Law and Psychology Commons^™

Social-Ecological And Protective Factor Approach To Managing Parental Incarceration, Jacquelyn Harris

Dissertations

Mass imprisonment does not only impact the incarcerated individual; it also affects approximately five million children in the United States. Researchers identified and compare the impact of parental incarceration on child development. They acknowledged the protective factors across the lifecycle from a social-ecological perspective and specifically related to parental incarceration. The comprehensive literature review inspired an innovative model, the social-ecological and protective factor approach to managing parental incarceration. The primary goal of this model is to combat the detrimental effects of parental incarceration by identifying protective factors across the lifecycle and throughout the microsystem, mesosystem, and exosystem. This model is ...

Felony Disenfranchisement: Factors Relating To Support For Restoration, Alexis K. Karpf

Student Theses

Felony Disenfranchisement, a collateral consequence, strips justice-involved individuals of their voting rights. While this policy is enacted in 48 states and the District of Columbia, a majority of community members are unaware of its existence. The current study used three hypotheses to guide its research about how education about disenfranchisement policy impacts a community member's opinion:1) Participants exposed to information about the effects of disenfranchisement will be more supportive of enfranchisement than those in the control condition; 2) Participants who receive the vignette featuring the White justice-involved individual will indicate a higher level of support for enfranchisement compared ...

Pre-Report Review Of Body-Worn Camera Footage: An Examination Of Stakeholder Beliefs, Laypeople’S Judgments Of Officer Credibility, And The Consequences For Memory, Kristyn A. Jones

All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Aim: This dissertation examines people’s beliefs about police officer access to body-worn camera footage, people’s judgments of officer credibility as it relates to video footage, and the consequences that review of footage has on reporting accuracy.

Rationale: With escalating police-civilian tensions in 2014, American police departments adopted body-worn camera programs. A majority of departments have policies allowing officers unrestricted access to camera footage. Because officers fear that inconsistencies between reports and videos could result in suspicion of officer deceit, they argue that officers should have access to footage before writing their reports to ensure reports match the footage ...

Indoctrination And Social Influence As A Defense To Crime: Are We Responsible For Who We Are?, Paul H. Robinson, Lindsay Holcomb

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

A patriotic POW is brainwashed by his North Korean captors into refusing repatriation and undertaking treasonous anti-American propaganda for the communist regime. Despite the general abhorrence of treason in time of war, the American public opposes criminal liability for such indoctrinated soldiers, yet existing criminal law provides no defense or mitigation because, at the time of the offense, the indoctrinated offender suffers no cognitive or control dysfunction, no mental or emotional impairment, and no external or internal compulsion. Rather, he was acting purely in the exercise of free of will, albeit based upon beliefs and values that he had not ...

Young Children's Ability To Describe Intermediate Clothing Placement, Breanne E. Wylie, Stacia N. Stolzenberg, Kelly Mcwilliams, Angela Evans, Thomas D. Lyon

University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series

Children’s ability to adequately describe clothing placement is essential to evaluating their allegations of sexual abuse. Intermediate clothing placement (partially removed clothing) may be difficult for young children to describe, requiring more detailed explanations to indicate the location of clothing (e.g., the clothes were pulled down to the knees). The current study investigated 172 3- to 6-year-olds’ descriptions of clothing placement when responding to commonly used questions (yes/no, forced-choice, open-choice, where), as well as children’s on-off response tendencies when describing intermediate placement (i.e.., labeling the clothing as fully on or off). Results revealed that "where ...

Youtube Is Unsafe For Children: Youtube's Safeguards And The Current Legal Framework Are Inadequate To Protect Children From Disturbing Content, Heather Wilson

Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental & Innovation Law

For America’s children, the amount of screen time they consume has not changed much over the years. Children under eight have steadily spent about two hours a day in front of a screen, with those under age two averaging 42 minutes a day. Children from low-income families spend roughly an hour and forty minutes longer in front of a screen. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, screen time should be limited to two hours a day for children ages two to five; whereas, for those youngest children—under two years—they recommend zero screen time.

While the average ...

The Use Of Digital Millenium Copyright Act To Stifle Speech Through Non-Copyright Related Takedowns, Miller Freeman

Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental & Innovation Law

In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This law provided new methods of protecting copyright in online media. These protections shift the normal judicial process that would stop the publication of infringing materials to private actors: the online platforms. As a result, online platforms receive notices of infringement and issue takedowns of allegedly copyrighted works without the judicial process which normally considers the purpose of the original notice of infringement. In at least one case, discussed in detail below, this has resulted in a notice and takedown against an individual for reasons not related to the purpose of ...

Ordinary People And The Rationalization Of Wrongdoing, Janice Nadler

Michigan Law Review

Review of Yuval Feldman's The Law of Good People: Challenging States' Ability to Regulate Human Behavior.

America’S Second-Class Children: An Examination Of President Trump’S Immigration Policies On Migrant Children And Inquiry On Justice Through The Catholic Perspective, Gabriel Sáenz

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming.

Not Your Average Summer Camp: Children In Immigration Detention, Cindy Izquierdo

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming.

Lessons Learned, Lessons Offered: Creating A Domestic Violence Drug Court, Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez, Dr. Stacy Speedlin Gonzalez

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming.

Discounting Credibility: Doubting The Stories Of Women Survivors Of Sexual Harassment, Deborah Epstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For decades, federal and state laws have prohibited sexual harassment on the job; despite this fact, extraordinarily high rates of gender-based workplace harassment still permeate virtually every sector of the American workforce. Public awareness of the seriousness and scope of the problem increased astronomically in the wake of the #MeToo movement, as women began to publicly share countless stories of harassment and abuse. In 2015, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace published an important study analyzing a wide range of factors contributing to this phenomenon. But the study devotes only ...

Trauma-Informed Advocacy: Learning To Empathize With Unspeakable Horrors, Susan Ayres

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

During the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh as associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, Christine Blasey Ford testified regarding an alleged sexual assault by Kavanaugh that had occurred thirty-five years earlier. Although some viewed Blasey Ford’s testimony as a doomed repeat of Anita Hill’s testimony during the hearings on the nomination of Clarence Thomas, one significant difference was that the Kavanaugh hearings demonstrated an increased public awareness of the impacts of trauma. And just as senators hired a prosecutor trained in trauma-informed lawyering to question Blasey Ford, today’s lawyers must ...

The Adversarial Mindset, Dan Simon, Minwoo Ahn, Douglas M. Stenstrom, Stephen J. Read

University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series

Many social outcomes are reached by means of competitions between opposing actors. While the positive effects of competition are beyond dispute, this paper contends that competitive situations also trigger a particular psychological mindset that can distort contestants’ judgment and lead to suboptimal courses of action. The paper presents a theoretical framework that consists of a myside bias, by which people adopt a self-serving view of the competition, evaluate themselves favorably, and evaluate their counterpart unfavorably. The framework also proposes the construct of otherside bias, by which people impute to their counterparts distortions that are similar, but opposite, to their own ...

Modern-Day Witch Hunts: How The Mental Health Industry Abuses Patients And The Judiciary While Committing Fraud, Joan L. Roberts Mrs.

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

Recognizing The Need For Mental Health Reform In The Texas Department Of Criminal Justice, Kara Mchorse

St. Mary's Law Journal

The ways in which mental health care and the criminal justice system interact are in desperate need of reform in Texas. The rate of mental illness in Texas is higher than the current state of mental health care can provide for. While state hospitals were once the primary care facilities of those with mental illness, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) has taken on that role in the last few decades; and when the criminal justice system becomes entangled with mental health care, it often leads to “unmitigated disaster.” If Texas continues to allow the TDCJ to act as ...

Non-Traditional Church Involvement As A Life-Course Turning Point: Qualitative Interviews With Religious Offenders, William Hunter Holt

Dissertations

This research project conducted and then analyzed qualitative interviews from former and current addicts and criminal offenders who are voluntarily participating in the Christian faith at the same non-traditional, Protestant church. An abridged case study of this church is also provided for background and context. Life-course theory and grounded theory are utilized.

Both the offenders and this church were chosen in an attempt to better understand how the offenders’ involvement at this house of worship, along with their faith in general, have impacted them. Obtaining the perspectives of the offender is essential for three reasons. First, qualitative research conducted in ...

Public Opinions Of Unmanned Aerial Technologies In 2014 To 2019: A Technical And Descriptive Report, Lisa M. Pytlikzillig, Janell C. Walther, Carrick Detweiler, Sebastian Elbaum, Adam Houston

Lisa PytlikZillig Publications

The primary purpose of this report is to provide a descriptive and technical summary of the results from similar surveys administered in fall 2014 (n = 576), 2015 (n = 301), 2016 (ns = 1946 and 2089), and 2018 (n = 1050) and summer 2019 (n = 1300). In order to explore a variety of factors that may impact public perceptions of unmanned aerial technologies (UATs), we conducted survey experiments over time. These experiments randomly varied the terminology (drone, aerial robot, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), unmanned aerial system (UAS)) used to describe the technology, the purposes of the technology (for economic, environmental, or security goals ...

Setting The Ground Rules: Use And Practice Of Ground Rules In Child Forensic Interviews, Melanie Fessinger, Kelly Mcwilliams, Faizun N. Bakth, Thomas D. Lyon

University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series

Most child forensic interviewing protocols recommend that interviewers administer a series of ground rules to emphasize concepts that are important to accurately answering interview questions. Limited research has examined whether interviewers follow ground rules recommendations in real-world forensic interviews. In this study, we examined how often highly trained interviewers presented and practiced each of the recommended ground rules. We also examined whether children accurately responded to practice questions. We coded transcripts from 241 forensic interviews of 4- to 12-year-old children conducted by interviewers in the United States who were largely trained using the Ten Step Investigative Interview (Lyon, 2014). Results ...

Justifying Bad Deals, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

In the past decade, psychological and behavioral studies have found that individual commitment to contracts persists beyond personal relationships and traditional promises. Even take-it-or-leave it consumer contracts get substantial deference from consumers — even when the terms are unenforceable, even when the assent is procedurally compromised, and even when the drafter is an impersonal commercial actor. Indeed, there is mounting evidence that people import the morality of promise into situations that might otherwise be described as predatory, exploitative, or coercive. The purpose of this Article is to propose a framework for understanding what seems to be widespread acceptance of regulation via ...