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Criminal Justice Update - March 2025, Mia Agudelo

Criminal Justice Updates

The Criminal Justice Update is a monthly newsletter created by the Adams County Bar Foundation Fellow providing updates in criminal justice policy coming from Pennsylvania's courts and legislature as well as the US Supreme Court.

Contents:

• Updates from PA Governor's Office (no updates this month)
• Updates from the PA Legislature (no updates this month)
• Updates from the Courts
• U.S. Supreme Court: Criminal Law & Procedure
• PA Supreme Court: Criminal Law & Procedure
• PA Superior Court: Criminal Law & Procedure

The Moderating Effect Of Empathy On The Relationship Between Psychological Reactance And Intimate Partner Violence Perpetration, Victoria Anne Rukus

Doctoral Dissertations

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is a phenomenon found across cultures, genders, and sexualities. Those who are victimized are more likely to experience negative health and psychological outcomes than those who have not and are also at an increased risk for becoming perpetrators themselves. This has resulted in a significant need to identify the risk factors associated with perpetrators, so cycles of violence can be broken and violence can be prevented. Previous research has utilized a predominately feminist perspective to understand IPV perpetration risk factors and has focused predominately on exclusively male samples. Additional research is needed to develop a broader …

[Whm] Women's History Month 2025, Raquel Estrada, William Flores

Library Display Posters

Poster showcasing films and books pertaining to women's history month. As well as a curated list of articles and dissertations/theses found in our institutional repository.

Overcoming Challenges And Unlocking Potential In Police Training Programs: The Case Of Blue Courage, Ryan E. Spohn

Reports

The Blue Courage website provides the mission of their agency: “The Blue Courage mission is to illuminate a path forward so that we ignite transformation in the individuals and organizations that we engage through our ground-breaking educational and consulting services. Transformation occurs with the small, consistent, incremental changes that amplify and reset current benchmarks of performance. Capacity continuously grows by enhancing our ability to execute, experience, and understand practical applications and tools that can be effectively used to ritualize capacity building practices — both professionally and personally.”

This noble mission reflects the dominate philosophies behind their law enforcement training program1 …

Women Residential Substance Use Treatment Program: A Quantitative Study Measuring Treatment Perceptions And Spiritual Experience Across Multiple Demographics., Michelle Davidson

Doctor of Social Work Capstone Projects

ABSTRACT

WOMEN RESIDENTIAL SUBSTANCE USE TREATMENT PROGRAM: A QUANTITATIVE STUDY MEASURING TREATMENT PERCEPTIONS AND SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE ACROSS MULTIPLE DEMOGRAPHICS

Michelle Davidson, LCSW

March 24, 2025

Substance use disorders (SUD) present complex challenges that necessitate comprehensive and personalized treatment approaches, particularly for women. Historically, SUD treatments have been predominantly driven by male treatment approaches, often neglecting the unique needs and experiences of women. This cross-sectional quantitative survey study explores the relationship between the variables of client treatment perceptions and spiritual experiences among women in residential treatment for their SUDs. This study utilizes the Treatment Perception Survey and Spiritual Experience Index-Revised to …

Adjudication Under Cover: Compliance And Inequality In The Criminal Courts, Mary Ellen Stitt

School of Criminal Justice Faculty Scholarship

State agencies tasked with governing poverty often aim to improve individuals’ social conditions by transforming their conduct. From welfare offices to prison reentry programs, those agencies work to compel behavioral changes by making the receipt of aid—or punishment— contingent on individuals’ compliance with requirements like appearances for regular appointments and negative drug test results. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a court-mandated therapeutic program, this study shows how “compliance” with standard behavioral requirements is constructed around health, financial resources, and institutional trust, with the result that the most vulnerable people are systematically marked as noncompliant and channeled towardmore punitive interventions. This …

Individual Liberty, Safety And Police Liabilities Under The Mental Health (Care And Treatment) Act, Gary Kok Yew Chan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

How should a society strike a balance between the objective of ensuring safety from dangers that may be posed by individuals believed to have a mental disorder and the deprivation of their liberty? How should police officers discharge their duties in apprehending such individuals with a view to conveying them to a medical practitioner at a psychiatric institution? These legal issues took centrestage in the Singapore High Court decision of Mah Kiat Seng v Attorney-General in which the apprehended individual brought claims in false imprisonment against a police officer. The decision examined the underlying purposes of the Singapore Mental Health …

Reassurance And Resolve: Enhancing U.S. Extended Deterrence Credibility In Europe, Andrew Ornduff

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

In the modern international security environment, extended deterrence and assurance remain critical components to the deterrence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO’s) competitors and threats. Within this organization, the United States plays a crucial role as the major nuclear power that supplies extended nuclear deterrence to its NATO allies. To enhance the credibility of its extended deterrence commitments, the U.S. practices various forms of assurance for its allies. This paper examines the extended deterrence relationships between the U.S. and France, Germany, and Estonia. It analyzes what assurance tools and strategies have been advantageous, disadvantageous, or irrelevant to the credibility …

Healthcare Workers' Level Of Comfort Screening For Intimate Partner Violence: Exploring Facilitators And Barriers., Latasha Richard, Seana Golder

Doctor of Social Work Capstone Projects

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is a public health issue that affects over 10 million people annually. Healthcare workers can be the first point of contact for patients experiencing IPV and screening practices are essential to identify those patients. This study aims to explore facilitators and barriers to healthcare workers screening for IPV. This cross-sectional research study was comprised of physicians, nurses, and social workers (n=39) from a Level 1 Trauma Center in Louisville, KY. An online survey was used to recruit participants and gain insight into screening practices that serve as facilitators or barriers. The results indicate that screening practices …

Conviction, Incarceration, And Recidivism: Understanding The Revolving Door, John Eric Humphries, Aurélie Ouss, Kamelia Stavreva, Megan Stevenson, Winnie Van Dijk

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Noncarceral conviction is a common outcome of criminal court cases: for every individual incarcerated, there are approximately three who were recently convicted but not sentenced to prison or jail. We extend the binary-treatment judge IV framework to settings with multiple treatments and use it to study the consequences of noncarceral conviction. We outline assumptions under which widely-used 2SLS regressions recover margin-specific treatment effects, relate these assumptions to models of judge decision-making, and derive an expression that provides intuition about the direction and magnitude of asymptotic bias when a key assumption on judge decision-making is not met. We find that noncarceral …

Are Descriptive Representatives More Successful Passing Group-Relevant Legislation? The Case Of Native American State Legislators, Elise Blasingame, Eric R. Hansen, Richard C. Witmer

Political Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Descriptive representatives often sponsor legislation that advances their groups’ policy interests, but it remains unclear how successful they are passing such legislation. Colleagues might defer and support group-relevant measures from descriptive representatives, perceiving them to have greater expertise and legitimate claims to address the issues than outgroup members. However, colleagues might also oppose those measures in an act of backlash against those groups (especially historically marginalized groups) making new claims on the political system. To answer the question of descriptive representative success, we review 3,401 pieces of legislation related to Native American issues introduced at the state level between 2010 …

Explaining Police Officer Intentions To Leave Their Career Field, Michael T. Rossler, Charles Scheer

Faculty Publications - Criminal Justice Sciences

Research examining police officer retention has generally relied upon general work environment predictors to explain intentions to leave a police career. Recent research has applied theory explaining departures as a multistep process, where job satisfaction and stress mediate the relationship between work conditions and leaving the profession. These prior inquiries have been methodologically limited in the number of predictors and agencies included. The current inquiry uses a survey of eight police agencies to test the conceptual framework that job satisfaction and stress mediate the relationship between workplace environment and intentions to leave policing. Findings indicate that many commonly theorized predictors …

Book Review When Rape Goes Viral: Youth And Sexual Assault In The Digital Age By Anna Gjika, Mary Frederick

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Is #Metoo Dead? Thoughts On The 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, Jody Raphael

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Feminists For Sex-Based Rights: Trump Or Harris In The 2024 Election?, Kara Dansky

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

Some US feminists who support sex-based rights for women and girls voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 US presidential election; others voted for Kamala Harris. For an American feminist to vote for a female Democrat for president is not surprising. Still, because the Democrats embraced “gender identity” at the expense of women and girls as a sex class, some feminists chose to vote for Donald Trump. This article explores some reasons for voting one way or the other (or not at all).

Examining The Relationship Between Police Officers’ Characteristics And Police Shootings, Denise D. Brown

Dissertations (2016-Present)

Police deviance, specifically police shootings, has been an ongoing issue and topic of discussion. Prior research has primarily focused on victim characteristics such as age, race, and gender, with limited exploration of police officer characteristics in relation to shootings. This study aims to understand the relationship between police officer characteristics and officer-involved shootings (OIS) and killings. Using state-level data collected over a 5-year period, this research examined how officer demographics correlate with shooting incidents. Findings indicated that officers' age and gender are not significant predictors of police shootings or killings, whereas officer race is a significant predictor of involvement in …

Exploratory Study Of The Relationship Between Housing Affordability And Violent Crime, Larence Budrich Snowden

Dissertations (2016-Present)

This dissertation investigates the complex relationship between violent crime and affordable housing through a mixed-methods approach. It merges quantitative crime data with qualitative insights from residents of public housing developments and areas concentrated with housing choice vouchers in Houston, Texas. The study aims to understand the statistical dimensions of crime and the subjective perceptions of residents living within areas of affordable housing and adjacent to these communities. The backdrop of this research focuses on Houston's metropolitan area housing landscape. The city is characterized by clusters of significant concentrations of affordable housing, primarily through traditional public housing developments and the allocation …

From Negotiating To Assessing Impact: Centering Student Authors In Open Access Agreements, Lindsey Skaggs, Rachel E. Scott

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

Librarians negotiating open access have several data points to consider. Although historic publishing is one such data point, student authors are not typically considered separately. Join librarians for a discussion of how student engagement with open access publishing informs negotiation and assessment and advances student success.

Deputization And Privileged White Violence, Ekow N. Yankah

Articles

A number of high-profile and racially charged killings, such as Trayvon Martin’s, Kenneth Herring’s, Ahmaud Arbery’s, and Jordan Neely’s, have been at the hands of civilians declaring themselves the law. These deaths stemmed from a phenomenon best described as “deputization.” Deputization describes a latent legal power that has empowered White people throughout American history to claim authority to enforce the law, as they see it, upon racial minorities generally and Black people in particular. This power turned the ancient common law duty to police all felons in England into a specific American common law duty to police Blacks. From the …

A Review Of The Ripple Effect Of Parental Incarceration: Suggestions For System Improvement From Neonatal Development Through Adolescence, Karen Thew, April Terry

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

Parental incarceration has the potential to drastically affect the social, behavioral, and physical lives of children. Such negative impacts include prenatal and chronic health conditions, behavioral and mental health issues, developmental delays, juvenile and criminal legal system involvement, and overall declines in well-being. These damaging outcomes occur for babies delivered during their mothers’ incarceration with negative lingering effects seen throughout the lifespan. Due to the stigmatization of incarceration, these children may experience bullying, engage in isolating behaviors, and struggle within the school, which may lead to the school-to-prison pipeline. While prevention and intervention services directed at these youth could not …

Exploring Mental Health, Future Rehabilitation, And Systemic Oppression In Inmates: A Qualitative Study, Vennissica F. Kelly

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this study was to examine the experiences of systemic oppression in incarcerated inmates, with a focus on their emotional/psychological experience of systemic oppression and how it impacted their willingness to participate in rehabilitation programs. This phenomenological study used elements of the narrative approach to obtain the common themes that surfaced while communicating with the participants and focused on two areas: systemic oppression and how it affected the mental health of inmates and how it affected their willingness to participate in rehabilitation programs. For this purpose, systemic oppression was defined as systemic power used to control others. To …

Strategies Police Agencies Can Implement To Improve Officer Mental Health, Robert Gleason

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The profession of law enforcement is commonly recognized as being extremely stressful. Policing has the potential to produce extraordinarily high levels of stress among officers, particularly in contemporary political and social situations. This stress can be induced by several reasons, including but not limited to the occupation itself, the organization, and the organizational leadership. Long-term exposure to chronic stress has been linked to adverse effects on mental and physical health, including post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, exhaustion, and, in extreme situations, suicidal ideations and attempts. This qualitative study examined strategies and initiatives that police officers believe would help agencies …

Casar Public Lecture: From Coolidge To Trump: A Century Of Racial Politics In America, The Prince Alwaleed Center For American Studies And Research Casar

Performances, Events, and Presentations

Dr. Gallagher's talk examined how various immigration policies in the United States have been shaped by the general public's attitudes regarding the race and ethnicity of those immigrating to the U.S. His talk explores the past and present social pressures that have led to both expansive and restrictive immigration policies.

Speaker: CASAR Guest speaker: Dr.Charles Gallagher ,Professor of Sociology from La Salle University, Philadelphia, USA.

Lecture 1: Date: Wednesday, Feb. 26th, 2025 Time: 7-9 pm Venue: Room 602 - Hill House building - AUC Downtown Tahrir Campus

Lecture 2: Date: Thursday, Feb. 27th, 2025 Time: 1-2 pm Venue: GAPP Executive …

Constraints Interfering With The Goals Of Child Maltreatment Programs In Northwestern Wyoming, Barbara Andersen

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Child abuse and neglect occurs in the United States and Wyoming. There are numerous variables that influence caregivers to abuse, and if unresolved, these variables can contribute to future events of child maltreatment. This study focused on the programs assigned to achieve reunification and the constraints observed by the program providers that interfere in resolving the variables that cause child maltreatment. The research questions were: What specific factors or constraints impede the successful achievement of program goals? In what ways do the identified constraints hinder the effectiveness of the programs? What strategies could be implemented to overcome constraints and improve …

The Perspective Of African American Single Mothers In Birmingham, Alabama On The Criminalization Of African American Male Adolescents, Jessica Ruth Whiteside

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the lived experiences of single African American mothers raising males and their association with criminal behavior. The nature of this research was phenomenological. This cross-sectional study, informed by the general strain theory, explored the effects of stress and strain from adversity and systematic racism on the criminality of African American male adolescents. The key research question was: In what ways do African American single mothers view their part and the part of their socio-economic context as contributing to the criminalization of their sons? A phenomenological research approach was used, and the …

Neurocriminology: A Beginner’S Guide, Jerrod Brown

Forensic Scholars Today

No abstract provided.

Neurocriminology: Revolutionizing Specialized Training For Criminal Justice System Professionals, Janina Cich

Forensic Scholars Today

No abstract provided.

Centering Black Resource-Poor Adolescent Voices: A Critical Phenomenological Study Of Lived Mental Health Struggles While Enduring The Covid-19 Pandemic, Paulette Dispagna

Counseling and Psychology Dissertations

There is a dearth of research in general and qualitative research specifically about the mental health experience of resource-poor Black adolescents living in Boston. This has implications for the field in terms of how adolescents experiencing mental health issues can be supported and how professionals can create more useful mental health treatment. Drawing from the theoretical lens of critical race theory and more specifically, intersectionality, this hermeneutic phenomenological inquiry examined the ways in which experiencing multiple levels of inequality, especially from racism and poverty, affected a Black adolescent’s mental health. Eleven adolescents were interviewed via Zoom. Six major findings included: …

Employee Perspectives On Reporting Sexual Harassment In The Workplace: A Study Of Lived Experiences And Outcomes, Ivy James Roberson

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Despite numerous laws and policies, sexual harassment remains a significant public concern that has failed to be resolved through contemporary measures. This research study presents a comprehensive review and analysis of sexual harassment focusing on why employees who were victims of sexual harassment may not report such an incident and how reporting of these incidences subsequently impacted the workplace experiences of those who report the issue. The foundation of this qualitative study was feminist theory and twelve participants were recruited through a LinkedIn ad and semistructured interviews were conducted via Zoom or phone with audio-recording. Thematic analysis of the data …

Deep Core Advocacy Coalitions, Christopher M. Weible, Anna M. Crawford, Allegra H. Fullerton, Kayla M. Gabehart, Katherine E. Imhoff, Giulia Mariani

Michigan Tech Publications

As one of the most established theoretical approaches to public policy, the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) has moored most of its theoretical arguments around a textbook policy conflict consisting of two or more advocacy coalitions in a mature adversarial policy subsystem within an advanced polyarchy. This article steps beyond the textbook by introducing deep core coalitions marked by compounding intersectional identities operating at the macro-system. It offers two illustrations of deep core coalitions, one bound by their collective transgender identity and the other by their collective traditionalist identity. Finally, this article concludes with a discussion of what it means for …