Digital Commons Network^™

More Amazon Than Mafia: Analysing A Ddos Stresser Service As Organised Cybercrime, Roberto Musotto, David S. Wall

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

© 2020, The Author(s). The internet mafia trope has shaped our knowledge about organised crime groups online, yet the evidence is largely speculative and the logic often flawed. This paper adds to current knowledge by exploring the development, operation and demise of an online criminal group as a case study. In this article we analyse a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) stresser (also known as booter) which sells its services online to enable offenders to launch attacks. Using Social Network Analysis to explore the service operations and payment systems, our findings show a central business model that is similar to …

Temptations, Techniques And Typologies: Insights From A Western Australian Sample Of Young People Who Burgle, Suzanne Rock, Natalie J. Gately, James Mccue, Nathalie St Martin

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

A significant amount of property crime is committed by young people. In this novel qualitative study, 50 young people were interviewed to obtain an insight into their motivations to burgle. Decisions were based on peer pressure, opportunity and perceived need. Bennett and Wright’s typologies of adult burglars were applied to young burglars. Young burglars were more prone than adults in Bennett and Wright’s study to commit opportunistic burglaries, but were deterred by similar target characteristics. The social and psychological factors are strong motivators for youth burglary and should guide the development of intervention and deterrence strategies.

Books To Support Mental Well-Being: A Study On The Possible Challenges In Implementing Bibliotherapy In The Sri Lankan Context, R.A.P.S. Senevirathna, L.H.M.D.S. Lansakara

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This ongoing research examines the Bibliotherapy in several aspects. Bibliotherapy is the "process of dynamic interactions between the personality of the reader and literature as a psychological field which may be utilized for personality assessment, adjustment and growth" (Shrodes, 1949). The focus of the study is on defining the concept, determining the capacity of Bibliotherapy to support mental well-being and discuss the possible challenges in applying Bibliotherapy to the Sri Lankan context. The study involved a qualitative thematic analysis concerning the selected areas. The study revealed that Bibliotherapy is a therapeutic approach which is assisted by the healing power of …

Mysterious Ways, Lawrence M. Friedman

FIU Law Review

The “mystery” or “detective” novel originated in the first half of the 19th century, and quickly became extremely popular. Its origins betray changes in English and American society—the same changes that led to innovations in criminal justice, especially the creation of detective squads in the big cities. The goal of the detective was to expose secret crime—crimes committed by confidence men, and others who worked in the shadows. Thousands and thousands of detective novels have been written; they are extremely varied; but they tend to share one common trait: they turn on the problem of hidden personal identities, which the …

Computer Vision Based Classification Of Fruits And Vegetables For Self-Checkout At Supermarkets, Khurram Hameed

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The field of machine learning, and, in particular, methods to improve the capability of machines to perform a wider variety of generalised tasks are among the most rapidly growing research areas in today’s world. The current applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence can be divided into many significant fields namely computer vision, data sciences, real time analytics and Natural Language Processing (NLP). All these applications are being used to help computer based systems to operate more usefully in everyday contexts. Computer vision research is currently active in a wide range of areas such as the development of autonomous vehicles, …

Social Disorganisation Theory And Violent Crime: A Spatial-Econometric Analysis Of Chicago And Sydney, Anthony N. Greening

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The spatialisation of violent crime is explored in two large case studies, Chicago and Sydney, using spatial econometric methods and macro-sociological variables derived from Social Disorganisation Theory.

Social Disorganisation Theory (SDT) is introduced in terms of its formulation in response to highly specific conditions arising in Chicago, as well as its adoption of methodological and theoretical developments from existing traditions. This specificity belies its breadth of application and enduring presence in criminology. With “Social Disorganisation Theory” hosting a wealth of highly nuanced academic dialogue conducted under its banner, current incarnations of SDT appear as branches on an evolutionary tree. This …

Civil Rights Catch 22s, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

Civil rights advocates have long viewed litigation as a vital path to social change. In many ways, it is. But in key respects that remain underexplored in legal scholarship, even successful litigation can hinder remedial projects. This perverse effect stems from civil rights doctrines that incentivize litigants (or their attorneys) to foreground community plight—such as academic underachievement or overincarceration. Rational plaintiffs, responding in kind, deploy legal narratives that tend to track racial stereotypes and regressive theories of inequality. When this occurs, even successful lawsuits can harden the structural and behavioral forces that produce and perpetuate racial inequality.

I refer to …

Of Afrofuturism, Of Algorithms, Ngozi Okidegbe

Faculty Scholarship

Algorithms are proliferating in criminal legal structures. The predictions produced by these algorithms inform life-altering decisions around surveillance and incarceration. Their continued use poses a challenge to ongoing racial justice efforts. Contesting how algorithms of today maintain the racial status quo requires a fundamental rethinking of the algorithm project. This essay explores how Afrofuturism can facilitate such a rethinking. It imagines how applying an Afrofuturist paradigm to the adoption, construction, implementation, and oversight of algorithms could radically change the kind of algorithms developed and the purposes for which they are developed. Tapping into this potential offers the chance for members …

Abortion Experts, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade,¹ has intensified the fight for access to medication abortion. ² As state governors put emergency orders into place limiting health care provisions to essential services, some also limited access to abortion, designating it a nonessential service. ³ In the face of these challenges, women's health advocates, in keeping with prior advocacy, have called for greater access to medication abortion.⁴ The increased reliance on telemedicine during the COVID-19 pandemic provides new possibilities for the provision of abortion medication that do not rely on a patient engaging in-person at a …

Unraveling The Web Of Legal Protection: Race, Police Misconduct, And The Favorable Termination Rule, Jasmine Gonzales Rose, Caitlin Glass, Neda Khoshkhoo

Faculty Scholarship

The murder of George Floyd raised greater awareness of the pervasiveness of racialized police violence in the United States. Advocates, activists, and concerned policymakers have drawn attention to legal barriers that prevent accountability for police who kill and abuse Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (“BIPOC”), such as qualified immunity. However, the true extent of the legal system’s protections regarding racialized police misconduct remains unrecognized. A key example of this is the favorable termination rule, which many jurisdictions have interpreted as imposing an “indications-of-innocence” standard. This standard, in numerous instances, serves as a procedural loophole that prevents civil rights …

Misdemeanor And Felony Diversion Program Success, Nicole M. Teske

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Previous research has demonstrated that individuals who commit crimes and have mental health concerns tend to do worse while incarcerated. For this reason, mental health diversion programs were created. These programs provide individuals with the necessary treatment and resources so they can be more successful living in the community. These programs often differ in terms of program requirements, and the impact of offender variables on outcomes are often inconsistent. The current study examined two mental health diversion programs in a rural community to examine the relation between offender gender, mental health diagnosis, and charge level in predicting program success and …

Ransomware Attacks As A Cybercrime In The United States: An Exploratory Study, Ayidh Alotaibi

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Ransomware has become a global cybersecurity issue in recent years. Ransomware is a type of malware that breaks into a security system and restricts access to infected users files to request money in exchange for decrypting keys. This issue has increased the concerns of cybersecurity specialists about the rapid spread of ransomware attacks across the world. This research studied the extent of ransomware attacks as a cybercrime in the United States. The goal of this study was to review the effect of ransomware attacks among individuals to rank states by the frequency of victimization and dollars loss in the United …

Critical Review Of The Use Of The Rorschach In European Courts, Igor Areh, Fanny Verkampt, Alfred Allan

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

In relation to the admissibility of evidence obtained using projective personality tests arose in F v. Bevándorlási és Állampolgársági Hivatam (2018). The Court of Justice of the European Union has held that an expert’s report can only be accepted if it is based on the international scientific community’s standards, but has refrained from stipulating what these standards are. It appears timely for European psychologists to decide what standards should be applied to determine whether or not a test is appropriate for psycholegal use. We propose standards and then apply them to the Rorschach because it was used in this case …

Schools, Separating Parents And Family Violence: A Case Study Of The Coercion Of Organisational Networks, Sue Saltmarsh, Kay Ayre, Eseta Tualaulelei

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

This paper considers how complex family circumstances such as parental separation, custody disputes and family violence intersect with the organisational cultures and everyday practices of schools. In particular, we are concerned with the ways that coercive control–a strategy used predominantly by men to dominate, control and oppress women in the context of intimate partner relationships–can be deployed to manipulate and coerce the organisational networks of schools into furthering abusive agendas. Informed by cultural theory and research from sociology of education, legal studies, criminology and family violence, we show how what we term the ‘coercion of organisational networks’ (CON) both relies …

How To Phrase Critical Realist Interview Questions In Applied Social Science Research, Andreas Brönnimann

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

The tenets of critical and social realism are well supported in the literature. However, researchers following a realist paradigm have concerns about the lack of methodical guidance for qualitative interviewing, despite their affirmation about the importance of in-depth interviews. A conducted review of empirical realist literature provides evidence of an absence of guidance and commonality regarding interview planning practices. To overcome this absence, this paper composes a guiding framework to assist researchers to phrase more appropriate interview questions in realist research. The steps are founded on critical and social realist concepts while guided by methodological realist principles. Its contribution aims …

Disclosure In Criminal Proceedings: Developments And Issues Ahead, Siyuan Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The last decade or so witnessed very significant changes to the disclosure regime for criminal proceedings in Singapore. These came mainly in the form of the enactment of the current Criminal Procedure Code, as well as the landmark cases of Muhammad bin Kadar v Public Prosecutor [2011] 3 SLR 1205 and Muhammad Nabill bin Mohd Fuad v Public Prosecutor [2020] 1 SLR 984. This article surveys all relevant developments since the enactment of the Criminal Procedure Code and considers some of the issues that may lie ahead, such as whether unused statements of the accused should be disclosed, whether statements …

Improperly Obtained Evidence In Criminal Proceedings: An Updated Framework, Siyuan Chen, Zhi Jia Koh, Jian Wei Joel Soon

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The 2012 amendments to the Evidence Act “significantly broadened the admissibility criteria for expert evidence”; at the same time, the judicial discretion to deny admissibility of relevant expert opinion evidence was also introduced. This article considers the key developments pre- and post-amendments, and in doing so provides an updated framework for prosecutors and defence counsel alike to admit and challenge expert opinion evidence in criminal proceedings. Since it complements earlier articles in this series on similar fact and hearsay evidence, readers are assumed to be broadly familiar with the features of the Evidence Act, such as its admissibility paradigm, the …

2022 Silicon Valley Pain Index, Scott Myers-Lipton, William Armaline

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

"For Better Or Worse": Imagining Innovation In Smart City Municipal Design, Kevin M. Kochever

Master's Theses

The smart city concept recently (ca. 2010) emerged as a corporate-led system-as-a-service (SaaS) tool to meet city needs of accessibility and efficiency. I looked at three Western cities—Reykjavík, San José, and Toronto—to discover what it meant for city managers to meet municipal needs by embracing smart initiatives. Senior-level city managers, consultants, and technologists invoked vocabularies of smartness and innovation, adopting Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) as tools to facilitate human resource and service efficiency needs. I found persistent ambiguity in how city managers described and measured outcomes for city smartness. I also found stakeholders used smartness to …

“Cancel Culture” And Criminal Justice, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores the relationship between two normative systems in modern society: “cancel culture” and criminal justice. It argues that cancel culture—a ubiquitous phenomenon in contemporary life—may rectify deficiencies of over- and under-enforcement in the U.S. criminal justice system. However, the downsides of cancel culture’s structure—imprecise factfinding, potentially disproportionate sanctions leading to collateral consequences, a “thin” conception of the wrongdoer as beyond rehabilitation, and a broader cultural anxiety that “chills” certain human conduct—reflect problematic U.S. punitive impulses that characterize our era of mass incarceration. This Article thus argues that social media reform proposals obscure a deeper necessity: transcendence of blame …

Filing While Black: The Casual Racism Of The Tax Law, Steven Dean

Faculty Scholarship

The tax law's race-blind approach produces bad tax policy.' This Essay uses three very different examples to show how failing to openly and honestly address race generates bias, and how devastating the results can be.² Ignoring race does not solve problems; it creates them. ProPublica has shown, for example, that because of the perils of filing income taxes while Black, the five most heavily audited counties in the United States are Black and poor.

The racial bias long tolerated-and sometimes exploited-by tax scholars and policymakers affects all aspects of the tax law. In 1986, Sam Gilliam was denied tax …

Social Justice As Desistance: Rethinking Approaches To Gender Violence, Deborah M. Weissman

Faculty Publications

Part I of this Article describes most domestic violence intervention programs (DVIPs) as they currently function with regard to gender violence. It critiques the structure of these programs, their close partnership with criminal legal system actors, perceived deficiencies, and it identifies missed opportunities to provide meaningful intervention strategies with those who have harmed. It demonstrates the ways that laws, regulations, and policies governing DVIPs constrain most programs from moving beyond established practices informed by punitive approaches to address the structural conditions that situate gender violence within a political economic framework.

Part II begins with a brief overview of the research …

Judges And Mass Incarceration, Carissa Byrne Hessick

Faculty Publications

This Article argues that judges—long overlooked in contemporary explanations of mass incarceration—have played a central role both through affirmative decisions that increased punishment and through failures to act as a check on prosecutorial power. It traces how judicial choices such as imposing the trial penalty, deferring to sentencing guidelines, allowing coercive plea bargaining, expanding pretrial detention, and adopting narrow or delayed statutory interpretations have structurally reshaped the criminal justice system to favor conviction and incarceration. The Article then proposes practical steps trial judges could implement immediately to reverse these trends, including reducing reliance on pretrial detention, eliminating the trial penalty, …

Defunding Police Agencies, Rick Su, Anthony O'Rourke, Guyora Binder

Faculty Publications

This Article contextualizes the police defunding movement and the backlash it has generated. The defunding movement emerged from the work of Black-led activists to reassert democratic control over policing and shift resources to social service agencies and other institutions serving community needs. In reaction, states have enacted anti-defunding bills checking local government reduction of law enforcement budgets. These anti-defunding measures continue a long tradition of state and federal control over local police spending, subverting local democratic control over police agencies. These limits include direct legal constraints on local police spending and indirect constraints through grants and authorization to collect fines, …

Preemption Of Police Reform: A Roadblock To Racial Justice, Rick Su, Marissa Roy, Nestor Davidson

Faculty Publications

In 2020, nearly half of the largest U.S. cities reoriented municipal spending priorities by directing money from their police budgets to social services; for many cities, these budgetary changes reversed decades of increases. Cities began implementing additional police reforms as well: New York City became the first municipality to end qualified immunity for police officers while San Francisco shifted to deploying crisis response teams, rather than police officers, to respond to mental health calls.

Instead of supporting these critical reforms, some states targeted cities that prioritized racial justice by preempting those cities’ ability to engage in meaningful change. In the …

Local Power, Alexandra B. Klass, Rebecca Wilton

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Article is about “local power.” We use that term in two distinct but complementary ways. First, local power describes the authority of local governments to enact regulatory policies in the interests of their citizens. Second, local power describes the authority of local governments to exercise proprietary control over the sources and delivery of electric power to their citizens. This dual meaning of local power is particularly important today, as an increasing number of local governments are seriously considering “municipalizing”--taking control of local electric power systems-—at the same time that, outside the electric power sector, many states are constraining local …

Restorative Justice: An Alternative Dispute Resolution Approach To Criminal Behavior, Kayla Welch

Journal of Dispute Resolution

Beginning with the end of the Mass Prison Era in the late 1800s, Americans have looked for a better way to respond to crime and those who commit it. Since the Reformatory Era, the United States has swayed between punitive models based on either the Reformatory or Retributive theories. Despite the changes we have made, our criminal justice system suffers from long waiting periods for a trial, overburdened public defenders, overcrowded jails and prisons that often lead to unsafe conditions for the inmates and corrections officers, and many other problems.

Getting Proactive With Police Proactivity: The Benefits Of Computer-Aided Dispatch For Directing Police Resources To Areas Of Need, Kris Henning, Christian Peterson, Greg Stewart, Kimberly Kahn, Yves Labissiere, Brian Renauer, Renee Mitchell, Sean Sothern

Criminology and Criminal Justice Faculty Publications and Presentations

Sherman and colleagues (2014) argue that crime reductions associated with hot spot policing can be maximized by carefully managing the dosage of supplemental resources delivered. Fully achieving this goal in prior studies has been difficult due to resistance by officers, the use of atypical strategies for directing patrols to target locations, and insufficient attention to the measurement of treatment dosages. This has led to calls for process research examining the implementation of hot spot policing in law enforcement agencies. The current study represents one such effort. The computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system for a large U.S. police department was pre-programmed with …

The Inequity Of Informal Guidance, Joshua D. Blank, Leigh Z. Osofsky

Faculty Publications

The coexistence of formal and informal law is a hallmark feature of the U.S. tax system. Congress and the Treasury enact formal law, such as statutes and regulations, while the Internal Revenue Service offers the public informal explanations and summaries, such as taxpayer publications, website frequently asked questions, virtual assistants, and other types of taxpayer guidance. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the IRS increased its use of informal law to help taxpayers understand complex emergency relief rules implemented through the tax system.

In contrast to many other legal scholars who have examined important administrative law issues regarding informal tax guidance, in …

Racial Capitalism In The Civil Courts, Tonya L. Brito, Kathryn A. Sabbeth, Jessica K. Steinberg, Lauren Sudeall

Faculty Publications

This Essay explores how civil courts function as sites of racial capitalism. The racial capitalism conceptual framework posits that capitalism requires racial inequality and relies on racialized systems of expropriation to produce capital. While often associated with traditional economic systems, racial capitalism applies equally to nonmarket settings, including civil courts.

The lens of racial capitalism enriches access to justice scholarship by explaining how and why state civil courts subordinate racialized groups and individuals. Civil cases are often framed as voluntary disputes among private parties, yet many racially and economically marginalized litigants enter the civil legal system involuntarily, and the state …