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A Longitudinal Analysis Of The Impact Of Child Custody Loss On Drug Use And Crime Among A Sample Of African American Mothers, Kathi L. H. Harp, Carrie B. Oser

Health Management and Policy Faculty Publications

This study examines the influence of child custody loss on drug use and crime among a sample of African American mothers. Two types of custody loss are examined: informal custody loss (child living apart from mother but courts not involved), and official loss (child removed from mother’s care by authorities).

Methods—Using data from 339 African American women, longitudinal random coefficient models analyzed the effects of each type of custody loss on subsequent drug use and crime.

Results—Results indicated that both informal and official custody loss predicted increased drug use, and informal loss predicted increased criminal involvement. Findings demonstrate …

Criminalizing Pregnancy, Cortney E. Lollar

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The state of Tennessee arrested a woman two days after she gave birth and charged her with assault of her newborn child based on her use of narcotics during her pregnancy. Tennessee's 2014 assault statute was the first to explicitly criminalize the use of drugs by a pregnant woman. But this law, along with others like it being considered by legislatures across the country, is only the most recent manifestation of a long history of using criminal law to punish poor mothers and mothers of color for their behavior while pregnant. The purported motivation for such laws is the harm …

It's Time: A Meta-Analysis On The Self-Control-Deviance Link, Alexander T. Vazsonyi, Jakub Mikuška, Erin L. Kelley

Family Sciences Faculty Publications

Purpose
The current meta-analysis examines the link between self-control and measures of crime and deviance, taking stock of the empirical status of self-control theory and focusing on work published between 2000 and 2010.

Methods
A total of 796 studies were reviewed for inclusion/exclusion criteria and yielded a final study sample of 99 studies (88 cross-sectional and 19 longitudinal effect sizes, analyzed separately). Random effects mean correlations between self-control and deviance were analyzed for cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, respectively. Publication bias was assessed using multiple methods.

Results
A random effects mean correlation between self-control and deviance was M_r = 0.415 …

Examining The Strain-Crime Relationship Among African American Women: An Empirical Test Of Agnew's General Strain Theory, Nathan Lowe

Theses and Dissertations--Sociology

Agnew’s (1992; 2006) general strain theory (GST) has become one of the foremost theories to explain crime in contemporary criminology. While it has undergone several empirical tests over the years, there remain many understudied aspects of the theory. The current study addresses some of these aspects by longitudinally exploring the relationship between multiple types of strain and drug and non-drug crime among a sample of African American women.

Data for this study were collected as part of a larger study on how drug use and criminality are related to health disparities, particularly HIV, and service utilization among African American drug-using …

Decisions To Prosecute Battered Women's Homicide Cases: An Exploratory Study, Sarah N. Welling, Diane Follingstad, M. Jill Rogers, Frances Jillian Priesmeyer

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Discretionary decisions to prosecute cases in which a battered woman kills her partner were investigated using several research strategies and targeting a range of case elements. Law students presented with case elements reported they would consider legal elements over nonlegal (or ‘supplemental’) elements when making a decision to prosecute. In contrast, law students assessed through an open-ended format as to important case factors for deciding to prosecute spontaneously generated high proportions of supplemental case elements compared with legal factors. Vignette comparisons of 42 case elements on participants’ likelihood to prosecute identified salient factors including legal and supplemental variables. Themes from …

Moral Judgments & International Crimes: The Disutility Of Desert, Andrew K. Woods

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The international criminal regime exhibits many retributive features, but scholars and practitioners rarely defend the regime in purely retributive terms—that is, by reference to the inherent value of punishing the guilty. Instead, they defend it on the consequentialist grounds that it produces the best policy outcomes, such as deterrence, conflict resolution, and reconciliation. These scholars and practitioners implicitly adopt a behavioral theory known as the "utility of desert," a theory about the usefulness of appealing to people's retributive intuitions. That theory has been critically examined in domestic criminal scholarship but practically ignored in international criminal law.

This Article fills this …

Turning Jails Into Prisons—Collateral Damage From Kentucky's War On Crime, Robert G. Lawson

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The primary purpose of this article is to scrutinize Kentucky's ever-increasing reliance on local jails for the incarceration of state prisoners. This objective cannot be achieved without an examination of the problems that compel counties and cities to allow (and even encourage) the state to capture their jails for this use. The first half of the article (Parts I-IV) provides general information about jails (including some pertinent history), contains a detailed description of jail functions (including some that have descended upon jails by default), and concludes with a discussion of what the state has done over two decades to convert …

Difficult Times In Kentucky Corrections—Aftershocks Of A "Tough On Crime" Philosophy, Robert G. Lawson

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The objective of this article is to cast some light on corrections system problems brought on by elevated (and possibly unnecessary) levels of incarceration, and especially on problems that trouble the Kentucky corrections system and threaten to undermine the effectiveness of the state's justice system. Part II describes how the country came to embrace sentencing policies and practices capable of producing "a penal system of a severity unmatched in the Western world.” Part III describes Kentucky's embrace of equally harsh sentencing policies and practices and the inmate population explosion that has occurred as a direct result of those policies and …

Perjury! The Charges And The Defenses, Richard H. Underwood

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Perjury is the most hotly debated topic in America today. In this witty and instructive article, the author explains what constitutes the crime of perjury, provides examples of how defendants have sometimes avoided conviction, and discusses the impact of federal and state statutes on prosecutors, defendants, witnesses, the judiciary, the legislature, and society.

Money Laundering And Lawyers, Eugene R. Gaetke, Sarah N. Welling

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The federal government has recently enacted money laundering laws to track and discourage the use of money generated by crime. Because some of that money is used to pay legal fees, the laws have a direct impact on lawyers. The laws increase the risk of prosecution for lawyers, inhibit some methods of fee payment, and make some cases less attractive financially. Generally, the laws make law practice more complicated and risky.

The laws have been criticized for their impact on criminal defense lawyers. Critics have raised three broad objections. The first objection is constitutional. Critics have also objected to the …

Victim Participation In Plea Bargains, Sarah N. Welling

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

There is a trend in the criminal law today to focus on the rights of victims. This trend has been manifested in actions by legislatures, courts, the President of the United States and others. Various programs have been implemented to ameliorate the crime victim's experience. For example, many states now provide compensation for victims, and victim/witness assistance programs have sprung up around the country. It has also been suggested that the victim's lot should be improved by granting them a right to participate in the prosecution of the defendant. This article examines whether victims should be accorded a right to …

Kentucky Law Survey: Criminal Procedure, William H. Fortune

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This Survey covers significant criminal procedure decisions of the Kentucky appellate courts for the period July 1, 1980, to July 1, 1982. It does not include cases construing the penal code or noteworthy decisions in the Kentucky law of evidence. The author has selected the most important criminal procedure cases for treatment in the text; a number of significant cases are summarized in footnotes.

Financial Screening In Criminal Cases—Impractical And Irrelevant, William H. Fortune

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In 1970 Chief Justice Burger, commenting on the work of the ABA Advisory Committee, compared the criminal justice system to a three-legged stool, one leg the judge, the second leg the prosecution, and the third leg the defense lawyer: "We concluded very quickly that that third leg in this context was as essential as the third leg of a stool. We have not quite said it ought to be jurisdictional that you have three parts to this enterprise but we have come very, very close to it." It is time to admit the overriding social need for attorney representation and …

Sentencing: The Use Of Psychiatric Information And Presentence Reports, Rutheford B. Campbell Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

It has become apparent that the two disciplines of law and psychiatry have a common "interface" in the field of criminal justice. Commentators generally agree that the administration of criminal justice is greatly aided by psychiatrists and psychiatric data. That is not to say, however, that the meeting of the disciplines has been without incident or misunderstanding. Problems have arisen because of divergent attitudes and goals of the professions. Some commentators say that the concerns of the two disciplines are not the same; others claim that much of the problem lies in the over-estimation of the certainty and reliability of …