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Public Policy

2014

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Articles 1 - 14 of 14

Full-Text Articles in Criminology

Federal Civil Rights Litigation Pursuant To 42 U.S.C. §1983 As A Correlate Of Police Misconduct, Philip M. Stinson, Steven L. Brewer Jr, Theresa M. Lanese, Mallorie A. Wilson Nov 2014

Federal Civil Rights Litigation Pursuant To 42 U.S.C. §1983 As A Correlate Of Police Misconduct, Philip M. Stinson, Steven L. Brewer Jr, Theresa M. Lanese, Mallorie A. Wilson

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

Police officers acting in their official capacity are subject to being sued in federal court pursuant to 42 U.S.C. §1983 for violating constitutional rights under the color of law. Using data obtained in a larger study on police crime in the United States, names of more than 5,500 nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers who were arrested during the years 2005-2011 were checked against the civil case party master name index of the federal courts’ Public Access to Courts Electronic Records (PACER) system. Findings indicate that more than 20% of the police officers who were arrested for committing one or more …


Federal Civil Rights Litigation Pursuant To 42 U.S.C. §1983 As A Correlate Of Police Misconduct, Philip M. Stinson, Steven L. Brewer Jr, Theresa M. Lanese, Mallorie A. Wilson Nov 2014

Federal Civil Rights Litigation Pursuant To 42 U.S.C. §1983 As A Correlate Of Police Misconduct, Philip M. Stinson, Steven L. Brewer Jr, Theresa M. Lanese, Mallorie A. Wilson

Philip M Stinson

Police officers acting in their official capacity are subject to being sued in federal court pursuant to 42 U.S.C. §1983 for violating constitutional rights under the color of law. Using data obtained in a larger study on police crime in the United States, names of more than 5,500 nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers who were arrested during the years 2005-2011 were checked against the civil case party master name index of the federal courts’ Public Access to Courts Electronic Records (PACER) system. Findings indicate that more than 20% of the police officers who were arrested for committing one or more …


Program Evaluation Of The Federal Reentry Court In The Eastern District Of Pennsylvania: Report On Program Effectiveness For The First 164 Reentry Court Participants, Caitlin J. Taylor Nov 2014

Program Evaluation Of The Federal Reentry Court In The Eastern District Of Pennsylvania: Report On Program Effectiveness For The First 164 Reentry Court Participants, Caitlin J. Taylor

Sociology and Criminal Justice Faculty work

This report describes the latest evaluation of the Supervision to Aid Reentry (STAR) program (hereafter referred to as Reentry Court). The success of the Reentry Court is assessed by comparing the first 164 Reentry Court participants to a group of similarly situated individuals under supervised release. Comparisons between the two groups are analyzed in services offered or received, sanctions imposed, employment status, supervision revocation and new arrests in the 18 months following prison release.


Is Burglary A Violent Crime? An Empirical Investigation Of Classifying Burglary As A Violent Felony And Its Statutory Implications, Phillip Kopp Oct 2014

Is Burglary A Violent Crime? An Empirical Investigation Of Classifying Burglary As A Violent Felony And Its Statutory Implications, Phillip Kopp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Under the common law, burglary is defined as a crime committed against the property of another, and is listed as a property offense for purposes of statistical description by the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). However, burglary is prosecuted and sentenced as a violent crime under habitual offender laws at the federal level, and can be regarded as violent in state law, depending on varied circumstances. Using a mixed methods approach, the current study compared state and federal burglary and habitual offender statutes to an empirical description of the offense. First, a comprehensive content …


Putting The Microscope On Crime Labs: The Effects Of Evidence Complexity And Laboratory Type On Jurors' Perceptions Of Forensic Evidence, Miliaikeala S.J. Heen Aug 2014

Putting The Microscope On Crime Labs: The Effects Of Evidence Complexity And Laboratory Type On Jurors' Perceptions Of Forensic Evidence, Miliaikeala S.J. Heen

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

An experiment was conducted to test the effects of evidence complexity and laboratory type on jurors' perceptions of forensic evidence. The study specifically focused on three types of labs: public labs, private labs, and "corporate labs." Public labs are managed by a federal, state, or local law enforcement agency, where evidence is usually analyzed internally at an agency. Private labs are those that have been formed as private businesses to provide services to federal, state, and local crime labs with overflow work. Corporate labs are managed by major retail corporations, and primarily service the needs of their store businesses, but …


The War On Drugs In The American States: Variations In Sentencing Policies Over Time, Katherine Anna Neill Jul 2014

The War On Drugs In The American States: Variations In Sentencing Policies Over Time, Katherine Anna Neill

School of Public Service Theses & Dissertations

Since the 1970s US drug policy has focused on harsh punishments for drug offenders. A wealth of research indicates that the social and political context of the drug policy discourse is a greater factor in determining drug policy than rising rates of drug use or drug-related crime. While considerable research has examined the factors driving federal drug policy, fewer studies have examined drug policy at the state level. This dissertation studies state drug sentencing policy to determine what factors may explain variation across states. By focusing on the period from 1975 to 2002, this study concentrates on policies passed during …


Home Foreclosures And Neighborhood Crime Dynamics, Sonya Williams, George Galster, Nandita Verma Apr 2014

Home Foreclosures And Neighborhood Crime Dynamics, Sonya Williams, George Galster, Nandita Verma

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

We advance scholarship related to home foreclosures and neighborhood crime by employing Granger causality tests and multilevel growth modeling with annual data from Chicago neighborhoods over the 1998-2009 period. We find that completed foreclosures temporally lead property crime and not vice versa. More completed foreclosures during a year both increase the level of property crime and slow its decline subsequently. This relationship is strongest in higher-income, predominantly renter-occupied neighborhoods, contrary to the conventional wisdom. We did not find unambiguous, uni-directional causation in the case of violent crime and when filed foreclosures were analyzed.


Your Friends And Neighbors: Localized Economic Development And Criminal Activity, Matthew Freedman, Emily Owens Mar 2014

Your Friends And Neighbors: Localized Economic Development And Criminal Activity, Matthew Freedman, Emily Owens

Matthew Freedman

We exploit a sudden shock to demand for a subset of low-wage workers generated by the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) program in San Antonio, Texas to identify the effects of localized economic development on crime. We use a difference-in-difference methodology that takes advantage of variation in BRAC’s impact over time and across neighborhoods. We find that appropriative criminal behavior increases in neighborhoods where a fraction of residents experienced increases in earnings. This effect is driven by residents who were unlikely to be BRAC beneficiaries, implying that criminal opportunities are important in explaining patterns of crime.

Forthcoming in the …


Book Review: Policing And The Poetics Of Everyday Life., Rodger E. Broome Phd Feb 2014

Book Review: Policing And The Poetics Of Everyday Life., Rodger E. Broome Phd

Rodger E. Broome

Policing and the poetics of everyday life. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008. 256 pp. ISBN 978-0-252-03371-1 (cloth). $42.00. Policing and the Poetics of Everyday Life is a hermeneutical-aesthetic analysis within a human scientific approach of modern policing in the United States. It is an important study of police-citizen encounters informed by hermeneutic aesthetic thought and the author’s professional experience as a veteran with a Seattle area police department in Washington, USA.


Forfeiture Of Illegal Gains, Attempts And Implied Risk Preferences, Jonathan Klick, Murat C. Mungan Jan 2014

Forfeiture Of Illegal Gains, Attempts And Implied Risk Preferences, Jonathan Klick, Murat C. Mungan

All Faculty Scholarship

In the law enforcement literature there is a presumption—supported by some experimental and econometric evidence—that criminals are more responsive to increases in the certainty than the severity of punishment. Under a general set of assumptions, this implies that criminals are risk seeking. We show that this implication is no longer valid when forfeiture of illegal gains and the possibility of unsuccessful attempts are considered. Therefore, when drawing inferences concerning offenders’ attitudes toward risk based on their responses to various punishment schemes, special attention must be paid to whether and to what extent offenders’ illegal gains can be forfeited and whether …


Agent-Based Simulation Of Mass Shootings: Determining How To Limit The Scale Of A Tragedy, Roy Hayes, Reginald Hayes Jan 2014

Agent-Based Simulation Of Mass Shootings: Determining How To Limit The Scale Of A Tragedy, Roy Hayes, Reginald Hayes

VMASC Publications

An agent-based simulation was created to examine key parameters in mass shootings. The goal of the simulation was to examine the potential effectiveness of Senator Dianne Feinstein's (D-Calif.) assault weapons and high-capacity magazines bill. Based on the analysis, the proposed law would have a negligible effect on the number of people shot during mass shootings. The assault weapons portion of the proposed bill will have no effect on the number of people killed or wounded in a mass shooting. The assault weapons ban does not seek to decrease the rate of fire of any firearm. Of the parameters tested a …


An Empirical Study Of Appointed Counsel Effectiveness In Jury Trials, James Patrick Hall Jan 2014

An Empirical Study Of Appointed Counsel Effectiveness In Jury Trials, James Patrick Hall

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Anecdotal evidence supports the belief among indigent individuals who are assigned defense counsel that they would be better represented by privately retained counsel. This perspective jeopardizes attorney effectiveness by reducing communication and trust between the attorney and client. Research on the effectiveness of counsel is sparse. The purpose of this quantitative study was to bridge this gap in knowledge by comparing the effectiveness of privately retained and publicly appointed counsel between 2008 and 2013, both before and after the imposition of state-wide compensation limitations on publicly appointed defense counsel. The theoretical framework was Stuntz's theory, which stresses that one part …


Gideon And The Effective Assistance Of Counsel: The Rhetoric And The Reality, David Rudovsky Jan 2014

Gideon And The Effective Assistance Of Counsel: The Rhetoric And The Reality, David Rudovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

There is general agreement that the “promise” of Gideon has been systematically denied to large numbers of criminal defendants. In some cases, no counsel is provided; in many others, excessive caseloads and lack of resources prevent appointed counsel from providing effective assistance. Public defenders are forced to violate their ethical obligations by excessive case assignments that make it impossible for them to practice law in accordance with professional standards, to say nothing of Sixth Amendment commands. This worsening situation is caused by the failure of governmental bodies to properly fund indigent defense services and by the refusal of courts to …


Exploring The Effects Of Ex-Prisoner Reentry On Structural Factors In Disorganized Communities: Implications For Leadership Practice, G. Michael Davis Jan 2014

Exploring The Effects Of Ex-Prisoner Reentry On Structural Factors In Disorganized Communities: Implications For Leadership Practice, G. Michael Davis

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

The purpose of this study is to explore the way(s) in which the disproportionate return of ex-prisoners to socially and economically disadvantaged communities impact(s) specific community structural factors identified in the study. After three decades of withstanding the enduring effects of the mass incarceration, communities stand at the edge of a new era. Economic realities, and the failure of policies designed to deter crime through imprisonment are rapidly ushering in an era of mass prisoner reentry. The complexity of the challenges surrounding the successful integration of offenders to communities requires a new leadership paradigm for justice leaders. This study posits …