Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

How Do Specialized Units Affect The Outputs Of Police Organizations?: Investigating The Effect Of Community Policing Units On Community Policing Activities In Local Police Departments, Hyon Namgung

Dissertations

A review of modern police history shows the trend of increased division of labor within police agencies. However, police organizations are often criticized for creating specialized police units when they are faced with specific problems or are not effectively tackling local problems. Other challenges from within the profession include potential inter-unit conflicts or indifference of officers from other units that may hinder program implementation by specialized units. The present study looked into the changing characteristics of specialized units within police departments between 2000 and 2007. This research also examined whether creation of specialized community policing units (CP Units) influences the …

Lightning Strikes Twice: An Examination Of The Political Factors Associated With State-Level Death Sentences And Executions In The United States, 1930-2012, Ethan Christopher Amidon

Dissertations

Over the course of the last 50 years, scholars have emphasized the role that political processes play in shaping the nature of capital punishment practices. Empirical studies that have examined the relationship between political factors and capital punishment have attributed variation in the imposition of death sentences and the execution of offenders across jurisdictions in the United States to the politicization of criminal justice policies and practices and the shift in public sentiment towards more punitive ideologies that began in the 1970s. Even though historians have argued that capital punishment practices have always been shaped by political considerations, empirical research …

Judicial Behavior And Litigant Success In Environmental Cases At The United States Court Of Appeals, Elizabeth Wheat

Dissertations

This dissertation tests the legal model of judicial behavior and uses party capability, or litigant resource, theory to explain litigant success in the Court of Appeals for environmental cases and help understand the role litigant type and resources play. Environmental law has received little attention in judicial politics, and I examine which judicial behavior model explains case outcomes. The legal model argues case characteristics best explain judicial outcomes, whereas litigant resource theory posits judicial a litigant’s resources, or lack thereof, explain outcomes.

Galanter’s (1974) party capability theory focuses on advantages repeat players, the “haves,” possess and how these advantages enable …

An Examination Of Cities' Resilence To Violent Crime: A Contextual Analysis Of Victim-Offender Convergence, Vanessa Hatch Woodward

Dissertations

In his 2012 Presidential Address to the American Society of Criminology, Robert Sampson purported that causality can only be reached when social science researchers accept that individual actions are dependent on social context. He referred to this as contextual causality and argued that future research needed to focus on how to measure and/or reoperationalize community measures of crime.

There were three primary goals of this study. First was to provide a better understanding of victim-offender convergence in time and space (Cohen & Felson, 1979) within incidents of violent crime. In order to meet this goal, 90 city agencies’ incident and …

The Politics And Practicalities Of Reentry: A Case Study Of The Reentry Environment In A Suburban Community, Carlene Sipma-Dysico

Dissertations

Although inquiry into reentry has grown significantly in the past decade, studies concerning formerly incarcerated persons entrance back into society tend to look at the outcomes and consequences of reentry, not the process. This "what works and what doesn't work" research approach (Seiter and Kadela 2003) leaves some very important aspects of reentry unexamined. While determining the efficacy of programs designed to reduce recidivism is important for public safety, social policy creation, and budgetary considerations, the role of the community in reentry remains largely unexplored.

This dissertation examines how reentry is done at the community level; by practitioners of reentry, …