Digital Commons Network^™

Jetstream Volume 2 Issue 2, Nancy Anzalone, Theresa Rienzo Mlis, Robert Martin Mls, Tabitha Ochtera Mlis, Tim Hasin Mlis, Albert Neal, Nikki Palumbo Mlis, Shikha Joseph Mlis, Maya Wilder Mlis, Susan Bloom Mlis, Tara Scully, Madeleine Nash Mlis

JETstream: Library Newsletter

Although the calendar indicated otherwise, with the countless snowstorms these past few months, it seemed as if spring would never arrive. But alas, spring has sprung at Molloy and with that, the end of the Spring 2018 semester. So before many of you leave for your summer breaks or vacations, I invite you to peruse our latest edition of JETstream, perhaps even take it along with you as your summer read! Okay, so maybe a newsletter does not top your summer reading list, but I have no doubt you will find something that is useful, or at the very least, …

Mothers’ Stories: How Family And Community Influences Affect Generations Of Literacy Challenges, April Arfaras

All Theses And Dissertations

This study critically examines America’s literacy crisis and focuses on the most affected: at-risk single-parent mothers of infant-toddlers. Illiteracy is a social justice concern that contributes to poverty, poor health, and crime, and affects the economy and America’s status as the former world leader in education. There is contention among academic, corporate, private, and government sources regarding the conflicting statistics of the severity of the literacy crisis (Amarao, 2016; Khazan, 2014; Layton, 2015; Rasco, 2017; Sugrue, 2008). Little is known from mothers closest to the problem (Knowles, 2015). The research questions addressed in this study are (1.) How do at-risk …

University Of Central Florida Undergraduate Catalog, 2018 - 2019, University Of Central Florida

UCF Catalogs

No abstract provided.

A Civil Liberty Or Sexual Exploitation: Revenge Porn?, Tessa Piety

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

“Revenge porn” is commonly used to describe the distributed digital and print publication of an individual in a nude state without the individual’s consent. Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act is a Federal Act protecting web distributors from legal repercussions if revenge porn materials are uploaded on their websites. However, currently there are no federal provisions for victims of revenge porn. Currently, state statutes are the main method of legal action that victims may use to combat their perpetrators. 94% of Americans state that they believe their sexually charged photographs are safe with their significant other. However, 60% of …

Can Mentoring Help Reduce The Risk Of Recidivism? An Analysis Of The Serious And Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (Svori) Data, Amanda Claire Workman

Theses and Dissertations

This research project investigates the effectiveness of mentors on rates of self-reported criminal offending for released offenders. I use data from the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (SVORI) study (2004-2007), which sought to evaluate factors relating to high-risk offenders outcomes post release in an effort to reduce the societal problem of mass incarceration. Previous research has examined the use of mentors to improve the delinquent and criminogenic behavior of youth, but little is known about the effectiveness of mentors used to aid imprisoned adult males. I utilize negative binomial analysis to compare the number of self-reported criminal activities among …

Teacher Identity And The Role Of Relational Coaching, Melinda R. Ehmer

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to identify specific strategies that principals use when coaching teachers who struggle to develop positive relationships with students. Using a qualitative case study design, six principals were identified through the use of a demographic survey. The principals were interviewed about their experiences. Each interview was recorded, transcribed, and coded for data analysis. The principals’ narratives, emerging themes and sub themes provide insight into their experiences with both relational and non-relational teachers. The emerging themes are: (a) relationship building for teachers and students; (b) coaching strategies; (c) roadblocks and deficiencies; and (d) identity and belief …

The Horror Behind My Love For Reading And Writing, Rebecca Filler

Emerging Writers

Finalist in the Creative non-fiction category of the 2018 Emerging Writers Contest. The essay explores love of the horror genre through a personal narrative.

Policing For The Community, Jeffrey Munoz

Senior Honors Projects

As a society, we are currently in a period of time where the community reflects their dissatisfaction with law enforcement by staging protests, organizing groups who demand change and unfortunately at times displaying a degree of violence towards authority. These issues are products of controversial police shootings like those of the killings of Tamir rice, Freddie Gray and Eric Garner in which all demonstrated a reasonable degree of uncertainty. The fact of the matter lies within the officers’ actions as they manifest an inherent racial bias seen one to many times by populations that have been oppressed throughout history. The …

The School To Deportation Pipeline, Laila L. Hlass

Georgia State University Law Review

The United States immigration regime has a long and sordid history of explicit racism, including limiting citizenship to free whites, excluding Chinese immigrants, deporting massive numbers of Mexican immigrants and U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry, and implementing a national quotas system preferencing Western Europeans. More subtle bias has seeped into the system through the convergence of the criminal and immigration law regimes.

Immigration enforcement has seen a rise in mass immigrant detention and deportation, bolstered by provocative language casting immigrants as undeserving undesirables: criminals, gang members, and terrorists. Immigrant children, particularly black and Latino boys, are increasingly finding themselves in …

Living Dead In The United States: Felon Disenfranchisement And White Privilege, A. M. Fletcher

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The purpose of this study is to re-examine the policy of felon disenfranchisement through an analysis of its historical lineage from the Jim Crow Era to the contemporary era of Black Lives Matter and identify the influence of White Privilege in its development. Review of previous research indicates a racial bias in the early implementation of felon disenfranchisement intended to prevent Blacks from exercising the right to vote as well as identifies racial motivations behind the use of the policy until present day. The United States has a history of trying to bar Black people from voting.1 Disenfranchisement prevents the …

Community Music Therapy And El Sistema : Addressing The Empowerment Needs Of Marginalized Individuals And Their Communities, Virginia Carolina Eulacio-Guevara

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Music is an accessible tool for positive change within people and societies, even in places facing socioeconomic marginalization due to poverty, discrimination, and lack of access to resources. Social capital has to do with the resources and networks available within society, which may help confront issues faced by individuals and communities. Community Music Therapy (CoMT) and the music education movement known as El Sistema both utilize music—understood as social capital—to address social justice. The purpose of this study was to comparatively examine the ways in which CoMT and El Sistema programs may address the empowerment needs of individuals and communities …

How Big Is Too Big? : The Potentially Coercive Effects Of Plea Discount On Innocent Defendants, Ryan Schneider

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In the United States, approximately 95% of all criminal cases end in guilty pleas. Many scholars are concerned with plea bargaining’s potential to be coercive, and cite data on wrongful convictions as proof that an innocence problem exists. Estimates of false guilty pleas may range between 18 and 27 percent, though a true base rate is difficult to establish. Using vignettes, I examined the effects of guilt, trial penalty and plea discount size on plea decisions of adult participants recruited online through TurkPrime. Guilt was the strongest predictor of plea acceptance, but guilty plea rates increased for all participants with …

African American Christians’ Decision Making To Pursue Or Not Pursue Professional Psychological Help : A Qualitative Study, Dawn Y. Norman

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The aim of this study was to explore how African American Christians’ have experienced decision making related to seeking counseling and other mental health treatment outside of the church. To this end, this study asked the following research question: What influences African American Christians’ decisions to pursue or not pursue professional psychological help? The impact of culturally related influences on the help seeking decision making of African American Christians was explored and discussed throughout this research study. The research question for this study was addressed through a qualitative interview design. This qualitative design included interviewing a total of 12 African …

Lawyers' Abuse Of Technology, Cheryl B. Preston

Cornell Law Review

Lawyers are highly educated and, allegedly, of higher than average intelligence, but sometimes individual lawyers demonstrate colossal errors in judgment, especially when insufficiently trained in the new and emerging risks involved with the technological age. For instance, although the internet is a necessary tool for attorneys' and is now a prominent feature in the everyday lives of all actors in the legal system, this technology poses particularized and often unanticipated risks of professional and ethical abuse -- risks that are extraordinary both in quantity and intensity. As Harvard's Director of the Center for the Legal Profession warned: We are "only …

Are Jurors’ Judgments About Confessions Affected By Juvenile Defendant Race?, Lisa Dobrowolsky

Criminal Justice

This research is focused on understanding jurors’ beliefs about how much weight juvenile defendants’ confessions should be given, especially when the confessions were coerced. This is an important topic because adolescents are vulnerable and at risk for producing false confessions. Because of their age and other developmental factors, they can sometimes be coerced by police during interrogation to admit to crimes they did not commit. Once a confession is obtained, it can be very persuasive to jurors because it is hard for them to believe that someone would admit to a crime they did not commit. This can lead to …

Emergency Preparedness Among College Students At The University Of Arkansas, Mary Gadberry

The Eleanor Mann School of Nursing Undergraduate Honors Theses

Students at the University of Arkansas could be susceptible to multiple forms of disaster including severe winter weather, earthquakes, tornadoes, lightning, floods, toxin release, radiological release from nuclear power plant, infectious diseases, food contamination, fires, active shooters, and bomb threats (Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA], 2013). The unpredictability of natural disasters, coupled with the increase in targeted school violence, served as the impetus for various federal initiatives intended to protect university populations (FEMA, 2003). The purpose of this study was to determine the emergency preparedness levels of college students at the University of Arkansas. Only 50% of students were concerned …

A Better Balance For Federal Rules Governing Public Access To Appeal Records In Immigration Cases, Nancy Morawetz

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Who Gets “Saved?” : Making Sense Of Racially Disparate Disciplinary Practices In Urban School Systems., Kala Brown

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

The “racial discipline gap” describes the phenomenon in which black and brown youth disproportionately face exclusionary punishments in schools for instances of misbehavior. Despite the declining trends in youth violence, decades of research still show that this process ultimately leads to minority youth being processed through the courts for mostly non-violent offenses as part of the school-to-prison pipeline. This paper examines minority youth perspectives on disciplinary practices in secondary schools as responses to, and embedded within, bureaucratic practices in school disciplinary systems. Using a review of qualitative research studies and labeling theory as the primary framework for this investigation, I …

The Right To Two Criminal Defense Lawyers, Bruce A. Green

Mercer Law Review

"What can courts, legislators, or criminal defense lawyers themselves do to seriously change criminal defense practice in a manner that significantly benefits criminal defendants and promotes justice?" That question was posed to the participants in an August 2017 SEALS discussion group and Mercer University School of Law's 2017 Symposium on "disruptive innovation in criminal defense." The implied premise of the question is that aspects of criminal defense should be fixed or can be improved-and in radical ways.

The question of disruptive innovation provides an occasion for identifying deficiencies and weaknesses in contemporary criminal defense practice, and because defense lawyers do …

A Penal Colony For Bad Lawyers, Bennett L. Gershman

Mercer Law Review

The concept of "disruptive innovation" is vague. Imagining the idea of lawyer "disruption" might conjure a scene from Al Pacino's aggressive role in the 1979 film And Justice for All 9 or embody the tradition of lawyers courageously representing unpopular clients, sometimes placing their lives at risk in courtrooms and on streets. But the panel, I discovered, was more interested in the concept of disruption as descriptive of radical departures from conventional lawyering and conventional discipline.

Recently, as I walked along the narrow cobblestoned streets of Prague--the same streets that Franz Kafka traversed while he was consumed by thoughts of …

Raising The Bar: Indigent Defense And The Right To A Partisan Lawyer, Steven Zeidman

Mercer Law Review

In Ake v. Oklahoma, the Supreme Court of the United States held that an indigent defendant is entitled to the assistance of an expert in cases where it is established that mental health is at issue. Thirty-two years later, in McWilliams v. Dunn, the Court finally addressed whether an expert must be independent of the prosecution. During oral argument, counsel for McWilliams argued that Ake required that the expert must be part of the defense team and on the defendant's side. Justice Gorsuch, in only his second week on the Court, stated dubiously that if that were the …

King For A Day, Joshua Feinblatt

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

King for a Day is a feature film script written by Joshua Feinblatt that follows a high school senior named Brian Fuller around as he becomes Principal for a day. Brian does not become Principal for a day because he wins a competition, rather, Brian takes over the office of his nemesis in the William Henry Harrison High School’s administration, Principal Valley. The script aims to be funny, clever, and playful, just like the main character. Brian is manipulative, cunning, and always one step ahead, but Principal Valley runs a tight ship and hasn’t missed a day in 30 years. …

Understanding Obama's Rhetoric On Race: A Critical Analysis Of Key Speeches, Jennifer Sweet

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Throughout his time as President, Obama was criticized for not speaking more openly on race relations or issues of systemic racism. This paper offers an extensive rhetorical analysis of four speeches, the 2004 DNC Speech, the A More Perfect Union Speech, the 2008 Victory Speech, and the Selma 50th Anniversary Speech, that collectively provide insight into Obama’s rhetoric on race. Analyzing these speeches, and assessing their overall impact, I determine what motivated him to speak out when he did, and why he chose to frame racial issues in the way that he did. The major finding of this study is …

Defining Flight Risk, Lauryn P. Gouldin

University of Chicago Law Review

Our illogical and too-well-traveled paths to pretrial detention have created staggering costs for defendants who spend unnecessary time in pretrial detention and for taxpayers who fund a broken system. These problems remain recalcitrant even as a third generation of reform efforts makes impressive headway. They are likely to remain so until judges, attorneys, legislators, and scholars address a fundamental definitional problem: the collapsing of very different types of behavior that result in failures to appear in court into a single, undifferentiated category of nonappearance risk. That single category muddies critical distinctions that this Article’s new taxonomy of pretrial nonappearance risks …

Errors In Misdemeanor Adjudication, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

Millions of defendants are convicted of misdemeanors in the United States each year but almost none obtain exonerations, primarily because ordinarily exoneration is far too costly and time consuming to pursue for anything less than years of imprisonment. The National Registry of Exonerations lists all known exonerations in the United States since 1989 — 2,145 cases, as of the end of 2017; only 85 are misdemeanors, 4%. In all but one of these misdemeanor exonerations the defendants were convicted of crimes that never happened; by comparison, more than three-quarters of felony exonerees were convicted of actual crimes that other people …

Factors Affecting The Longevity Of Individual Terrorists, Madeline Brice

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to examine factors that affect the longevity of individual terrorists. Previous studies on terrorist group longevity have focused on the decisions terrorist groups have made rather than focusing on factors that help individuals evade capture. Literature also suggests that terrorists that manage to stay active may be able to use this as a valuable recruiting tool. This project examines six different relationships with longevity, including Attorney General (AG) Guidelines, demographics, ideology, level of participation, number of activities, and sophistication of attack. To examine these relationships, data will be used from the American Terrorism Study …

Examining Food Insecurity Among High School Students: A Risks And Resources Model, Jill Niemeier

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examined the relationships between food insecurity, risks, and resources among adolescents attending a large high school in Northwest Arkansas. In a sample of 1,493 students, in which the majority are Hispanic/Latino and receive free and reduced lunch, food insecurity relationships were first assessed controlling for a number of sociodemographic variables, such as ethnicity, gender, and social class. In addition, a number of risk and resource variables were identified at four ecological levels: individual, family, school/peer, and community. These risks and resources were analyzed using a three-step ordinal regression model in order to examine how sociodemographic controls, risks, and …

Social Network And Black Students: Relative Effects Of Member Expectations On Academic Achievement, Lester Robert Collins Jr

Social Work Dissertations - Archive

Objective: The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between social network member college expectations of Black students and the college expectations and college attendance of the students. Methods: This study conducted secondary analysis of the nationally representative data from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002. Selected variables were recoded into binary variables and binary logistic regression was conducted on the independent and control variables and the dependent variables of student college expectations and student college attendance. Results: Some of the independent variables were found to be predictors of student college expectations and college attendance. Conclusions: Members of …

A Case Study Of Teacher And Principal Perceptions Of A School-Wide Positive Behavior Intervention And Supports Framework In An Urban Elementary School., Cassaundra Lynn Watkins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This single site case study examined the perceptions of teachers and the principal of a persistently low achieving elementary school in a large urban school district. Using the Concern-Based-Adoption-Model (CBAM), which originated in Fuller’s (1969) study of perceptions of pre-service and practicing teachers and used by Roach, Kratochwill and Frank (2009) as a tool to ascertain support for the implementation of research-based practices, teacher and principal perceptions of the effectiveness of School-Wide Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS) framework were examined. Interviews and document analysis were utilized to collect data and triangulate teacher and principal perceptions of obstacles and supports …

Automatic Iq Estimation Using Stylometry Methods., Polina Shafran Abramov

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Stylometry is a study of text linguistic properties that brings together various field of research such as statistics, linguistics, computer science and more. Stylometry methods have been used for historic investigation, as forensic evidence and educational tool. This thesis presents a method to automatically estimate individual’s IQ based on quality of writing and discusses challenges associated with it. The method utilizes various text features and NLP techniques to calculate metrics which are used to estimate individual’s IQ. The results show a high degree of correlation between expected and estimated IQs in cases when IQ is within the average range. Obtaining …