Digital Commons Network^™

Past And Present Of The Cvs: Empirical Research And Evidence-Based Policy, Kevin T. Wolff

Publications and Research

In this keynote address, I emphasized the critical role of accurate crime measurement in developing evidence-based policies. I discussed the "dark figure of crime," highlighting how many crimes go unreported, and stressed the importance of victimization surveys in uncovering these hidden crimes to provide a more complete picture of criminal activity.

I also explored how technological advancements, particularly AI, are transforming how we collect and analyze crime data. While AI offers significant benefits in predictive policing and resource allocation, I cautioned about the risks of bias and privacy issues that must be managed carefully.

Regional collaboration, standardization, and inclusivity are …

Helping The Helpers: The Role Of Organizational Support And Peer Influence On Police Officer Receptivity To Employee Assistance Programs, Kenneth Quick

Publications and Research

Purpose – This study aims to investigate critical differences between police officer willingness to use and recommend an employee assistance program (EAP) to a peer, including the relationship between officer perceptions of macro-level organizational support and micro-level EAP support.

Design/methodology/approach – A survey of 213 police officers from a large, urban police department in the Northeast United States of America is used to evaluate the relationship between officer perceptions of the EAP and the officers’ willingness to use and recommend the EAP to peers. Generalized linear regression models are used to evaluate the moderating effect of perceived organizational support (POS) …

Technology In The Security Sector: Mexico, Vanessa J. Gutierrez, Melina Ponte, Angiee Rosario, Arleen Castillo, Henry Saldarriaga, Hector Tejeda, Stephanie Reich, Rosemary Barberet

Publications and Research

The use of technology in policing seeks to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the daily duties police officers may encounter. However, there is mixed empirical data on the use of technology and if it is really contributing to the institutional goals of the security sector, or, if it is contributing to other factors. This report provides an exploratory approach to understanding what information technology is being used in Mexico at the state level, in order to compare where broader application of information technology could make impactful contributions to the security situation in the country.

With a focus on six …

Sex Is As Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity (Preface And Introduction), Paisley Currah

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Restorative Relationships And 'Radical Help': Reimagining Welfare-To-Work Beyond The Market-Family Divide, Lynn D. Lu

Publications and Research

The unprecedented global lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the extreme vulnerability of “essential” yet underpaid workers, the vast inequality between the wealthy and the less fortunate, and the bottomless pit facing those without a social safety net. While the crisis has laid bare the near-universality of human susceptibility to disease and unemployment in a world in which few can safely work, it has also highlighted the disproportionate precarity experienced by low-wage and contingent workers, people of color, and non-citizens. Well before the pandemic, rampant socioeconomic and racial inequality, high underemployment and concentration of wealth, and technological advances …

Decarcerating New York City: Lessons From A Pandemic, Nicole Smith Futrell

Publications and Research

Over the last decade, long before the far-reaching impact of COVID-19, the criminal legal system in New York City was on a meandering path toward decarceration. Set against the national backdrop of declining crime rates and a reckoning with the economic, social, and racial costs of mass criminalization and incarceration, elected officials in New York City and State had finally acknowledged that a shift toward reducing the number of people held in New York City jails was long overdue. Sweeping legislative reforms to bail, discovery, and speedy trial statutes, as well as the planned closure of Rikers Island, the city’s …

The Internet Never Forgets: Image-Based Sexual Abuse And The Workplace, John Schriner, Melody Lee Rood

Publications and Research

Image-based sexual abuse (IBSA), commonly known as revenge pornography, is a type of cyberharassment that often results in detrimental effects to an individual's career and livelihood. Although there exists valuable research concerning cyberharassment in the workplace generally, there is little written about specifically IBSA and the workplace. This chapter examines current academic research on IBSA, the issues with defining this type of abuse, victim blaming, workplace policy, and challenges to victim-survivors' redress. The authors explore monetary motivation for websites that host revenge pornography and unpack how the dark web presents new challenges to seeking justice. Additionally, this chapter presents recommendations …

The Bar Exam And The Covid-19 Pandemic: The Need For Immediate Action, Claudia Angelos, Sara J. Berman, Mary Lu Bilek, Carol L. Chomsky, Andrea A. Curcio, Marsha Griggs, Joan W. Howarth, Eileen Kaufman, Deborah Jones Merritt, Patricia E. Salkin, Judith Welch Wegner

Publications and Research

The novel coronavirus COVID-19 has profoundly disrupted life in the United States. Among other challenges, jurisdictions are unlikely to be able to administer the July 2020 bar exam in the usual manner. It is essential, however, to continue licensing new lawyers. Those lawyers are necessary to meet current needs in the legal system. Equally important, the demand for legal services will skyrocket during and after this pandemic. We cannot close doors to the profession at a time when client demand will reach an all-time high.

In this brief policy paper, we outline six licensing options for jurisdictions to consider for …

Improving Law Enforcement’S Victim-Centric Responses To Sexual Assault: Global Best Practice Catalog, Ayesha Ashraf, Sebastián Galleguillos Agurto, Frederick Geyer, Kamela Gjoka, Jasmine Hwang, Stanley Montinat, Jessica Moor, Pierre Reyes, Tara Ventimiglia, Hongda Xu

Publications and Research

This catalog was compiled as part of a U.S. State Department Diplomacy Lab Project entitled “Improving Law Enforcement’s Victim-Centric Responses to Sexual Assault,” in fall semester of 2019, for American Citizens Services, US Embassy Bangkok. It is intended to cover best practices in law enforcement response to sexual assault across the globe, including laws, policies and programs.Ten multilingual graduate students in the capstone seminar of the Master of Arts Degree Program in International Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) established criteria for inclusion and standardized elements for each entry in this catalog. The ultimate aim …

Please Tweet Responsibly: The Social And Professional Ethics Of Public Defenders Using Client Information In Social Media Advocacy, Nicole Smith Futrell

Publications and Research

Every day the criminal legal system hauls poor and marginalized individuals through a process wrought with trauma, indignity, and abuse. Public defenders representing the criminally accused view their clients and the system from a unique vantage point: they bear witness to the human costs of a system that falls far short of its purported norms and ideals. For the public defender who works within this reality day in and day out, fighting for each individual client might feel limited in its wider impact. Some public defenders have found that using online and social media platforms, such as Twitter, to provide …

Visibly (Un)Just: The Optics Of Grand Jury Secrecy And Police Violence, Nicole Smith Futrell

Publications and Research

Police violence has become more visible to the public through racial justice activism and social justice advocates’ use of technology. Yet, the heightened visibility of policing has had limited impact on transparency and accountability in the legal process, particularly when a grand jury is empaneled to determine whether to issue an indictment in a case of police violence. When a grand jury decides not to indict, the requirement of grand jury secrecy prevents public disclosure of the testimony, witnesses, and evidence presented to the grand jury. Grand jury secrecy leaves those who have seen and experienced the act of police …

Something Old, Something New: Historicizing Same-Sex Marriage Within Ongoing Struggles Over African Marriage In South Africa, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

This article examines contemporary struggles over same-sex marriage in the daily lives of black lesbian- and gay-identified South Africans. Based primarily on 21 in-depth interviews with such South Africans drawn from a larger project on post-apartheid South African marriage, the author argues that their current struggles for relationship recognition share much in common with contemporaneous struggles of their heterosexual counterparts, and that these commonalities reflect ongoing tensions between more extended-family and more dyadic understandings of African marriage. The increasing influence of dyadic understandings of marriage, and of associated ideals of romantic love, has helped inspire same-sex marriage claims and, in …

Emancipatory Learning, Open Educational Resources, Open Education, And Digital Critical Participatory Action Research, Jason Leggett, Jay Wen, Anthony Chatman

Publications and Research

Given that we must prepare students for the future workforce today how can we use the power of Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Digital Social Science research to improve student learning and help students develop technical skills needed for the high-tech workforce? In this article, we use transformative learning theory (Mezirow, 1978) and Digital + Critical Participatory Action Research (D+CPAR) to analyze the effectiveness of integrating OERs into a course and reflect on how we used OERs to support student learning and make civic engagement more equitable at an urban community college. In a criminal justice course analyzing the legal …

Introduction: For Better Or For Worse? Relational Landscapes In The Time Of Same-Sex Marriage, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

As same-sex marriage has become a legal reality in a rapidly growing list of countries, the time has come to assess what this means for families and relationships on the ground. Many scholars have already begun to examine how marriage is helping some same-sex couples, but in this introduction I call for a broader and more critical research agenda. In particular, I argue that same-sex marriage crystallizes a key tension surrounding families and relationships in many contemporary societies. On the one hand, strict family norms are relaxing in many places, allowing more people to form more diverse types of caring …

Very Long Engagements: The Persistent Authority Of Bridewealth In A Post-Apartheid South African Community, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

This article examines the persistent authority of the customary practice for forming recognized marriages in many South African communities, centered on bridewealth and called “lobola.” Marriage rates have sharply fallen in South Africa, and many South Africans blame this on the difficulty of completing lobola amid intense economic strife. Using in-depth qualitative research from a village in KwaZulu-Natal, where lobola demands are the country’s highest and marriage rates its lowest, I argue that lobola’s authority survives because lay actors, and especially women, have innovated new repertoires of lobola behavior that allow them to pursue emerging needs and desires for marriage …

The Law Code Of Hammurabi: Transliterated And Literally Translated From Its Early Classical Arabic Language, Saad D. Abulhab

Publications and Research

This book, which includes new translations of the old Babylonian laws of Hammurabi, is the second book by the author examining, from a historical Arabic linguistic perspective, a major Akkadian document. The first book offered new translations of three tablets from a literary work, the Epic of Gilgamesh, written in a late Babylonian language. The pioneering methodology used by the author to decipher the ancient Mesopotamian texts in both documents involves the primary utilization of old etymological Arabic manuscripts written by hundreds of accomplished scholars more than a thousand years ago. Using this methodology does not only provide more accurate, …

Sending A Dear John Letter: Public Information Campaigns And The Movement To “End Demand” For Prostitution In Atlanta, Ga, Samantha Majic

Publications and Research

This paper examines “Dear John”, a public information campaign that ran from 2006–2008 in Atlanta, GA, to ask what narrative it conveys about commercial sex and those who engage in it, in order to understand the gendered (and other) discursive constructions it produces, reflects, and complicates about these activities and subjects. Drawing from both policy and sex work/trafficking scholarship, this paper argues that Dear John used symbolic images and direct and consequential text to convey a “male demand” narrative, which holds that men’s demand for sexual services harms girls and young women and will not be tolerated. Yet, in so …

You Learn What You Live: Prevalence Of Childhood Adversity In The Lives Of Juveniles Arrested For Sexual Offenses, Jill S. Levenson, Michael Baglivio, Kevin T. Wolff, Nathan Epps, William Royall, Katherine C. Gomez, Dahlia Kaplan

Publications and Research

Social workers often find themselves working with children or adolescents who have been victims of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), including youths who have ended up in the juvenile justice system. Childhood trauma has been linked to negative health, mental health, and behavioral outcomes across the lifespan. The aim of this study was to examine the prevalence rates of child maltreatment and household dysfunction in the lives of juveniles who have been arrested for sexual offenses (JSO; n = 6,549). ACE prevalence rates for JSOs were compared by gender to juveniles arrested for other crimes, to adults arrested for sexual offenses, …

State Reform And Respect For The Rights Of The Disabled People: A Reflection On The Olmstead Decision The Case Of New York State, Roseanne L. Flores

Publications and Research

Individuals with serious mental illness are often forced to live in institutional settings which limit their freedom and rights to become fully integrated into the community. The Olmstead v. L.C., 527 U.S. 581 (1999) decision ruled that states must provide individuals with disabilities the opportunity to live in the most integrated settings based on their needs. Since that time several lawsuits have been filed on behalf of individuals with disabilities against states for failing to comply with the Olmstead decision. New York State is one such state. The purpose of this paper is to describe the lawsuit which was brought …

Masquerading Sanity: Crimes, Violence And Victimization On The Internet, Heath Grant, Cathryn Lavery

Publications and Research

The world of cybercrime has transformed significantly over the past ten or twenty years. Early concerns focused on the vulnerability of the financial industry, including the crimes of identity theft and hacking. However, in recent years, cybercrime has evolved to include crimes of harassment, child pornography, rape, “cyberterrorism” and even murder. This work examines an emerging form of violent crime involving the internet: Social Media Victim Targeting Networks (SVTN). The anonymity and limited available law enforcement on social media sites leaves predators with a large pool of vulnerable victims provide predators a new way to display and strengthen their criminological …

Traversing The Triangulum: The Intersection Of Tobacco, Legalised Marijuana And Electronic Vaporisers In Denver, Colorado, Emily Anne Mcdonald, Lucy Popova, Pamela M. Ling

Publications and Research

Objective: To explore the intersection of tobacco, legalised marijuana and electronic vaporiser use among young adults in the ‘natural laboratory’ of Colorado, the first state with legalised retail marijuana.

Methods: We conducted semistructured interviews with 32 young adults (18–26 years old) in Denver, Colorado, in 2015 to understand the beliefs and practices related to the use of tobacco, marijuana and vaporisers.

Results: We found ambiguity about whether the phrase ‘to smoke’ refers to the use of tobacco or marijuana products. Smoking marijuana blunts (emptied cigarillo or tobacco wrap filled with marijuana) was common, but few interpreted this as tobacco use. …

New Approaches To Data-Driven Civilian Oversight Of Law Enforcement: An Introduction To The Second Nacole/Cjpr Special Issue, Daniel L. Stageman, Nicole M. Napolitano, Brian Buchner

Publications and Research

In April of 2016, National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement (NACOLE) and John Jay College partnered to sponsor the Academic Symposium “Building Public Trust: Generating Evidence to Enhance Police Accountability and Legitimacy.” This essay introduces the Criminal Justice Policy Review Special Issue featuring peer-reviewed, empirical research papers first presented at the Symposium. We provide context for the Symposium in relation to contemporary national discourse on police accountability and legitimacy. In addition, we review each of the papers presented at the Symposium, and provide in-depth reviews of each of the manuscripts included in the Special Issue.

Early Warning/Intervention Systems (Presentation Slides From Nacole Symposium 2016 Held At John Jay College), Jennifer Helsby, Samuel Carton, Kenneth Joseph, Ayesha Mahmud, Youngsoo Park, Joe Walsh, Lauren Haynes

Publications and Research

Adverse interactions between police and the public harm police legitimacy and produce high costs due to harms to both officers and the public as well as litigation. Early intervention systems (EIS) that flag officers considered most likely to be involved in one of these adverse situations are an important tool for police supervision and for targeting of interventions such as counseling or training. However, the EIS that exist are often not data-driven and are based on supervior intuition. We have developed a prototype data-driven EIS that uses a diverse set of data sources from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department and machine …

Unmanned Arial Systems (Uas) In The Local Public Safety Environment: A Review, Hiram Taylor, Blount-Hill Blount-Hill, Charles R. Jennings

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

South African Marriage In Policy And Practice: A Dynamic Story, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

Law forms one of the major structural contexts within which family lives play out, yet the precise dynamics connecting these two foundational institutions are still poorly understood. This article attempts to help bridge this gap by applying sociolegal concepts to empirical findings about state law's role in family, and especially in marriage, drawn from across several decades and disciplines of South Africanist scholarly research. I sketch the broad outlines of a nuanced theoretical approach for analysing the law-family relationship, which insists that the relationship entails a contingent and dynamic interplay between relatively powerful regulating institutions and relatively powerless regulated populations. …

Iraqi Women Confronting Isil: Protecting Women’S Rights In The Context Of Conflict, Lisa Davis

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Costs Of "Broken Windows" Policing: Twenty Years And Counting, K. Babe Howell

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Forecasting The Senate Vote On The Supreme Court Vacancy, Scott J. Basinger, Maxwell Mak

Publications and Research

This paper forecasts current senators’ votes on Merrick Garland’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, in the unlikely case that a vote actually takes place. The forecasts are necessarily conditional, awaiting measurement of the nominee’s characteristics. Nonetheless, a model that combines parameters estimated from existing data with values of some measurable characteristics of senators—particularly their party affiliations, party loyalty levels, and ideological positions—is sufficient to identify potential swing voters in the Senate. By accounting for a more nuanced and refined understanding of the confirmation process, our model reveals that if President Obama were to nominate almost any nominee (conservative or …

Deaths Due To Use Of Lethal Force By Law Enforcement: Findings From The National Violent Death Reporting System, 17 U.S. States, 2009–2012, Sarah Degue, Katherine A. Fowler, Cynthia Calkins

Publications and Research

Introduction: Several high-profile cases in the U.S. have drawn public attention to the use of lethal force by law enforcement (LE), yet research on such fatalities is limited. Using data from a public health surveillance system, this study examined the characteristics and circumstances of these violent deaths to inform prevention.

Methods: All fatalities (N¼812) resulting from use of lethal force by on-duty LE from 2009 to 2012 in 17 U.S. states were examined using National Violent Death Reporting System data. Case narratives were coded for additional incident circumstances.

Results: Victims were majority white (52%) but disproportionately black (32%) with a …

Immigration Federalism As Ideology: Lessons From The States, Lina Newton

Publications and Research

Over the last decade states passed hundreds of immigration bills covering a range of policy areas. This article considers the recent state legislative surge against scholarly treatments of immigration federalism, and identifies the symbolic politics in state lawmaking. The analysis combines a historical treatment of key court decisions that delineated boundaries of state and federal immigration roles with a legislative analysis of over 2200 immigration bills passed between 2006 and 2013, to identify the numerous ways in which national immigration policy shapes state measures. It argues that recent laws must be considered against symbolic federalism which privileges state sovereignty and …