Criminology Commons^™

Crime And Precaution, Allen Gnanam

Allen Gnanam

Precautionary logic and risk assessments can be associated with counter terrorism, criminal profiling, and the management of high risk individuals/ groups. Overall, risk precautionary logic and risk assessments can be framed using the Ban-opticon concept identified by Bigo, though panopitic elements do exist when discussing concepts of surveillance. The Ban opticon framework has 3 major concepts: (a) Criminal profiling, (b) the management of movement and (c) exceptionalism.

Both precautionary logic and risk assessments are associated with the profiling of harms and threats, the management of individual or group movement, and both are used to provide qualitative and quantitative rationale for …

Understanding Deviant Behaviors Through Coercion And Social Support Theory, Maria Nicte-Ha Uribe

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Mark Colvin, Francis T. Cullen and Thomas Vander Ven (2002) developed an integrated theory of crime called "coercion, social support, and crime" which hypothesizes that coercion and social support are inversely related and that these variables have direct effects on criminal and deviant behavior as well as a combined effect. Specifically if an imbalance between coercion and social support exists, crime is more likely to occur because coercion induces weak social bonds and low self control thereby increasing crime. On the other hand, social support prevents criminal involvement through organized networks of human relations that assist people in meeting their …

Restoration But Also More Justice, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

This short essay replies to Erik Luna's endorsement of restorative justice. He is right that the goal of healing victims, defendants, and their families is important but all too often neglected by substantive criminal law and procedure, which is far too state-centered and impersonal. The problem with restorative justice is that too often it seeks to sweep away punishment as barbaric and downplays the need for deterrence and incapacitation as well. In short, restorative justice deserves more of a role in American criminal justice. Shorn of its political baggage and reflexive hostility to punishment, restorative justice has much to teach …

The Pace Of International Criminal Justice, Jean Galbraith

All Faculty Scholarship

This article examines how long international criminal cases take in practice. It considers the cases of all 305 individuals charged at six international and hybrid criminal tribunals (as of shortly before this article's publication). Contrary to the conventional wisdom, on average today’s international criminal cases do not take much longer than comparably complex domestic criminal cases, once the defendants are in custody. Nonetheless, international criminal cases may take too long to achieve the goal of helping to reconcile the affected communities – particularly where a community has abruptly transitioned from an abusive old regime to an entirely new one. Where …

Modeling Peer Influence And Peer Selection As Processes, Bob Edward Vasquez

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Behavioral scientists are aware of the strong and persistent correlation between peer and individual behavior. Evidence suggests selection and socialization effects explain the correlation, but the processes, or the details of the ways in which these effects operate in an empirical model, remain relatively unexamined.

Impulsivity, Offending, And The Neighborhood : Investigating The Person-Context Nexus, Gregory M. Zimmerman

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

A key assumption of the traditional trait-based approach to the study of crime is that personality traits cause people to act similarly across a wide array of contexts. This approach has been challenged for its failure to acknowledge differences in the social environments to which individuals are exposed. Similarly, community-level explanations of crime have been criticized for failing to acknowledge that there are important individual differences between criminals and non-criminals. Ultimately, a full understanding of crime requires the consideration of both individual and environmental differences, perhaps most importantly because they may interact to produce offending behavior. In particular, the influence …

Pleading Guilty For Life : An Exploration Of Plea Bargaining In The Face Of Death, Susan Ehrhard

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation explores decision making and the process of plea bargaining in aggravated murder cases. The study focuses on the extent to which, if any, the death penalty acts as a bargaining tool, inducing guilty pleas to sentences that would otherwise not be accepted, were the death penalty upon conviction at trial not a possibility. The role of the death penalty in this process is an important consideration and one that raises significant implications concerning the human and financial costs of capital punishment. Interviews with prosecutors and defense attorneys in a state where the maximum punishment for murder is death …

Treatment Process In Youth Residential Treatment Centers (Rtcs) : The Congruence Of Youth's Treatment Climate Perceptions And Treatment Interventions, And Its Impact On Treatment Outcomes, Yufan Huang

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation research focuses on clients' perceptions of treatment climate in youth's residential treatment centers (RTCs). It explores how clients perceive the treatment environment differently and the impact of these climate perceptions and the other key treatment process component--the treatment interventions/services, on both in- and post-program treatment outcomes. An important hypothesis of "treatment congruence" is tested, in which treatment is expected to be more effective when these climate perceptions are congruent with treatment interventions/services in their effects on client. Data come from a longitudinal pilot study of 130 youth and families from two RTCs, with detailed measures of their treatment …

Infected Justice : The Impact Of Hiv/Aids On The Police In Anglo-Phone Sub-Saharan Africa, Nathan Carl Meehan

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Sub-Saharan Africa is an epicenter of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This disease is affecting nearly every aspect of society in this region. This disease destroys individuals, strains family structures, weakens economies, burdens health systems, and can destabilize entire countries. The police are also being affected by HIV/AIDS. The way in which this disease impacts police organizations in sub-Saharan Africa is understudied. This project sought to estimate the HIV/AIDS impacts on police organizations in Anglo-phone sub-Sahara by utilizing the available literature on how HIV/AIDS affects military, civil service, healthcare, and education organizations in these same countries. It also attempts to identify the …

Officers' Perceptions And Experiences With Citizen Disrespect : A Cross-National Analysis, William Christopher Pizio

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Although a body of research exists examining the influence of citizen disrespect on police decision making and use of force, that research is limited in its capacity to appropriately conceptualize citizen disrespect. In fact, little is known about the verbal and nonverbal behaviors that for officers signify disrespect - in the United States and abroad. Utilizing survey data from officers in a mid-sized city police department in the United States and the London Metropolitan Police, this research seeks to understand the breadth of behaviors that officers find disrespectful, to discover how often officers perceive that they are experiencing disrespectful citizens, …

Optimization Of The Microprecipitation Procedure For Nuclear Forensics Applications, Lyndsey Renee Kelly

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Microprecipitation has become one of the most widely used sample preparation techniques for alpha spectroscopy. Many factors during the precipitation process can affect the yield and energy resolution by adding unwanted mass to the sample. Current applications in nuclear forensics call for an optimization of energy resolution and yield in order to improve identification and quantify specific radionuclides. The purpose of this research is to determine the optimal parameters used for microprecipitation. The optimal solution temperature, precipitation time, carrier amount, and hydrofluoric acid amount are used to investigate the influence of varying the type of carrier, as well as, the …

Prosecuting Domestic Violence: A Philosophical Analysis, Michelle Dempsey

Michelle Madden Dempsey

The main question which motivates the inquiry undertaken in this book is: what should public prosecutors do when victims withdraw support for domestic violence prosecutions? The answer defended herein can be summarized as follows: within the realm of justified (permissible) action, prosecutors should respond effectively; which is to say that, ceteris paribus, domestic-violence prosecutors should respond as feminists. This claim is intended as a provocative formulation of the proposition that domestic violence prosecutors should act for reasons generated by the value of reconstituting their states (and communities) as less patriarchal. This book defends that claim in two steps: first, it …

A Sheltered Life: Observations On A Domestic Violence Shelter, Angela Moe

Angela M. Moe

No abstract provided.

Theoretical And Contextual Predictors Of Perceptions Of Criminal Justice Agents Among Juvenile Offenders, David May, Daniel Phillips, Elissa Johnson

David May

No abstract provided.

Induction And Deduction In Criminal Profiling, Wayne Petherick

Wayne Petherick

Extract:

Literature on criminal profiling has reached a considerable volume, including not only a quantity of true crime works but also numerous scholarly texts and articles. The casual reader will be familiar with some aspects of profiling, with the more discerning reader being familiar with the steps involved in the profiling process (Holmes & Holmes, 2002; Ressler, Burgess, & Douglas, 1988; Turvey, 2008), the so-called "inputs" and "outputs" of a criminal profile (Davis, 1999, Egger, 1999; Geberth, 1996; Ressler & Burgess, 1985; Ressler et al., 1988), and the personality and grandiosity of profilers (see a variety of memoirs, such as …

Examining Theoretical Predicators Of Substance Use Among A Sample Of Incarcerated Youth, David May, Kelly Cooper, Irina Soderstrom, G. Jarjoura

David May

A wide variety of theoretical perspectives have been found to have an association with substance abuse. Most of these studies use data from samples of public school students and thus capture only part of the youth population. Using data from approximately 800 delinquents incarcerated in a Midwestern state, we examine the association between attitudes about drug and alcohol use and use of drugs and four theoretical perspectives: nonsocial reinforcement theory, social learning theory, social control theory, and strain theory. Our findings suggest that nonsocial reinforcement is the best predictor of both preference for and use of illegal substances among this …

An Evaluation Of The Rational Choice Theory In Criminology, Serdar Kenan Gul

Serdar Kenan Gul

Rational choice theory is an approach used by social scientists to understand human behavior. This approach has long been the dominant paradigm in economics, but in recent decades it has become more widely used in other disciplines. It is basically about how incentives and constraints affect behavior. This article discusses rational choice theory in criminology. This study provides the basic assumptions of the rational choice approach, and then evaluates this approach by giving several examples of its use. The first example is about rational choice model of illegal sales of tobacco products to underage youths, which places a strong emphasis …

The First Dime: A Decade Of Convict Criminology, Richard S. Jones, Jeffrey Ian Ross Ph.D., Stephen C. Richards, Daniel S. Murphy

Jeffrey Ian Ross Ph.D.

No abstract provided.

That Was Then, This Is Now, What About Tomorrow? Future Directions In State Crime Research, Dawn L. Rothe Ph.D., Jeffrey Ian Ross Ph.D., Christopher W. Mullins`, David Friedrichs, Raymond Michalowski, Gregg Barak

Jeffrey Ian Ross Ph.D.

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Special Issue On State Crime, Jeffrey Ian Ross Ph.D., Dawn L. Rothe

Jeffrey Ian Ross Ph.D.

No abstract provided.

Internet Scallywags: A Comparative Analysis Of Multiple Forms And Measurements Of Digital Piracy, Whitney Decamp

Whitney DeCamp