Digital Commons Network^™

Enhancing Community Policing: Exploring Formal Learning Experiences Among Urban Police Officers, Kyle Znamenak

Adult Education Research Conference

This ground theory study investigated the formal learning experiences that enable police officers to acquire knowledge and skills related to community relations in an urban environment.

Profiling Cybercriminals: Behavioral Analysis And Motivations Behind Cybercrime Activities, A'Shya Latrice Reynolds

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

The study of cybercriminal behavior and motivations is crucial for understanding and combating the evolving landscape of digital crime. This paper delves into the intricate realm of cybercrime profiling, employing a multidisciplinary approach to dissect the behavioral patterns and underlying motivations of cybercriminals. Drawing from psychology, sociology, and criminology, the research examines the intricate interplay of individual traits, social dynamics, and technological factors that shape cybercriminal activities.

Through analysis of case studies and research, this paper uncovers the diverse range of motivations driving individuals towards engaging in cybercrime. From financial gain and ideological extremism to thrill-seeking and revenge, cybercriminals exhibit …

Global Criminal Justice Practices And Public Safety, Rachel Hwang

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Popular political discourse in the U.S. assumes that more funding for law enforcement and prison facilities will make civilians safer, presumably by reducing crime and sense of disorder. However, studies have shown that the relationship between these factors may not be as straightforward. With the killing of George Floyd and increased media coverage of police brutality, existing literature focuses mainly on the relationship between police and crime in the U.S. The impact of incarceration (the result of procedural justice) on the community (for whom procedural justice exists) is less known, especially on a global scale. We argue that cycling people …

Problem Gambling, General-Strain Theory, And Gender, Michelle Malkin

International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking

Prior research identified a host of factors that increase the likelihood that an individual will become a problem gambler, most of which would be identified by criminologists as “strains” under the framework of General Strain Theory (GST). Yet, GST has not been widely used as a possible explanation for why people become problem gamblers. In addition, there has been little examination of how gender interacts with those variables to affect problem gambling. In this research, I display how propositions from GST provide a framework for understanding why people become problem gamblers and whether gender is a moderating factor in this …

Criminological Evaluation Of The Impact Of Pathological Ludomania To Gambling Among Nigerian Youths, George Nzeadi Duru Mr., Larry Okechukwu Awo Mr.

International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking

ABSTRACT

The study was designed to evaluate the effects of pathological ludomania to gambling on Nigerian youth. The study looked at how get-rich-quick mentality, access to gaming, and poverty can lead to gambling ludomania in young people. The Social Learning and Differential Association Theories were debated and chosen as the theoretical framework for the study. A questionnaire created to represent the study's research topics was utilized to collect the study's data. A structured questionnaire was sent to two hundred (200) respondents, who were chosen using a multi-stage sampling procedure. The data were analyzed using simple percentage, descriptive, and chi-square statistical …

Giglio Feds: The Void Of Ethical Leadership Within Federal Law Enforcement, Christopher J. Boosey

Helm's School of Government Conference - American Revival: Citizenship & Virtue

No abstract provided.

Sustainable, Accessible, Feasible, Effective (Safe) School Safety Planning: Educator Preparedness In Crisis Detection And Response, Katherine Fallon, Juliann Sergi Mcbrayer, Dawn Tysinger, Chad Posick, Mary Jo Carney

National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Conference

As incidents of school violence have hit the news media, school safety is of increasing interest to scholars and practitioners. Unfortunately, schools are ill-equipped to prevent violence and intervene when it occurs. This presentation will discuss how research can inform school readiness and public policy to prevent and intervene in violence.

Controlling Images: Black Male And Female Representations, Peyton Gindrow

Capstone Showcase

American culture has a very rich history that has shaped our society in the present day. One thing in history that has stayed with us throughout the years is racism. This phenomenon has had a big impact on our society throughout the years. And if it never came into existence, our world would be a much different place. Racism affects any and everything imaginable. It affects the way we see each other, communicate, and interact with each other. Slavery was a turning point for racism and it allowed for racism to flourish by dehumanizing people just because of the color …

Public Health Interventions For Children Of Incarcerated Parents, Daniel Bullman

GS4 Georgia Southern Student Scholars Symposium

The impact of social and structural determinants of health have lifelong consequences on an individual’s quality of life. Literature focusing on child health and wellbeing of incarcerated parents indicate significant negative health outcomes and adopted detrimental health behaviors. Using a systematic realist review, recent publications were reviewed for their potential discussion or recommendation for interventions in changing health outcomes. This review found that additional research is needed in identifying and testing potential interventions or determining if parallel public health initiatives have had positive impacts in promoting the health behavior change process for children and adolescents of incarcerated parents.

Reformation Within The Nation: Adapting The Nordic Rehabilitation And Reintegration Model To Positively Recondition The United States Criminal Justice System, Jessica Cornell

Helm's School of Government Conference - American Revival: Citizenship & Virtue

An analytical and statistical based comparison of criminal sentencing, incarceration, rehabilitation and reintegration in the United States of America to those of the five countries which follows those of the Nordic Criminal Justice System.

Policing Perspectives Of Human Trafficking, Joanne V. Silva

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

This study incorporates a criminological and feminist analysis of policing perspectives surrounding the power dynamics within human trafficking.

Why Does An Ex-Offender Reoffend?, Jacob Rybak

Symposium of Student Scholars

What leads an offender to go back to prison? This researcher has lived in the Georgia State prison system for 3.5 years. Using personal insights as well as analytics, this researcher analyzes Iowa state’s six-year data set tracking recidivism of released offenders and recommends changes to the prison system to address the analytical findings.

The Iowa recidivism data set includes the following information for all offenders: age group, type of release (parole vs different discharges), release year, original offense, and whether they recidivated. For the recidivating offenders, the data set includes the days to return to prison, the type of …

Employment And Recidivism: An Analysis Of A Faith-Based Reentry Program, Emily Friedman, Caitlin J. Steckley, Rachel Simmons

Showcase of Osprey Advancements in Research and Scholarship (SOARS)

Project of Merit Winner

Recently released criminal offenders are generally subjected to heavy stigma as they reenter society which is compounded by the general isolation that many feel upon release. Because of these difficulties, re-entry programs can be an effective, prosocial way for ex-offenders to reintegrate back into the community and workforce. This project was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of a local faith-based, non-profit re-entry program in Duval County between 2015 and 2019. Prisoners of Christ (POC) services both low and high-risk offenders through their employment assistance and residential housing programs. We conducted quantitative research on POC participants utilizing …

Mass Incarceration & Hiv Infection, Naya Young

Scholars Day Conference

HIV is a critical problem among the incarcerated population. As of 2014, African Americans disproportionately made up 2.3 million of the 6.8 million correctional population. People of the correctional population are more susceptible to a decrease of CD4 cells (cells that kill the HIV virus). African Americans are at an elevated risk of HIV vs. everyone else in the correctional population.

Sometimes A Joke Is Not Just A Joke: Examining The Role Of Humor On Police Officers’ Workplace Experiences, Rachael Rief

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Masculinity is pervasive in the field of policing, present in both the culture and organizational structure. As women continue to represent a low number of all sworn law enforcement officers, research has begun considering how culture and structural conditions interact with gender to affect women’s experiences in policing. This research suggests that many informal and formal practices in police culture, including the use of gendered jokes or sexist humor, work to exclude women and highlight the importance of gendered aspects of the job. However, little research has explored the extent to which humor and joking behavior explicitly interacts with women’s …

An Elite Squad?: Intimate Partner Violence Myths In "Law & Order: Special Victim Unit", Katelyn Ahern

Capstone Showcase

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is a long-running fictional crime drama centering on “an elite squad” (NBCUniversal 2019) of detectives. While the show touts a progressive image, it has been previously found to victim-blame, stereotype, and contain rape myths (Brinson 1992; Rader and Rhineberger-Dunn 2010; Rader, Rhineerger-Dunn, and Vasquez 2016). For the present study, I examined how intimate partner violence (IPV) myths are represented in episodes of Law & Order: SVU. I conceptualized IPV myths for use in this study using Peter’s (2008) Domestic Violence Myth Scale. It was found that characters on SVU overwhelmingly support myths more often …

Silenced Voices: Remedying The Historical Suppression Of Felons And The Black Vote, Isabel Tayag

Creative Activity and Research Day - CARD

The disenfranchisement of felons in the United States evolved from a historical precedent brought to the Americas during colonization. Our country adopted the political philosophy that shaped criminal voting laws around the country—criminals are unable to govern themselves and therefore unable to govern a country; their participation in our government would be danger to the purity of the ballot box. With rising racial tensions after Reconstruction, preserving the purity of the ballot box became a preservation of the white vote. This paper argues that felon disenfranchisement became a tool to further suppress African American after poll taxes, literacy tests, and …

Examining Sexual Victimization Among Male And Female Inmates, Sara Toto

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Sexual victimization can be damaging to victims, regardless of where it occurs. Yet, it is especially detrimental when such abuse occurs in the context of incarceration. The consequences of sexual violence occurring in prison are both immediate (i.e., physical pain and increased risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases) and long-term (i.e., mental health problems and reduced likelihood of successful reentry into society). Studies regarding the prevalence and predictors of such events in prisons are few. This research uses data collected on a sample of male and female prisoners to understand how often sexual perpetration and victimization occurs within prison.

Screen Culture: A Closer Look At The Impact Of Screen Use On Developmental Outcomes, Dylan Leslie, Joseph Schwartz Phd

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Excessive screen time among adolescents has long been considered a potential risk factor for a host of negative physical, mental and behavioral outcomes. There are important questions surrounding this association that remain unanswered. The temporal order of the association remains unestablished, as it is fully possible that preexisting physical, mental, and behavioral issues are causing excessive screen use. Similarly, selection bias remains possible, as influences that promote excessive screen use may also, simultaneously, impact negative physical health, mental health, and behavior. Finally, the developmental impact of increased screen time remains relatively unknown, as the majority of existing studies are exclusively …

Public Perceptions Of The Police: The Role Of Social Media, Ebonie Epinger

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Policing in the US has come under fire over the past few years due to highly publicized shootings of unarmed black citizens. These events have monopolized the media, which can potentially undermine their legitimacy in the public eye. Extant research has explored the traditional media- such as television news, crime dramas, and crime reality shows- on citizens’ attitudes toward the police, with decidedly mixed results. Given the rise of social media and concern of the potentially biased portrayal of police by such media sources, research is needed which can assess what, if any, effect social media has on individuals’ attitudes …

Demanding Accountability In Domestic Violence Courts, Johnna Pike

Violence Against Women conference

This presentation explores whether specialized domestic violence courts are achieving their stated objective of abuser accountability. Domestic violence emerged from the private realm of family life into the public consciousness during the 1970s. Since then, there has been a largely successful movement to reframe domestic violence as a “real” social problem necessitating meaningful criminal justice intervention. Within the criminal justice system, victim and feminist groups have mostly prevailed in controlling the discourse around domestic violence as a gender-based offense. As a result, a criminal court model aimed at empowering victims and at holding abusers accountable has emerged. However, the efficacy …

The Critical Need For Mental Health Education To Be Mandated In New Mexico's Public Schools, Bonnie L. Murphy

Shared Knowledge Conference

Based on a review of research and best practices in mental health awareness and skills, this inquiry project argues for state legislative policies that would require mental health awareness and skills in the K-12 curriculum. Mental health affects individual accomplishments in every stage of people’s lives beginning in early childhood and throughout the life cycle. Prevention and treatment of mental illness plays a key role in the ability of an individual to cope with loss and develop resiliency and perseverance in challenging times and to make better decisions that improve the individual’s life and the lives of those around them. …

Topical Analysis Of The Enron Emails Using Graph Theory, Casey Kalinowski

Student Scholar Showcase

The Enron Scandal of the early 2000s shook the financial world. The subsequent investigation of the Enron Corporation resulted in the arrests of many top-level executives, but are these employees the only ones responsible for the wide scale fraud in the company? A topical analysis of a social network of over 150 employees of the Enron Corporation using Graph Theory could result in new findings or prove that the investigators were correct in their original findings. The research is a retrospective analysis of a corpus of over 500,000 emails from more than 150 employees and top-level executives of the Enron …

Exploring Victim Precipitation In Internet Crimes Against Children, Bryce L. Coulter

Student Scholar Showcase

In the past decade, reports of online child sexual exploitation have significantly increased. The purpose of this study is to explore how Internet technology has influenced the family structure resulting in the increased vulnerability of juveniles. The Family Systems theory provides rationale as to how the nurturing relationship between juvenile and parent can be reversed. The conceptualized ‘role reversal’ is characterized by parents consistently seeking nurture from their child results in the neglecting of their own child’s development. A secondary data analysis of 356 online child sexual exploitation case files from 2007 to 2014 was utilized to explore victim precipitation …

The Identification And Prevention Of Insider Threats, Matthew D. Waters

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Insider threats, or attacks against a company from within, are a pressing issue both domestically and internationally. Frequencies of these threats increase each year adding to the overall importance of further research analysis. In fact, many case studies have been conducted which state that these employees who participate in insider attacks tend to exhibit certain personality and characteristic traits, as well as certain observable behaviors, that would indicate to other employees that an attack is imminent. It is hypothesized that companies will be able to take a more preventative stance of security as opposed to a reactive stance by identifying …

Childhood Factors And Incarceration For African American Men: How Early Life Community Experience Influences Adult Outcomes, Abigail Cobb

Research in the Capitol

There is a dearth of research that analyzes childhood influence on adult incarceration, and an associated lack of emphasis on the relationship between childhood poverty, lack of educational attainment, and family structure on criminality among African American men – a population wherein individuals are both incarcerated and generally socioeconomically disadvantaged at disproportionately higher rates. Consistent with the recent demand for criminal justice reform, the need for systematic research pertaining to tendencies in criminality has become apparent. Resulting from secondhand statistical data analysis on aggregate state factors such as childhood poverty rate, rate of single-parenthood, and high school drop out rate, …

License To Kill: Theoretical Critique Of “Stand Your Ground” Policies, Lonn Lanza-Kaduce, Andrea Davis

Center for the Study of Race & Race Relations: Lectures and Events

This paper extends themes from sociologist Austin Turk’s theory of normative-legal conflict to the Martin tragedy and Florida’s “Stand Your Ground Law” as a point of entry for examining more general theoretical notions about how legal and social statuses can combine in counterintuitive ways. His theory is premised on deference and the impact that different ways of structuring social interaction will have on the probabilities that conflict will become overt. In some contexts, the relationship between legal status and social status allow the potential for conflict to de-escalate. In others, the relationship aggravates the prospect for overt conflict. Because laws …

Broken Windows, Police, &Traffic Safety, Carol Servino

Graduate Research Symposium (GCUA) (2010 - 2017)

Abstract This research explores application of the “broken windows” theory of public disorder and urban decline to the pattern and problem of police officer fatalities in motor vehicle crashes. It contextualizes the influential theory into a 45-year timeline of significant events related to legislative efforts and traffic safety behavioral safety programs in the United States. It finds one police agency that reported fewer crimes and fewer crashes after implementing a community-wide Safe Streets program designed around “broken windows” theory in 1997. It pays particular attention to states with the highest percentages of law enforcement officer fatalities in motor vehicle crashes, …

Examining The Role Of Life Satisfaction And Negative Emotionality In A Social Disorganization Framework, Jeremy Waller, Timothy C. Hart

Graduate Research Symposium (GCUA) (2010 - 2017)

At the core of the social disorganization perspective is the notion that neighborhood structural factors (i.e., socio-economic status, residential mobility, racial heterogeneity, family disruption, and urbanization) disrupt a community’s ability to self-regulate, which in turn leads to crime and delinquency.

Exogenous neighborhood characteristics believed to be causally linked to crime and delinquency are consistently derived from official Census data and endogenous community characteristics are typically measured from self-reported surveys.

The body of literature supporting the social disorganization explanation of criminogenic places is growing and supports the idea that neighborhood structural determinants of crime influence residents’ feelings of social capital and …

Assessing The Impact Of Police-Order-Maintenance Teams On Crime: An Application Of The ‘Broken Windows’ Hypothesis, Steven A. Pace, William Sousa, Dan Mcgrath

Graduate Research Symposium (GCUA) (2010 - 2017)

High levels of violent crime and disorder characterize certain neighborhoods of northwest Las Vegas. In April 2009, collaboration between academics and police personnel announced the deployment of a police order-maintenance unit designed to reduce minor and major offenses in these areas. Drawing on the Broken Windows hypothesis, the unit combined a detailed crime analysis with extensive police efforts to address specific community problems. This paper discusses the implementation and impact of the police order-maintenance unit during its operation.