Digital Commons Network^™

Examining The Decision-Making Processes Of Sex Tourists Using On-Line Data, Thomas J. Holt, April M. Zeoli, Kathleen Bohrer

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Criminological research has increasingly focused on the decision- making processes of offenders in order to better understand criminal behavior as a whole. A small body of research has considered how the bounds or limits of offender decision-making are shaped by various factors. In addition, limited research has considered the role of preference and bounded rationality in crimes where long-range planning and careful consideration of options are possible. To that end, this study explores both the factors that influence individual decisions and the way that they interact with preference to shape the decision-making process of sex tourists or individuals who travel …

Van Den Hoonaard, D.K. Qualitative Research In Action: A Canadian Primer, Deborah Landry

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Dr. Deborah Van Den Hoonaard has made a distinguished career of applying qualitative methodologies to uncover the rich everyday experiences of marginal populations. Professor Van Den Hoonaard holds a prestigious position as Canada Research Chair in Qualitative Analysis, garnering the respect of her peers for her fieldwork. The savvy experience of a seasoned field researcher unfolds easily in this guidebook, which feels more like a documentary than a methodology textbook. Nodding to the ethnographic traditions of the Chicago School and McGill University (the Canadian version of the Chicago School), her engagement with contemporary approaches is couched in an informed historical …

Louise Westmarland, Gender And Policing: Sex, Power, And Police Culture, Maria D. H. Koeppel

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Originally released in 2001, Louise Westmarland’s Gender and Policing has been released with a new publisher. With Routledge’s rerelease of the book, it is necessary to reassess the value of its research in the field of gender and policing to determine if it is still relevant. Throughout the book, Westmarland uses qualitative data to explore gendered themes in United Kingdom police forces. More specifically, her work focuses on whether differential deployment exists in policing based on gender and explores the role of gender within policing culture in several different situations. To analyze possible gendered patterns, Westmarland bases her work on …

“We’Re All Born With Equal Opportunities”: Hegemonic Individualism And Contextual Mitigation Among Delaware Capital Jurors, Ross Kleinstuber

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"The Supreme Court has ruled that evidence derived from a capital defendant’s life history is crucial for making the reasoned moral judgment that is central to the death penalty’s constitutionality. However, Dunn and Kaplan (2009) suggested that individualism is so embedded in American culture that most people defer to it uncritically, which makes the use of such contextualizing mitigating evidence challenging. Prior studies suggest that capital jurors do not understand mitigation and focus on guilt-related issues when making their sentencing decisions, but they do not examine why this is so. This study extends these prior works by comparing the content …

Geoff K. Ward, The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy & Juvenile Justice, Robin D. Jackson

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Drawing on biographical details, people’s experiences, and historical documents, Geoff K. Ward examines Black child savers’ efforts and struggles to transform a Jim Crow juvenile justice system into a racially democratic model of juvenile justice. In his first book: The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy & Juvenile Justice, Ward describes Black child-savers as concerned Black Americans and their allies who sought racial reform in the juvenile justice system and who intervened on the behalf of Black dependent and delinquent youth. Ward also discusses “the sociocultural origins and organization of Jim Crow juvenile justice as well as the social movement by …

W.E.B. Dubois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, Howard Henderson

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Criminology’s Forgotten Genesis?

Crime is a phenomenon of organized social life, and is the open rebellion of an individual against his social environment. Naturally then, if men are suddenly transported from one environment to another, the result is lack of harmony with the new conditions; lack of harmony with the new physical surroundings leading to disease and death or modification of physique; lack of harmony with social surroundings leading to crime. (DuBois, p. 235) "

Saundra D. Westervelt & Kimberly J. Cook, Life After Death Row: Exonerees’ Search For Community And Identity, Jeanne Subjack

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Life After Death Row examines how individuals wrongly sentenced to death adjust to life after their release. The idea for the book arose in 2009, after Westervelt and Cook attended a conference and learned about the different aspects related to wrongful convictions that had yet to be addressed in academia. To gain a more thorough understanding of the events the participants experienced, the authors used life history and feminist methods to conduct their research. Although the current analysis is not necessarily focused on gender, feminist methods are useful here because they can be applied when a researcher “seeks an …

Two Truths And A Lie: Stories At The Juncture Of Teen Sex And The Law, Michelle Oberman

Faculty Publications

Laws governing adolescent sexuality are incoherent and chaotically enforced, and legal scholarship on the subject neither addresses nor remedies adolescents’ vulnerability in sexual encounters. To posit a meaningful relationship between the criminal law and adolescent sexual encounters, one must examine what we know about adolescent sexuality from both the academic literature and the adults who control the criminal justice response to such interactions. This article presents an in-depth study of In re John Z., a 2003 rape prosecution involving two seventeen-year-olds. Using this case, I explore the implications of the prosecution by interviewing a variety of experts and analyzing the …

An Examination Of The Correlates Of Prison Misconduct In The Arkansas Prison System, Gavin Lee

Theses and Dissertations

The study of prison misconduct has been a topic which has been a subject of great import to criminological literature from the early 20th Century onward. The implications of the carceral experience have both ethical and utilitarian import to society as a whole. Over the last 80 years, two competing theoretical perspectives have been used to view this phenomenon: the importation model (Irwin and Cressey, 1962) and the work of Clemmer (1940) and Sykes (1958), the institutionalization/deprivation model. This dissertation seeks to examine the relative strengths of each perspective using official data. The findings of this study provide support for …

Teen Dating Violence: Adolescent Development And Its Role In The Success Of Prevention Programs, Lisa Dougherty

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

This study was conducted to explore adolescent development and adolescent dating violence in order to determine if prevention programs need to be written to reflect the different stages of development. Research was gathered from four areas: adolescent development, adolescent romantic relationships, teen dating violence, and teen dating violence prevention programs. Using an inductive approach, a content analysis of the literature was used to answer the following questions: 1) After reviewing research on adolescent development and adolescent romantic relationships; are there stages in adolescent romantic relationships where conflict appears most often? 2) In the teen dating violence studies, what stage(s) of …

College Of Behavioral And Social Sciences News, Georgia Southern University

College of Behavioral & Social Sciences: News & Publications (2012-2022)

• Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology presents cybercrime lecture
• Guest speaker to address “Tenderest Torment” of mothers, daughters in Holocaust

The Expansion Of Criminal Registries And The Illusion Of Control, Molly J. Walker Wilson

Louisiana Law Review

The American public consistently ranks crime prevention as the single most important objective for the criminal justice system, putting this goal ahead of punishment, enforcement, and rehabilitation. One popular but controversial method recently employed to prevent recidivism is the use of offender registries. The most common type of registry currently in use is the sex-offender registry. Responding to the public's perception that sex offenders pose a particular risk to society, federal legislators--as well as legislators in all 50 states and the District of Columbia-- have enacted legislation creating mandatory sex-offender registries. The primary rationale for tracking and notification requirements was …

Booklet Of Selected Theses From The Ma In Criminology, Ma In Law, Ma In Child, Family And Community Studies, And The International Masters In Early Childhood Education, 2010-2012, Matt Bowden, Carmel Gallagher, Kevin Lalor

Dissertations

This booklet highlights and celebrates the research work of graduates from taught Masters programmes in the School of Social Sciences and Law:

• the MA in Criminology

• the MA in Law

• the MA in Child, Family and Community Studies

• the International Masters in Early Childhood Education, co-delivered with Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences (Norway) and the University of Malta (Malta).

The MA in Criminology and the MA in Law commenced in 2006 and the MA in Child, Family and Community Studies commenced in 2007. Each has quickly become established in its field as a …

Socially Situated Identities Of Gay Gang- And Crime-Involved Men, Vanessa R. Panfil

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Within the criminological literature, gay men have primarily been portrayed as victims of anti-gay bias crimes or intimate partner violence, or as sex workers and/or drug users. This coverage, which is limited in scope, largely fails to recognize that gay men have agency (choice or power to control the situation). It also provides an incomplete picture regarding gay men's involvement in gangs, violence, and crime.

Online Mental Disability Law Education, A Disability Rights Tribunal, And The Creation Of An Asian Disability Law Database: Their Impact On Research, Training And Teaching Of Law, Criminology Criminal Justice In Asia, Michael L. Perlin, Heather Ellis Cucolo, Yoshikazu Ikehara

Articles & Chapters

Two professors at New York Law School (NYLS) and the director of the Tokyo Advocacy Law Office are engaged in initiatives with the potential to have major influences on the study of law, criminology, and criminal justice: the creation of a Disability Rights Tribunal for Asia and the Pacific (DRTAP), and expansion of NYLS’s online mental disability law program (OMDLP) to include numerous Asian venues.

DRTAP seeks to create a sub-regional body (a Commission and eventually a Court) to hear violations of the UN’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This will explicitly inspire scholarship about issues such …

Once Bitten, Thrice Wise: The Varying Effects Of Victimization On Routine Activities And Risk Management, J. Michael Vecchio

Criminal Justice & Criminology: Faculty Publications & Other Works

While the relationship between offending and victimization is well established, less is understood about what contributes to the varied effects of victimization on future behavior. Drawing on qualitative interviews from a sample of at-risk men, the study explores recognized and unrecognized effects of victimization on subsequent behavior and management of lifestyle risks both within and across narratives. Findings demonstrate a range of perceived effects on behavior and risk management, with the presence or absence of substantive effects related to whether the event was both severe and directly attributable to involvement in at-risk behavior. Consequences for the victimization–termination hypothesis are discussed.

Corporal Punishment And Aggression In Adulthood: A Product Of Social Learning, Derek R. Schneider

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

The focus of my study will be on the relationship between child abuse and aggression in adulthood. Individuals who support corporal punishment are more likely to support using violence against other adults, as compared to those that do not support corporal punishment. In other words, adults that are likely to use violence to resolve conflict with children are more inclined to use violence to resolve conflicts with other adults. Bandura (1977) explained that human behavior is learned observationally through modeling. The idea of modeling involves observing others and beginning to form an idea of how new behaviors are performed; on …

Fetal Attraction: A Descriptive Study Of Patterns In Fetal Abductions, Kerry E. Arquette

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Fetal abduction is a crime in which a perpetrator forcibly takes an unborn baby from the womb of another woman. The act is always done without the permission of the pregnant woman, is always violent, and is often deadly for the mother or baby, or both. Based upon available data, the crime of fetal abduction is rare and relatively new, but publicized incidences in the United States of America are growing, which raises the question, "Why?" In order to answer that and other questions surrounding fetal abduction it is necessary to know more about the crime and the criminals. This …

The Use Of Familial Dna Searches: A Policy Analysis, Caroline O. Moorman

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Many cases go unsolved every day in the United States; some due to a lack of technological advancement in forensic science. When a person is killed, raped, or in danger of physical harm, it is the responsibility of law enforcement and their collaborative agencies to find and apprehend the responsible parties. The use of familial DNA searches in the United States is a relatively new investigative technique. Traditionally, DNA samples found at a crime scene are run through a national Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) to look for possible matches. When a sample does not return a positive hit, investigators …

Gender And Sentencing: Single Moms, Battered Women, And Other Sex-Based Anomalies In The Gender-Free World Of The Federal Sentencing Guidelines, Myrna S. Raeder

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Cj Times Volume 7, Issue 1, Department Of Criminal Justice

CJ Times (Newsletter)

No abstract provided.

Cold Case Homicides: An Examination Of Clearance Factors, Matthew M. Lunn

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

The killing of one individual by another is something in our culture that garners a lot of attention from the media as well as community leaders. Law enforcement agencies have a duty to find resolution to these crimes. Yet, even with the rapid growth of forensics and the technology associated with it, there are still cases that go unsolved. These cases are commonly referred to as cold case homicides. In order to evaluate whether forensic evidence or investigative technique plays a larger role in the clearance of cold case homicides, a retrospective study was conducted to examine previously solved cold …

Effective Parole Supervisor Traits Observed By Texas Parole Officers, David H. Bolding Ii

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

This research study uses a quantitative method to identify the traits that Texas parole officers observe make an effective leader. This study adds to what seems to be a void in research on parole supervisors. Prior literature has identified that numerous individual traits and observable traits play an active role in effective leaders. This study uses "Survey Monkey" to employ the use of surveys across Texas, and to ensure confidentiality. By utilizing the method in this study, effective traits can be identified and used as a tool to increase present supervisory capabilities and allow others to have a guide on …

Community Reentry Programs And Their Effect On Recidivism:: A Study Of Life Skills Clients At The Denver County Jail, Valerie M. Gantzler

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Recidivism, or repeat offending, is prevalent among misdemeanants. Their sentences are usually short and become even shorter with mandates to keep county jails from overcrowding. These misdemeanants are then released from jail and go back to the same environments they were in before. Many of these people go on to commit the same or similar crimes and end up back in jail. Jails across the U. S. have begun implementing transitional programs in the hopes that providing repeat offenders with case management, counseling, and other services might enable them to break the habit of repeat offending and make better choices …

Juvenile Risk Factors Affecting Probability Of Rearrest And Treatment Options, Susan D. Kindred

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Studies have been conducted gaining insight into the effectiveness of making arrests and what the effects are to juvenile offense rates especially for those living in lower socioeconomic statuses. Researchers have attempted to develop new theories in order to prevent re-offending, while also analyzing offender risk factors. While individuals continue to re-offend, questions arise if an individual's socioeconomic status, or individual risk factors effect whether or not an arrest will be made for the offense committed and how it will be treated to prevent future offending. This study analyzes case studies addressing the issues of juvenile offending as it relates …

Fear Of Crime' & Media Representation Of Crime In Denver, Ryan M. Martinez

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

This research project looks at the 'fear of crime' as a concept that is valuable to law enforcement agencies, politicians, and the public. By examining past research, it can be concluded that 'fear of crime' is often studied through the use of victimization surveys despite methodology complications. 'Fear of crime' is studied quantitatively in this project in relation to media articles from The Denver Post from 2008-2010. By performing a longitudinal case study on these incidents, comparing past qualitative research on factors relating to 'fear of crime', and using content analysis of news articles, this study examined which factor if …

Leadership Traits: An Analysis Of Perceived Leadership Qualities In Law Enforcement And Work Production, Joshua T. Hotchkiss

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Leadership is immensely important to most organizations, and its development is a recognized key to organizational success. Leadership, as a construct, has been researched in boundless depth and has been a focal point to establishing increased productivity and success. Law enforcement has placed a special interest in developing leadership as it relates to performance, productivity and succession planning. Although leadership development is a seminal part of law enforcement objectives, it is difficult to implement clear strategies for doing so. This study examines the gap in research as it pertains to leadership traits and work production by analyzing officers' perceptions of …

Examining Sociobiological Fitness Traits In Conjunction With The General Strain Theory In Convicted Rapists, Lorinda R. Hetterle

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

The purpose of this study is to determine if sociobiological theories are useful in studying deviant behavior. Due to sociobiology being a field that has only recently been developed, there is little research regarding the overlap between criminology and sociobiology. Using forcible rape as the conduit of research, this study examined if and how sociobiology stressors contributed to the General Strain Theory. Specifically, this research answered the question, "Were sociobiological fitness stressors present in convicted rapists prior to the offense(s)?" Using secondary source data, a content analysis was performed on five separate case studies to qualitatively assess what, if any, …

Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design And Crime Rates In Apartment Settings, Robyn M. Radosevich

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

This comparative study has employed qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the implications of the Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED) theory. Due to significant inconsistencies in prior research, the effectiveness of CPTED in reducing crime rates was examined. Research analysis has examined the elements of CPTED present at three sample apartment complexes located in a large western city and determined if the apartment settings with physical elements consistent with CPTED experienced lower crime rates. Observational qualitative data and quantitative crime rates were applied in a comparative analysis.

Perceptions Of Community-Based Advocates In Jefferson County, Colorado Concerning Intimate Partner Violence Against Women, Amanda A. Lathrop

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

This qualitative study explored perceptions of community-based advocates in Jefferson County, Colorado and their experience assisting victims of intimate partner violence against women. Open-ended interview questionnaires were collected from community-based advocates and used to derive the perceptions community-based advocates hold with regard to access to community resources, ability to establish social support, improve quality of life, and ultimately reduce re-abuse. Results of these perceptions were combined with and compared to previous secondary research by Deborah Bybee and Cris Sullivan. This research of victims' perceived effectiveness combined with data collected from advocates' perceived effectiveness allowed for further insight into intimate partner …