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Virtual Life Sentences: An Exploratory Study, Jessica S. Henry, Christopher Salvatore, Bai-Eyse Pugh
Virtual Life Sentences: An Exploratory Study, Jessica S. Henry, Christopher Salvatore, Bai-Eyse Pugh
Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works
Virtual life sentences are sentences with a term of years that exceed an individual’s natural life expectancy. This exploratory study is one of the first to collect data that establish the existence, prevalence, and scope of virtual life sentences in state prisons in the United States. Initial data reveal that more than 31,000 people in 26 states are serving virtual life sentences for violent and nonviolent offenses, and suggest racial disparities in the distribution of these sentences. This study also presents potential policy implications and suggestions for future research.
Smoke But No Fire: When Innocent People Are Wrongly Convicted Of Crimes That Never Happened, Jessica S. Henry
Smoke But No Fire: When Innocent People Are Wrongly Convicted Of Crimes That Never Happened, Jessica S. Henry
Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works
Nearly one-third of exonerations involve the wrongful conviction of an innocent person for a crime that never actually happened, such as when the police plant drugs on an innocent person, a scorned lover invents a false accusation, or an expert mislabels a suicide as a murder. Despite the frequency with which no-crime convictions take place, little scholarship has been devoted to the subject. This Article seeks to fill that gap in the literature by exploring no-crime wrongful convictions as a discrete and unique phenomenon within the wrongful convictions universe. This Article considers three main factors that contribute to no-crime wrongful …
Exploring Places Of Street Drug Dealing In A Downtown Area In Brazil: An Analysis Of The Reliability Of Google Street View In International Criminological Research, Elenice De Souza Oliveira, Ko-Hsin Hsu
Exploring Places Of Street Drug Dealing In A Downtown Area In Brazil: An Analysis Of The Reliability Of Google Street View In International Criminological Research, Elenice De Souza Oliveira, Ko-Hsin Hsu
Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works
This study assesses the reliability of Google Street View (GSV) in auditing environmental features that help create hotbeds of drug dealing in Belo Horizonte, one of Brazil’s largest cities. Based on concepts of “crime generators” and “crime enablers,” a set of 40 items were selected using arrest data related to drug activities for the period between 2007 and 2011. These items served to develop a GSV data collection instrument used to observe features of 135 street segments that were identified as drug dealing hot spots in downtown Belo Horizonte. The study employs an intra-class correlation (ICC) statistics as a measure …