Obviously, the concept of interpassivity is opposed to that of interactivity. What is at stake in the thesis of the ritualists, is therefore not the “primitivism” consisting of lack of mythology. Rather, it is the idea that even in so-called “high” cultures, the social imaginary can be organized in a different way. Objective, “interpassive” belief can stand for itself. And such an organization of the social imaginary is not a mark of primitive societies, but rather a mark of culture. In other words, ritual comes before myths means that also high cultures are able to avoid the barbarism of succumbing to ascetic ideals. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how “interpassivity versus interactivity” can help to clarify our understanding of criminal justice/social justice.
Criminology, Crime Control and Hygiene
By its nature Crime belongs to the state of unruly things constitutive of the heterogenaic which also contains all other things sacred, abject, transgressive and unproductive. As a base and abject behaviour that violates the normal rules of homogeneous society, crime is something that modern homogeneous socities must be inoculated from, as they must from all forms of unproductive behaviour. In a society which, like America, has selected repressive and violent means to achieve this (including recourse to disproportionate punishment, mass incarceration, execution), the response directed at suppressing the heterogeneity of crime paradoxically requires invoking the mobilisation of heterogenaic means themselves incompatible with the normal rules of homogeneous life. This paper traces the tactics deployed within America that enable it to live with the violent and unproductive orders of expenditure it sanctions; and explores how it deploys such mechanisms to sustain a simulation of itself as positively productive — despite its decent into the violent orders of heterogenaic life. At the level of crime control this simulation, I will suggest, is sustained by overt attempts at literal denial; hygenising violence through removing it to the margins of society, ‘civilising’ its most brutal manifestations, and representing it as other than itself. At the level of criminology these processes of hygiene operate through the proliferation of forms of knowledge organised around epistemologies systematically designed to filter out the very violence of the industry they serve.
Criminology and Public Policy in Africa
This paper critically reviews the literature on the interconnections between criminology and public policy in Africa. General and specific developments and trends in selected countries are addressed from a historical as well as contemporary perspective.
Criminology as if Race, Gender and Class Mattered: Implications for the Society and the Field
Criminology generally and the American Society of Criminology (ASC) more specifically benefit in very direct ways from diversity. Unlike fields that have arguably less to gain, understandings of crime, victimization and criminal justice are about precisely the issues that this title implies. However, despite the obvious role played by poverty in some criminological theorizing, the field has been slow to embrace race and gender as key elements in theorizing. Past that, the field of criminology has a long way to go to when it comes to addressing the unique problems and challenges experienced by women, minority, and class “outsiders” who attempt to enter academic life and the life of the Society.
Criminology Then and Now
Unique and revealing snapshots of the evolution of criminology are offered by three prominent criminologists. Joe Albini, Frank Scarpitti, and Freda Adler discuss the changes that have taken place in the last three decades along with recent trends in the discipline. The accumulated wisom of these scholars is a rare opportunity to enhance our undesrtanding of “what was” and “what might be.” Joe Albini is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Wayne State University and visiting professor at the University of Nevada. He is considered to be a pioneer empirical researcher in the realm of organized crime and a major force in the development of related theoretical concepts. Freda Adler is Distinguished Professor of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University and past President of the American Society of Criminology. Her areas of interest are in criminological theory, female criminality, narcotic and alcohol abuse, cross-cultural female criminality, judicial education, crime and development, social control, and maritime crime. Frank R. Scarpitti is the Edward and Elizabeth Rosenberg Professor of Sociology at the University of Delaware, where he has been a faculty since 1967. His work has addressed issues related to mental illness, juvenile delinquency, female crime, group therapy, organized crime, and substance abuse treatment programs.
Cultural Criminology: Engaging With Race, Gender and Post-Colonial Identities?
While Cultural Criminology is a somewhat open-ended enterprise, its proponents have set out some key tenets. For instance, it is said to explore ‘the common ground between cultural and criminal practices in contemporary social life — that is, between collective behaviour organized around imagery, style, and symbolic meaning, and that categorized by legal and political authorities as criminal’ (Ferrell and Sanders 1995:3). We argue that it is also crucial to examine how, within particular parameters of race, gender, and class, harms can be concealed, dismissed or even justified. Becker’s injunction to study not only criminal subcultures but also the legal and political authorities who constrct subcultures as criminal has been a powerful influence on the development of cultural criminology (Ferrell and Sanders 1995:6). However, it is equally important for cultural criminology to study and understand how power constructs and legitimises forms of social harm, in both symbolic and material ways. We focus on race, gender and the construction of post-colonial identities, and the consequences of such constructions for claims to justice by marginalised groups.
Cultural Criminology, Phenomenology, and the Return to Astonishment
This paper outlines the potential role of cultural criminology in contributing to “a return to astonishment” in formal reflections upon crime, transgression, and evil. At present, mainstream criminology and its allied forms of social praxis approach these phenomena through the enactment of a reductionist ontology that essentially reifies them as abstract “problems.” Under the influence of the interpretive regime born of this ontology, the holism and complexity intrinsic to human predicaments becomes translated into “objects” or “data” amenable to distinct kinds of analysis and control. Using phenomenology to “suspend” the everyday stance of criminological and bureaucratic practitioners, I show how the respective natural attitudes intrinsic to both forms of praxis share common ontological roots, among the most important manifestations of which is a penchant for normalizing and rationalizing what is, when otherwise regarded in the wholeness of its presence, utterly mysterious and astonishing. I argue that, in at least two notable ways, cultural criminology offers a uniquely propitious vantage point from which to expand this kind of phenomenological inquiry. First, the philosophical approach of phenomenology can be combined with the specific theoretical concerns of cultural criminology, in order to inaugurate a phenomenological metacriminology. Such a project would seek to engage criminology in sustained critical reflections upon its own contingencies–epistemic, metaphysical, cultural, historical, and otherwise. Second, a phenomenological approach applied to any of the range of particular inquries that have become the hallmark focus of cultural criminology’s investigations, holds forth strong prospects for the development of novel analyses that will continue progress towards more holistic and authentic engagements with the elemental nature of crime.
Cultural Diversity and the Criminal Law System
As a result of more than fifty years of immigration Europe has become a series of multi-cultural societies. There is cultural variation in the extent of criminality and many groups show their own crime characteristics. The institutions of the criminal law are faced with a whole series of dilemmas: should they recognize cultural specificity or not? and should it matter in the administration of law? The paper disusses daily practices as well as fundamental choices in a way that is not common in a field that is fraught with considerations of political correctness. Yes: culture matters.
Culture vs. Survival: The Effect of Police Intervention on Retaliatory Homicide in Disadvantaged Communities
Interactions between the police and minorities have long been marked with tension, strain, and distrust. Research has shown that minorities living in disadvantaged communities often feel that the police do not respond to them quickly enough when they are called but are more attentive to residents in non-disadvantaged neighborhoods. Some residents in poor communities have adapted to police inattention by resolving conflicts within the community, sometimes with violent responses. It is not clear, however, whether and to what extent the lack of police intervention in disadvantaged communities contributes to future violence. Thus, the understanding interaction between formal social control (i.e. police intervention) and informal social control (community intervention) is key. This study attempts to determine whether retaliatory homicide is greater in disadvantaged neighborhoods due to a reliance on a street code characterized by a perception among residents that police do not offer adequate protection when they are victimized. Using homicide data from a southern police department, and in-depth interviews with neighborhood residents, community leaders, and police, this study also assesses whether the lack of faith in the police contributes to retaliatory homicide in disadvantaged communities.
D
Defining the Devil: How the Commercial Appeal Made Monsters Out of Innocents
This paper will be an exploration into the connection between media and what has become known in the sociological and criminological communities as the “war on youth culture”. Through an analysis of contemporary literature and select instances in which the popular media has concerned itself with specific acts of youth violence, consideration will be given to the idea that the media promotes moral panics surrounding America’s youth that serve to create tension between youth subcultures and the larger population. Specifically, this inquiry will consider how the media perpetuates negative stereotypes about teenagers who fail to conform to societies expectations. The thesis of this paper is that, by promoting a criminal view of alternative youth cultures, the media perpetuates the criminal treatment of law-abiding youth in the larger culture. Furthermore, this paper will attempt to illuminate possibilities for positive relationships between the media and justice. The case of the West Memphis Three, three teenage boys convicted of murder, will be used to discuss the media’s ability to not only persecute the innocent, but defend those that have been denied proper justice.
Determining the Effectiveness of Interpersonal Strains for Predicting Delinquency and Depression Among Male and Female Adolescents
We understand little about how interpersonal strain can be used to examine the different processes affecting male and female involvement in delinquency and their vulnerability to depression. By using General Strain Theory (GST), this study offers new insight into the pathology of delinquency and depression for males and females. Using a unique sample of African Americans, we test for how interpersonal strain differentially predicts delinquency and depression for the two genders. Results are similar for both family strain and peer strain. Analysis from structural equation modeling indicates that interpersonal strain predicts both involvement in delinquency and vulnerability to depression for adolescent females but not males.
Do Peace Activists See War as Criminal? Implications for Critical Criminology
For some time, critical criminologists have argued that the legal definition of crime is no more and perhaps even less legitimate than social harms definitions of crime. Borrowing from both traditions, state crime scholars have had little problem conceptualizing war, imperialism, and other harmful governmental actions in criminological terms. But do other progressives outside of critical criminology? This study explores a part of this question via interviews with a convenience sample of peace activists agains the U.S.-Iraq war. In practical terms, the study seeks to clarify the extent to which activists feel comfortable framing such events as criminal and therefore provide some measure of (a) the indirect level of progressive support of academic in critical criminology as it pertains to praxis, (b) attitudes toward practical solutions to the control of state crime found in the scholarly literature, and (c) the potential limits and usefulness of the label “crime” as a tool for promoting social justice and peace.
Does the Media Effect How Jurors Assign Guilt in Cases of Individual and Organizational Wrongdoing?
This paper examines the impact of the media on the assignment of responsibility for both individual and organizational wrongdoing. That the media has a considerable effect on the way people view and judge everyday events, including crime and deviance, is an assumption that is built into the criminal justice system and reflected in the jury selection process. However, few studies have empirically examined the nature of the presumed media effect, particularly in cases of organizational wrongdoing. This study addresses this gap by using a randomized block design to randomly assign students in undergraduate classes to the either a “media” or control group and to then assign individuals within those classes to one of two vignettes (based on the Cold War human radiation experiments) where the role of the actor (an autonomous or obedient scientist who participated in the experiments) was manipulated. Data were collected from 201 students enrolled in Introduction to Sociology courses at a large Midwestern university to examine whether the media, role, or both, shaped respondents’ attributions of responsibility with respect to the individual and/or organization involved in the Cold War human radiation experiments. Results indicate that both role and media effect how respondents assign responsibility; however, findings suggest that the media matters more for organizations than individuals. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for the jury selection process.
Doing Gender as Structured Action: Women Guarding Men
This paper addresses a continuum of gender based presentation of self implemented by women correctional officers as survival mechanism to accommodate the social structure of men’s prisons. Much research has been conducted amongst the general population analyzing the role of gender in presentation of self. Over the past two decades the number of women working in male prisons as correctional officers has significantly increased (data). Lacking in this research is analysis of the influence of gender role upon women whose job it is to guard men. The discussion of styles of presentation of self implemented by female prison guards lays foundation for a discussion of policy recommendations intended to enhance the efficacy of women whose job it is to guard men, and to improve the interaction between male prisoners and female guards.
Domestic Violence Mandatory Arrest Laws: To What Extent Do They Influence Police Practice?
The piecemeal research that has been conducted indicates that intimate partner violence arrest rates have risen as a result of passage of mandatory and preferred arrest domestic violence laws. However, this research also suggests that part of this increase is attributable to the police arresting both parties involved in an incident, carrying out what are known as “dual arrests.” To date no large-scale research project has examined the comparative effects of mandatory, preferred, and discretionary warrantless arrest laws on arrest practices in intimate partner violence cases and the extent to which the increased rates of arrest are attributable to “dual arrests.” Of additional interest is the issue of whether strongr intimate partner violence arrest laws lead to increased arrest rates in other domestic and non-domestic violence cases. Using calendar year 2000 NIBRS assault data from 2,821 police departments in 19 states, this paper examines the differential likelihood of arrest in intimate partner, other family, acquaintance, and stranger assaults and the effect that the statutory framework has on the likelihood of arrest. The implications of the findings for policy-makers are addressed.
“Drug Court Saved My Life” — Evaluation of a Drug Court Program in Arkansas
The therapeutic jurisprudence movement that began in Europe during the 1960s has come to fruition in the American drug court. This study examines the operation of a single drug court in the Little Rock, AR metropolitan area and its effects on drug offenders in the program and the shift in costs from corrections to community corrections. Participants and staff are interviewed and participant records are examined to determine which factors correlate to program success or failure during the three years that the drug court has operated.
Dual-Diagnosis Courts: A Case Study in California
Many of the mentally ill offenders who are under supervision in the criminal justice system are also substance abusers, often self-medicating. These offenders often recycle through the system if they do not get treatment for their mental health or substance abuse disorders. A few jurisdictions have designed correctional treatment programs for dually diagnosed offenders that are modeled after drug courts. This paper presents the preliminary results of process and outcome evaluations of a dual diagnosis court in southern California. Observational data, treatment and probation records were used to examine the characteristics of participants, the treatment received, and short-term outcomes. This paper also provides policy implications for other jurisdictions.
E
Effects of Parental Imprisonment on Children’s Antisocial Behaviour and Delinquency Through the Life-Course
Background: Prisoners’ children appear to suffer profound psychosocial difficulties during their parent’s imprisonment. However, no study has disentangled the effects of parental imprisonment from the effects of parental convictions and other childhood risk factors; and there is very little evidence on the later life outcomes of prisoners’ children. We hypothesise that parental imprisonment predicts children’s own antisocial/delinquent outcomes partly because parental imprisonment directly causes children’s outcomes, and partly because it is associated with parental convictions and other childhood risk factors for delinquency. Methods: This study uses prospective longitudinal data from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD). The CSDD includes data on 411 Inner London males and their parents. We compare boys who experience parental imprisonment during their childhood (age 0-10) with boys whose parent(s) were imprisoned before their birth, and with boys whose parents never went to prison. Individual, family and parenting risk factors for delinquency were measured when boys were aged 8-10. Twelve antisocial and delinquent outcomes wre assessed at ages 10, 14, 18, 32 and 40. Results: Parental imprisonment during chilhood predicted all antisocial/delinquent outcomes in the study, and predicted higher rates of antisocial/delinquent outcomes than parental imprisonment before birth and multiple parental convictions without imprisonment. Parental imprisonment during childhood was strongly associated with many other childhood risk factors for delinquency. After controlling for parental convictions and other childhood risk factors, parental imprisonment during childhood still predicted several antisocial/delinquent outcomes, even up to age 32. Conclusions: Parental imprisonment is a strong predictor of antisocial/delinquent outcomes through the life-course. Prisoners’ children’s outcomes are partly explained by parental criminality, and partly explained by other risk factors associated with parental imprisonment. Our results also suggest that parental imprisonment experienced during childhood is a direct cause of several important antisocial/delinquent outcomes in later life.
Eligible Jurors’ Knowledge, Information Sources, and Attitudes About the Jury System
Over the last decade the petit jury has been the target of increased denigration. Complaints about “irrational” verdicts in criminal trials and excessive damage awards in civil actions have been routinely heard in the media and throughout the society. The present study, using data collected from a survey of 400 residents of Spokane County, Washington, examines the relationship between citizens’ attitudes toward the jury system, their knowledge about the role juries play in the justice system, and the source of this knowledge. Results from multivariate analysis controlling for relevant demographic factors are presented and policy implications are discussed.
Enemy of the State: Promulgation and Legacy of the Patriot Act
The aftermath of 9/11 brought important political changes in the criminal justice system. The Patriot Act, as promulgated by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, suspended the consitutional due process rights of suspects. Such protections as speedy trial, formal indictment, and legal representation were denied to individuals suspected of terrorist involvement. This paper examines the creation and passage of the U.S. Patriot Act, the legal issues surrounding the original Patriot act and the proposed second Patriot act legislation, and the prospects for abridged civil liberties stemming from the influence of the Homeland Security Department.
Environmental Threat and Social Control
The social threat approach to social control has traditionally emphasized the putative threat of minorities as a factor that can mobilize punitive responses. We argue that the relevance of threat for punitiveness can be more broadly understood and that social threats can have a variety of origins. In this paper we focus on threats to public and personal health and to quality of life that may be posed by various environmentally sensitive factors such as hazardous waste disposal, industrial pollution, chemical spills, etc. We use data collected from a national telephone survey (N=876) and OLS regression to assess whether the perception of environmental threat is related to respondent’s willingness to impose various forms of social control on those who commit environmental infractions. In addition, we examine whether the relationship between threat and control is mediated by factors that reflect the salience of threat to respondents. Specifically, we consider the mediating effects of tolerance for environmental risk and assessments of environmental crime seriousness.
Equality Does Not Mean Equal
This presentation will focus on the issues that have surrounded minorities and women since the beginnings of this country. To understand what justice is all about, one needs to understand history, the law, and the holdings of the various cases, and their impact on this group of individuals. Thus, this presentation will focus on problems of race, minorities, and women, and how to present a better understanding in all criminal justice undergraduate and graduate courses. An understanding of cultures and of peoples who come from various backgrounds will help us to understand what justice really means and why equality does not mean equal.
Evaluating Sex Offender Registration Laws
Sex offender registration statutes have been in effect for over fifty years, with California being the first to enact such as law in 1944. However, it was not until the 1990s that these laws received the greatest attention. Startling prevalence rates reported by researchers and government agencies as well as several high profile violent sexual assaults against children brought sex crimes to the forefront of discussion. Due to public outrage, federal and state legislatures enacted stringent monitoring guidelines for offenders convicted of a sexual offense. In 1996, the Federal government passed Megan’s law requesting that all state legislatures enact registration statutes or risk losing 10% of their Byrne funds. These statutes protect the public by reducing recidivism through monitoring dangerous offenders more closely. In theory, stricter supervision deters offenders from recidivating and serves as an investigative tool to law enforcement. However, the reliability of these registries depends on whether or not offenders comply with registration requirements. Thus, while all 50 states have accomplished the minimal requirement of establishing a sex offender database under Megan’s Law, some states have taken a second step to ensuring public safety by implementing a proactive tracking system to locate absconders. To date, there continues to be a dearth of research regarding sex offender registration statutes. First, we know that not all offenders comply, but we do not know the characteristics of these offenders. Second, there have not been any evaluations examining whether proactive tracking is helpful in locating noncompliant individuals and lastly, we do not know whether there has been any impact on recidivism rates. In an exploratory study, evaluating state sex offender registration data, the value and shortcomings of registration statutues is examined, providing invaluable information to policy makers.
Evaluation of Criminal Justice Advisory Board Education
The purpose of this project was to educate criminal justice executives in a retreat setting on subject matter such as systems thinking, change theory, strategic planning and the importance of collaboration. Developmental and evaluative research methodologies were used. The developmental methodology was used because the researcher was creating a product to educate criminal justice executives. The evaluative methodology was used to determine the effectiveness of the curriculum and retreat delivery system. Nine procedures were used; primary among them was the use of an extensive literature review, a pilot retreat, and the creation of formative and summative committees to provide valuable feedback to the researcher on the curriculum and evaluation. The iterative review process was the central tool in working with these two critical committees.
Evaluation of the Pennsylvania School Resource Officer Program
The Center for Safe Schools and Communities received a two-year grant from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency to assess the value of the School Resource Officer (SRO) Program and identify the critical components that lead to success of the program. The Center for Safe Schools partnered with the Mercyhurst Civic Institute to conduct the evaluation with the intended goal of developing a best practice manual for SRO programs within the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Twenty-four school districts were identified as having received or currently receiving state funds for the SRO program and only those sites were asked to participate in the study. The first year of the evaluation consisted of teacher, parent, and student surveys in addition to personal interviews with school administration and the SROs. Of the twenty-four districts, half participated in the survey portion of the evaluation, and twenty-one participated in the interviews. Results were compiled into an SPSS database and analyzed to determine components of the program that receive the greatest levels of acceptance and support. Through the evaluation, there were some commonalities among the SRO programs that showed stronger support of the school administration, parents, teachers, and students than others. The second year of the evaluation is to consist of surveys of law enforcement officers and supervisors regarding acceptance, understanding, benefits, and barriers to working with a SRO Program. The second year evaluation will be completed by summer of 2004.
Evaluation of the Sanction Certainty Directive of the Erie County, Pennsylvania, Adult Probation Department
In 1997, Judge John Bozza requested that the Adult Probation Department in Erie County, Pennsylvania, implement a Zero Tolerance (Sanction Certainty) pilot program which would provide swift and certain responses to violations; the desired outcomes being a reduction in the number of violations and a decrease in the amount of incarceration for offenders. From 1998-1999, the Erie County Adult Probation Department performed a year-long study, which found fewer revocations, violations, and days of incarceration for the Zero Tolerance (Sanction Certainty) caseloads compared to the control caseloads. In 2001, the Mercyhurst College Civic Institute conducted a replication study finding similar results. This paper will present the results of the continued evaluation (April 1, 2003 to March 31, 2004) of the program, which is now being applied to nearly all adult probation caseloads. The study utilizes data collected from the Erie County Adult Probation Department. In addition to analyzing the number of violations, revocations, and days of incarceration, this study will also consider the demographic factors of violators to determine if correlations exist between these factors and offenders’ rates of recidivism.
Evolving Standards of Decency and the Execution of Juvenile Offenders
The decision by the Supreme Court in Trop v. Dulles (1958) held that the definition of cruel and unusual punishment “must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” (356 U.S. 86, 101 (1958). While the court limited the execution of juveniles to ages 16 and 17 in Thompson v. Oklahoma (1988), the recent decision in Atkins v. Virginia (2002) on mental retardation indicate that the evolving standards of decency on executing special populations may be changing. Based on the court’s ruling in Atkins, the Missouri Supreme Court held that the execution of juvenile offenders violates the 8th amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment (Simmons v. Roper (2003)). Following a review of the history of juvenile executions and the current state of juvenile executions, this paper focuses on how the decision of Atkins and the granting of certiorari by the court in Roper may indicate a willingness to eliminate the execution of juveniles in the United States in the near future.
Examining the Death Attitudes of Aging Female Prisoners
The notion of dying in prison is a fear that haunts the existence of almost every older prisoner. Older prisoners must cope with the thought of dying in prison as well as coping with the death of friends or family members on the outside. When combined with their own personal fears of dying and declining health, these losses can be devastating. This research explores the fear of death among 92 older female offenders with a mean age of 56 years. Using Templer’s Death Anxiety Scale, the study revealed that female offenders have a higher degree of death anxiety compared to male prisoners of a comparable age. Correlates of death anxiety include the inmates functional health status, degree of anxiety and depression as well as the prison environment itself. Implications for social policy are discussed.
Examining the Influence of State-Level Characteristics on Sentence Outcomes Under the Federal Sentence Guidelines for Organizations
One of the stated goals of the federal sentencing guidelines is to provide uniform and consistent punishments for defendants that commit similar offenses and have similar criminal backgrounds. As such, extralegal factors including geographical location should not affect sentence outcomes. However, research at the individual level has found that geographical factors influence sentence disparities (Kautt, 2002). This research examines whether locational factors affect sentence outcomes among organizational defendants. Using information from the 2001-2002 federal sentencing guidelines organizational defendant’s data, initial findings indicate fine amounts vary by states. Theoretically, this research uses assertions from the state corporate crime perspective to suggest that state-level characteristics not only initiate and facilitate corporate crime but these state characteristics can also tolerate crime by failing to effectively punish corporate offenses. In particular, the goal of this research is to determine whether states identified as pro-business fine corporations lower than pro-labor states.
Examining the Media’s Effects on Fear of Terrorism
Extant fear of crime research suggests that a relationship exists between the media’s portrayal of crime and the public’s fear of crime. It has also been suggested in the literature that the two are linked to public support for punitive criminal justice policies. It has not yet been established whether media portrayals are associated with fear of terrorism and public support for anti-terrorism policy. This paper will build from existing research on the relationship between fear of crime, the media, and support for more punitive crime policies and examine the relevance of these findings for the study of media effects on fear of terrorism and anti-terrorism policy preferences.
Experiences in Reentry Program Implementation: The Genessee County (Flint, MI) Parolee Re-Entry Program
The Genesee County Parolee Re-Entry Program (GPREP) attempts to reduce instances of parolee substance abuse relapse and recidivism through a system of integrated transitional services coupled with rigorous drug testing and sanctions. The one-year program (twelve months) consists of two phases. Phase I (up to the first thirty to forty-five days of parole) requires the immediate reporting of eligible parolees to New Paths Residential Programs Center in Flint, Michigan upon release from prison. Parolees during Phase I receive individual, group, and family group treatment; life skills training; employment readiness courses and referrals; substance abuse counseling; and drug testing. After successful completion of Phase I, parolees graduate to Phase II and transition to an approved home placement and continue to receive case management; individual and group treatment; substance abuse counseling; and drug testing. The goal of the program is to enhance or create protective linkages for parolees within the first thirty days of their release from prison and reverse or reduce known risk factors associated with substance abuse relapse and criminal behavior in order to improve parolee integration back into the community for the remainder of their first year on parole. The following poster presentation will provide a descriptive overview of GPREP and highlight the collaborative efforts made by GPREP stakeholders – the Michigan Department of Corrections, New Paths, Community Recovery Services, and Michigan State University/Justice Research Associates – during the first year of program implementation.
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Farmed Out: A Case Study of Differential Oppression Theory and Female Child Farm Labor in the Early 20th Century
The hardships faced by children in early American history have been well examined in contemporary sociology (Bremner, 1971; deMause, 1974; Dolgin, 1997; Empey, 1978; Platt, 1966; Pogrebin, 1983; West, 1996; Youcha, 1995; Zeliver, 1985). It is understood that few social safety nets existed for children in the late 19th and early 20th century–especially for those children who resided in the isolation of rural Western America. The programs, shelters, schools or other assistance that were offered to children existed mainly in the large cities of the East. A guiding principle of these programs was that in order to “save” these unfortunate souls from a life of sin and degradation, they must be raised away from the wicked influences of the city; their developmental needs would be best met by embracing the Protestant Ethic, hard work and fresh air–none of which could be found, it was thought, in the urban environment or within any of the newly developed child-institutions or houses of refuge. A 1910 annual report of the New York Children’s Aid Society noted that, “For bringing the child into normal, healthy, and practical relations with the world, there is no asylum equal to the farmer’s home.” It was thought that a life on the farm was a life of virtue. This paper offers a rare opportunity to learn about farmed-out orphans–in particular female, farmed-out orphans. It provides a content analysis of Wisconsin state records kept of orphaned children whose lives were overseen through a formal system of child-welfare as well as a case study of one family of rual, orphaned children whose assistance came via the information system of “farming-out.” More importantly, this paper applies the theory of Differential Oppression to rural, female, orphans in an effort to explore the dual nature of the oppression they experienced due to their status as both children and as females and to examine the mode of adaptation to said oppression utilized by these children.
Fear of Crime and Attitudes Toward Rehabilitation and Death Penalty Opinion
This paper will examine the relationship of fear of crime and attitudes toward rehabilitation with death penalty opinion. Approximately 200 persons in one area of a southern state were polled. Death penalty items included an overall measure, measures about the death penalty for juveniles and for mentally retarded defendants, and an item about life without the possibility of parole. Results will be compared to previous studies such as Moon, Wright, Cullen & Pealer (2000).
Female Drug Use and Crime Rates in the United States
This presentation examines the relationship between the increasing number of female offenders and their drug use. An explanation of the increase in female offenders is the sale and use of drugs. Probable reasons of this relationship correlate with Merton’s Strain Theory and female offender’s inability to adapt to the expectations of society.
Female Role Models in Criminal Justice
Some of the leading female scholars in criminal justice will share their experiences as researchers, teachers, and administrators with developing scholars.
Feminism and Criminology Revisited
This presentation reviews the current state of feminist criminology with an eye toward the current debates within the field. Key issues to be addressed are current trends in the areas of feminist theorizing, feminist methodologies, and the intersection between feminism and activism.
Finding and Defining Evil: The Social Construction of Crime as Evil?
This paper is a product of a research agenda I call “The Language of Justice” in which I examine the usage of various words, terms or phrases central to the modern social discourse on justice, particularly social justice and criminal justice. This research paper is the study of the term “evil” and in its relationship to the notion of “crime.” My project is defined by three tasks. The first is a lexicon study of the word “evil.” This study is not exhaustive or definitive, but an overview (using dictionaries from the last 4 centuries), of how “evil” has been defined historically and how the definition has changed in the course of time. The second task is the study of the contexts in which “evil” is commonly employed today by examining its usage in modern every day life of English speaking communities via a study of media data in LEXIS-NEXIS. Finally, my third task is to take the findings of the previous two studies and evince their contribution to criminological scholarly literature already linking the notions of “evil” and “crime” to a process of social construction. At the heart of this paper, then, is an examination of the language on “evil” in the context of the study of “crime.” More specifically, my research underlines how “evil” is part of three different processes of social construction having to do with crime. In the end, I find that the lexicon study of “evil” and “crime” brings evidence to a conception of crime as socially constructed, and that the LEXIS-NEXIS study of “evil” brings evidence to both an ongoing conception of “crime” as socially constructed and an accompanying conception of “crime” and “criminal” as other than socially constructed. These two studies support existent literature, examined in my third study, which already argues that modern criminology is in part built on top of a model which rejects the social construction of crime.
Forensics and the Media: The Affects of Forensics on Television on the American Juror
In contemporary times, a myriad of forensic sciences exploded onto the scene that parallels the ferocity of technological advancement, thus expanding our capacity to increase the objectivity and accuracy of criminal investigations. Parallel to this phenomenon is a vast public intrigue that has been increasing just as feverously — as marked by increased lip service in the media, the development and proliferation of television dramas with forensic science services as its primary premise, and the expansion of secondary and post-secondary educational courses and degrees in the forensic sciences. Unfortunately, there is an uncertain amount of misinformation that may have a very strong influence on our criminal justice system in various ways, particularly in the portrayals of the forensic sciences on television. In the criminal justice system, jurors perhaps are the most susceptible to use this misinformation in their decision making. This project seeks to identify the problematic portrayals of the forensic sciences, to describe the influence it has on the American juror, and to determine if this phenomenon has any detrimental effect on the jury trial system.
Forms of Crime Interdependence
This paper applies broad ecological theory, drawn from larger science, to understand interdependences among offenders, targets and guardians. It considers not only symbioses but also non-symbiotic relationships among crime participants. It distinguishes predatory crimes from parasitic crimes. It separates mutualism from commensalism, with examples. Ecological theory and knowledge has grown quite a bit since Mackenzie, Shaw, McKay, and Hawley took a peek into that world.
Framing Marketocracy’s Dynamics: Moral Inversion, Double Dehumanization, and the Pecking Order
As the second in a planned series, this paper continues efforts to frame the dominant forces that shape transnational corporate, state, and state-corporate crime. The first paper developed a conceptual framework that combines Thomas Kuhn’s epistemological concepts, problem exemplars and exemplary problem solutions, and Kurt Lewin’s behavioral formula, B =f(PE). The central force identified as contributing to transnational crime was a new concept conceived by Martha Ture, marketocracy, i.e., the supremacy of market values and rules that overshadow the power of nation states and existing international law. Guided by this framework, the present paper builds upon existing literature and describes three additional forces that characterize marketocracy: moral inversion, double dehumanization, and the pecking order.
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Gambling, Drugs and Gay Marriage: Varied Routes to Decriminalization
This paper compares the divergent cases of the legal treatment of gambling in the United States over the past 40 years with the stubborn case of drug decriminalization and recent advances in the case of gay marriage. The paper first presents the varying situations of each activity during criminaliation, then describes the variables in the successful (or unsuccessful) efforts for decriminalization of each. Included in this analysis are: the changing basis of public opinion: coalitions, stakeholders, and the role of social movements; and the framing of claims for changes in the law and criminal justice.
Gender, Race, and Class: Teaching About Meaningful Differences
This presentation will provide information on effective pedagogical practices for teaching race, class and gender in criminal justice education.
Gender, Race, and the System: Teaching Criminal Justice
This presentation will focus on techniques used in addressing race, class, and gender in a senior capstone course. The importance of focusing on these three together as well as independently will be stressed, along with problems in the available data for adequately addressing race, class, and gender issues.
General Strain Theory and Within-Individual Change in Offending
Most previous tests of General Strain Theory have used cross-sectional data or lengthy lags between data points to examine the effect of strain on crime. These types of data make it impossible to explore issues of within-individual change or temporal patterning. This paper contributes to our knowledge of General Strain Theory by addressing within-individual change and temporal patterning of strain and crime using more appropriate data. Specifically, using monthly retrospective data collected from 277 incarcerated women at the Baltimore City Women’s Detention Center, we explore how within-individual changes in levels of strain are related to changes in the likelihood of engaging in violence, drug use and property crime. In addition, we address the problem of causal ordering and attempt to disentangle temporal issues like recency, duration, clustering and accumulation of strain.
Getting the Usual Treatment: Censorship and the Marginalization of Convict Criminology
In the course of finishing dissertation research, this author encountered a wall of opposition from the Canadian Penitentiary Service and Parole Board. For political reasons, they opposed research on dangerous offenders from the perspective of Convict Criminology, concluding that “this proposal does not reflect CSC [Correctional Service of Canada] priorities and service objectives, and would result in disruption to institutional operations.” For a period of two months, this criminologist was actually kicked out of all penitentiaries in Ontario, and could not interview any inmates. Complaints were made to members of Parliament, including the then Solicitor General of Canada, as well as the Office of the Correctional Investigator. Even my university tried to sensor the project. This paper seeks to place this episode in the context of the historic marginalization to which critical and Convict Criminology have been subject. It will document how the state controls the criminolgoical research agenda, and what happens when “voices from below” want to have a say in penological research. Of related interest will be a discussion of how a university research ethics committee literally conspired with the penitentiary service to try to kill this project.
Girl Scouts Beyond Bars: A Collaboration Across Professions, Values and Experience
A concept initiated in 1995 by Ms. Marilyn Moses, of the Institute of Justice, the Girl Scouts Beyond Bars (GSBB) program was designed to preserve and enhance the relationship between young girls and their incarcerated mothers. An innovative collaboration among the Kentuckiana Girl Scout council, the Kentucky Correctional Institution for Women, and Indiana University Southeast resulted in the development of a successful visitation program for incarcerated women and their young daughters and granddaughters and the implementation of an extensive evaluation model verifying the positive benefits of enhanced visitation. After reading about the GSBB program in an Institute of Justice publication, Dr. Marcia Segal, Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Dean for Research at Indiana University Southeast initiated contact with Ms. Betty Kassulke, Warden of KCIW. Their communications extended to the Kentuckiana Girl Scout Council and key interested parties including nursing faculty, education faculty, IUS alumni, and correctional officers. A unique group made up of educators, researchers, correctional personnel, Girl Scout volunteers and advocates for women and children met over the course of a year, staging a process that included the development of goals and objectives, creation of an infrastructure, skills identification and values clarification. Significant contributions to this initiative were identified in the program evaluation strategy, built from the “bottom up” and reflecting clear program goals, shared responsibility for data generation and cooperative approachs to data analysis. The successful articulation of individual and group talents and needs, along with the generation of new identities linked to this project were meaningful outcomes of the GSBB collaboration. The true measure of success of this collaboration is the sustainability of the program and its evolution in the hands of those who followed the initial planning group. This presentation will identify the process and outcomes of the GSBB collaboration, focusing not only on the specific impact on the participating girls and their mothers, but the effect of a health promotion model on the collaborations among offenders and correctional personnel involved in other parenting programs.
Globalization, Empire, and Crime: Unraveling the Motives for America’s Illegal Invasion of Iraq
Beginning in the late 20th century, state theory has been heavily influenced by narratives of globalization in which territorial states play a vastly diminished role in a new world order mapped according to the contours of fully de-nationalized capitalism. The illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq in March, 2003 offers a potential challenge to this vision of the withering state. Was the invasion an anachronistic state crime by a declining sovereignty? Or was it an imperial move designed to solidify the world dominance of U.S. capital and further the global reach of the U.S. state? In an attempt to answer this question, this paper examines the underpinnings of the U.S.-instigated war on Iraq. I give particular attention to (1) the political-economic vision guiding Bush Administration decision-making, particularly as that vision was articulated by the Project for the New American Century, (2) the intersection of these political-economic goals with the design of the Administration’s post 9/11 “war on terror,” and (3) the mapping of the “war on terror” according to earlier, empire-enhancing strategies to internationalize the “war on drugs.” Taken together, these factors suggest that the invasion of Iraq served to further expand the jurisdiction of a U.S. capitalist empire, and provide little evidence that the long-standing symbiotic relationship between capitalist expansion and sovereign states is being supplanted by the “stateless future” of globalization theory.
Globalization, International Terrorism and Criminology
The events of September 11 have once again brought urgency to the study of international structures and processes in matters of crime and social control. Calls to study criminology internationally, to broaden the scope of criminological investigations, and to think globally with respect to crime and its control are once again made with trendous vigor. However, unless developments beyond confined localities are taken seriously, criminology will remain as parochial as ever. I apply insights rooted in classical sociological theory to analyze international issues of social control and, specifically, international police cooperation from a comparative-historical viewpoint. Such an empirically broad and theoretically meaningful perspective shows that globalization may be more novel in the field of criminology then it is new to many of the social concerns social scientists have long been interested in studying.
Growing Old Behind Bars: One Woman’s Experience
The increase in the number and proportion of an unprecedented aging prison population represents one of the most dramatic changes in American correctional system. Although the older female offenders comprise a small percentage of the total prison population, their numbers are growing. With this growth comes the need to better understand the lives of this special prison population. Using a single case study approach, this paper examines the realities of “aging in place” as an older women. Issues discussed will include the devalued identity, mental and physical health issues, anxieties about death and sexuality, and the general coping strategies used by this 60 year old respondent residing in a southern prison to survive as an incarcerated lifer.
Guideline Revisions and Courtroom Actor Decision-Making: Assessing the Influence of Legislative Changes in Pennsylvania, 1991-2000
Despite the widespread implementation and restructuring of sentencing guidelines, relatively little empirical evidence exists on whether or not courtroom actor sentencing behavior is significantly influenced by guideline revisions. On the one hand, legally mandated guideline recommendations should serve to structure courtroom decision making; however, as some scholars suggest, the influence of these formal guidelines may be superceded by the informal concerns of individual courtroom actors embedded in locally varying courtroom norms (e.g. Ulmer and Kramer, 1998). Using ten years of data from the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing (1991-2000), the present study investigates the extent to which courtroom actor sentencing behavior is influenced by recent guideline revisions (in 1994 and 1997) in the state of Pennsylvania. Preliminary findings suggest that guideline revisions do in fact affect change in overall sentencing patterns. We discuss these findings in terms of both public policy concerns surrounding the continuing evolution of sentencing guidelines, and in terms of theoretical perspectives regarding the relative import of “formally rational” guidelines and “substantively rational” courtroom actor sentencing norms.
Gun Policy in the News: Coverage of Guns and Gun Control by CBS News and The New York Times
The mass media’s portrayal of events, individuals and groups influences the public’s perceptions in a variety of ways. Charges of bias against the media have been leveled by both the left and the right for several decades. With regard to the issue of guns and gun control, the charges originate almost exclusively from the advocates of gun rights. According to what is mostly anecdotal evidence, the media have a pro-gun control bias that is reflected in both the stories that are covered and the way in which those events are presented. While the negative aspects of guns are covered extensively (particularly shootings that involve children), the positive aspects of gun ownership (particularly defensive gun uses) are largely ignored. It is also suggested that this bias can be found in coverage of the interest groups that lobby on the issue with pro-control groups receiving more favorable coverage than pro-gun rights groups, specifically the National Rifle Association (NRA). Critics often point to specific stories with charges of bias, but there is a dearth of long-term methodologically sound analyses. This content analysis examines elite media coverage of guns and gun control in CBS Evening News and The New York Times between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2003 in addition to coverage of the final passage of the Brady Bill in 1993, the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, and the 2000 Presidential campaign. Each of the stories was coded for the following variables: network, news anchor, length, reporter(s) topic(s), type of story, content bias, tone bias, visuals shown (up to three), experts interviewed (up to three), interest groups mentioned, how those groups were portrayed, if any statistics were used in the story, if the story include children, and if there was any mention of a defensive gun use.
Gun-Related Crime in North Dakota — Results From PSN Research (Part 2)
This paper is a continuation of the topic initiated with the paper presented at the 2003 ASC annual meeting. It presents more data from Project Safe Neighborhoods research for North Dakota. The topics covered this time include: city-level data (including mapping gun violence), victims of firearms offenses, and results of a survey of inmates convicted of gun crimes. Research results confirm the notion that even though the state of North Dakota enjoys the lowest rates of violent crime in the nation, at the same time it must deal with many aspects of violent crime which are unique to largely rural jurisdictions like North Dakota. PSN research also reveals that even with the low crime rates, there is always room for improvement in the gun violence and public safety situation. The research concludes with some recommendations which should be implemented to successfully deal with gun-related violence in the state.
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Hate Crimes, Civil Rights and the USA Patriot Act
This presentation will address the recent explosion of hate crimes against some South Asian and Middle Eastern ethnic minorities in the context of the post 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks. An attempt is also made to examine the violation of civil rights for these minorities in the US, the ramifications of the USA PATRIOT ACT, and their due process consequences in our administration of justice.
Hate Crimes and NIBRS
The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) is an incident-level crime reporting program for local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. Within each criminal incident, NIBRS captures information on offenses, victims, offenders, property, and persons arrested. The ability to link and analyze this detailed information is a significant improvement to the existing Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. NIBRS is rich with information about bias crimes reported to the police. However, NIBRS is a very large and complex dataset, a fact that has become an impediment to its full utilization. In this paper the author presents a comprehensive analysis of the bias crimes reported through NIBRS between 1995 and 2000. He also provides instructions to other researchers who are interested in accessing and analyzing this complex data set.
Homicide Sentencing and the Behavior of Law
While a vast research literature exists detailing inequities and extralegal disparities in criminal sentencing in the United States, relatively little is known about whether such disparity exists in the sentencing of homicide defendants. The research to be presented examines sentencing outcomes in homicide cases adjudicated guilty in Philadelphia over the period 1995-2000 with specific focus on the victim/offender dyad, testing propositions advanced in the works of Donald Black regarding “the behavior of law” (and later, “the social structure of right and wrong”). Specifically, this research examines whether homicides in which offenders and victims have disparate social status are treated differently than those in which offenders and victims are similar on status variables. Consistent with Black, it is hypothesized that sentences will reflect status disparities between victims and offenders, with a sentencing “premium” placed on defendants whose victims are higher status, relative to offenders, net of legally relevant control variables.
How Law Enforcement Gets Brutal and How It Becomes Relaxed
In the presentation I will argue that “weak states” are more likely to use brutal punishments — like the death penalty — than “strong states”. This argument is supported by two historical and two contemporary case studies: by the comparison of England and Austria from 1700 to 1914, and modern Europe and the United States. I developed a model relating long-term state formation processes to changes in the penal code. Basic settings of this model are: changes in the power balance between social classes and different modes of monopolizing violence. It will be argued that in “weak states” controlling crime is more up to local elites and not to distanced civil servants. These local elites have to deal with restricted means to fight crime. It is not easy, however, to install effective bureaucratic domination in such a situation. To replace ineffective control mechanisms with powerful police organizations may undermine the domination of these local elites. Thus, makes an extensive use of the death penalty more likely. This is especially true under conditions of a social order being challenged (or the belief of being challenged) by certain other social groups. In situations that social order is being challenged weak states are inclined to react with more brutal means of law enforcement. Strong states, on the other side, have the ability to rely on much power resources to control the population. They, therefore, can react in a more relaxed manner to the threat of breaking the law by many.
‘I Wanna’ be “MotoGP”: Resistant Coding, Hyper-Masculinity and Motorcycle Youth Culture
Conventional criminological constructions of young male sportbike riders often code them within one of several “delinquent subculture” models. Rather than reproduce this highly problematic discourse, this paper is a critical ethnography of young motorocycle (sportbike) enthusiasts which details the author’s participant observation of the young tribe and explores themes/issues salient not only to the street participants (commodities, regulation and control, contested meanings, “ownership”, knowledge and street-capital) but as well to the body of literature loosely known as cultural criminology.
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Images of Power: An Analysis of the Militarization of Police Uniforms and Messages of Service
This paper examines the symbolic order of the American policing system. By symbolic order we refer to the various codes of communication between police and community members that reinforce “boundaries” in social relations. In the paper we argue that the militaristic symbolic vessels “worn” by the police reflect the institution’s perceptions of worth and value regarding the public. Furthermore, we contend that these symbolic forms identify and perpetuate power inequalities and serve as mechanisms of social control. We conclude the paper with specific recommendations on how police may openly foster and communicate messages of service to community members.
Immigration and Homicide: A Spatial Analytic Test of the Social Disorganization Theory
This study seeks to address two lines of scholarship that have yet to be integrated: spatial analysis and immigration/crime research. The social disorganization theory is concerned with the crime-producing effects of social changes caused by immigration. At the time, the theory makes specific claims regarding the spatial distribution of crimes across an ecological area. An emerging body of research consistently finds that immigration is not associated with increased levels of violent crime. However, recent scholarship neglects the spatial arguments made by the social disorganization theory, focusing instead on the effects of immigration and other social structural covariates on crime. Using homicide data for Miami-Dade county, this study applies the latest methods of Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA) to examine the extent to which homicide and other structural factors, such as immigration and income, are spatially dependent. Contrary to the expectations of social disorganization theory, we do not find a high degree of spatial autocorrelation between immigration and crime.
Imperial Machines and Bodies
This contribution expands on a current-albeit subtle-shift in the imaginary of Empire. This shift is one from the imagination of Empire as highly effortful, ever-unaccomplished engineering, to the imagination of Empire as accomplished nature. The relevance of this shift for matters and issues of regulation and control will be outlined.
Improving the Evaluation of Criminal Justice Programs
The participants in this session will review recent events that have focused attention on the quality of evaluation research on criminal justice programs and discuss some of the more problematic aspects of such research. The session will begin with an overview of the concerns that have been raised about the current state of evaluation research in criminal justice, drawing mainly on a National research Council report of a workshop related to this topic (Lipsey). Next, the central and contentious issue of what methods should be used for outcome evaluations, and the related question of the value and feasibility of randomized control designs, will be examined (Weisburd). Following that, consideration will be given to a critical but often neglected aspect of evaluation, ascertaining how well the program has been implemented and its influence on the outcomes (Gottfredson).
Impulsivity and the “Culture of the Now” Versus Rational Choice Theory and the Criminology of Normality
Impulsivity is fast becoming an installed feature of late modern society. From digitized ‘sales loops’ to the expansion of credit facilities, we are, at a societal level, increasingly encouraged to eschew long-term conservatism and pursue instead a course toward individual gratification, plotted by materialistic desires and located as sources of pleasure and identity. Such a breakdown in temporality coupled with the concomitant search for instantaneous (and emotive) experiences has real consequences, not least in terms of attitudes towards social norms and crime. This paper considers the implications of this situation for criminology. In particular, it suggests that such a culture of impulsivity–Jameson’s (1991) ‘world of the now’–is likely to further challenge the effectiveness and viability of administrative criminology and the static typologies associated with rational choice theory.
Increased “Punitivity” — Only a Consequence of a Harsher Punishment of Sex Offenders?
The problem of increased “punitivity”, i.e., actual harsher criminal sanctions or/and a higher public demand for more severe sanctions has been widely discussed among North American and European countries during the last years. Nevertheless, it is still doubtful whether there has been a general increase in punitivity in all these countries. In Germany, like in other European countries, the discussion on the demand for harsher sanctions is closely associated with the actual punishment of sex offenders. Using sentencing statistics, this article examines changes in the punishment of sex offenders during the last decades. These data are compared with the punishment of other types of violent offenders. Despite of the comparably small increase in registered sex offences during this period, the actual sanctions of sex offenders became much harsher compared with other violent offenders. Together with new legislations on sex crimes, these data indicate that the discussion on punitivity is mainly focused on sex offenders.
Indicators of the Right-to-Lifer
While previous research has examined the effects of religion and/or religiosity on attitudes towards suicide, euthansia, capital punishment, or abortion, these dependent variables have yet to be addressed as a single measure of ‘right-to-life’ attitudes. Therefore, this study will assess the relationship between religiosity, religion, and right-to-life attitudes. The difference between religion and religiosity is subtle but important. Religion is a nominal measure that refers to an individual’s self-identified faith group membership such as Catholic or Jewish. Faith groups vary in the level of conservatism; thus, religion, as an independent variable, is sensitive to these differences and in an analysis should be grouped according to levels of conservatism rather than as a dummy variable (faith group membership vs. no faith group membership). Religiosity, on the other hand, is usually a scaled measure of an individual’s strength in attitudes and behaviors toward their religion. For example, a person who frequently attends church and believes strongly in its teachings will be higher in religiosity than an individual who rarely attends church and waives in his/her beliefs. Data from the NORC General Social Survey (GSS) for the years 1994-2002 will be used to analyze this presentation. The year 1994 is used as a cut off point for the data since this is when the GSS switched from an annual to a biennial survey with two surveys given for 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. Each survey contains approximately 1500 cases which gives a maximum of 15,000 cases. The final ‘n’, however, will be significantly less than this maximum due to missing and unusable values. Additionally, the participants for each survey are drawn by a full probability sample of all English-speaking individuals who are 18 or over, living in the United States, and are non-institutionalized.
Innovations in Court Processes in the JOD Sites
The Judicial Oversight Demonstration Initiative is a court-centered approach to intervening in intimate partner violence cases that involves strengthening and building new partnerships between the court and other criminal justice and community service agencies, with the goal of enhancing victim safety and access to services and increasing offender accountability. The demonstration has been underway for the past 4 years in Milwaukee, Ann Arbor, and Dorchester. This paper describes the innovations in court processes — pretrial, adjudication, and post-conviction — that have occurred at the JOD demonstrations sites and the impact of these innovations on the courts. The paper also describes policy and procedural changes that were required to implement the court innovations, including requirements for staff and relationships with other agencies, and discusses the innovations considered most likely to be transferable to other jurisdictions interested in implementing court-based innovations for responding to intimate partner violence.
Institutional Fads in Criminal Justice
Recent analyses point to the importance of fads or fashions in many contemporary institutions, including business management, education, science, and medicine. While criminal justice obviously displays fad-like waves of enthusiasms for different policies, criminal justice fads seem less visible and less important than in other institutions. This paper examines three reasons for this difference: cultural assumptions about progress and perfectability seem less common in discussions of criminal justice policy; channels for disseminating information about innovations are relatively restricted; and would-be reformers find that they have less flexibility than in other institutions.
Institutional Racism: Is Law Used as a Tool to Perpetuate Racial Inequality?
Law is a mechanism we use to instigate social change and bring about equality. It is also the tool that has been used to institutionalize, legitimize and perpetuate inequality. Is the law still being used to institutionalize racism? In this paper, conflict perspectives are applied to the role of the economy, politics and the state to foster understanding of drug laws and their racial consequences. The institutional racism perspective is utilized to analyze drug laws as potential mechanisms of discrimination. The institutional racism perspective also guides analysis of the differential and negative effects of federal drug laws, specifically side-effect discrimination, both economic and political: economic in terms of employment in that disproportionate incarceration rates may lead to more differential hiring practices, and politically, the disproportionate incarceration rates may lead to differential political power due to disenfranchisement.
Internet Gambling: The Birth of a Victimless Crime?
As internet gambling continues to grow, it presents law enforcers and policy makers with a myriad of potential problems. This paper reviews the nature of internet gambling, problems associated with its growth, and the law and policy alternatives that are being proposed to minimize the social harm associated with its development.
Introducing the European Society of Criminology
The European Society of Criminology (ESC) was founded in 2000. The ESC aims to bring together in Europe persons actively engaged in research, teaching and/or practice in the field of Criminology. The ESC wishes to foster criminological scholarship, research, education and training, and to encourage scholarly, scientific and practical exchange and cooperation among criminologists in Europe and elsewhere. Its objective is further to serve as a forum for the dissemination of criminological knowledge at the European level (http://www.esc-eurocrim.org). The first four conferences of the ESC took place in Lausanne (Switzerland, 2001), Toledo (Spain, 2002), Helsinki (Finland, 2003), and Amsterdam (The Netherlands, 2004). The fifth conference will take place in Krakow (Poland), from August 31 to September 3, 2005 (http://www.eurocrim2005.com).
Is Anybody in Favor of Convicting the Innocense? The Response in Congress
It would seem that no issue could have less than unanimity than on the issue of convicting the innocent, but in the U.S. Congress there is considerable division. This paper will look at the “Innocense Protection Act,” which has been absorbed into the “Justice Through DNA Technology Act,” which together would seem to be reforms that none could possible oppose. Yet, there is considerable opposition, and passage seems problematic. Groups and positions both for and against this seemingly unassailable bill will be examined.
Is Criminal Justice a Science?
This paper addresses the question: What does it mean to label criminal justice a science? Science implies a closed system with a given universal methodology. Should the study of criminal justice be circumscribed in this way? Should certain types of questions be excluded from the discipline, namely those that do not lend themselves to measurement, such as the concepts of justice, fairness, and equity? This paper will approach these questions through the philosophies of phenomenology and structuralism.
Is There a Penalty for Going to Trial in Federal Court?
Is there a penalty for offenders who choose to exercise their constitutional right to trial? This has been posed as one explanation for the decreasing trial rate over the last 40 years. The phenomena is apparent in both state and federal courts. Available data shows that in the federal system, the percentage of offenders who go to trial in criminal cases has decreased from about 15 percent in 1962 to 2.9 percent in 2002. State offenses mirror the federal system as, in criminal cases, the trial rate has decreased from about 15 percent in 1976 to less than five percent in 2001. The decreasing trial rate has also been a concern for courtroom communities. The American Bar Association (ABA) held meetings (titled “The Vanishing Trial”) on this topic in December of 2003. This paper, using federal sentencing data, will try to improve on previous studies in this area by using national data to ascertain the extent of the “trial penalty” in the federal system. Previous studies on this subject have suffered from a lack of generalizable data and a lack of specific controls which may explain the reasons behind the sentencing decision outside of whether the offender went to trial or not. By using the extensive federal sentencing data, it is believed that the problems of the past will not be revisited.
Isolating System Effects That Explain Offender-Characteristic Case Processing Disparities
The degree to which offender characteristics affect case processing outcomes has always been an area of controversy. It is an inherently controversial issue because offender characteristics such as gender, race, and ethnicity should not have any effect on case-processing outcomes. It has remained a controversial issue because of the inconsistency in findings over the past several decades about the importance of these effects on case outcomes. While statistical methods for measuring the impact of these effects have grown more sophisticated over time, findings continue to be mixed, particularly with respect to the effect of race and ethnicity. It is argued that understanding when and how changes in decision-making criteria occur over time may make it possible to determine the extent to which these type of case processing disparities are due to systemic factors rather than the personal or unconscious biases of decision makers. A method developed by the author to diagnose why conviction rates change over time and how the criteria used to determine the probability of conviction also change along with these rates will be used to conduct an analysis that will attempt to isolate sources of systemic disparity in decision making. If successful, it may be possible to develop decision-making procedures that could reduce or eliminate the identified sources of systemic disparities. Study sites will include selected New York City counties. Case-level data obtained from the New York State Computerized Criminal History (CCH) System will be used in the conduct of this analysis.
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Jane Addams on Peace, Crime, and Religion
This paper examines two questions: first, should Addams be recognized as a founding sister of peacemaking criminology in the U.S.?; and second, is her effect still present in contemporary peacemaking criminology? Before I address these questions, however, I outline Addams’ fundamental conceptions of crime and peace, as well as the role of religion in her life and works. I use archival methods to study the histories of sociology, criminology, and peace studies, specifically Addam’s role in all three. From here, I discuss of feminist pragmatist theory, a theory that Addams subscribed to as well as the theory that I employ here to understand and frame her work. What follows is a brief discussion of Addams’ biography, including general information, relationships and memberships in various religious and peacekeeping organizations, sociological influences, and, finally, Tolstoy’s and Ghandi’s influence. I present Addams’ theory of crime using prostitution and juvenile delinquency as examples, and her work on peace before and after World War I, with a follow-up overview of contemporary peacemaking scholarship, particularly the writings of Quinney and Pepinsky. Finally, the three primary components of crime, religion, and peace are synthesized and implications for contemporary criminology and criminal justice practices are suggested.
Japan is not an Exception to a Rule of Moral Panic. No Longer Re-Integrative Society, but Frightened by Phantoms of Increasing Violent Criminals
Japan has enjoyed the reputation for being one of the most crime-free economically advanced countries. Crime has never been a political agenda. However, since the late 1990s, with constantly increasing crime rate and dropping clearance rate in police statitics, it appears that the Japanese public has lost confidence in its safety and the effectivness of the criminal justice system. The Japanese press has generally associated the 1990s economic slump with crime through ‘the collapse of traditional community-based society’. Also a survey of public attitudes showed that the proportion of the public who thought crime was getting worse had increased from 19% in 1998 to 27% in 2000. In the last general election in 2003, crime prevention has become an important political agenda and major political parties proposed various measures to control crimes, such as installing more cctv and police officers on the streets, longer sentences for offenders such as introducing life sentence without parole and building more prisons in their manifestos. However, in terms of crime statistics, in the late 1990s, there was a series of police scandals in Japan that fundamentally changed the way the press reported policing issues. Such changes provoked key policy changes toward the reporting and recording of Japanese crime. This in turn resulted in a sudden increase in the number of crimes recorded, and a sudden decrease in the clear up rates. The moral panic created by the press coverage of crime statistics appears to have resulted in increasingly punitive public views about offenders and sentencing in Japan.
Joan McCord: A Life Course in Experimental and Theoretical Criminology
Joan McCord’s career produced a remarkable integration of experimental, longitudinal, and theoretical work that is an exemplar for the future. Providing the first thirty-year follow-up of a randomized controlled trial in crime prevention, she demonstrated the enormous importance of testing for negative (as well as positive) effects of such programs over the life course. Her continuing efforts to link powerful empirical results to theories of crime and the life course showed us all not to stop at mere program evaluation or policy conclusions, but to place experimental criminology at the core of the discipline. Her final recommendation to the ASC in a 2003 Plenary Session was that future longitudinal work should be linked to the testing of interventions, since that would help advance our theories more rapidly. Sherman and Farrington will review McCord’s contributions to experimental criminology, Tremblay will discuss McCord’s contribution to understanding crime and the life course, and Karstedt will discuss McCord’s theoretical work. A video of an oral history interview with McCord a decade ago will be shown by Sabra Horne of Wadsworth, and general discussion from the audience will be encouraged.
Judge Among the People?
Over the last few years, Californian courts have intensified the relationship with their communities. The Court and Community Collaboration Program as undertaken by the Judicial Council of California stimulates a dialogue between courts and society. To promote public trust and confidence, the Program encourages courts to become more responsive to community concerns and educate the public about the role and functioning of the court system. During the 2003-2004 academic year, the author studied the Program on behalf of the Dutch Judicial Council for its relevance to Netherlands. At the conference the author will discuss the outcomes of her study. She will give an overview of the initiatives put into practice to make the courts more responsive to the demands of the public, and report on their effectiveness. Special attention will be paid to ethical dilemmas arising from an increased community involvement. She will conclude with some lessons for the Dutch courts.
Judges on Trial: The Impact of Judge Characteristics Across Modes of Conviction
Recent research suggests that courtroom decision making processes may vary depending on whether or not a case is pled or convicted at trial (Johnson, 2003). If the role of different courtroom actors in the sentencing process varies by mode of conviction, then the influence of courtroom actor background characteristics should also be expected to vary by mode of conviction. Using recent data from the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing (PCS), the present study tests this hypothesis by examining the influence of a variety of judicial background characteristics across different modes of conviction. Preliminary findings indicate that several judge level predictors of sentencing exert differential effects for plead cases compared to cases convicted at trial. These results have important implications for both past and future research on courtroom actor background influences in sentencing, and they provide useful insights for future theorizing on courtroom decision-making processes and outcomes.
Juggling Resarch, Teaching, and Service: The 40/40/20 Split in the Real World
While university and departmental missions vary, they typically share a focus on faculty productivity in the areas of teaching, research and service. For the individual faculty member, balancing the demands of research, teaching and service are a common, on-going challenge. Panel members will discuss their experiences with balancing these three, sometimes competing, demands and some strategies for effectively juggling teaching, service and research. This panel of tenured and tenure-track faculty will present their perspectives of how to get the job done.
Justice as Culture
It has been argued that justice is a universal concept. This paper, however, will argue that the concept of justice is culturally constructed. In order to understand what justice means in a given culture, one must understand both the cultures underlying values and its language. The study of language is important because languages are structured differently, and so delineate reality along dissimilar lines. The following study will examine and compare two cultures and their cultural and social artifacts in order to analyze the universality of the concept of justice.
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Keeping the Knowledge Store Stocked: What Researchers Produce and What Practitioners Need
Research knowledge comes in many sizes and shapes. In some situations, qualitative research may be the best way to reveal key social relationships in which crime, social order, and justice can be understood. However, funding agencies face increasing pressure to focus on “gold standard” program evaluation. Typically, this translates into an emphasis on randomized control trials using quantitative measures and statistical tests. At the same time, criminal justice practitioners demonstrate a desire for continuous involvement by researchers in solving day-to-day practical problems and providing “real-time” feedback of research findings for policy-making. How should a “knowledge broker” funding agency respond? What drives the demand for some types of research strategies? Can we better anticipate the need in our field for these alternate research strategies?
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Legal Issues Involving Show-Ups, Line-Ups, and Photographic Identification
Research has shown that eyewitness testimony is an unreliable method of identifying persons involved in criminal activity. Yet, the criminal justice system frequently relies on such testimony and the lay public believes that short of DNA evidence show-ups, line-ups, and photographic identifications of suspects are an effective way of identifying criminal suspects. This paper explores the legal issues involved in eyewitness identification through use of show-ups, line-ups and photographic identifications.
Legitimate Organizations as Lock Between Legal and Illegal Around Transnational Crime
Transnational crime often involves an interface between criminals and so-called legitimate actors. This poster deals with a particular variation of this interface. Sometimes, legitimate organizations may literally act as interface between legal and illegal. This means that transnational activities are either legalized or criminalized by passing through these organizations. Organizations thus act as lock between legal and illegal. In this poster presentation, the so-called Lock-Model is described with its two submodels. These models were developed in the ongoing Ph.D. study into interfaces between legal and illegal actors in transnational crime.
Letting the Guilty Go Free: Whites’ and Blacks’ Willingness to Participate in Jury Nullification
Research shows that a majority of African Americans, and a significant number of white Americans, perceive the criminal justice system as racially biased. Few studies have addressed the consequences of these views. This paper examines whites’ and blacks’ willingness to participate in jury nullification using an innovative survey-based experiment from the 2002 Race, Crime and Public Opinion study (N=2,387). The experiment systematically varies the race of an alleged offender, the crime for which he has been accused, and whether police conduct in the case has been influenced by racial bias. Results show that there is more willingness to let a guilty person go free if he is accused of a non-violent drug offense than an attempted murder, and if there is a possibility of police racial bias in the case. Moreover, there is a substantial black-white difference, with blacks more willing than white to engage in jury nullification. Multivariate analyses examine the sources of these attitudes, focusing on the effects of perceived racial bias in the criminal justice system, racial prejudice, ideology, crime salience, views of the police, and contact with the criminal justice system. The implications of the results are discussed.
Life After Death: Life Histories of Innocents Released From Death Row
We discuss the findings of a pilot study of ten individuals exonerated and released from death row because of substantial evidence of their actual innocence. The nine men and one female spent from 2 to 18 years condemned to death before their exoneration. We examine their coping and adjustment strategies upon release, focusing on those factors that both facilitated and impeded post-release adjustment. In particular, release from prison resulted in difficult transitions back to “free” society where their home communities played critical roles in their success post-release. We conclude with a brief discussion of policy implications.
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Making Change Permanent: Problem-Solving Innovation in a Centralized Setting
Across the country, court leaders in states like California, Louisiana, Ohio and New York are seeking to transfer successful practices of drug courts and other problem-solving courts (e.g. enhanced screening and assessment, expanded sanctioning options, judicial monitoring) into a centralized court setting. They face a number of challenging questions: Which problem-solving principles travel easily and which do not? Does adopting a problem-solving approach come with a hefty price tag? What new measures of success (referrals to long-term drug treatment, reduced recidivism, improved confidence in justice) can courts adopt to motivate institutional change? And how do you overcome resistance to problem-solving from reluctant judges and attorneys? The ‘Making Change Permanent’ essay will draw upon interview with court administrators and scholars, as well as empirical evidence from a range of research reports and published articles.
Making Time and Space for Time and Space: Contextualized Criminology for the 21st Century
The Division of International Criminology (DIC) has existed formally since 1990. Membership has increased steadily, especially in the past few years, and in 2003 the DIC was the largest ASC Division. This paper will suggest the reasons for this interest, detail the DIC’s activities over the past five years, and point to ways in which the ASC can and should internationalize its policies, publications, conferences, outreach activities and general scholarship. The emphasis of the DIC is to foster the international exchange of ideas among criminologists, as well as encourage US-based criminologists to consider the problem of external validity in their own research and theory building. Thus, this paper deals with the general issues of context and history: “making time and space for time and space” in criminology.
Managing Disobedience as Crime: Legal and Extra-Legal Discourse in Military Court Verdicts of Unauthorized Absentees and Conscientious Objectors
The paper, part of a larger project, attempts to “enter the mind” of the legal system in order to uncover the way it shapes its perceptions of, and solutions to, social problems. By looking for sources of knowledge, strategies, subterfuges and stereotypes in the verdicts, the paper presents an image of the Israeli military court’s constructions of two military offenses: desertion, often due to economic difficulties and cultural problems, and conscientious objection, ideologically motivated and strongly linked to the academic intelligentsia. Through verdicts in both cases, the paper illustrates the shortcomings of the doctrinal legal approach as a social problem solving technique: the law’s “colonizing” effect on other disciplines leads to poor, one-dimensional, flattened images of the problems, selectively borrowing concepts from extra-legal disciplines and reinventing them to fit Weberian, ideal-type based classifications and distinctions. Offenders are then classified through the reinvented disciplinary paradigms and treated accordingly in the verdict rhetoric. While this problem-solving technique is deficient for all social problems, routine offenses and marginalized offenders are those who suffer the most from it, while more resourceful offenders occasionally succeed to introduce a broader discussion framework into the legal scene.
Manifestations of Victim Restoration in the Texas Death Chamber
Despite the longstanding research tradition looking at administration of the death penalty jurisprudentially, extant work has only begun to examine such punishment within the framework of “emotionally intelligent justice.” Using data on executed inmates from Texas for the period late 1982 through early 2004, this study examines the manner in which starkly personal pronouncements (e.g., remorse, admission of guilt, defiance) manifest in the execution chamber. Multivariate logistic regression models suggest that the incorporation of restorative justice principles influences redemptive emotions in offenders. Implications for future research are addressed.
Mapping the Criminal Justice Policy Community: Implications for Research
This paper will attempt to advance criminal justice policy analysis by drawing on a number of conceptual tools that political scientists have developed to assist researchers in their explorations of particular policy sectors. Among those tools that are the concepts “policy community” and “policy network.” The paper will argue that by drawing on concepts from political science, the process of policy development can be both illuminated and understood more clearly. In particularly volatile policy areas like criminal justice, conceptual tools that help to organize the policy environment are especially necessary.
Measuring Juror’s Agreement on the Existence of Mitigation and Aggravation Evidence in Capital Trials
The United States Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the constitutionality of modern capital sentencing statutes rests in large part on the jury’s ability to make an individualized sentencing determination. This individualized determination is informed by both aggravating and mitigating circumstances presented as evidence during the penalty phase of a capital trial. Recent research has suggested that there is wide variation in how black and white jurors view this evidence. This variation is particularly stark in interracial killings especially black defendant/white victim cases. Prior studies have foucsed primarily on jurors’ receptivity to evidence they reported as being presented at trial. This study attempts to take a step back and determine if there is any significant variation, among jurors serving on the same trial, in the types of evidence they recall being presented. These findings will assist in locating the genesis of the racial divergent views of penalty phase evidence. Using data collected by the Capital Jury Project this research will quantify the rate of agreement regarding the existence of aggravating and mitigating factors in capital trials. Particular attention will be paid to variation among black and white jurors serving on cases involving interracial killings.
Media (In)Attention to Racial Disparities in Criminal Justice: The Problem of Decontextualization
A report released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in April 2003 announced that the Nation’s incarcerated population had surpassed 2 million people. Newspapers and magazines responded with articles that relayed both the general trends and more specific demographics described in the report, including the vastly disproportionate representation of African American and Hispanic males. This study examines the media’s decontextualization of race in its coverage of incarceration rates and its potential impact on the public’s perception of appropriate policy responses to the crime problem. A content analysis reveals that despite the relative consistency in reporting racial disparities in the system, very few news sources sought to explain the possible causes or impact of such a high incarceration rate among minority communities. This work goes beyond current literature regarding the media’s role of framing criminal justice policy through media scares and moral panics, suggesting that the exclusions of media content are as vital to its messages as what is included. I conclude with suggestions regarding how the media can more responsibly frame the racial inequities of incarceration in ways that better inform the public on criminal justice policies.
Meth and Crack: Media Constructions and Political Consequences
This paper compares the media constructions of meth and crack and the political consequences of these constructions. Specifically, I detail six commonalities. (1) Both meth and crack are erroneously defined as something radically different than methamphetamine and cocaine. (2) Both substances are falsely considered “instantly addicting,” fatal, and a direct cause of violence. (3) A shared vocabulary is used in the portrayals of meth and crack–both are epidemics. (4) Questionable research reports are presented that show that meth and crack use promote the spread of HIV. (5) First-hand accounts demonstrate the alleged consequences of the substances for the destruction of the family and the resulting crisis in social services such as foster care. (6) The concept of “meth baby” is invented and seen as the modern equivalent of the “crack baby.” Data on meth are derived from a content analysis of every article in the InfoTrac online library that uses the term “meth” in its headlines. Comparable statements on crack are culled from the extensive available sources in the scholarly literature. Media accounts of meth and crack tend to focus on the underclass substance users, ignoring individuals who use the substances who are outside this suspect class. A crucial element in the discussions of meth and crack is scapegoating, blaming the drugs or their alleged effects on their users for a wide variety of preexisting social ills. The notion that poverty and unemployment set the stage for the cultural milieu in which drug selling takes place is completely ignored. According to media reports, it’s the crack that has destroyed urban neighborhoods. Likewise, meth labs are seen as responsible for “rural blight” and meth considered the number-one threat to rural America.
Minimizing Errors of Justice: The Role of the Prosecutor
The legitimacy of the criminal justice system is undermined by errors of justice, two major categories of which are errors of due process (involving harms imposed on innocent persons and overly punitive sanctions imposed on offenders) and errors of impunity (involving failures to bring culpable offenders to justice). This paper considers evidence that points to the prosecutor as a source of those errors. It then asks what prosecutors can do to minimize the social costs associated with errors of justice–through better systems of accountability, more coherent articulation of the goals of prosecution, and greater awareness of the impact of policies and strategies governing case screening, post-arrest, investigations and plea bargaining on errors of justice and other goals of prosecution: pursuit of justice, reduction of crime, efficiency, evenhandedness, celerity, quality of life in the community, and legitimacy. The effects of recent developments in prosecution are also considered, including community prosecution and the loss of information about what happens to felony arrests and why. This paper is part of a larger project to identify the nature and sources of criminal justuice errors and find remedies.
Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Revisited: Does Race Matter for Native American Offenders?
Using Minnesota Sentencing Guideline Commission data from 2001, a number of frontstage and backstage sentencing decisions are exmined to see if the decisions for Native American offenders are more harsh or more lenient than for white offenders. A multivariate analysis is conducted on a number of sentencing outcomes, including stayed and executed prison sentences. Both OLS and logistic regression techniques are used, while controlling for a variety of legal and extra-legal variables. A modified conflict theory is proposed as a basis for the research hypotheses and the interpretation of results.
Missouri Residents’ Opinions Regarding Medical Marijuana
The primary purpose of our research is to provide a valid assessment of Missourian’s opinions regarding the use of marijuana as a legitimate therapy option for physicians in Missouri. The data collected will also be used to test hypotheses related to medicalization and conflict theories that might explain how subjects might potentially differ on these opinions. The evolution of policies that permit or forbid the use of marijuana for treatment of diseases and their symptons will also be addressed. The results of our research will be presented and will represent the culmination of preliminary research currently (Spring 04) being conducted among residents of southwest Missouri by the authors of this proposal. Students from criminology and sociology classes are now utilizing the computer Assisted Telephone System (CATI) of SMSU’s Center for Social Sciences and Public Policy Research (CSSPPR) and are currently collecting raw data. The study will attempt to measure under what conditions Missourians might support or oppose legalization of prescription marijuana by physicians, as well as various independent variables that might explain why they hold a particular view. The results will be disseminated to the general public through the statewide media, as well through articles in refereed journals and through presentation at academic conferences.
Monitoring and Support for High-Risk Offenders: The Youth Violence Reduction Partnership
In 1999, seeking to reduce Philadelphia’s homicide rate and put youthful offenders on the path to a productive adulthood, various Philadelphia agencies and organizations, including Public/Private Ventures, partnered to form the Youth Violence Reduction Partnership. Its goal is to steer youth, ages 14 to 24 and at the greatest risk of killing or being killed, toward productive lives through increased support and supervision. This poster describes Philadelphia’s Youth Violence Reduction Partnership and provides evidence the initiative may be reducing homicides.
Moral Panics, Social Crusades, and the Criminal Justice Documentary
The paper will focus in depth on 3 criminal justice documentaries showing the ongoing impact of moral panics and social crusades on the lives of those likely to have been falsely accused as a result of stepped-up law enforcement efforts. The documentaries covered will be” Capturing the Friedmans, Paradise Lost and Revelations: Paradise Lost Revisited. The first features the child porn scare of the 1980s/1990s and the second and third efforts to brand teens as Satanists during the satanic panic of the same era. The broader implications of the documentary film as a format for critical criminology will be discussed.
Moral Struggles and Crime: The State, Individualism, and Community
This paper proposes a critical theoretical framework for criminology centered on the moral struggle for recogntion and public trust within local community. This articulation of struggle illuminates alternative foundations for critical theorizing. The analytical dualities that guide this analysis include: 1) the Impersonal State and the need for moral recognition and 2) the relationship between possessive individualism and the development of trust in the local community. First, the author draws on political philosphy, as well as criminolgoical studies, to underscore the importance of conceptualizing the Liberal State in such a way that discloses how bureaucratic processes and political leadership affect social perceptions of authority and recognition. This involves a critique of the Nation-State and how its leaders engage the potential contributions of local citizens and the relevance of this condition to local ‘codes of honor’ that bestow moral recognition. Second, critical theory informs a discussion of the degradation of conditions that lead to community-centered ‘public trust.’ This diminution of trust stems from expectations attending participation in the possessive market. This section argues that the discernment of needs and desires is confused and without a general frame of reference that accounts for community-based moral expectation. These factors constitute a peculiar social organization of crime. Indeed, in the absence of a normative vision that links national identity to community life and leaders to members, meaning and order are provided through alternative relationships governed by possession, ‘private trust,’ and an informal source of authority that recognizes the whole person. Criminal behavior is thus a maintenance and product of these factors: persons attempt to secure a mystified conflation of needs and desires in a predictable fashion and ensure membership in a recognition-granting group. This argument further claims that the definition and occurrence of crime reveals a failed relationship between the Sate and members of local community.
More Executions, Less News, Little Public Knowledge: News Coverage and Public Awareness of Executions in the U.S., 1977-2003
For executions to have any effect on potential murderers–either deterrence or brutalization–information about executions must be widely disseminated. Similarly, for the public to participate nationally in discussions about the death penalty, they must be knowledgeable about it. This paper tests two hypotheses related to public knowledge of executions: (1) As executions have increased in frequency, they have received less news coverage, and (probably as a consequence) (2) the public is currently unaware of the actual frequency of executions. To test the first hypothesis, network television and newspaper coverage of executions imposed since 1977 were analyzed nationally and within several states that had many, few, or no executions. To test the second hypothesis a national mail survey of the American public was conducted to assess knowledge about the frequency and recency of executions nationally and within respondents’ state of residence. The data are consistent with both hypotheses: As executions have increased, news reports about them have become less frequent, shorter, and less prominent in both national and local news media. The results of the survey reveal that people substantially underestimate the actual frequency of executions nationally, but have more accurate perceptions of execution frequency within their home state.
Murder in the Ranks: Patterns of Homicides Committed by US Soldiers, WW II
During the latter half of the 20th century sociological and criminological interest in the military grew, yet it did not create a readily recognizable body of literature. Today things appear to be changing. In addition to a number of recent articles and books on intra military crimes and various social sanctions that developed during post-war settings, publishers on both sides of the Atlantic have recently issued edited collections based on social science approaches to studying the military. This paper is a continuation of previous research on felonies committed by US soldiers in the European Theater of Operations (ETO), WW II. Earlier work focused on the official records of crimes and reported racial disparities found in patterns of rape in England, France and Germany, and in the patterns of punishment, including capital executions by the U.S. army. Here we report on the patterns of homicides committed by US soldiers against civilians and military personnel in the ETO, WW II.
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Nature of Intimate Partner Violence Against Native American Women: Understanding Control, Conflict, and Socioeconomic Contexts
Little is known regarding the nature of intimate partner violence (IPV) against Native American women. Feminist theorists posit that men’s use of violence against women in intimate relationships is fundamentally a means of coercive control to maintain power over women. In contrast, family conflict theorists argue that violence is a tactic used by some partners to resolve conflicts of interest that arise naturally in relationships. Recently, Johnson has proposed two distinct forms of IPV, one characterized by control and another rooted in conflict. However, many Native American scholars contend that IPV against Native women should be understood within the contexts of Western imperialism and colonialism, whose consequence has been massive loss of lands and resources, severe disruption of traditional gender roles and family structures, and high levels of poverty among many tribes. This paper examines the multiple contexts of control, conflict, and socioeconomic conditions in order to improve understanding of the nature of IPV against Native American women. Data are drawn from a cross-sectional, in-person interview study conducted in 1999 with 431 low-income Native American women aged 14-45 years. Participants were recruited from tribally operated Women-Infant and Children’s Nutritional Program (WIC) clinics, tribal facilities, and a vocational school, all in western Oklahoma (response rate = 80.9% of eligible women). IPV victimization was assessed using modified revised Conflict Tactics Scales. Context measures included: 1) a control tactics scale consisting of three subscales: partner’s severe control (6 items, alpha=0.80), partner’s jealous control (10 items, alpha=0.91), and respondent’s jealous control (8 items, alpha=0.83); 2) a 12-item relationship conflict scale that assessed reasons for arguments: partners’ jealousy/drinking (8 items, alpha=0.86), and money/household responsibilities (4 items, alpha=0.81); and 3) socioeconomic characteristics including family income and resources, and respondent’s and partner’s employment status and education.
Neighborhood Level Disparities in Court Dispositions Before and After the Implementation of Sentencing Guidelines in Ohio
Characteristics of defendants’ neighborhoods reflecting greater social and economic disadvantage may result in harsher case outcomes at the individual level if court actors incorporate such characteristics into their perceptions of more crime-prone environments. This situation inhibits the achievement of two goals simultaneously: equity in the treatment of criminal defendants versus improving quality of life in high-crime neighborhoods (a goal of community justice). We argue that neighborhood differences in criminal case processing can be framed in similar fashion to research on extra-legal disparities in case processing conducted solely at the individual level, with the additional consideration of Karp and Clear’s (2000) conceptual framework of “community justice”. The study described here focuses on the relevance of neighborhood characteristics for shaping disparities in felony case processing in Ohio courts of common pleas, both before and after the implementation of sentencing guidelines. Tri-level models (defendants, neighborhoods, and jurisdictions) reveal that, regardless of the time period examined, the socio-economic status (SES) of a defendant’s census track of residence is more important for predicting charge reductions, convictions, and prison sentences when compared to the same status indicators measured at either the individual or jurisdiction level. The persistence of neighborhood level disparities under sentencing guidelines suggests that state-level sentencing reforms may necessarily be limited in their impact when they do not address these types of neighborhood effects on case processing.
New Faculty Workshop (Sponsored by the Division on Women and Crime)
This workshop is intended to provide a space for open discussions of the myriad of concerns and issues faced by new faculty members in academe. The idea for this workshop arose from concerns noted by new faculty during the Division on Women and Crime Business Meetings. Among the topics to be addressed are academic socialization; isolation/marginalization; work environments/social support networks; personal and political identifies; research/publishing; pedagogy and self-presentation; and time management (balancing service, teaching and research). A diverse and experienced set of panelists will be present to share their perspectives on negotiating the academic terrain, field questions, and engage in conversation with attendees.
New York’s Death Penalty: 1936-1962
This paper provides an historical analysis of capital punishment in New York between 1936 and 1962. It examines public opinion, politics, and legislation during this period to provide the social and historical context in which executions were taking place in the state. It further examines more than 200 state-sponsored executions, as well as the cases of death-sentenced prisoners who ultimately were not executed, focusing in particular on whether systematic differences emerge between the executed offenders and those who were spared execution by judicial or gubernatorial action. The paper concludes with observations about the relevance of this history to contemporary and future capital punishment in New York.
New York’s Death Penalty at the End of the 19th Century: 1863-1900
This paper examines death penalty law and practices in New York between 1863 and 1900, a time following the peak of the abolition movement in the state and during which the country’s first law authorizing death by the electric chair was passed and utilized. The paper includes a description of the legal, social and political context surrounding the electric chair’s origns, and state and national reactions to the country’s first electrocutions.
Newspaper Coverage of the Police: Past and Present
Has newspaper coverage of the police and their activities changed over the past fifty years? This study provides a content analysis of police stories contained in newspapers from various sized communities with a special emphasis on comparisons between 1954 and 2004. The present paper answers two specific questions: (1) Are police stories today more likely than in the past to focus on an association between the police and violent crime? and (2) Are there more negative police stories today than in the past?
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Of Fragmentation and Ferment: The Impact of Sentencing Policies on State-Level Incarceration Rates and Admissions to Prison, 1970-2002
The indeterminate sentencing structures that dominated criminal justice systems in the United States through the 1970s fragmented over the last three decades, replaced by patchworks of determinate and structured sentencing, mandatory sentencing, habitual offender laws, and truth-in-sentencing laws. During the same period, all states experienced rapid increases in admissions to prison and incarceration rates. Scholars have examined recent state-level reforms in an effort to understand their philosophical underpinnings; similarly, analysts have examined these dramatic changes in state prison populations in an effort to explain the social, political, or cultural factors driving incarceration. Yet, there remains a lack of comparative work systematically analyzing the influence of particular sentencing and corrections policies on variation in state-level prison populations over the last three decades. Those studies that have included policy influences in their analyses generally code policies as simple dichotomous variables, failing to account for variation in policies both across states and within states over time. Using a pooled time series design, this paper assesses the impact of determinate sentencing, sentencing guidelines, mandatory sentencing laws, habitual offender laws, and truth in sentencing laws on changes in prison admissions and incarceration rates across all 50 states between 1970 and 2002. Rather than using dichotomous variables to denote the presence or absence of a policy in a state, each policy is scaled according to its scope of coverage or sentence severity; thus, the influence of policies and changes in policies on prison populations is assessed over time.
Officers’ Determinations of Citizen Disrespect: An Exploratory Study
Although a body of research does exist examining the influence of citizen disrespect on police decision making and use of force, that research is limited in the capacity to appropriately conceptualize citizen disrespect. In fact, little is known about the verbal and nonverbal behaviors that for officers signify disrespect. Utilizing semi-structured interviews of officers in a mid-sized city police department, this descriptive research will seek to capture the most meaningful behavioral cues of what actually constitutes disrespect in officers’ eyes. With a stronger ability to define disrespect conceptually for observations, future research can then focus on determining what effect, if any, disrespect has on officer decision making.
On the Inside, From Elected Office
Few criminologists even think about running for elected office, but it is an option, and provides unique opportunities to apply theory. The author will assess his effectiveness as a criminologist in the role of county commissioner in Utah.
On the Way to Settled Law: An Examination of Law Making and Law Finding in Federal Appellate Decisions
With enactment of the Federal Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, both the government and defendant can challenge lower court sentencing decisions. Our research examines judicial reasoning in federal appellate challenges of the application and interpretation of substantial assistance departures under the federal sentencing guidelines. Our research relies on textual analysis of appellate decision for the purpose of exploring the development of settled law from 1988 to 2000. In our study we focus on how formalism, analogy, and realism are relied upon in appellate court opinions.
Overcoming Operational Obstacles in a Mental Health Court: Structural vs. Individual Factors of Success
Although a large number of mentally ill individuals are currently under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system, involvement in the criminal justice system does little to address their needs (Ditton 1999). This has led to criminal justice innovations, especially in the form of diversion programs such as mental health courts (MHC’s). MHC’s generally divert mentally ill offenders out of the criminal justice system, provide access to treatment in the community, and monitor participants for compliance. Yet, mental health courts face significant barriers to implementation and operation. In addition to facing persistently scarce resources, this type of diversion program is a departure from standard jail/court operation and requires a unique collaboration of individuals and agencies to function. As a collaborative network of, there is great opportunity for both individual resistance and structural limitations to create obstacles in such diversion programs. Yet, there is equal opportunity for individual effort and innovative structural change to overcome those obstacles. This researcn will identify factors that foster or hinder the adjudication of and service delivery to clients within a mental health court and examine these factors from an organizational perspective. To do this, I will be using the Dekalb County Diversion Treatment Court (DTC) in Decatur, GA as a case study. I will draw on the mental health and criminal justice literature to discuss the extent to which the Dekalb County DTC has succeeded in addressing the needs of mentally ill offenders. I will further draw on several literatures, especially those portions of the organizational literature that describe the factors necessary for successful collaborative efforts (Bardach 1998), to discuss the sources of operational obstacles and solutions in the DTC.
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PAST PRESIDENT’S PANEL: The Present and Future Status of Criminology
Panelists will present their views on the present status of the discipline and where they see it going in the future. Topics will include assessments of theoretical attempts to explain crime, methodologies used to measure crime and related variables, the public policy impact of our theory and research, and the overall intellectual vibrancy of criminology. Each panelist will bring his or her unique experience to bear on taking stock of the present and speculating on the future.
People’s Assessors System, Current Function, and Its Fate in Future: A Study of the Lay Judge System in China
Lay participation in adjudication has been prevalent around the world, existing in major legal traditions such as common, civil and socialist legal systems. Though the majority of nations in the world have gone through a process of professionalization, the lay practice has been kept in various forms (e.g., jury practice, magistrate judges, and lay judges in mixed judge panels) to serve important purposes such as involvement of the community, a deterrence of power abuse by professional judges, legitimization of final rulings, and a means of fostering civic education. Lay participation has been regarded fundamentally important for democracy, justice, and socio-legal change. This paper assesses a unique form of lay participation in adjudication — the people’s assessors system, in China by discussing its historical and legal developments, current practices, and future prospects. Following previous studies of lay participation in general, we conduct a two-step project to study both the selection of people’s assessors (selection) and the actual role they play in the courtroom (participation). Both interviews and questionnaires are conducted to collect information from professional judges and people’s assessors (lay judges).
Perception and Data on Violent Hot Spots
A limited amount of research has been conducted to connect crime data with crime perception at the neighborhood level. Not only is there a disconnect between perception and data research, but there is also a lack of joint quantitative and qualitative data. This poster will visually display violent hot spots in and around a public housing development in Chicago. Resident’s perceptions of dangerous locations will be compared and contrasted with block level crime data. Although there is a correlation between perception of dangerous places and crime data, it is not a perfect correlation. Residents might describe a particular intersection in their neighborhood to be the most dangerous, while crime data points to the same interestion as a low crime location. This research will demonstrate first, that locations that residents consider as the most dangerous areas are often rigidly avoided. This avoidance decreases the violent crime statistics in this location. Hence, residents might describe a particular interesection in their neighborhood to be the most dangerous, while crime data points to the same interesection as a low crime location. Second, this research demonstrates that combing perception of crime with crime data gives a more accurate depiction of violent hot spots than if one relies exlusively on crime data.
Perceptions of Procedural Justice Among Victims and Probationers
Baseline surveys (about one month after case disposition) were conducted with several hundred victims and probationers in two JOD sites and two comparison sites. These surveys include perceptions of procedural justice in the treatment received from various justice agencies and non-governmental agencies that serve victims and offenders. Results will be presented from analyses comparing across JOD and comparison sites, and testing the factors associated with perceptions of procedural justice (such as case outcomes, abuse history, demographic characteristics). The primary questions of interest are: how are perceptions of procedural justice affected by personal, situational, and case processing factors, and what short-term outcomes are associated with varying degrees of procedural justice?
Permission to Hate: State Complicity in Enabling Native American Victimization
Interviews with more than 200 Native Americans from 7 states, and representing 7 American Indian nations have revealed startling patterns of racial violence against this community. One factor that emerges to account for the persistence of this victimization is state complicity. This paper explores the myriad ways in which state actors facilitate a climate which confers “permission to hate” American Indians. Participants have reported activities ranging from willful blindness toward Native American victimization at one extreme, to police brutality at the other.
Personal Concepts About “Crime and Punishment” — Results of a Qualitative Interview Analysis
Previous criminological research on attitudes towards crime and punishment has essentially relied on the so-called quantitative methodology, in particular by applying standardised questionnaires. Complementary to that, the design of the presented study is basically qualitative, i.e., participants were free to say, whatever they think to be important. Using an in-depth qualitative interviewing technique, 18 German laypersons, selected by gender, age and socio-economic status, were asked about their regarding attitudes and their (customarily implicit) personal constructs about crime and punishment. All interviews were digitally audio-taped, transcribed verbatim and subsequently analysed using qualitative content analysis. The results unfold the basic elements of the participants’ subjective theories and concepts. Considering these results, we hope to evaluate and substantiate the concept of “punitiveness” in a psychologically more adequate manner, particularly in light of its increasing popularity in recent criminological research and political debate. Eventually, this will also provide future research with more contour and life, thus (hopefully) operationalising the concepts in question more validly.
Perspectives on Race and Crime
This presentation will address issues involved with teaching students about various perspectives on race, class, and crime as these topics relate to law and justice within the criminal justice system.
Pesticide Exposure Among Farm Workers in California and Enforcement of Regulations: A Critical Analysis
This paper examines the effects of pesticide exposure among farmworkers in California. Specificaly, it assesses the following effects: illnesses/injuries sustained, whether the exposure was fatal, number of days of missed work, and number of days spent in the hospital. A number of possible causes of variations in these effects are analyzed, including demographics, activity engaged in at the time of exposure, means of exposure, etc. Potential chronic effects are also discussed. The second part of this paper looks at the enforcement of pesticide regulations in California in terms of its certainty, switness, severity, and meaningfulness.
Physical and Psychological Violence in the Lives of Low-Income Hmong Women: Does Social Support Matter
There is little research examining the role played by social support in potentially mitigating violence in the lives of low-income women. This paper reports the results of an exploratory study of low-income women’s (n = 144) experiences of physical and non-physical violence in a Minnesota city. Particular attention is directed to the question of whether social support distinguishes women who have been victimized from women who have not, by type of offence and ethnic background. Of special interest is the inclusion in the sample of a number of Hmong women (28% percent of the sample), a group about which virtually nothing is known as far as violent victimization is concerned. Implications for further research and policy are also discussed.
Police and the Use of Deadly Force: A New Test for a New (and Some Old) Theory
The police killing of a civilian has been, and always will be, an area of great concern to both the public and the police. However, in the past 20+ years of research there have traditionally been only two theories used to explain police use of deadly force: conflict and danger-perception. While these two theories have found much support, we still do not fully understand what influences a police officer’s use of force. This study not only reexamines the conflict and danger-perception explanations of police use of deadly force, it also offers a third theory for testing: the vigilante officer theory. This theory argues that some police officers may take the law into their own hands, and consequently use deadly force, when they do not believe that the criminal justice system is doing its job effectively. This theory, along with both the conflict and danger-perception theories, will be tested using select counties from five major United States metropolitan statistical areas over a period of 27 years (1975-2001). In addition to the testing of the new vigilante officer theory, this study utilizes pooled time series analysis, a relatively new method for the field, in order to study the conflict and danger-perception theories in a new light. Data comes from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and the U.S. Census Bureau. Ultimately, this study will provide the field with an additional explanation for police use of force and results from the analysis should provide us with a better understanding of police homicides in general.
Police Investigation of Sexual Assault
There have been many studies of the police investigations of sexual assault, and few put the police in a positive light. While there are some studies that show that years of training has resulted in police generally aware of the need to treat female victims with some care and concern, others feel that this is just a veneer that covers a “business as usual” misogynistic and homophobic culture. This study investigates police attitudes toward the roadblocks to a successful rape investigation, and the frustrations suffered by police first responders and investigators. Some topics of interest are time management problems that prevent much time being put into any one case, the stress that rape investigations can feel from being made the butt of jokes from other officers, and the difficulties of dealing with male on male and lesbian rape.
Police Militarization in Urban Areas: The Obscure War Against the Underprivileged and the Underclass
The politically stated war on crime and the Madison Avenue marketing of the drug epidemic in urban America served to change the breath and scope of urban policing. During the concluding 20th Century decade and at the onset of the 21st Century, urban residents were encapsulated by the police militarization of their communities. These resident’s have become victims in their own communities, of an urban war being waged by a militarized police organization. This paper will examine the use of military tactics by urban police forces to maintain order in urban neigborhoods. This paper will also assess the effectiveness and applicability of this military model of urban policing. Special topics to include the evolution of urban policing, recruit indoctrination, the war on crime, public support for the war on crime, and post 911 policing will also be discussed.
Policies of Imprisonment: The Adoption of Determinate Sentencing and Sentencing Guidelines in the United States, 1975-2002
The indeterminate sentencing structures that dominated criminal justice systems in the United States through the 1970s fragmented over the last three decades, replaced by patchworks of determinate and structured sentencing, mandatory sentencing, and truth-in-sentencing laws. Scholars have examined these recent state-level reforms in an effort to understand their philosophical underpinnings and their impact on the criminal justice system. Yet, there remains a lack of comparative work systematically analyzing the factors that determine why certain states have adopted particular sentencing laws while others have not. This paper assesses those factors that determine the timing of the enactment and content of two sentencing laws adopted across the states between 1975 and 2002: determinate sentencing and sentencing guidelines. Explaining those factors that determine variation in the adoption and content of policies across jurisdictions continues to challenge policy innovation scholars in political science, sociology, and economics. However, while policy innovation studies have considered innovation across a wide range of policy areas, few have focused on the adoption of criminal justice policies. Using event history analysis, this paper tests the influence of several socioeconomic, political, and cultural factors on the propensity to enact legislation, explains why some states chose to enact determinate sentencing or sentencing guidelines legislation while other did not, and examines what determines the content of that legislation. These factors will include variables identified by scholars as influencing the adoption of criminal justice policies specifically and variables identified by policy innovation scholars as determining the adoption of policies generally. While scholars continue to debate the philosophical underpinnings and effects of recent sentencing reforms, determining those state-level factors dring the initial adoption and content of particular sentencing policies is critical to understanding the fragmentation in the American approach to punishment in an era of rapid policy change and harsh approaches to sentencing.
Policy Influence Through Professional Organizations
Most criminologists function publicly through voluntary professional associations. That is our political base, but we don’t think of it that way. How this untapped resource can be used will be discussed. Possible conflicts between such participation and our professional role will also be discussed.
Politics and the Presentation of Terrorism in the News Media
In this study, we examine the news media’s role in federal criminal justice policy-making. We are interested in two issues. First, we are interested in the presentation of terrorism in the news media over time. Specifically, we examine how news coverage of celebrated terrorism events affected the terrorism policy agenda over a thirty-year period. We will link these changes to the number of congressional hearings and legislative initiatives passed and consider at least two case studies to more clearly identify the role of the media in federal criminal justice policy-making. Second, our interest in linking variations in political agendas and ideology to changes in media coverage of terrorism from the Lyndon Johnson administration to the present. The examination of the intensity of terrorism coverage is based on sources of archival data including the New York Times Annual Index, Vanderbilt Television News Abstracts and The Congressional Masterfile. We expect to find that politicians and other social-control institutions consistently attempt to further their political agendas by linking policy initiatives to the celebrated terrorist acts. We also believe that some frames used to discuss terrorist acts will remain constant, while other frames will change over time with the varying political agendas and definitions of terrorism.
Post-Prison Supervision in Ohio: A Descriptive Study of Violation Patterns and Agency Response
The dramatic growth nationwide in prison releases and the related focus on prisoner re-entry have important implications for effective management of violation behavior among offenders under community supervision. Using data from a sample of supervision cases in Ohio, this paper presents critical baseline information about the extent and nature of that behavior and the overall range of administrative response among supervising officers and field staff. Specifically, the purpose of the study is to describe overall violation rates, the type of violations committed, and the violation histories of offenders with various supervision outcomes, distinguishing among noncompliance with the conditions of supervision and new criminal behavior. It also describes the nature of agency response to violation behavior, including severity of sanctions assessed and level of organizational response. The differences in these patterns are examined by type of prison release, offender risk, geographic region, and severity of violation. The study is based on a statewide sample of first-time releases to post-prison supervision and relies on detailed information manually coded from supervising officer files. The findings reveal important differences in the level and extent of violation patterns by release type. They also demonstrate that agency responses are generally commensurate with the level of violation behavior and risk of offender. The descriptive findings of the study and richness of the dataset provide a basis for more complex modeling of the dynamic sources of various supervision outcomes.
Poverty and Incarceration: A State by State Correlational Analysis
Throughout the last five decades poverty has been significantly related to high incarceration rates in every sector of the United States. This research explores factors which lead to poverty and how these factors correlate with delinquents and offenders in predisposing them to a greater extent to engage in crime and in crime and delinquency. This research explores the question of to what extent does poverty affect the crime rate.
Pre-Treatment Characteristics of Legally Coerced Drug Treatment Seekers
This study examines the sociodemographics, drug use, criminal, and treatment histories of 598 residential and outpatient legally coerced drug treatment seekers in the Kentucky Treatment Outcome and Perfornace Pilot Studies Enhancement Project. Analyses examined whether users/addicts entering chemical dependency treatment under legal coercion differed from non-legally coerced treatment seekers. Results showed demographic and behavioral differences were noted between no coercion and legal coercion on several dependent variables: gender, age, educational status, pretreatment criminality and current treatment modality. In addition, differences between the legally coerced and not legally coerced clients varied across geographic regions.
Predicting Sex Offender Recidivism: An Examination of Florida’s Sex Offender Civil Commitment Law
Sixteen states have implemented sex offender civil commitment (SOCC) laws, resulting in approximately 3,500 sex offenders being detained upon the expiration of their lawful prison sentence. The critical and controversial piece of SOCC policies is the attempt to determine the likelihood of future sexual re-offending, through various clinical and actuarial assessments. To date, no research exists on the organization and professional-judgment processes associated with these assessments. This study investigates Florida’s SOCC law, administered by the Sexually Violent Predator Program (SVPP), by evaluating the decision-making associated with predicting future sex offending. Two decision-making points are of interest, namely the initial screening and the subsequent clinical psychological evaluation. Data is gathered from the SVPP database, which contains comprehensive records on 9,000 cases referred between July 2000 and August 2003. These data are supplemented with information obtained from surveys and a random sample of results from the face to face/clinical evaluations of the sex offender. Two logistic regression analyses will be conducted to identify the unique effects of the independent variables on each of two outcome decisions. Ultimately, the analyses will indicate the relative weight of static versus dynamic risk factors and whether salient differences (legal or otherwise) exist between sex offenders deemed not likely to recidivate and sex offenders referred to the next phase of evaluation and ultimately a civil commitment trial.
Pretrial Monitoring of Intimate Partner Violence Defendants
One of the most challenging times of intervention in intimate partner violence cases is the time between arrest and case disposition. This is a time when the system has little legal control over a defendant and when the defendant may be the most desperate to keep a victim from cooperating with the criminal justice system. In turn, this time has been identified as a particularly dangerous time for victims of intimate partner violence. In an attempt to increase victim safety and defendant accountability during the pretrial phase, the Milwaukee site of the Judicial Oversight Demonstration Initiative implemented the Domestic Violence Court Commissioner’s court (DVCC) and the Pretrial Monitoring Program (PMP) to help assure that defendants are complying with bail conditions, in particular the no contact order. The bail monitor of the PMP has a limited caseload of 40 high risk defendants and operates by monitoring compliance with bail conditions through the use of face-to-face office visits, call-ins and home visits. Additionally, the bail monitor works closely with the alleged victim during the pre-trial phase. The bail monitor offers the victim assistance in accessing victim services, offers the victim an avenue for reporting violations of no-contact orders to the court, and keeps the victim informed of the status of the court case. One very important aspect of the Pretrial Monitoring Program is the extensive communication with all players in the criminal justice system, including the police, courts, district attorney’s office, nongovernmental advocates, and probation. The bail monitor works closely with every part of the system for case management of the strength of a coordinated criminal justice system holding offenders accountable and working to keep victims safe. This presentation will describe the benefits and challenges of the PMP program.
Prison Administration in Nuevo Leon, Mexico: Criminal Justice System Evolution and Reform Since 2000
Writer Mario Vargas Llosa once called the governance of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (known as the PRI) in Mexico as the “perfect dictatorship”. Prior to 2000, the PRI held tight centralized control over all levels of government through a process of “trickle-down power assignments”. The President’s office appointed PRI candidates for state governors which in turn named PRI candidates for state legislatures. The president was also a key figure in the selection of deputies and senators, and therefore had substantial leverage over the Congress. During the 71 year reign of the PRI in Mexico, there was also evidence of manipulation of the judiciary. Political shifts in Mexico began to be realized in a candidate for governor. Constant political pressure from opposition candidates throughout the 1990s coupled by economic and social pressures from wide sectors of the population culminated in the election of President Vicente Fox Quesada of the National Action Party (known as the PAN), in 2000. President Fox vowed to overhaul the country’s criminal justice system and to seek consensus among the country’s various political parties. He also promised to attack government corruption and to reduce crime rates. This paper explores these reform initiatives and examines examples of how the Fox-led government has addressed criminal justice system deficiencies in Mexico. Preliminary results from research on prison administration in the state of Nuevo Leon will be presented.
Prison Education How Prisoners and Teachers Talk About Problems and Solutions
This research uses a convict criminology perspective to examine educational programming in a Midwestern Medium Security Prison. Through 107 interviews of prisoners (interviews included graduates, current participants, students terminated from the program, and nonparticipants) and 9 interviews of educational staff members (about two-thirds of the entire educational staff), problems with the educational offerings (from both the perspective of the teachers and the students) are discussed and identified. Additionally, each group’s claims concerning solutions to these established and emerging problems are also discussed. We also discuss the procedures used to develop and implement a “college preparatory educational program,” which has been designed and implemented to address the issues discussed by all those involved in the current educational offerings.
Prison Visits: Service is its Own Reward
This paper presents the observations and comments of a group of prison visitors, and provides further discussion on the social, personal, and academic advantages to be derived from visiting prisoners. More than half a century ago Sykes (1958) identified one of the five pains of imprisonment as a deep sense of rejection by the free community. This sense of community rejection is undoubtedly exacerbated by the placement of prisoners in institutions thousands of miles away from their families, reducing the likelihood of family visits. In response to this situation, prison visitation organizations have been created throughout the country that attempt to lessen this pain of imprisonment by engaging service-minded individuals in prison visits which benefit both the prisoners and the visitors. Prisoners benefit from these programs because communication with the free community tends to help improve their sense of self-worth and connectedness to the outside world; ultimately these visits could influence the prisoner’s ability to effectively reintegrate into the broader society. Those who visit the prisoners also benefit because they are provided with a unique opportunity to fulfill social, personal and professional needs and objectives that result in both tangible and intangible rewards. One of the tangible rewards for visiting inside prisons is the heart felt gratitude expressed by the men and women for the time given to them. Additionally, the experience of visiting convicts can guide and improve the research and pedagogy of academics and researchers.
Prisoner Reentry and Community Policing: Can Police and Former Felons Find Common Ground?
The paper will look at the lived realities of former prisoners and their relations with law enforcement, particularly those agencies espousing principles of community policing. The paraoxical nature of relations between former prisoners–persons usually listed among “the usual suspects”–and their supposed “protectors” will be investigated. The paper will conclude with suggestions for smoother relationships between individuals on opposing sides of the “thin blue line.” Methodologies will consist of ethnographic fieldwork, focus groups, and a review of the relevant literatures.
Prisonization Reconceptualized: Toward a Theoretical Foundation Supportive of Sound Empirical Research
Dramatically rising imprisonment rates, higher than desired recidivism levels, and a host of other concerns in corrections highlight the need to better understand prisonization and its implications for management, treatment, and reentry. This paper argues that reconceptualization of prisonization is a prerequisite to improved empirical examination of its causes, processes and consequences. Its seminal status in the sociology of prison literature notwithstanding, prisonization has suffered from a lack of attention in recent years, and following earlier critiques and qualifications, is withering as a concept. Current conceptualizations are imprecise, suffer from internal inconsistencies, and are too narrowly construed; these flaws undermine theoretical and empirical efforts employing the concept of prisonization. Yet the concept remains central to undetstanding both the effects that imprisonment has on people as well as implications for addressing those effects. This paper outlines an alternate conceptual framework for prisonization. The ambiguous distinction between the convict code(s) and prison subculture(s) is addressed. The definition of prisonization is expanded to include all changes the prisoner undergoes in prison, whether due to adoption of subcultural components (values, norms, and the like), opposition to the subculture, or changes unrelated to the subculture. Potential benefits of reducing deprivation and importation from competing, central (explanatory) roles in prisonization to a single, integrated background (contextualizing) role are discussed. We offer recommendations for more appropriate selection and study of deprivation and importation variables, whether using qualitative or quantitative methods. We differentiate three mechanisms driving the prisonization process, and discuss the distinct implications of each for the prevention, interdiction and treatment of prisonization. Finally, we offer recommendations for further theoretical development.
Probation Violations and Sentencing Decisions: The Imprisonment of Low-Level Drug Offenders in Arizona
The relationship between probation and criminal offending has received notable attention in prior studies. Such studies have primarily focused on the impact of probation violation in criminal activity. To date, very few studies have analyzed how probation violations impact sentencing outcomes. In fact, the decision to revoke probation and the role of revocations in prosecution and sentencing decisions remains unexamined. In this study, we examine how the passage of Arizona’s mandatory drug treatment law impacted probation violations and how those particular violations influenced sentencing outcomes of drug cases. We also compare sentencing decisions across probations and non-probations. We rely on a stratified sample of incarcerated low-level drug offenders and use data from probation, prosecution, and sentencing case files from four Arizona counties. Policy implications for probation supervision and drug treatment laws are discussed.
Problem-Solving Courts: Stretching the Notion of Adjudication
I examine the emergence of problem-solving courts and their implications for our notion of adjudication. I review the ways that problem solving courts frame the ‘problems’ they aim to address, the strategies they employ, and their ways of knowing and acting on their subjects. I focus primarily on drug courts but also include discussion of other examples–including domestic violence courts and courts organized around restorative justice–in order to emphasize the perceived emergence of a new approach to judging. My paper augments Candace McCoy’s intellectual history of therapeutic courts and her analysis of the ramifications of their institutionalization. I conclude by discussing the aspects of adjudication that problem-solving courts emphasize, as well as the benefits and pitfalls of adapting our adjudicative model to the problem-solving approach.
Professional Crime in Finland in the 1990s
The study describes Finnish professional criminal groups: their structures, internal/external relations and the development of the group participants’ individual characteristics during the 1990s in Finland and in cross-border operations. The crime area studied were different kinds of smuggling (drugs, alcohol and tobacco), delivering and procuring prostitutes, economic crime (money laundering) and dealing in stolen goods. The empirical material covers 14 different Finnish groups that were active in the 1990s. The purpose of the study is tripartite: 1) to analyze individual characteristics of the participants (age, gender, marital status, etc.) of the 14 Finnish groups studied, 2) to analyze the crimes that were committed according to selected crime areas (smuggling alcohol, tobacco and drugs, procuring prostitutes, handling stolen goods) and, 3) to analyze how the groups that were studied were structured during the 1990s in Finland and in cross-border operations. The purpose of this tripartite illustration structure is to clarify the characteristics of Finnish professional criminals, crimes committed and to demarcate between group criminality functioning on a temporary basis and long-running, more permanently organized criminal groups. The objective for studying the personal charcteristics of group members, the crimes that they commit and the structures of the groups was to gather collective information about the world of Finnish professional criminals. The empirical data were collected using non-structured thematic interviews with 15 offenders and one group interview with six offenders. The total number of personal in-depth interviews conducted was 33 and the taped discussions totaled around 50 hours. The selection of the persons to be interviewed was based on various public sources (TV, radio and newspaper), and the persons interviewed were those most prominently in the headlines in the 1990s.
Promoting a Culture of Fear
After September 11th, the United States declared a “War on Terror” and mobilized to avenge that horrific terrorist attack. The target was the Taliban in Afghanistan, a nation harboring terrorist groups that orchestrated the attacks on New York and Washington. After the attacks, the Bush administration identified an “Axis of Evil,” which included Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, omitting both Afghanistan, who had provided refuge for terrorists and Saudi Ariabia, the home of the majority of September 11th perpetrators. In this way, the Bush administration has skillfully and systematically used the “War on Terror” and September 11th to build up a case for invading Iraq, and skilfully has used language and rhetoric to cement a connection between Saddam Hussein and September 11th for the general American public. Furthermore, the Bush administration has turned actions of dissent from the government’s policies into criminal acts through the Patriot Act. This has created an environment where post-September 11th, real dialogue and critical discussion of our own government’s actions was suppressed. Through discourse analysis of George W. Bush’s speeches rallying U.S. support for an invasion of Iraq after September 11th, we will examine the language used to create a fear of a monolithic force of terror and Islam and to connect Iraq with recent terrorist events. We will explore Bush’s use of, language, imagery, and semiotics to secure support for the invasion of Iraq under the guise of the “war on terror” with no evidence that Iraq had been involved with September 11th. By juxtaposing imagery of September 11th with its agenda to invade Iraq, thereby leveraging the fears of citizens who felt under attack in the wake of September 11th, the government has used language to exploit fear and carry out its own agenda in the Middle East.
Public Awareness of Project Safe Neighborhoods in Memphis, Tennessee
Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) is a nationwide commitment to reduce gun crime in America. A critical component of the program is development of a communications strategy whereby offenders are made aware of the increased focus of law enforcement agencies on gun crimes. This paper examines public awareness of PSN in Memphis, Tennessee, using results from a telephone survey of the general public. It assesses public awareness of PSN as shown in a marketing blitz in newspapers, billboards, television and other media. Public opinion about neighborhood safety and fear of crime is also examined.
Public Confidence in the Criminal Justice System in England and Wales: Recent Messages for Policy Makers From Research
The government in England and Wales has recently set a target to increase the level of public confidence in the CJS. Hitherto, however, there has been little research that has explored what factors are most important in driving the public’s confidence in criminal justice. There has indeed been relatively attention to key issues such as what the public understands by the ‘CJS’ and what the key components of the concept of ‘confidence’ are. In order to provide policy makers with a sounder basis of knowledge on which to act, the government in England and Wales has recently commissioned a range of research, which is designed to cast light on these important issues. This includes survey work, which has explored public views about the most important priorities of the CJS and sought views about how well these functions were performed, as well as ratings of individual CJS agencies. It also includes focus group studies, designed to explore the dynamics of confidence at local level and to establish why levels of confidence in CJS performance vary significantly between areas. The first results of this research are now becoming available and this paper will explore the emerging findings. The paper will also consuider to what extent the results of the research may have relevance to other countries.
Public Defenders’ Pragmatic Motivations: A Qualitative and Inductive Study
Open-ended interviews with nearly fifty public defenders in three sites found that public defenders are motivated by a series of both “political” motivations (those that reflect outwardly upon the defenders’ role in the criminal justice system) and “pragmatic” motivations (those that express what public defense work accomplishes for public defenders themselves). The opportunity for trial work (valued for its intellectual challenge, competition, inherent drama, and the possibility, however unlikely, of a thrilling victory) is among the most compellig of the pragmatic motivations that drive public defenders. Others include professional autonomy, task variety, regular social interaction, the voyeuristic attraction to crime and violence, the comeraderie of like-minded colleagues, and such lifestyle advantages as a completely criminal practice, the avoidance of the business end of private practice, a convenient work schedule, a fixed income and great benefits. In the end, the pragmatic attractions of public defense work provide powerful explanations for why public defenders do the job they do.
Public-Empowering Justice: Arguments From Effectiveness, Legitimacy and Democracy
The adoption of community policing worldwide and the proliferation of restorative justice programs, taken together, suggest a sea change in perspectives on social ordering. A policy direction is evolving that empowers citizens–to the greatest extent consistent with the inherently coercive role of the state–to make crucial decisions about how crime and disorder will be handled in their communities and to have the freedom and the resources to assume major roles in making their communities safer. What are the primary justifications for this shift away from adversarial, state-centered criminal justice? Viewed individually, the arguments for public-empowering justice are all quite partial. But perhaps they can be creatively combined within a framework that applies with particular force to countries in transition to democracy. This paper discusses several of those arguments in the context of the need for transformation of policing and judging in post-apartheid South Africa. Public-empowering justice in a country in chaos (as most democratizing countries are) cannot be expected to significantly reduce crime in the short term and is only marginally likely to increase understanding and appreciation of the formal justice system. But the experiences of partnerships with the state in providing a public service and leadership in advocating change in justice policy and practice can contribute importantly to the larger process of democratization.
Publishing Issues for the Developing Scholar
Panelists will discuss various publishing issues for developing scholars, such as writing for publication, the submission process, writing and publishing books, converting research into publications, and the ethics of publishing.
Punitive Attitudes Towards Persons With HIV: A Preliminary Analysis
The mainstream American values rooted in society during the 1950s and 1960s have set a precedent for the idea of homosexuality as a social ill many of which are still visible today. When the knowledge of AIDS spread Americans, homosexual and heterosexual alike, feared that they would be victims of this deadly disease. Although that is possible, the extent to which this fear from a perceived social threatenting sub-population has infiltrated our society has created punitive attitudes towards people with AIDS, and by association towards homosexuals. Coercive actions taken by the government and individual actors of the criminal justice system may restrict the individual liberty. The extent to which the public supports these intrusive measures may indicate how threatening the public now views HIV positive members of the community. This study will examine several dimensions of punitive social control measures, such as mandatory registration, towards people with AIDS using data from a large telephone survey conducted in Florida. The current study will compare a random sample (N=1600) as well as an over-sample of status and other corresponding variables. From this study we expect to find more punitive attitudes towards people with AIDS versus people with other fatal diseases or none at all.
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Qualitative Analysis of the Experiences of Jurors in Capital Murder Trials
This paper addresses qualitative issues in capital murder trials in the state of Maryland. This study is part of the Capital Jury Project Phase II, funded by the National Science Foundation. Six cases were obtained from the years 1996-2003, and extensive interviews with members of each jury were conducted in order to learn more about the group dynamics and individual decision-making factors involved in a juror’s final decision. Factors such as juror empathy, race, and personal beliefs about the death penalty are examined. This study is currently ongoing, therefore there are no results to report at this time.
Questioning the Measurement of the Dependent Variable Used in Sex Disparity Research
This paper is a replication of and an expansion of Spohn and Holleran’s (2004) research which challenged the dichotomous measurement of the dependent variable when analyzing severity of sentence and racial/ethnic disparity. This research will focus primarily on sex disparity and sentence severity. The goal of this research is to determine if the measurement of the dependent variable affects the findings when focusing on sex disparity. This research utilizes two dichotomous measures and two categorical measures of the dependent variable to determine which measurement is more appropriate when focusing on sex disparity in sentencing.
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Race, Perceptions of Injustice and Contact With Police: A Multi-Method Approach to Understanding and Deconstructing Delinquency
This researches a multi-method approach to understand the creation, cultivation, and effects of youth perceptions of injustice. Chicago provides an especially interesting locale to evaluate the confluence of racial inequality, economic instability, spatial segregation, and crime. I use a sample of over 25,000 Chicago Public School youth to quantitatively examine the variation in race, class, and perceptions of injustice. However, the findings from these analyses reveal that further exploration must be done to both understand the processes that shape individual’s perceptions of injustice; and explore the reciprocal relationship between perceptions of social injustice, behavior/delinquency, and police contact/trouble in school. This work will address the following questions: Q1: What mechanisms drive the reciprocal relationship between perceptions of injustice, legitimacy accorded to the law, behavior (particularly delinquent behavior), and contact with police/trouble in school? Q2: What impact do youth’s interactions with authority figures in multiple contexts (family, school, neighborhood) have on their perceptions of injustice? Q3: What is the substantive content of youth’s interactions with police and other authority figures and how are these interactions influenced by prior perceptions of injustice. How are subsequent encounters different? This research project is important because understanding the impact of multiple social contexts on youth’s perceptions of injustice and their behavior can inform sociological theory by providing more in-depth knowledge of the causal relationship between perceptions of injustice, contact with police (and other authority figures), and engagement (or propensity to engage) in delinquency.
Racial, Ethnic, and Citizenship Disparity in Sentencing Under Federal Sentencing Guidelines: A Comparison of Two Judicial Districts
This paper examines the relationship between defendants’ race, ethnicity and citizenship in departures and sentencing within two Federal judicial districts. Analysis employed federal sentencing data provided by the U.S. Sentencing Commission for the fiscal year 2001 and qualitative interviews with court officials in both districts. The results indicate that Hispanic non-U.S. citizens had greater odds of receiving downward judicial departures from federal judges in the district with a higher proportion of non-U.S. citizens as defendants. Black and Hispanic defendants were found to have lower odds of receiving departures for substantial assistance from federal prosecutors compared to white defendants in the district with a low proportion of non-U.S. citizens as defendants. Non-US citizens were also found to have higher rates of imprisonment as a sentencing outcome, relative to White US citizens across both districts. The results of this study indicate that the racial, ethnic, and citizenship status of defendants has varying effects on case outcomes throughout the sentencing process and are consistent with Steffensmeier and colleagues’ (1998) focal concerns theory of unwarranted disparity in criminal sentencing.
Rape During War: It’s Historical and Legal Evolution as a Crime Against Humanity
From the earliest recorded military histories, sexual assault has been one of many tools of terror used by an army’s soldiers against a newly conqured (or in the process of becoming conqured) population. For the first time in history such acts have formed the basis for a set of war crimes charges: the World Court in the Hague has defined systematic sexual assault as a prosecutable Crime against Humanity in reference to the Kosovo tribunals. This paper will examine the ideological foundations and on-the-ground realities of the practice, the legal position which has been taken by the World Court in reference to the on-going Kosovo tribunals and explore how this specific crime fits into the current mandate of the International Criminal Court.
Readdressing the Racial Divide in Support for Capital Punishment
This project investigates the racial divide in support for capital punishment. We first examine whether race has a direct effect on support for capital punishment, and we test whether the influence of race varies across measures of class, being a native southerner, confidence in government officials, political orientation, and religious affiliation. Using data drawn from the General Social Survey (GSS), we find that there is a substantial racial divide, with African Americans much less likely to support the death penalty. Further, the analysis reveals that shared factors that might be expected to bring African Americans and whites together–class, confidence in government, conservative politics, regional location, and religious fundamentalism–either do not narrow black-white punishment attitudes or, at best, have only modest effects. These results suggest that the racial divide in support for capital punishment is likely to be enduring and, turn, to remain a point of symbolic contention in black-white conceptions of criminal injustice in the United States.
Reclaiming the Expressive Subject of Crime
Situated within the theoretical and philosophical frameworks of Romanticism and expressionism in the arts, this paper argues for conceptual renewal in the study of crime, specifically entailing a reclamation of the expressive subject. In particular, it is argued that many forms of crime and deviance can and should be understood as fundamentally artistic, embodying creative, expressive, emotive, symbolic, and communicative elements characteristic of art. The emergence of expressionism in the arts is described as issuing from the more general Romantic ethos, characterized by its critique of transformations brought by modernity and its affirmation of the creative, expressive dimension of being human. It is argued that many forms of crime and deviance, at least analogously, embody characteristics of this Romantic ethos. The paper concludes by discussing the need for renewed attention to human subjectivity in the study of crime, drawing in part from existentialism as a contemporary sociological counterpart to the Romantic ethos.
Recognizing and Nuturing Research Collaborations: What is Known and What is Not?
This paper reviews the current literature and the “state of the art” on methods of building and maintaining practitioner/researcher collaborative research. It then outlines issues for further examination, including the following: –Funding agencies like NIJ and CDC may include “collaboration” in an RFP (request for proposals), but how do they know it when they see it? Are there criteria for a “true” collaboration, and if so, what are they? If a research project wants to be more collaborative, how can it do so? –What are the advantages and disadvantages of identifying “best practice” collaborative practitioner/researcher research projects? –When a research project wants to be more collaborative, does it help to attract project members who are skilled collaborators? Can collaboration skills be learned? Can people be trained in collaboration skills? Can we even identify what collaboration skills are? –On the other hand, perhaps we can’t teach collaboration skills, but we can facilitate them. How can we reward practitioner/research collaboration within a research project? –How can funding agencies nurture and reward practitioner/researcher collaborations? Do the standard practices of funding agencies sometimes create obstacles to collaboration? –What are the rewards of research collaboration from the practitioners’ point of view? What are options for agencies that are interested in having reesearch done, but have little resources (money and time) to contribute? Since practitioners are not researchers, for the most part, are there guidelines for the often intimidating process of approaching academics? How can agencies find the right researcher?
Reentry and Recidivism: Defining the Public Safety Challenge of Prisoner Reentry
This presentation will focus on a critical question that fuels the public’s concern about the large numbers of returning prisoners, shapes the reentry policies of elected officials and criminal justice administrators, and remains largely unaddressed in the research literature: What are the public safety consequences of the four-fold increase in the number of individuals entering and leaving the nation’s prisons each year? Drawing both from the findings of the study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (2002) documenting the recidivism rate of a sample representing 272,111 prisoners released from the prisons of 15 states in 1994 and on additional analyses of these data, the limitations of the utility of “recidivism rates” as the metric for public safety is examined, and a new measure, the “rearrest ratio” is introduced. The utility of this framework to both assess the public safety risks posed by returning prisoners and to provide guidance to the development of local safety strategies will be discussed.
Regional Problem Solving Using NIBRS: An Analysis of the Distribution of Heroin in Springfield, Massachusetts
Law enforcement’s ability to monitor “hot spots” of crime and anticipate changes in patterns of offending provides an important opportunity to engage in proactive, prevention strategies that target scarce resources where they may be needed the most. Crime mapping and other analysis techniques that help identify such crime patterns over time and location also support problem-oiented policing efforts. The same advantages that come from mapping crime within one jurisdiction also apply to mapping across regions covering multiple jurisdictions. Over the past decade, research has shown that offenders have become more mobile, making identification and arrest more difficult. As offending patterns have changed, it has become increasingly important for law enforcement to step beyond their boundaries and work in collaboration with neighboring agencies through multi-jurisdiction efforts. As we have seen from the crack-cocaine epidemic, certain patterns of offending are more prone to rapid expansion. While a locality may be able to monitor the growth within its own boundaries, understanding the regional implications can help thwart a rapid expansion across jurisdictions. Unfortunately, the practice of multi-jurisdictional crime mapping has encountered numerous obstacles. Information sharing between law enforcement jurisdictions is often limited. This paper demonstrates the use of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ enhancement to the FBI’s standardized Incident-Based Reporting system for overcoming several multi-jurisdictional data sharing obstacles. Heroin sale and distribution activity in the capitol of Massachusetts and the communities immediately adjacent are examined. The results demonstrate that the addition of address information to the standard NIBRS data structure can have significant benefits for regional problem solving efforts.
Repairing Damaged Democracy? Toward an Improved Model of Public Consultation in Penal Policymaking
Changes in the way penal policy decisions are made have rendered some governments (e.g., in the United States, England and Wales, Australia) nearly powerless to resist the urge to legislate reactively in the face of high-profile crimes. This is often premised upon assumptions that the public will is generally and indiscriminately punitive. However, cross-national research utilizing more sensitive measures of public attitudes has consistently shown that the public possesses much more nuanced views about what they believe ought to be done with offenders. The result is often regrettable, unjust, and counterproductive policies that fail to ease the public’s concern in the face of high-profile crimes and that, in failing, tend to undermine the legitimacy of government policymakers. By contrast, other countries (e.g., the Nordic countries and the Netherlands) appear to retain structural features that in most cases impede such knee-jerk legislating. This paper has two purposes: First, it draws upon comparative research to examine the apparent impedimentary role played by “consensus democracy” in countries successfully resisting most populist pressures. Second, it makes the case for structures of “deliberative democracy” in those countries that currently lack such structural impediments. These structures are meant to facilitate deliberation and public judgment in political decision-making processes, to ensure the full range of public and expert views are considered, and to generate more precise assessments of the will of an informed public.
Representing Corporate Violence: The Media, the Politics of Truth and the Denial of Crime
This paper studies the exercise of power, the production of narrative, and the representation of violence in the aftermath of the Westray mine explosion in Canada which claimed twenty-six lives. It examines twenty-six hundred news stories written between 1992 and 2002, and analyzes how the press constructed and reconstructed “truth” about the explosion and its aftermath. I argue that the news media was a site of discursive contestation where various social groups registered claims about the causes, character and consequences of the mining disaster. Several “regimes of truth” were produced by the press: Westray was initially constituted as a natural tragedy, then a legal disaster, and eventually a political scandal. While there were discursive challenges and transformations over time and movements between uncontested and contested realms of media discourse, the press did not register the deaths of the Westray explosion in a discourse of corporate, workplace violence. They disqualified and denied crime in their news narratives and in the process contributed to the invisibility of corporate homicide in public culture.
Resistance Strategies: A Grounded Theory Approach to Domestic Violence
Women in ongoing abusive relationships may be popularly conceived as having insufficient psychological resources such as self-esteem and self-efficacy, or as lacking in social power. Over-psychologized portrayals of domestic violence victims may cast them as individuals who lack the ambition and knowledge to break out of their abusive circumstances–as existing in a state of “learned helplessness.” Over-socialized portrayals may cast them as powerless victims of their low placement into social stratification systems. What these polar, over-simplified perspectives share is a failure to account sufficiently for human agency. Much work in social psychology warns against theoretical explanations of dominant-subordinate relationships that do not take into account the agency of the subordinates. Whether we are talking about sex/gender, race/ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, or any other system, it should be recognized that lower-status persons are not passive recipients of their subordination–subordinates too are an active force in the social construction of reality. Some recent feminist literature argues cogently that women in subordinate positions create and utilize cognitive and behavioral strategies to negotiate their social situations and identities, including resisting dominant forces and solving problems stemming from oppression, represssion, and exploitation. This analysis contributes to this literature in that it illustrates strategies used by women to resist their abusive male partners. Unstructured, in-depth interview data was gathered from a sample of 15 women located across the state of Iowa. The interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed verbatim. The analysis involved extracting comments that revealed the ways in which these women tried to protect themselves and remove their abusers from their lives. A rich collection of qualitative data show that they used creative strategies aimed at countering and/or evading physical attacks, avoiding future attacks, and learning about and utilizing criminal justice and social service agencies.
Restorative Justice and Criminology: Must the Accused Always Apologize and Be Remorseful?
Restorative Justice has become a very popular philosophy in criminal justice. Chief among its principles are that victims are center-focused, crime is harmful to the victim and the community, restitutions must be made by the offenders, apologies and remorse must be expressed and shown by the offenders and the offenders must accept responsibilities for their conduct, and reconciliation among the offenders, victims, and community. While these principles are laudable and exemplary, they presuppose that laws are just and the offenders treated fairly in arriving at their guilt or innocence — important principles that have been lost in society’s zeal to be tough on crime and criminals. More importantly, what are the implications for restorative justice when the principals in the legal system–judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys are racist and corrupt in producing convictions? Must the unfairly convicted still apologize and be remorseful. This paper answers these questions.
Restorative Justice Programs in Lean Times: A Critical Analysis of Policy Decisionmaking
A survey was conducted with more than 200 public and privately funded restorative justice programs in the United States and Canada, and examination of budgets in those states and provinces, indicate waning monetary support for restorative justice services. This trend is examined from a cost-effectiveness perspective, and then from a radical perspective situated in the present socio-political climate of North American culture. Important differences emerge between responses to fiscal crisis in Canada and the United States.
Restrictive Intermediate Punishments Under Pennsylvania’s Sentencing Guidelines: An Impact Assessment
In 1997 Pennsylvania’s sentencing guidelines were changed to incorporate Restrictive Intermediate Punishment to better meet the needs of drug addicted offenders. This study examines a population of drug addicted offenders sentenced to drug treatment as an alternative to incarceration for the years 1998-1999. The treatment group is compared to a sample of RIP eligible offenders sentenced to state incarceration, county jail, or probation in 1996, before the RIP program was available. Data indicated that recidivism was lower among the treatment group.
Revisiting the Death Penalty for Juveniles
With the granting of certiorari for the case of Simmons v. Roper, Superintendent, by the Supreme Court of the United States, the issue of when a person who was a juvenile at the time of committing a state capital offense may receive the death penalty has effectively been reopened. By deciding Simmons squarely on Eighth Amendment grounds, the Supreme Court of Missouri has challenged the Supreme Court of the United States to follow its lead in recognizing a new standard under the Trop v. Duilles ‘evolving standards of decency’ analysis. The determination of whether the nation has collectively moved forward to a new level of civilization or continues where it was in the days of Stanford v. Kentucky remains to be seen. The Court may follow the Supreme Court of Missouri but it should revisit the evolving standards of decency and redefine it or reject it all together.
Rhetoric and the War on Terrorism in the Aftermath of 9-11
This paper will examine rhetoric dealing with the “war on terrorism” after September 11, 2001. The events of 9-11 created a firestorm of discussion and debate about the nature of the terrorist acts, the perpetrators, and suitable social control responses. Through an examination of media accounts, this research will investigate the rhetorical themes dealing with claims making. Using Toulmin’s schemata, claims making will be examined using the elements of grounds, warrants and conclusions concerning 9-11.
Rollovers, Recalls, and Rhetoric: Corporate Framing of the Ford/Firestone Controversy
In early 2000 media reports surfaced of motorists dying in sport utility vehicle-related (SUV) crashes. Ultimately, hundreds of deaths were attributed to rollovers involving Ford Explorers equipped with Firestone tires. Under intense scrutiny from the public and a highly publicized investigation by the government, both corporations launched massive public relations campaigns to salvage their tarnished organizational images. This research examines the rhetorical strategies employed by both organizations as they responded to widespread allegations of misconduct, attempted to frame the tragic and scandalous events in self-serving terms, and ultimately denied responsibility for the deaths. While criminologists have begun to pay more attention to the criminal and deviant acts of powerful actors such as governments and corporations, the field remains biased toward describing and explaining the actions of individuals. Even those studies that focus on organizations largely ignore human agency, often attributing crimes of the powerful to reified notions of organizational structure and culture. Researchers are often quick to study the stigma management strategies and “techniques of neutralization” of individuals but they have been less interested in understanding the efforts of corporate actors to positively spin disastrous events. This research overcomes both of those biases by examining the tactics that corporate actors actively employ to manage the stigma of deviance claims leveled against them. To examine the rhetorical stragegies of Ford and Firestone in the wake of the rollover controversy, we collected data from a variety of sources, including company press releases and internal documents, congressional hearings and regulatory agency reports, and national newspapers. Utilizing a grounded theory approach to data analysis, we identified five techniques both corporations used to frame what happened: shifting blame, promises of cooperation, appeals to science and research, revising safety history, and reinterpreting the profit-safety contradiction. This research has several important implications. First, our interpretation of the Ford/Firestone controversy highlights the critical role of human agency in corporate deviance, which sets it apart from past studies of the phenomenon that have been structurally and culturally deterministic. Additionally, this study has implications for state theories, revealing the circumstances under which two industrial giants, historically bound together, became pitted against each other. Finally, this research contributes to our understanding of regulatory dynamics, illustrating how industrial elites manage to “capture” and ward off regulators when things go wrong.
Routine Activity Theory in RA/CA Crime Simulation
There is increasing interest in describing spatial characteristics of crime patterns with geographic information systems. However, systemic errors in crime data and static theories of patterns make it difficult to interpret these findings. Routine Activity (RA) Theory provides a useful framework for understanding the development of these patterns. Static RA identifies a number of agents whose interaction in microenvironments gives rise to crime events. In this paper we describe how we can move from a static RA model of crime events to a dynamic model of crime patterns by incorporating agent movement and learning. We identify a class of simulation models (RA/CA) that facilitate improved theory development, the identification of testable hypotheses, and “bench testing” of interventions prior to implementation. Key words: crime patterns, routine activity theory, crime simulation
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Sadism in the American Print Media
One of the recurring themes in the interests of what can be defined as pop culture has become the “sadistic” offender. Blockbusters like Hannibal, The American Psycho, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (editions 1&2) all have their role in the perpetuation of this society’s fascination with sick and twisted crimes. What is it that the public is being shown and told about actual sadistic behavior that has helped feed this fondness of its representation in entertainment? To understand the nature of what American popular culture labels as the most perverse of all criminal behavior, one must turn to the true crimes that the mass media has come to label as such. With a clear understanding of how the label “sadistic” is being applied to real world criminal actions by the media, social and behavioral sciences have a better chance of coming to the roots of the fascination with sadism in contemporary society. Little study has been done in reference to this curiosity, and it is suggested that an examination of the language used in true crimes may be an appropriate place to begin. This study conducts a content analysis on a sample of newspaper markets over a five year period. Basic statistical analysis was carried out on these initial results, and trends concerning the sex and age of the victim, type of crime committed, and instrumentality all began to arise. To extend the study, the search will be widened to include crimes that the media label “sick,” “psychopathic,” and “cruel.” Additionally, another sample group will be chosen at random that will be used as a control group in a comparison against the ‘sadistic’ group. These differences combined with more detailed statistical analysis will hope to hi-light how certain crimes are defined as especially deviant, while others are not.
Searching for a Needle in a Haystack: Tales of and From Indiana’s Innocence Project
There can be no greater injustice than serving time for a crime that one did not commit. Innocence Projects are being created across the country with the express purpose of assisting those falsely accused to obtain their freedom. This paper will describe the Indiana experience in developing an Innocence Project. Special attention will be paid to the growing pains of structuring a collaborative project between a Law School and a Department of Criminal Justice. Additional topics to be addressed include developing an effective screening procedure; the trials and tribulations of maintaining databases, and; preliminary findings regarding the substance of the pleas for assistance. Early steps in the investigative process will also be discussed.
Seeking Markets Behind Bars: Capitalism Will Go Anywhere for a Buck
This paper explores the many different businesses that sell their products or services to the agencies of the criminal justice system, especialy the correctional system. The products and services range from everyday prisoner needs (e.g., food, clothing, medical services) to high-tech security systems for the system itself (e.g., fencing, locks, urine testing kits). Profits from such services are large enough to suggest that there is a need for a steady supply of criminals and victims. Private prisons and jails merely add to the profits already being made through federal, state and local operations.
Sentencing Decisions in Three U.S. District Courts: Testing the Assumption of Uniformity in the Federal Sentencing Process
Critics of federal sentencing research suggest that the research conducted to date has produced an incomplete and, perhaps, misleading picture of the federal sentencing process. With few exceptions, the research conducted to date focuses on sentencing decisions at the national level. These studies assume there is little inter-district variation in case processing policies and procedures and that findings regarding sentence outcomes at the national level therefore reflect the reality of decision making in each of the U.S. District Courts. The purpose of this study is to test this assumption of national uniformity in sentencing. Using data on offenders sentenced in three U.S. District Courts in 1998, 1999, and 2000, we attempt to determine if–net of controls for offense seriousness, offender culpability, and other legally relevant factors–there are statistically significant differences in sentence severity. We also attempt to determine if the predictors of sentencing are invariant.
Sentencing Decisions of Judges in Milwaukee’s Specialized Domestic Violence Courts
Over the past ten years, criminal justice sentencing research has been conducted for cases involving intimate partner violence. The type of sentence that an offender receives for a crime against an intimate partner is just one aspect of that individual’s experience with the criminal justice system. However, it is a critical component for holding offenders accountable in a structure that ties together the efforts of police officers, district attorneys, judges, and correction agents. This study, which focused on offenders in the city of Milwaukee, was particularly interested in the sentencing phase as research has shown that judges’ actions can be effective in reducing recidivism for some offenders. In cases of domestic violence, judges not only receive incomplete information, but the information they do get can be conflicting and contradictory as victims often depart from earlier testimony or withdraw from the case entirely. Consequently, judges direct their attention to a set of “focal concerns”, according to theory, that drive their decisions on appropriate sentencing. Ordinal logistic regression used in this study found that offenders’ race and marital status to the victim, and whether or not victims disclosed prior calls to the police for abuse perpetrated by the same offender all affected judges’ sentencing decisions.
Separation/Divorce Sexual Assault in Rural Ohio: The Contribution of Male Patriarchal Peer Support
Less than a handful of North American studies have examined separation/divorce sexual assault. Further, almost all of the limited empirical work on this topic, regardless of whether it is qualitative or quantitative, was done in urban areas. To help fill these research gaps, an exploratory qualitative study of separation/divorce sexual assault was conducted in rural Ohio. The purpose of this paper is to present findings showing how patriarchal male peer support contributes to a social problem that has thus far received selective inattaion.
Shooting for the Stars: Top Rated Programs and Faculty
Faculty members from top rated criminology and criminal justice programs describe and discuss what makes a successful program, with an emphasis on the role of faculty members. A 2002 article in the Journal of Criminal Justice ranked the University of Cincinnati, University of Missouri-St. Louis, University of Maryland, Pennsylvania State University, Temple University, and University of Nebraska as the top six programs in the United States. Additionally, the University of California, Irvine’s Criminology, Law and Society program has built a department that includes many of the leading scholars in the field and stands out as being on the cutting edge of criminology. This panel explores the attributes of these shining stars and attests to the “sacred spark” theory of success.
Should the Subject Matter Jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court Include Drug Trafficking?
The international legal community has been contemplating the creation of a permanent international criminal court for more than seven decades. That goal was finally realized with the formation of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Established in July 2002, the ICC investigates and prosecutes the most egregious violations of international criminal law–the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. These four offenses are eligible for prosecution before the ICC because they violate fundamental humanitarian principles and, arguably, constitute the most serious crimes of international concern. Unfortunately, the court’s subject matter jurisdiction is limited to only these four categories of offenses. One other crime of international significance–drug trafficking–has been excluded from the Statute and is thus ineligible for prosecution before the ICC. This is an execrable omission. In the current essay, the prosecution of drug trafficking before the ICC is assessed. Part II discusses the prevalence and associated problems of illicit drugs in the United States and on an international scale. Cross-sectional and longitudinal data are presented to illustrate the illimitable nature of the problem. Part III reviews the major narcotics conventions, describes the development and subject matter jurisdiction of the ICC, and reviews the arguments for and against expanding the subject matter jurisdiction of the ICC to incorporate drug trafficking. Given that modern states exist as part of an interdependent, international community, Part IV offers insight into the future of the ICC and discusses how the problems associated with drug trafficking might be remedied.
Size Matters–The Impact of Correctional Services on a Statewide Scale: An Evaluation of the California Preventing Parolee Crime Program
The California Department of Corrections received funding from the Legislature to expand its previous selected correctional service programs to encompass the vast geographical areas of the state. Tens of millions of dollars poured into various statewide programs and tens of thousands of parolees were enrolled. Statistical analyses at both the aggregate and individual level strongly indicate that these services reduced re-incarcerations among its participants, mostly among those who completed the treatment services, which resulted in major cost savings. Incremental success was also evident with different levels of participation in the treatment programs. Although the statistical analyses achieved significant control over differences between the program participants and the comparison group, the apparent effectiveness of the program may be due to selection effects and other sources of bias. This evaluation supports the argument for providing services to parolees to reduce their likelihood of recidivating. It also points to the need to design and implement correctional programs that will allow rigorous evaluations to increase confidence in the findings.
Social Systemic Approaches to the Causes and Consequences of Using DNA Evidence Within Criminal Justice
Criminal justice has an unprecedented opportunity to become more efficient and effective through the creation and development of innovative methods of change. The most recent change experienced by criminal justice agencies and the public is the use of DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid) to identify criminal offenders with conviction. This study attempts to identify, describe, and/or define social systemic approaches to the causes and consequences of using DNA evidence based on principles of social development and the use of DNA samples. Further attempts are made to respond to questions as how the technology of DNA testing has changed the criminal justice system; and how reliable are DNA test results in resolving or reducing crime and the systematic causes and consequences of using DNA test results as evidence in courts–what occurs upon conviction and/or post-conviction using a DNA rofileis included. One must ask “what about the WRONGFULLY CONVICTED? Where does DNA profiling become reliable and accurate when identifying characteristics for determining who the criminals are and who the innocent individuals that have been “WRONGFULLY CONVICTED” since the days of Dr. Richard Shepard to the present release of Julius Earl Ruffin who was imprisoned for 17 years for a rape and exonerated in September 2003. In conclusion, challenges are discussed that appear to affect the effectiveness and efficiency of the crime laboratories critical the “nature of science systems theories and the principles of social systemic approaches.” In conclusion, policy and political issues are drawn with assumptions, implications, limitations, and consequences to the criminal justice system as a dynamic organization, constantly changing while maintaining the business of “combating crime” resulting in state Forensic Crime Laboratoeis to contract out DNA testing and analysis to private laboratories such as Cellmark Corporation do reduce time delays. However, more research is required to complet.
Spectrum of Innocence
Criminal courts avoid the term ‘innocent’ by accepting a not guilty plea from the accused rather than a plea of innocence. Although guilty pleas are most common, not guilty pleas that go to trial are also very likely to result in conviction. Such high conviction rates are made possible by the opportunity that juries have to find defendants guilty of lesser included offenses. A defendant who is not guilty of first degree murder, still may be judged guilty of second degree murder because the elements of the proof of guilt of those lesser crimes are imbedded in the greater offense. So the accused may be not guilty of the original charge, but not completely innocent either.
Statutory Provisions and Legal Precedents in the Area of Bail Bondsmen and Bail Recovery Agents: Assessing a Fringe Element of the Criminal Justice System
Much mystique and folklore surrounds the roles and activities of bail bondsmen and bail recovery agents (aka “bounty hunters”). Although they have long operated on the fringe of the criminal justice system, the formal processing of the courts is heavily reliant on these licensed agents. While select individuals and cases gain notoriety through media exposes, there exists a paucity of scholarly literature on this topic. This paper reviews the existing statutory provisions and legal precedents that govern the practice of bail bondsmen and bail recovery agents across the U.S. We also consider civil actions brought against bail bondsmen and bail recovery agents by private citizens. Our analysis seeks to better contextualize the status of these legal actors as they operate within our system of justice.
Study of Hispanic Outcomes in U.S. Federal Courts
Building upon the earlier work of Steffensmeier, Demuth and others, this project expands the examination of racial and ethnic effects on sentencing, specifically the relationship between different racial groups within the overarching category of Hispanics. Previous research has shown disparities within Federal Courts and State level in regards to the sentencing (chance of conviction and sentence length) of Hispanic, White and African American offenders. The goal of this project is to fill some holes in the sentencing literature, by expanding the focus and scope of previous analyses. The analysis will be expanded in several ways. First the Hispanic category will be analyzed in more detail by separating black and White Hispanics. Also by matching court districts to census data, this study will look at sentencing outcomes for specific ethnic groups (Mexican, Puerto Rican and Cuban). In addition outcomes will be looked out in the context of different districts in order to see to what degree the context of location may effect sentencing outcomes. By using recent Federal Sentencing Data from 1996 through 2000, this study will extend previous work by allowing for analysis or recent trends as well as long term trends.
Studying the Correlates of Victimization and Reporting of White Collar Crime
Little is known about the correlates of white collar crime victimization, and even less is known about white collar crime reporting. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which the predictors of white collar crime victimization are the same as the predictors of white collar crime reporting. In addition to examining this shared relationship, we also investigate whether the same set of demographic factors relates to both outcomes. Future research directions are also discussed.
Surviving the Dissertation Successfully
Speakers will give advice on successful dissertation strategies.
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Taking Stock of the Internationalization and Globalization of American Criminology
The growing field of what is loosely called “international criminology” consists of four subfields which are developing at different rates. Two subfields, comparative criminology and comparative criminal justice, are well established and are beginning to move beyond the elementary tasks of definition, description and classification. Two other subfields, transnational crime and transnational criminal justice, are exploding in relative importance to policy makers and law enforcers yet have received minimal attention from academics. This paper sketches out some of the conceptual, methodological, theoretical and political issues that researchers in these two newer subfields face.
Taking the Punishment Out of the Process: From Substantive Criminal Justice Through Procedural Justice to Restorative Justice
This paper takes as its starting point Malcolm Feeley’s seminal insight that in the lower criminal courts, the punishment is usually the process itself, making the question of guilt or innocence irrelevant. The paper then draws on work in the procedural and restorative justice fields and applies these combined perspectives to discuss three promising experiments to make lower criminal courts more essentially just, focusing in particular on an innovative non-profit criminal defense organization in Atlanta: The Georgia Justice Project.
Targeting the Black Underclass: The War on Drugs
The incarceration rate in the United States increased more than 450% between 1970 and 1998. African-Americans, as a percentage of those sent to federal and state prisons, increased from 37% in 1980 to 54% in 1992. A number of social scientists have argued that increases in the incarceration rate and racial disparity in the inmate population have resulted from the war on drugs launched in the mid-1980s. Supporting this disparity in the inmate population have resulted from the war on drugs launched in the mid-1980s. Supporting this position, I will present secondary research evidence that inner-city youth gangs have been unfairly blamed by state managers for an exaggerated “drug problem” in the U.S. I will further argue that the war on drugs was politically motivated, unnecessary, and that it disproportionately targeted the black underclass. I will attempt to support a hypothesis that racial disparity in the nation’s prison population has increased as a result of the war on drugs by targeting young, black men, and using highly punitive and racially biased sanctions against them. Finally, I will argue that shortsighted “lock ’em up” criminal justice policies ignore the social-structural problems that gave rise to urban youth gangs. These problems require socioeconomic solutions, not harsh punishment.
Teaching Issues for Developing Scholars
Speakers will share advice, tips, and strategies for teaching in criminal justice. Topics to be discussed include mentoring and teaching online.
Teaching Violence Against Women: Issues of Race/Ethnicity, Nationality, and Class
This presentation will focus on developing innovative ways to teach about issues of violence against women. Included in this presentation is a focus on ways to encourage students to understand the phenomenon of violence against women with intersections of race/ethnicity, nationality, immigration status, and class.
The “Greying” of America’s Prisons: Elderly Inmates and Their Impact on Corrections
Since the 1980’s, there have been increasing concerns about the changing demographics within our nation’s prisons and jails. Much of this concern has centered on the “greying” of the prison population. In 2000, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that while only 3.3% of state and federal correctional populations were age 55 or older that figure was expected to rise tremendously over the next several decades. With the “greying” of America’s prisons, many believe there will be increased pressures on federal and state correctional managers to provide services and health care to meet the needs of this special population of offenders. Many state corrections systems are only now beginning to turn their attention to understanding the implications for incarcerating this group of offenders and the special needs that they require. The current paper examines the impact of the elderly inmate population on corrections using a national survey of state inmates from two time periods. Changes in the elderly inmate population are presented and the special needs of this population are analyzed. The paper concludes with a discussion of the findings and their implications for correctional policy.
The Adversary Jury Trial and Wrongful Conviction
This paper explores various elements of the adversary jury trial to assess its capacity to ascertain the ground truth of alleged crimes. Whether the jury trial better assess ground truth than the civil law “inquisitorial” is an old subject, going back to differences between Blackstone and Bentham. This paper takes a closer look at the role played by the judge, rules of evidence, reforms to allow more jury involvement, and the like to estimate whether a series of technical modifications in contemporary can make jury trial arguably more accurate.
The Constitution and the Death Penalty for Juveniles: Assessing Standards of Decency
In January, 2004, the Supreme Court agreed to re-consider the issue of age-eligibility and the death penalty (Roper v. Simmons, No. 03-633). In doing so, the Court reversed its position of January 2003, when it declined to hear the appeal of Scott Allen Hain (Hain v. Mullen, No. 02-6438). Since 1989, when the Court ruled that the death penalty was permissible for offenders ages 16 and 17 [Stanford v. Kentucky, 492 U.S. 361 (1989)], several developments including declining use of the death penalty, changing public opinion, international policy and world opinion, and increased exonerations of offenders sentenced to death, suggest emergent standards of decency that support a ban on juvenile executions. This paper summarizes some of these developments as well as the use of the death penalty, and reviews the context of recent Court decisions that set the stage for the Roper agruments.
The Construction of a Crime Initiative: An Analysis of Project Safe Neighborhoods
Project Safe Neighborhoods is a major federal program that was established with practically no debate or opposition and in a Republican political climate, where gun control has been a critically deliberated issue. Considering this, how then was the construction and passage of the PSN initiative such an effortless task? Why were Republican politicians, who are generally considered to be against gun control, so supportive of this initiative? The National Rifle Association has even been a strong supporter of the initiative, out of concern that existing federal gun crime laws were not being enforced by the Clinton administration Justice Department, and thereby placing restrictions to law abiding citizens. On the other end of the spectrum, there is concern that escalating federal presence in criminal law will produce a host of unwanted consequences. Prosecutorial mischief affecting the racial composition of juries and creating single-issue prosecutors can lead to a mindless zero-tolerance policy for technical infractions of gun laws. Many questions have arisen regarding the constitutionality of the federal government having unrestricted authority to interfere in intrastate criminal matters. The PSN initiative is paramount because it appears to be driven by societal pressure to decrease gun violence and not by political agenda. However, it may be disguised as a gun control policy, when in actuality was originated by the NRA and Bush Administration to forestall further anti-gun legislation by emphasizing tougher enforcement of existing gun laws. This analysis will examine the underlying reasons for the construction of the PSN initiative, how and by whom its development has been influenced, who benefits from the protection of the initiative, the constitutionality of PSN, and the outcomes/consequences of its development.
The Culpabable Corporation: A Historial Overview of the Federal Court’s Ruling on the Corporation as Criminal Defendant
Corporations such as Enron, and their officers, are being held accountable for criminal wrongdoing. Historically, the corporate entity was seldom held accountable for any criminal activity; but that has changed over the course of time. This paper is a historical survey of federal court decisions that are part of the evolution toward holding the corporate entity criminally responsible. We will examine the development of the notion of firms as wrong-doers and analyze patterns and trends in the cases against the treatment of individuals who commit crimes.
The Culture of Mazzel. Trust and Crime Among Diamond Dealers in Antwerp
Trust is a basis of diamond trade. Diamonds worth thousand of euros can change hands on the basis of a handshake alone, payment is taking place much later. There is no signature, no contract, what matters is the word. Trust between dealers is expressed by a handshake and the Hebrew words ‘Mazzel Tov u’Vracha’ (Good Luck and Blessing). The origin of this trust is tight family links, outsiders almost never get into the circle. If one is too late, or unable to repay his debt, there is always someone from his family who will do it for him. Doing international business on the basis of handshake is a cultural phenomenon, the modern diamond industry is based on internal regulation system and traditional trust relationships. However, in the process of internationalisation and globalisation of economy, this tradition becomes more and more affected by external factors, including criminal aspects. Diamonds are suitable tools for smuggling, money laundering and fraud. In the last years a number of criminal groups abused the flexible internal rules of the Antwerp diamond sector in order to commit financially tinted crimes in all discretion. Do loyalty and trust — the two most important principles of the diamond trade are loosing their original meaning?
The Death of Innocence: Factual and Procedural Errors That Result in Wrongful Convictions
Over the last decade, legal scholars have meticulously documented cases of wrongfully convicted men in America’s prisons. However, the idea that innocent men are sent to prison is not new in this country. The American public’s renewed in this subject may be due largely in part to newly discovered evidence that has freed wrongly convicted men from death row in several states. In fact, over the last several years, investigative journalists have found that many people who currently sit on death row are probably innocent. Given these repeated instances where innocent men have been imprisoned and later set free, one must ask what contributes to this problem. Is it a system that places a premium on convictions at all costs? Is it a system that allows prosecutors unfettered discretion and resources in to pursue the presumed guilty? In the alternative, is it a system whose goal is no longer the search for the truth? Though these are only rhetorical questions, there may be a ring of truth to all three. This paper will attempt to answer some of these questions through an examination of a subset of cases from Radelet, Bedau, and Putnam’s study where race of the defendant played a major part in the conviction. The intent of this paper is to demonstrate that race has long played a major part in determing who is sentenced to death. In addition, this paper will address recent developments in criminal law in light of claims of innocence. In this manner, issues such as ineffective assistane of counsel, police and prosecutorial misconduct, and mistaken eyewitness identification will be explored.
The Death Penalty in Contemporary New York: 1994-2004
This paper focuses on the 1994 New York gubernatorial election in which George Pataki defeated Mario Cuomo, the state death-penalty legisation drafted and approved following Governor Pataki’s taking office, how the law has been administered since taking effect September 1, 1995, and legal challenges that have been raised and resolved regarding the New York death penalty statute. The paper discusses the major structural and applied challenges that have yet to be decided involving the death penalty law, and speculates about future capital punishment law and practices in New York.
The Death Penalty in Early 20th Century New York: 1901-1935
Large numbers of prisoners were sentenced to death in New York during the early 20th century. Most were executed, but many were spared execution because of court action and executive clemency. This paper focuses on the death-sentenced prisoners in New York between 1901 and 1935 and examines and attempts to account for differences in the outcomes of their cases. It also describes changes that occurred in New York’s capital punishment laws during the time period and examines how the laws were carried out during this period of state history.
The Death Penalty in New York: Colonial Years 1624-1775
This paper examines the history of capital punishment during Dutch and English rule in colonial New York (1624-1775). It explores the law and application of capital punishment within the context of other social institutions, focusing particularly on the death penalty as a form of social control. Early usage of capital punishment in New York is compared to contemporary practices and observations are offered about the relevance of this history to current death penalty issues.
The Division on Women and Crime in the 21st Century: Future Directions for Feminist Criminology
With the turning of the new millennium still vivid in our memories, the twenty-first century remains in its infancy. In contrast, the feminist project is over one hundred years old, having begun with first-wave feminism during the women’s suffrage movement of the early twentieth century and progressing through the somewhat tempestuous second-wave movement of the 1970s. The dawn of this century is greeted by third-wave feminism, and by the increasing prescence of feminist studies within the field of criminology. This paper will explore the role of feminist criminology in the coming decades, and will highlight the opportunities that lie ahead for scholars who are committed to the study of women, crime, and justice.
The Effects of Jury Racial Composition on Capital Sentencing
The role of race in influencing decisions regarding capital punishment is an on-going controversy. However, there is little systemic, empirical work that determines the association of jury racial composition with actual death sentencing patterns. The present study (1) addresses issues acquiring data for a study of this nature and (2) presents preliminary results from North Carolina that explores the role of jury racial composition as predictive factor in death sentencing, net of other legal and extra legal variables that may invluence such decisions.
The Future of Capital Punishment in the United States
The purpose of this roundtabe, which has become a fixture at ASC annual meetings, is to discuss new developments in the practice of capital punishment in the United States. Topics vary. Audience participation is encouraged.
The Globalization of For-Profit Imprisonment: Bentham, Neo-colonialism, and Human Rights
This paper explores the “globalization” of for-profit imprisonment by documenting its recent emergence in places ranging from China and North Korea, Africa and Scandanavia, South America and the Middle East, as well as North America. The article builds on earlier work documenting a trans-national commerce in politically and economically dispossessed prisoners in a “first-world” dominated global system of coercive economic production. The UN Declaration on Human Rights is used to critique this global commerce in what amounts to a for-profit system dependent upon human disposession.
The Illinois State University Innocence Project
The context of wrongful conviction in Illinois is one that has received a tremendous amount of media attention. In the wake of discovering that 13 death row inmates had been wrongfully convicted and exonerated, Former Republic Governor George Ryan declared a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois, commuted the sentences of 167 inmates, and pardoned four others. This paper provides insight into the development of the ISU Innocence Project, a multi-disciplinary student organization that investigates allegations of wrongful conviction. This paper details our experiences in the Innocence Project, as well as the obstacles we have confronted in our pursuit for justice. Other topics in the paper include: methods for case selection, investigation procedures, investigative outcomes, and collaboration with other Innocence Projects.
The Image and Reality of Justice
To understand justice, one cannot rely on faith in its “essence.” Justice takes many forms and is individualized within a person. In particular, justice as possibility becomes an actuality. It is not a concrete object or a Reality. The best way to undersand justice is to explore the anomalous cases. By exploring and explaining crime myths we attempt to show that the criminal justice system is based on myth and faith. Justice is not based on the notion of “essence.” The rationalist concept of justice as “just deserts” masks the impossibility of equal justice.
The Impact of Bench Trial Convictions on Sentencing
Research on criminal courts has shown that the mode of conviction (e.g., guilty plea, jury trial) has important implications on the length of sentence imposed. Most sentencing research has demonstrated that offenders convicted by jury trial are much more likely to receive a harsher sentence compared to offenders who plead guilty. While much scholarship has focused on jury trials, and their relationship to guilty pleas, little has been done to examine an alternative to either conviction approach: the bench trial. In most sentencing research, a bench trial conviction is secondary to other scholarly topics. The few studies that have focused on bench trials, have demonstrated that they produce sentencing outcomes that are similar to guilty pleas (Johnson, 2003; Myers, 1981; Uhlam & Walker, 1979; Eisenstein and Jacob, 1977). The dated nature of most of this research and the importance of bench trials as a non-plea alternative to jury trials, gives rise to new calls for an examination of this topic. Are bench trial sentences comparable to their guilty plea counterparts? Are sentences generated from bench trials less severe compared to sentences that result from jury trials? In order to address these questions, sentencing data from the State Court Processing Statistics (SCPS) database will be examined. SCPS is a biannual data collection series sponsored by the Bureau of Justice Statistics that tracks defendants arrested on a felony charge in 75 of the Nation’s most populous counties for one year. The merged data file contains demographic, offense, prior record, pretrial release, conviction type, and sentencing information on 87,343 defendants arrested on a felony charge in 1990, 1992, 1994, 1996, 1998, and 2000. Consequently, the SCPS dataset allows for the utilization of multivariate techniques to compare the impact of guilty pleas, bench trials, and jury trials on sentence length, while controlling for other factors that can impact on sentencing outcomes.
The Impact of College Experience on Hate Crime Attitudes
The Hate Crime Statistics Act has provided consistent evidence of the rate of hate crimes in America. Hate crime are equivalent in actions to criminal offenses as defined by the penal code. They stand apart, however, in that the motive of the perpetrator is used to define additional charges. College experience has been seen as one solution to lowering hate crime (Craig, 1999). The present study tested the hypothesis that a college education results in changes in hate crime attitudes. A review by Pascarella and Terenzini (1991) concluded that those who attend college change their attitude in a number of different areas. Further, these changes are a result of attending a college or university, and not merely maturational. Other studies have found that during college, attitudes and values tend to become more open, liberal and tolerant (Kuriloff and Lottes, 1994). Some studies argue that a more open-minded attitude increases appreciation of others and reduces the probability of a hate crime. However, to date no study has directly investigated the influence of college on attitudes toward hate crimes. (Weil, 1984). A pilot study examined the attitude of 161 college students from a southern regional university. A 22-item questionnaire was constructed and distributed equally to Freshmen and Seniors representing several majors. The psychometric properties of the scale showed internal consistency. The results demonstrated there was evidence that college students favor hate crime laws, and they believe that police should consider the motive of an individual who has committed a crime. However, their attitudes did not change across the period of college. These findings may have resulted from a restriction in range and a revised questionnaire will be presented.
The Impact of Defense Council on the Processing and Disposition of Felony Court Cases
In recent years law journals have given considerable attention to the problem of effectiveness of counsel in criminal cases; however, there have been very few empirical studies on the subject. The studies that appear in the literature are not recent, making it difficult to understand the contemporary nature of this problem. This paper presents the findings of a study measuring the impact of counsel, using data from the 75 most populous urban areas in the United States. Using multivariate analysis this study will test for relationships between type of counsel and several decision points between time-of-arrest and the final court disposition. The paper will also explore how these relationships may interact with the suspect’s sex and race.
The Impact of JOD Probation Review Hearings in Milwaukee
For the Judicial Oversight Demonstration, judges in Milwaukee scheduled review hearings for offenders on probation for intimate partner violence. Hearings were held 90 to 120 days after sentencing. Probation officers filed reports with the court prior to each hearing on compliance, focusing on attendance and progress in court-ordered batterer interventions. Noncompliant probationers were sanctioned and often scheduled for an additional review hearing. The study compares recidivism among a sample of 300 JOD probationers scheduled for review hearings to 300 similar offenders on probation prior to JOD.
The Impact of Legally Inappropriate Factors on Death Sentencing in California
This paper examines California homicides over a ten year period, 1990-1999, and attempts to identify which homicides are most likely to end with a death sentence. We measure homicides with two different data sets: 1) police data, reported to the FBI as “Supplemental Homicide Reports” (which also give information on the number of victims in the case and whether it included additional felonies), and 2) Vital Statistics data, which give more accurate counts of homicides but not as much information on each case. We use the latter source to adjust or correct the former source. No matter which data set is used, those suspected of killing non-Hispanic whites are more likely to be sentenced to death than other homicide suspects. These differences persist even when we examine only homicides with one or two levels of aggravation. The data also show clear regional disparities in death sentencing, with counties that have a lower population density and a higher proportion of non-Hispanic whites in their populations to have the highest rates of death sentences.
The Impact of Race on Parole Revocation in Four States, 1990-2000
While there is an extensive research literature on the predictors of incarceration for new offenders, little is known about the circumstances under which individuals are returned to prison for violating the conditions of their parole. At the same time, parole revocations account for an increasingly large share of prison admissions (in 1980 parole violators represented 17% of prison admissions, increasing to 35% of admissions in 1999), making an understanding of this decision point crucial. In this paper we analyze parole release data from the National Corrections Reporting Program from 1990-2000 for four representative states (MI, NY, KY, and UT) to identify individual factors that affect an offender’s likelihood of revocation. We look specifically at the role race plays in revocation decisions, predicting that, because this is a low visibility decision point and because offenders have fewer legal protections than at earlier decision points, race disparities will arise. Indeed, preliminary analyses suggest that, in our sample, minorities are approximately 30% more likely than whites to have their parole revoked due to a technical violation. We include in our analyses a number of demographic, criminal history, offense, incarceration experience, and parole experience variables to better understand the overrepresenation of minorities in the population of revoked parolees.
The Impact of Sentencing Guidelines Policy Reform: Florida’s 1994 Sentencing Guidelines
During the 1993 Florida Legislative session, the Florida Legislature enacted new sentencing guidelines as part of the “Safe Streets Act.” The new guidelines, which went into effect on January 1, 1994, were established in response to perceived weaknesses in Florida’s original sentencing guidelines created in 1983. These newly created sentencing guidelines were intended to accomplish several goals that the Florida legislature believed would improve perceived weaknesses in sentencing by Florida’s courts. Among the goals of the 1994 Sentencing Guidelines were the desire to 1) prioritize prison space for the incarceration of serious and repeat offenders; 2) ensure the neutrality of sentencing with respect to race; 3) equate the sentence with the severity of the primary offense; and 4) increase the severity of the sentence for offenders with longer and more serious prior records. This paper examines whether the revised sentencing policy accomplished the legislature’s goals by analyzing the predictors of felony sentences under the 1994 guidelines.
The Importance of Neighborhood Ties to Local Police: An Analysis of Victimization Rates abd Risk
This project investigates the impact of neighborhood ties to the local police department on victimization rates and individuals victimization risk. We argue that neighborhoods with strong ties to the police are neighborhoods in which residents are more willing to control crime (public social control) and thereby reduce crime. We use the Police Services Study (1977) which has data on 60 neighborhoods in three cities (Rochester, NY; St. Petersburg, FL, and St. Louis, MO). Preliminary analyses show that victimization rates and risk are indeed lowest in neighborhoods with positive ties between neighborhoods and the local police. We discuss implications of this research for understanding how a neighborhoods ability to control crime is partly a function of ties to external actors such as the police.
The Interaction Between Victim Race and Gender on Capital Sentencing Outcomes in North Carolina
The study is an exploration and extension of previous research on the interactive effects of victim race and gender on death sentence outcomes in Ohio (Williams & Holcomb, 2004) to see if Williams and Holcomb’s results can be corroborated. Williams and Holcomb’s study suggests that an interactive effect exists between victim-race and victim-gender in Ohio death sentencing outcomes, such that a killer of white women are especially singled out for capital punishment. The current study restricts the analysis to death eligible cases at the trial level in North Carolina to determine if Williams and Holcomb’s findings hold up at a different level of case processing and in a different state. Results are reported based on a sample of North Carolina first-degree murder cases where the state sought the death penalty. Logistic regression is used to determine if there are direct and/or interative effects of victim’s race and victim’s gender on capital sentencing outcomes, controlling for the variety of other factors that influence that decision. Results suggest that interactive effects do not exist in North Carolina at the sentencing/penalty processing phase of capital trials. Results are discussed.
The Law and Economics Movement: A Critical View
This paper attempts to analyze the “Law and Economics” movement from a critical perspective. The origins, history and central tenets of this paradigm will be discussed with a context of a broader conservative political climate.
The Main and Conditioning Effects of Community Characteristics on Sentencing: A Multilevel Analysis
The present research uses data on a nationally representative sample of felony defendants adjudicated in large urban counties, along with information on the characteristics of the counties in which these criminal cases were processed, to examine the main and conditioning influences of community attributes on sentencing outcomes. Drawing on prior theoretical and empirical research, multilevel models are estimated to determine whether and the extent to which various contextual factors (e.g., racial composition, age structure, unemployment, sex ratio, crime rates, location, and political or religious affiliation) affect the nature or length of criminal sentences, net of other factors associated with sentencing outcomes. Additionally, this research explores whether the influences of defendant race, age, and sex vary across counties and, if so, whether county characteristics condition these effects. The implications of these findings for research, theory, and policymaking are discussed.
The Middle Classes, Social Capital, and Social Control
In The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society, David Garland explicitly states that it is not his intention to map changes in punitiveness, or desire for harsher social control through segments of the U.S. or British populations (Garland 2001: 148). That being said, he explores the complicated and widespread increase in social conservatism from the early 70s through today by focusing on a specific portion of the American middle class: the professional middle class. He focuses attention on this occupationally and culturally defined substrata, claiming that since the late 1960s this demographic has been particularly influential in development of a culture increasingly concerned with control. This paper will argue that because the non-professional middle class since the 1970s has experienced greater effects associated with slowing of economic growth and erosion of social capital, this non-professional stratum may have played a greater role in development of the culture of control than Garland suggests. Using data from the General Social Survey, this paper will examine the degree to which individuals in the upper and lower middle classes are concerned about social control in light of economic stresses and declining social capital.
The Midtown Community Court Reconsidered?
The Midtown Community Court opened for business in the Times Square area of Manhattan in 1993 as a carefully planned experiment in devising more effective sanctions for low level offenders and establishing a close connection between a court and its surrounding community. The author participated in two large-scale research projects that evaluated the new court over its first four years of operation using a wide range of methodologies. Findings from that research viewed in the context of the subsequent growth of problem-solving courts are shown to have implications for current debates about problem-solving courts such as their model of adjudication, impact on the larger trial court system, likely longevity, and role as a change agent.
The Myth of Punitiveness
The perceived surge in punitiveness is widely believed to account for the rise in the prison population. The concept of punitiveness, however, is under-theorised and many of the explanations which are centred around this concept either gravitate towards naive empiricism or rampant idealism. In this paper the concept of punitiveness is examined and it is argued that it provides a superficially plausable point of references for explaining recent changes in crime control but is ultimately a less significant factor than is often suggested.
The Negligent State: Privatization and State Criminality
Governmental negligence is principally a consequence both of ideological commitments to favoring particular programs and constituencies over others, and of decisions of political expediency (Friedrichs 1996). An examination of government decisions to private public services reveals that governmental negligence is present in both the privatization of correctional services and welfare services. In light of the harmful and often fatal consequences and the unnecessary economic losses that occur as a result, this paper attempts to move us toward extending the concept of the negligent (or wasteful) state to include the inadequate and ineffective governmental responses to crime and poverty and to define this as a form of governmental criminality.
The Northern Arizona Justice Project
Recently, a report issued by Columbia University Law Professor, James Liebman, indicated that Arizona is among the worst states in the country when it comes to making mistakes in death penalty cases (A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases, 1973-1995). The Northern Arizona Justice Project, which investigates cases of factual innocence, is committed to seeing all wrongfully convicted people set free. Our organization examines cases where DNA evidence is present and may prove exculpatory, as well as cases where no DNA exists. This paper will provide an overview of the development of the NAJP and coverage of such topics as case selection processes and investigative techniques.
The Politics of Problem-Solving: An Overview of the Origins and Development of Therapeutic Courts
All court reform movements have the goal of solving some problem. A century ago, juvenile courts were instituted to solve the problems of underclass youth. More recently, sentencing reform was designed to solve the problem of punishment disparities. These examples advise caution in building new models of court functioning such as that advocated by the contemporary therapeutic courts movement. Using the example of the growth of drug courts, this law review article is a content analysis of abstracts on drug courts held in the Gottfredson Library at Rutgers University. It is clear that drug courts began as an organizational adaptation responding to case overload caused by the War on Drugs and mandatory sentencing. Only later did a quasi-evangelical therapeutic model emerge, and later still a call to reformulate the roles of court professionals such as judges and defense attorneys. The drug court model spread because of a highly successful transfer of technology and funding from the federal government. When this funding shrinks, local courts will have to make hard choices about exactly what problems can be solved and how far the traditional model of a due-process-providing court should be supplanted with a therapeutic model, as opposed to renewed support for traditional social services.
The Power of the Prosecutor: Understanding Prosecutorial Discretion in a Social Network Analysis Framework
Discretion levied by the court system has been widely discussed and theorized about in the criminological literature, especially discretion as it has been wielded by judges and prosecutors. Traditionally, this discussion has focused on the role of judicial discretion in sentencing, a practice that oftentimes led to discrimination and disparity. More recently, however, scholars have turned their attention to the role of prosecutorial discretion, as many have argued that new sentencing guidelines enacted to eliminate or at least curtail judicial discretion have only changed the distribution, putting more power into the hands of the prosecutor. This shift of power has led to much discussion by researchers as to what effect increased prosecutorial discretion has had on the court system. Much of this research, however, has been at the aggregate level and has not examined any changes that have occurred within the courtroom workgroup, the place where, theoretically, changes between power relations would have the most impact. This research is an attempt to use social network analysis to study whether changes in workgroup characteristics have indeed occurred due to these recent reforms. Network characteristics of courtroom workgroups will be compared in two jurisdictions with different levels of prosecutorial control based on judicial reliance on sentencing guidelines.
The Punitive Gaze
How might a still photograph become a punitive instrument? How should a critical criminology respond to this force? In a sense these questions are a particular case of a more general problem of the relation of the image to power. In order to develop a critique of media images of crime we need to understand a number of different modes of power, including the power of photography. Photographic theory has begun to understand this power but tends to see it as mediated by knowledge, ideology or simulacra. However we need to go beyond such ideas in order to appreciate how the still photograph is both a scene and means of punishment. I will use concepts derived from the post-structuralist theory of the image in order to construct a dynamic theory of the photograph that allows for the force effects of circulation on the body of the viewer as well as that of the viewed. These dynamics act through presentation rather than representation, indication rather than symbolisation and sensation rather than cognition. Through a case example I will show how the circulating phtograph is part of a force field in which photogenic punishment acts in a regime of the punitive gaze.
The Role of Race, Gender, and Social Class in Deciding Who Dies
Prior research has found that the demographic characteristics of jurors affect how they decide capital cases. This paper will review prior findings and analyze quantitative and qualitative results from interviews with jurors who actually decided capital cases. It will compare black and white jurors who served as members of the same jury, and examine attitudes towards punishment, responsibility for the sentence, and perspectives on the crimes, victims, and defendants. The interaction of race with gender and social class also will be explored.
The Role of Research in Practice
Practitioners are often criticized for lacking objectivity and quality research designs in evaluation research. Academicians often fail to consider the needs and issues regarding practical, applied research. This paper examines applied research conducted by three different types of evaluators: internal, external and governmental. The advantages and disadvantages of each type of research are discussed. Additionally, issues that should be considered by both practitioners and academicians are presented.
The Role of the United States Military in Forced Prostitution and Sex-Trafficking World Wide
Throughout history women and girls have been victims of military violence and abuse, often being used as sex slaves and/or civilian targets. There is considerable evidence that the U.S. Military today participates in “forced prostitution” and in turn plays a significant role in sex trafficking. Summarized in this paper are the results of a pilot study conducted which surveyed current and past members of the United States Military about their perceptions of soldier’s use of prostitutes during times of “rest and recreation”. Rest and recreation is the term the United States Military uses to refer to the down time of the troops. The soldiers surveyed in this study represent areas where the United States has had a previous historical military presence as well as areas in which it has occupied more recently. Specific areas on the survey which the author discusses in this paper include soldiers’ perceptions of both the frequency and duration of such activities, the environment(s) in which these activities take place, the precautions, or lack thereof, of the military to control these activities, and any training or safeguards, official or unofficial, that the military offers soldiers in regards to these activities. Other areas on the survey which are also briefly discussed include the soldiers’ perceptions of how women are treated, in general, by the military and their perceptions of participation in prostitution as they relate to the military and their perceptions of participation in prostitution as they relate to the Global AIDS epidemic and other STDs. Finally, the author briefly discusses changes to military policy that could aid in both eliminating this problem, making it safer for all parties involved until that elimination can be accomplished and discusses specific military culture practices which foster these and other related activities.
The Struggle to Move Beyond Description in Comparative Studies
Descriptive accounts are the necessary first step in developing and advancing the field of comparative criminology and criminal justice. Over the last several decades scholars and practitioners have provided an essential base of professional articles, books, and government documents that describe domestic crime in a variety of countries and offer intriguing accounts of the criminal justice process in countries around the world. As we take stock of comparative criminology and criminal justice, it becomes apparent that we must now move to more analytical endeavors. Comparative criminology has more successfully applied theory to an understanding of how and why crime rates differ across countries than has comparative justice applied theory to understand how justice agencies operate in different countries. But both of those versions of comparative studies seem ready for the next step. This paper reviews reasons why comparative analysis will be increasingly important in the twenty-first century, and argues for particular attention to transnational crime.
The Supreme International Crime: The War on Iraq, International Law, and State Criminality
Illegal wars are the most destructive and destabilizing of all state crimes. In fact, under the Nuremberg Charter a war of aggression is considered to be “the supreme international crime.” This paper argues that the unprovoked invasion and occupation of Iraq by the United States and the United Kingdom in 2003 qualifies as such an illegal act of aggression. Since the war was not necessary for self-defense against an armed attack and was not authorized by the United Nations Security Council, it was illegal under the U.N. Charter and other forms of international law. Thus, the invasion of Iraq can be considered a state crime that can be brought within the boundaries of criminology for examination. The paper starts by offering a definition of the concept of state crime and then argues that international law provides the appropriate legal framework for bringing the socially harmful acts of states within the boundaries of criminology. After assessing the publicly stated reasons that American and British officials offered for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the paper than describes the specific international laws that were violated by the U.S. and the U.K. in undertaking this war, and analyzes the legal justifications both states offered in their defense.
The United States’ War on and Occupation of Iraq: International Illegalities and Future Control Issues
The United States’ invasion and occupation of Iraq is not only a politically contentious policy, but is in violation of international law, U.S. actions constituted a vast number of other international standards and laws (i.e. war crimes, crimes against humanity, International Humanitarian Laws, and International Human Rights Laws). This paper argues that while the U.S. was and is in violation of multitudes of customary and codified laws, the potential ramifications for international law, international organizations (such as the International Criminal Court), and controls for crimes of the state implicate serious manifest and latent repercussions. Thus, this paper explores the surrounding illegalities of the war an occupation of Iraq as well as examining future ramifications for international relations, international law, and controls for crimes of state.
The USA Patriot Act and the Politics of Fear
The USA Patriot Act was enacted by Congress against the backdrop of two monumental events: the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the cutaneous anthrax outbreak that occurred a month later. Although the Act’s long-term objective was to curb the fears of the 9/11 and anthrax attacks, it would actually reproduce those fears in its own execution. This paper explores the lived politics of that fear. It discusses controversies surrounding the Act’s implementation, public resistance against the Act, and governmental responses to the resistance. Finally, I discuss the implications of conducting terrorism research in a time of war.
The Uses of Ethnography for Policy Makers and Practitioners
The increasing demand for “proven results” has placed criminal justice policy makers, practitioners and researchers in the position of having to more frequently justify the utility of their approaches. Meeting the gold standard of evaluation is a laudable goal, but there are often obstacles that make randomized control trials impossible, incluing time constraints that demand timely, if “unproven,” answers to pressing problems. This paper describes some of the primary uses of ethnography for policy makers and practitioners, focusing especially on it’s usefulness in exploring emerging problems, its ability to produce information in a timely fashion, and the utility of the “thick” descriptions that ethnographic methods provide. Some of the important findings that have been made by ethnographers–for example, the onset and waning of the crack epidemic–are discussed in terms of subsequent responses by other researchers, policy makers and professionals. The ability of ethnographic approaches to rapidly assess and respond to emergent social problems–like increasing homicide rates or public health crises–is described using examples of fruitful partnerships between researchers, practitioners, policy makers and community residents. Finally, the ability of ethnography to provide rich examples that best illustrate a particular problem is described, underscoring the utility of this method to policy makers who must often defend their choices to the general public.
The Utility of Jury Consultants in the Twenty First Century
Attorneys throughout the United States are using jury consultants at an alarming rate. Currently, jury or trial science is a 500 million dollar a year industry. Interestingly, many consultants claim they can produce the desired outcome whether in or out of court. However, research in trial or jury science often suggest that the variables consultants claim to manipulate are not possible. Part I of this paper discusses the American Society of Trial Consultants. This organization is the cornerstone of the jury consulting field. Part II examines the services offered by members of the ASTC. Part III provides an overview of research that demonstrates severe limitations as to what consultants can and can’t do. Part IV concludes with a discussion of how services offered by consultants should be scrutinized carefully.
The View From Washington: An Assessment of the Election
What can we expect in crime policy in the near future? The just completed election will be assessed as to its impact on crime policy, and the effect of all elections will be a sub-text. Discussion is encouraged.
Therapy Through Justice: An Evaluation of the Riverside County Mental Health Court
Recent developments of the criminal justice system aimed at reducing recidivism include the expansion of offenders served by “alternative justice courts”. The most current wave of courts of this nature is the development of mental health courts. Mental health courts serve criminal offenders who are mentally ill, and/or drug addicted, or dually diagnosed by providing services needed to address these issues through sentencing and court supervision. Riverside County’s Mental Health Court has served approximately 800 clients to date and successfully reduced recidivism among its’ clients. This paper evaluates the effects of Riverside County’s court on the population served.
This is a Man’s World … or Least That’s How it Looks in the Journals
Criminology still tends to focus on gender as a control variable, ignoring the different pathways to crime of males and females. This leaves us with knowledge that we already have — males commit more criminal and delinquent acts than do females. Feminist approaches tend to do one of two things: deal with girls and women only or deal with women and men separately to illuminate the differences. In this paper, we will examine articles in two major journals, Criminology and Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, to explore the ways that gender is treated in mainstream criminology journals. Then, we will discuss the implications this has for feminist criminology.
Threatening Civil Rights: An Analysis of Government Neo-Surveillance Powers
Recent federal legislation has reshaped citizen privacy rights and safeguards against government intrusion. Under the aegis of protection against criminal victimization and terrorist act, these changes have rendered citizens more vulnerable to government surveillance and intrusion as some constitutional safeguards are dismantled. This paper examines the emergence of neo-surveillance and expanded search powers given to government through federal statutes and procedures. Such legislation as the Patriot Act and others has changed in the scope of citizen defense against government intrusion into private financial transaction, information sharing, and communication. The findings suggest that the recent enhancement of government surveillance powers has fueled a trend of eroding constitutional protection. While these statutes propose to protect society from victimization, they may ultimately create a more fertile ground for government abuse of civil rights.
Toward a Criminology of Public Display
Over the past decade or so criminology has drifted into a greater concern with image and representation–an appropriate scholarly response to a world increasingly suffsed with displays of crime and crime control. Absent a reappraisal of traditional social scientific assumptions regarding images and aesthetics, however, this drift has produced more ugly distortions and than it has useful insights. If criminology is to move past this ugliness to engage effectively with realms of representation and public display, new sensitivities are needed–sensitivities drawm from the fields of documentary photography, cultural studies, and visual criminology and sociology. Embracing these sensitivities, an emergent criminology of publi display can be imagined, and with it the possibility of investigating the many dimensions of crime and crime control–criminality, criminal events, fear of crime, crime victimization, policing, imprisonment–as meaningful public displays.
Towards a Theory of State Crime
Although many excellent case studies of the role of the state in the commission of crime have been produced, few attempts have been made to develop a theory of state crime. The author reviews the theoretical work that alludes to the power of the state in criminal wrongdoing and then attempts to fashion a necessary theory of state crime.
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Understanding Criminal Justice Policy Implementation Pragmatically and Theoretically
A juvenile detention reform initiative has yet to show success in one state, though funding has been provided for the execution of the initiative. The purpose of this paper is to conduct a policy analysis that sheds light on implementation issues pragmatically and theoretically. Qualitative interviews with approximately forty key stakeholders are being conducted. Those interviewed include judges, probation officers, and Department of Juvenile Justice officials. A theoretical framework for policy implementation analysis is explored utilizing a grounded theory approach. Questions focus on barriers to reform. Themes include political and social context, organizational change, influential actors, and philosophical orientations. Building blocks to successful criminal justice policy implementation are discussed.
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Voices From the Field: Practitioner Reactions to Collaborative Research Initiatives
Numerous accounts of the difficulties encountered in research collaborations can be found in the extant literature. Most of these accounts, however, are from the perspective of academically-based researchers. Comparatively little is known about how agency staff respond to these initiatives. To address this gap in knowledge, the paper describes the challenges encountered during an ongoing research collaboration through the voice of agency participants. Interviews were conducted with agency staff who have partnered with a university-based research team in an attempt to implement a continual learning system in their agencies. Despite taking great care to set up the project in a way that was intended to foster collaboration, the project has encountered some difficulty over the course of its first three years. These issues have tended to be structural, contextual, and process related. The paper concludes with suggestions for both the implementation of research collaborations and research on the endeavors themselves.
Voices From Underneath the Earth: Women and Solitary Confinement
Every aspect of the criminal justice system affects women differently than it does men. For the most part, the penal industry is still controlled by a male hierarchy. In this paper we will particularly address solitary confinement in women’s prisons. Reasons for being placed into SHU are for women even more characterized by arbitrariness and power differential. The experiences in solitary confinement, especially over extended periods, are not only traumatic but intensely humiliating. Often the impact is long lasting and psychologically debilitating. By examining the accounts of women who have spent time in the SHU, it appears that in particular a higher percentage of incarcerated white collar professional women and women with mental illnesses are targeted by the prison administrations for confinement in the SHU. While Cauasian women typically make up the largest number of women confined in the SHU, a higher percentage of African American women are targeted for disciplinary confinement. Examination of the punitive nature of confinement in SHU, and the conditions under which women are held there, reveals that there are both short and long term psychological ramifications for women held either in protective custody or disciplinary segregation of our nation’s prisons. For women, it appears that pre-prison social status, acute mental illness and racial discrimination are all significant factors that have resulted in the SHU’s use by prison officials as a punitive measure.
Voluntary Participation in Correctional Programming and Recidivism: Does It Predict Success Upon Reentry?
Correctional settings offer a number of different programs designed to assist offenders reintegrate into society upon release. These programs include basic educational substance abuse, behavioral modification, life skills, vocational skills, higher education and faith-based interventions. Some of these are structured as compulsory, or as a condition of early release. Some are strictly voluntary efforts on the part of the offender. This paper is an analysis of the degree of success claimed by several voluntary programs. In particular, voluntary participants in various higher education and faith-based programs are compared with non-voluntary participants and non-participants. The comparison is primarily along standard measure of success during a three year follow up.
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What Can Europeans Learn From American Criminology? The Powers and Liabilities of Policy Transfer in Crime Control
Crime control policy in Britain has been influenced by American criminological ideas about the effectiveness of ‘zero-tolerance’ policing strategies, ‘three-strikes-and-you’re-out’ mandatory sentencing and ‘boot camp’ penal regimes. However, American criminology has also been influential in defining, ‘What Works, What Doesn’t and What’s Promising’ in routine crime reduction. This transatlantic trade of criminological ideas exemplify a universalism in which criteria for the evaluation and accreditation of crime control policies are assumed to apply irrespective of the local social contexts. American exports of crime control policy have been celebrated as a means of generalising best practice (Sherman et al, 1997) and criticised for diffusing a regressive and penal ‘common sense’ into hitherto enlightened European societies (Wacquant, 1990). But this universalism ignores the ‘double hermeneutic’, as evaluative criteria for ‘what works’ are subject both to the meanings which practitioners attribute to the ‘effectiveness’ of their actions and, in turn, the interpretation of these by the scientific community. This interpretative dimension suggests that, whilst policy rhetoric can be easily exported, the implementation of policy is always filtered by the specific political, economic and cultural contexts into which it is imported. To suggest, however, that such contexts effectively block the possibility and desirability of policy transfer is as implausible as the argument that criteria for what works and what doesn’t can simply be emulated from one locale to another. The question for intelligent policy transfer is how to differentiate those elemtns of criminological theory that are context dependent from those that can withstand translation across localities as diverse as those found within, as well as between, America and Europe. The powers of intelligent transfer and liabilities of naively emulating crime control policies are illustrated in this paper through reference to the formulation and implementation of the British Home Office’s Crime Reduction Programme.
Where We’re Headed: Predictions on the Future of Feminist Criminology and the Impact of the Division on Women and Crime
In light of the ASC Division on Women and Crime’s 20th Anniversary, I have been asked to speak on what the future may hold for us. This is a daunting task. While our future may be predicted by what we have accomplished thus far, it may also be foretold by our collective goals. Hence, I will report on the results of a survey administered to the DWC membership which asks each of us to articulate our future aspirations as scholars, activists, teachers, and members of the ASC, and to reflect upon how we may achieve these objectives in the years ahead. Based on these findings, as well as what we have accomplished thus far, I will offer some predictions on the future of feminist criminology as well as the impact of the DWC.
Who, What, Where, and Why: Meet the Editors
Editors from leading criminology journals discuss the history, philosophy, and goals of the publication process. Who makes the ultimate decision on publication? What types of articles are most likely to be published? Where should you send your articles? Why is the journal a good fit? This panel presents the audience with a unique opportunity to ask questions and engage in a “how to” and “why” discussion with the editors from Criminal Justice Review, Criminal Justice Studies, Criminology and Public Policy, Justice quarterly, Police Quarterly, The Prison Journal.
Who Are We?: What C.S.I. Teaches Us About Criminology
The resurgence in popular attention focused upon forensic studies is apparent in such diverse social arenas as television programming, the administration of justice, university hiring practices, and criminal justice enrollment. This interesting conjuncture of popular and public culture marks a strategic site for the exploration of criminology’s cultural translation. Employing television’s top-rated and most successful crime drama for three years running, this paper investigates how C.S.I.’s heightened attention to forensic methodologies, depictions of the scientific process, and centrality of the victim are characteristic of a significant turn in the public discussion of criminology, science, and truth. We then explore how the strength and pervasiveness of these depictions shape the way in which criminology is taught, perceived, and conducted.
Why Bother Connecticut? The State of Connecticut’s Experience With Capital Punishment
This paper is a critical analysis of Connecticut’s experiment with capital punishment from a retributivist perspective. Since 1976, Connecticut has given the death penalty to seven of its worst offenders — vicious individuals who were felt deserving to die. Michael Ross was convicted of raping and murdering four young women. Todd Rizzo was convicted of murdering a 13 year old boy with a sledgehammer because he wanted to see what killing someone felt like. Daniel Webb was convicted of kidnapping, attempted rape and murder of a 37 year old woman. Three of Connecticut’s seven death row inmates were convicted of their crimes in 1987 and 1989. A fourth inmate was convicted and sentenced to death in 1991 and a fifth in 1995. Four of the seven inmates have been sitting on death row for over thirteen years. Why? Capital punishment is said to serve two penological purposes — retribution and deterrence. If capital punishment, according to the Supreme Court, fails to meaningfully contribute to one or both of these goals it becomes “nothing more than the purposeless and needless imposition of pain and suffering and hence an unconstitutional punishment”. Connecticut has unsuccessfully satisfied either goal. Connecticut’s most vicious and callous offenders deserve to die, and the state has an obligation to carry out its duty in a timely fashion. Connecticut has spent millions of dollars on its experiment with capital punishment — to what end?
Why Do New Professions and Multivocational Networks Need Ethics? A Case of the Non-Consensual Medical Sedation of an Asylum Seeking Family
Professional ethical dilemmas are often complex and even more complex they are when work is carried out by a network comprised of representatives from different professions As an example we use a case from 2003 where a whole family of asylum seeking immigrants were sedated against their will in order to deport them from Finland. Two of the family members were children. The rejection of the family’s asylum application was in itself legal. However, The Council of Europe’s Anti-Torture Committee criticised the non-consensual medical sedation as a means to that deportation. The Committee emphasised that the administration of medication to persons subject to a deportation order must always be carried out on the basis of a medical decision and the persons concerned must be physically seen and examined by a medical doctor, which was not so in this case. The incident also created controversy in Finland. The leading authorities said that it was difficult to believe that this had happened. The newspaper with widest circulation, Helsingin Sanomat, regretted in its editorial that Finland, as a civilised country usually defending human rights, was now on the Anti-Torture Committee’s list. All the professionals involved justified their actions. The physician said that he believed that the Police, whose task it is to enforce law, could not ask for anything illegal. The nurse who gave the injections classically claimed to “only be doing what was ordered.” Conversely the police officers said that they had placed their trust in the expertise of the medical professions, including the legality of their actions. The conclusions from this case will be summarised in twelve theses of ethical principles concerning new professions and multivocational networks.
Will Words Ever Harm Me? Escalation From Verbal to Physical Abuse in 6th Grade Classrooms
The establishment of a positive sense of identity is one of the main developmental outcomes of adolescence. By playing the role of a mirror, peers are a major source of self-esteem regulation and evaluation for young adolescents as they go through the developmental stage of identity vs. role diffusion (Erickson, 1950). This fact makes young adolescents particularly sensitive and vulnerable to the criticism, ridicule, sarcasm, and verbal abuse of their peers, which may testify to their own inadequacy and worthlessness. Based on in-depth qualitative interviews, this study provides the opportunity to 145 sixth graders to tell in their own words how they feel and react when subjected to verbal and emotional abuse from classmates. Content analysis of these interviews used a constant comparative method. Findings indicate that students differentiated between verbally aggressive messages that were meant to be “for fun” from those that were not based on (1) contextual cues, (2) the reaction of the other peers present, and (2) malleability of the personal features that were the topic of the attack. When interpreted as not being for fun, verbally aggressive messages primed hostile thoughts, anger, and a desire for retaliation. Pronounced gender differences were found in the reasons provided for not acting upon such a desire, with girls being better able to rationalize away verbal abuse as a sign of their male classmates’ immaturity. However, when verbal provocation touched a permanent trait or characteristic that is an integral and indispensable part of the student’s sense of self and social identity, then gender differences disappear concerning the affective state of the students. Feelings of suffering, humiliation, and anger often justify escalation from verbal to physical aggression. The reaction of peers present during the provocation was found to play an important role in either reducing or escalating tension and resultant violence. Recommendations for practitioners are suggested.
Women of Color in Criminal Justice/Criminology Transitions: Classroom to Administration
In this short course, women of color present strategies for making the transition from the criminal justice/criminology classroom to administration. Topics to be covered include downward mobility, sense of identity, professional development, time management, and stressor reduction.
Women of Color in Criminal Justice/Criminology Transitions: Classroom to Administration
In this short course, women of color present strategies for making the transition from the criminal justice/criminology classroom to administration. Topics to be covered include opportunity to transition, prioritizing decision factors, learning curve, balancing collegial relationships (old and new), and understanding standards of performance.
Working With the National Incident-Based Reporting System: Developing a Typology of Aggravated Assaults
Research on homicides has shown that understanding the characteristics of a crime through the development of a typology can prove useful for defining intervention strategies and guiding policy decisions. The same principals apply to other crimes such as aggravated assault. However, the development of a clear typology requires incident level data. For homicides national incident level data has been available since the introduction of the Supplemental Homicide Reports in 1961. Until recently incident level data for one offense like aggravated assault has not been available at the national level. The FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) provides the incident level details necessary to develop a typology of aggravated assaults. The current project uses NIBRS data for the years 2000 and 2001 to develop a typology of aggravated assaults. The research has three objectives: 1) to demonstrate the utility of the FBI’s NIBRS data for incident level analysis, 2) to demonstrate the utility of the FBI’s NIBRS data for developing a typology of aggravated assault, and 3) use the typology of aggravated assaults for a discussion of the policy implications and intervention strategies.
Workshop on Using Blackboard 6.1 in the Classroom
This workshop will first provide an overview for those faculty considering a course management system. Then, we will specifically review the new features, tips and downsides of using Black Board 6.1. While participants will not be in hands-on laboratory setting, all workshop participants will be given a CD of workshop activities to use in their own courses.
Wrongful Conviction: Evidence From Oklahoma’s DNA Exonerations
Over the last several years as DNA has provided a new source of evidence to be considered by the court, capital punishment has come under significant scrutiny. Many of the court discussions and media coverage of wrongful convictions focus on specific cases and the consequence to the individual defendants. This situation serves to perpetuate an impression that wrongful convictions are isolated incidents resulting from uncommon circumstances. While acknowledging the individual impact to defendants, this research suggests that situations of wrongful conviction are not the isolated, atypical occurrences we are led to believe but rather they are the result of routine procedures in the criminal justice system. To understand the broader implications these processes have it is necessary to consider the source of wrongful conviction in an unrestricted, systemic way. Viewing error as an outgrowth of systematic processes entrenched in the organization and regularly relied upon to assure that justice is done places wrongful conviction at the heart of the struggle between due process and crime control. Focusing on this proposition, the nine instances of exoneration of actual innocents occurring in Oklahoma as a result of DNA testing will be used to document and evaluate the structural causes of wrongful conviction. Through reviews of news paper accounts, court records, trial transcripts and appeals rulings in each of these cases a pattern of error emerges which can be used to demonstrate the extent to which organizational processes lead to wrongful conviction.
Wrongful Felony Convictions in the United States
In the initial wake of the moratorium placed on executions in Illinois and the eventual commutation of Illinois death row inmates sentences, the subject of wrongful conviction has become more obvious in the public eye. However, there are identifiable cases of wrongful conviction that date back to the Salem witch trials. This project is a broad overview of the problem of wrongful felony convictions entailing extensive research (1) documenting the extent of the problem of wrongful felony convictions, (2) discovering the reasons why people are wrongfully convicted, and (3) finding ways in which the problem can be alleviated.
