Criminology Commons^™

Racially Neutral Policing?: Puerto Rican And Mexican Young Adults’ Experiences With Order Maintenance Strategies, Claudio G. Vera Sanchez, Jacinta M. Gau

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Despite the proliferation of seemingly racially neutral police strategies, Latinos continue to report unfavorable views toward police. Limited attention has been given to how urban strategies, such as order maintenance policing, are experienced by young Latino males. The present study uses data from in-depth interviews conducted with male Latino youth in two Chicago neighborhoods: one majority-Latino, predominantly Mexican; and one mixed-race, gentrifying Puerto Rican. Results show that youth in both neighborhoods report enhanced surveillance and aggressive stop-and-frisks. Additionally, neighborhood context shapes the dynamics between police and young Latinos. In the Puerto Rican neighborhood, policing is enmeshed in culture clashes. In …

A Long-Term Follow-Up Of Crossover Youth: Young Adult Outcomes For Maltreated Youth In The Juvenile Justice System, Carly Lyn Baetz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Crossover youth, those with histories of childhood maltreatment and delinquency, may be at high risk for negative outcomes compared to other youth. However, very little is known about the long-term outcomes for this population. This dissertation compared four groups: youth with histories of child maltreatment and juvenile arrest (n = 180), youth with a history of maltreatment only (n = 428), youth with a history of juvenile arrest only (n = 91), and youth with no history of maltreatment or juvenile arrest (n = 496), on a range of outcomes, including mental health, education, employment, and criminal behavior. Data from …

Visualizing Abolition: Two Graphic Novels And A Critical Approach To Mass Incarceration For The Composition Classroom, Michael Sutcliffe

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This article outlines two graphic novels and an accompanying activity designed to unpack complicated intersections between racism, poverty, and (d)evolving criminal-legal policy. Over 2 million adults are held in U.S. prison facilities, and several million more are under custodial supervision, and it has become clearly unsustainable. In the last decade, there has been a shift in media conversations about criminality, yet only a few suggest decreasing our reliance upon incarceration. In meaningfully different ways, the two novels trace the development of incarceration from its roots in slavery to its contemporary anti-democratic iteration and offer an underpublicized alternative.

Critical and community …

Proposing A Pedigree Risk Measurement Strategy: Capturing The Intergenerational Transmission Of Antisocial Behavior In A Nationally Representative Sample Of Adults, Joesph A. Schwartz, Eric J. Connelly, Kevin M. Beaver, Joseph L. Nedelec, Michael G. Vaughn

Criminology and Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

An impressive literature has revealed that variation in virtually every measurable phenotype is the result of a combination of genetic and environmental influences. Based on these findings, studies that fail to use genetically informed modeling strategies risk model misspecification and biased parameter estimates. Twin- and adoption-based research designs have frequently been used to overcome this limitation. Despite the many advantages of such approaches, many available datasets do not contain samples of twins, siblings or adoptees, making it impossible to utilize these modeling strategies. The current study proposes a measurement strategy for estimating the intergenerational transmission of antisocial behavior (ASB) within …

Tokin Up In The 5280: Insight Into How Denver Police Officers Make Sense Of, And Define, Interpret, And React To The Legalization Of Marijuana, Kara K. Hoofnagle

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

Laws surrounding the possession, use, and distribution of marijuana have undergone many changes for over a century. Political pressures and social prejudices have most often been the cause of these changes, rather than scientific research or rational thinking. As a result, the law has sometimes lagged behind social practice as in the current case in much of the U.S., including Colorado. In such an environment, it often falls on a police officer's definition, interpretation, and reaction to the laws to determine the extent to which certain laws and sanctions are enforced. Drawing on the work of Weick (1976), this dissertation …

The Strength Of Social Bonds In Preventing At Risk Youth From Engaging In Delinquent And Law Violating Behavior, Christopher A. Falcone

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of the study is to assess whether social bonds (i.e., attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief) are associated with a decrease in delinquent and law violating behavior among at-risk youth in various geographical locations. According to Travis Hirschi's (1969) social bonding theory, delinquent acts occur when an individual's bond to society is weak or broken. Hirschi stated that humans by nature are deviant, and that the value individuals place on their relationships prevent them from engaging in such behavior. Using data from the 2000 ICPSR Evaluation of the Children at Risk Program in Austin, Texas; Bridgeport, Connecticut; Memphis, Tennessee; …

The Impact Of Realignment On Property Crime: Perspectives Of Chiefs Of Police, Daniel S. Llorens

Dissertations

Realignment, instituted in October 2011, was California’s latest effort at prison reform by realigning responsibility for prisoners labeled nonviolent, non-serious, and non sex-related from the state to counties. Many of these offenders were in state prison upon conviction of property crime offenses. Realignment had a net decarcerative effect on offenders. Simultaneously, California cities’ officer staffing levels shrunk during the great recession. To determine what impact realignment may have had on property crime in small California cities, and to identify effective response strategies, property crime and officer staffing data was analyzed and a survey administered to the chiefs of those cities. …

Editorial, Willard M. Oliver

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Welcome to the third volume of the Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice & Criminology. I am pleased to report that the journal is still going strong and manuscripts continue to be submitted on a regular basis. The journal continues to hold its authors to a high standard and as you will note for this issue’s updated analytics, the journal is currently holding a 16.9% acceptance rate. I believe you will see the satisfactory results of maintaining the high standards in this first issue of Volume 3. Lisa Kort-Butler and Michael Killingsworth lead off with a historical analysis of media-crime …

“Were You Drunk At The Time?”: The Influence Of Parole Boards On Accounts And Neutralization Techniques In State Parole Hearings, Danielle Lavin-Loucks, Kristine Levan

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"This paper examines the collaborative nature of accounts and neutralization techniques that are employed in parole hearings. Prior research using neutralization theory has largely overlooked the role of other actors in the development of neutralizations, examining them through interviews or narratives where interaction is either scripted or limited and thus has little bearing on the production of such accounts. In contrast, this study evaluates real time interaction, examining how parole board members propose, respond to, and modify neutralizations issued by inmates seeking parole. Ethnographic observations of 438 regular parole and parole revocation hearings, videotapes of 40 such hearings from the …

Becoming A Hacker: Demographic Characteristics And Developmental Factors, Kevin F. Steinmetz

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Hackers are not defined by any single act; they go through a process of development. Building from previous research and through ethnographic interviews and participant observation, the current analysis examines characteristics which may influence an individual’s development as a hacker. General demographic characteristics are analyzed, the participants’ school experiences are discussed, and perceived levels of parental support and influence are defined. Finally, descriptions of first exposures to technology, the concept of hacking, and the hacking community are presented. The study concludes with theoretical implications and suggestions for future research."

Summer Cop: A Qualitative Study Of Summer Police Officers, Brad Campbell

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"There are approximately 18,000 police agencies employing 750,000 police officers in the United States in order to police a population over 300 million citizens. In addition, sketchy estimates state there are 400,000 police reserves assisting full-time sworn officers in their duties. One major subgroup of these police reserves are summer police officers (“summer cops”) who serve full-time during the tourist season in mostly beach communities. There has been little to no research into this subpopulation of police officers and little is known about their background and reasons for becoming summer reserve officers. In order to fill this gap in the …

From Burlesque To Grand Theft Auto: An Historical Analysis Of The Treatment Of The Media-Crime Relationship In Criminology Texts, Lisa A. Kort-Butler, Michael Killingsworth

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"The degree to which criminological scholarship on the mediacrime relationship has been subject to the tides of moral panics is not well-understood, although there are theoretical reasons to hypothesize about the role of scientists in moral panics. Textbooks are one location in which a discipline chronicles its scholarly history and speaks to the public, making texts an important site for understanding how scholars interpret the media-crime relationship. A content analysis of over 200 criminology texts, ranging in publication dates from 1880 to 2012, was conducted. Almost half the texts covered the media-crime relationship. These texts often appeared to be responding …

Sharon S. Oselin, Leaving Prostitution: Getting Out And Staying Out Of Sex Work, Melisa M. Jaris

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Leaving Prostitution highlights the critical role that prostitute-serving organizations (PSO) can play in prostitutes’ efforts to leave the sex industry. PSOs can provide prostitutes subsidized housing, employment opportunities, food, transportation, counseling, education, and mentoring. These fundamental amenities offer prostitutes the life choices and confidence needed to leave the sex industry."

Rachel Zimmer Schneider, Battered Women Doing Time: Injustice In The Criminal Justice System, Cortney A. Franklin

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Advocacy and scholarly attention directed toward the plight of battered women began in the mid-1970s (del Martin, 1975). Since that time, a host of research has been conducted on the incidence and prevalence of domestic violence, the dynamics of battering relationships (LaViolette and Barnette, 2014), the predictors of why men batter, and the risk of increasing harm for survivors who are courageous enough to leave domestically violent relationships. As Lenore Walker (1977) so insightfully recognized in her early work using a sample of sheltered women who had escaped a domestically violent partner, these relationships are characterized by specific stages and …

Nickie D. Phillips & Staci Strobl, Comic Book Crime: Truth, Justice, And The American Way, Jordan E. Mazurek

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"In what can be described as an ethnographic content analysis of (super) heroic proportions, Nickie D. Phillips and Staci Strobl’s Comic Book Crime: Truth, Justice, and the American Way provides an in-depth exploration of crime and justice discourses presented in the medium of the comic book in the first decade of the 2000s. The authors employ years of in-depth participant observation in the comic book subculture along with group interviews to inform their analysis of the story arcs in two hundred popular comic book series, along with a number of graphic novels, in the post-9/11 American context. Drawing on a …

S.F. Sharp, Mean Lives, Mean Laws: Oklahoma’S Women Prisoners, Kerri Bellamy

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Using a feminist strain approach, Susan Sharp’s Mean Lives, Mean Laws: Oklahoma’s Women Prisoners, investigates the impact of incarceration on women in the Oklahoma prison system and their families. Oklahoma incarcerates women at a rate of 135 per 100,000, the highest in the nation. The book examines this high incarceration rate by investigating factors such as childhood abuse and neglect which may continue into adulthood and that contribute to women’s imprisonment. Sharp makes it clear that once in prison there are few avenues for the women to obtain education and healthcare or to maintain relationships with family on the …

Sutherland, Edwin H., The Professional Thief, Jurg Gerber

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Perhaps because he was the son of a minister and raised in a very traditional home (Geis & Meier, 1977, p.24), Edwin Sutherland (1883-1950) had a populist streak and is known for two major contributions to American criminology: the theory of differential association (DA) and the concept of white collar crime (WCC). His classic book entitled The Professional Thief is at the intersection of these two interests, although its influence has been more acknowledged with respect to DA than WCC. This review traces scholarly reactions to the book and its enduring contributions to American criminology."

Alice Goffman, On The Run: Fugitive Life In An American City, Dzhamilia Makashova

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Alice Goffman’s On the Run is an ethnographic study of the impacts of the war on drugs and policing in an American urban neighborhood. Her research started during her sophomore year at the University of Pennsylvania in Dr. David Grazian’s urban ethnography class. As a part of the class, Goffman’s assignment was to pick a site to observe and take notes, and she got a job at a cafeteria at the west edge of Penn’s campus with Miss Deena, a Black woman in her sixties who managed the staff. Through this job, Goffman was introduced to Miss Deena’s family and …

Violence-Related Police Crime Arrests In The United States, 2005-2011, Philip M. Stinson, Steven L. Brewer Jr, Joelle K. Bridges

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

This study is a quantitative content analysis of news reports and court records on 3,328 violence-related arrest cases of 2,586 individual sworn law enforcement officers during the years 2005-2011. The arrested officers were employed by 1,445 nonfederal state, local, special, constable, tribal, and regional law enforcement agencies located in 805 counties and independent cities in 49 states and the District of Columbia. Binary logistic regression and classification and regression tree (CART) analyses were conducted to predict criminal conviction in violence-related police crime arrest cases. Finding indicate that conviction of police officers on one or more offenses charged are driven by …

Challenging The Political Assumption That “Guns Don’T Kill People, Crazy People Kill People!”, Heath J. Hodges, Mario Scalora

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Every time an infamous mass shooting takes place, a storm of rhetoric sweeps across this country with the fury of a wild fire. “Why are we letting these people carry guns?” “Why were they not hospitalized?” “The government needs to crack down on this issue!” What is the government’s response to these cries of concern? Politicians and the media attempt to ease public fears by drawing tenuous connections among a handful of poorly understood tragedies. The salient commonality is that these high-profile shooters had some history of mental illness. A cursory review of the Internet will paint a troubling picture …

What Is Wrong With Sex In Authority Relations? A Study In Law And Social Theory, Galia Schneebaum

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Criminalization of Sex within Authority Relations (SAR)—such as sex in the relationship between a therapist and a patient or an employer and an employee—is a growing phenomenon. Current theories conceptualize and consequently justify SAR offenses either under a liberal conception of sexual autonomy or under a feminist conception of gender inequality. Yet both conceptualizations are inadequate and fail to capture the distinctiveness of this new legal category. Specifically, they fail to explain the main puzzle underlying SAR offenses, which proscribe sexual contact in the absence of coercion by the offender. Rejecting both liberal and feminist analytical frameworks, this Article draws …

The Influence Of A Juvenile's Abuse History On Support For Sex Offender Registration, Cynthia J. Najdowski, M. C. Stevenson, J. M. Salerno, T. R. A. Wiley, B. L. Bottoms, K. M. Farnum

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

We investigated whether and how a juvenile’s history of experiencing sexual abuse affects public perceptions of juvenile sex offenders in a series of 5 studies. When asked about juvenile sex offenders in an abstract manner (Studies 1 and 2), the more participants (community members and undergraduates) believed that a history of being sexually abused as a child causes later sexually abusive behavior, the less likely they were to support sex offender registration for juveniles. Yet when participants considered specific sexual offenses, a juvenile’s history of sexual abuse was not considered to be a mitigating factor. This was true when participants …

Safety Concerns, Fear And Precautionary Behavior Among College Women: An Exploratory Examination Of Two Measures Of Residency, Adam J. Pritchard, Carol E. Jordan, Pamela Wilcox

Office for Policy Studies on Violence Against Women Publications

This study examines the impact of two distinct measures of residency on college women's perceptions of safety, fear of crime and precautionary behaviors within both on-campus and off-campus areas. A student's current residency either on- or off-campus and a student's prior residency in a metropolitan, micropolitan or rural county prior to college are compared across these three aspects of campus safety. Current residency is found to be significantly related to a student's perceptions of safety in off-campus areas around campus, as well as the likelihood of engaging in precautionary behaviors such as avoiding specific locations on campus or carrying or …

Rituals Upon Celluloid: The Need For Crime And Punishment In Contemporary Film, J C. Oleson

Cleveland State Law Review

Most members of the public lack first-hand experience with the criminal justice system; nevertheless, they believe that they possess phenomenological knowledge about it. In large part, the public’s understandings of crime and punishment are derived from television and film, which provide modern audiences with a vision of institutions that are normally occluded from view. While public rituals of punishment used to take place on the scaffold, equivalent moral narratives about crime and punishment now occur on film because modern punishment is imposed outside of the public gaze. Yet because crime films distort what they depict, the public’s view of crime …

The "New Civil Rights" : The Innocence Movement And American Criminal Justice, Robert Norris

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Few issues have captivated the criminal justice world in recent years like wrongful convictions. An advocacy network has developed around the United States, responsible for exonerating more than 1,500 individuals and successfully passing reforms at all levels of criminal justice policy and practice. This "innocence movement" has been described as a "revolution" and a "new civil rights movement," yet has rarely been examined in-depth by scholars. In this dissertation, I explore the history and theoretical underpinnings of the movement through interviews with 37 actors involved in innocence work, archival materials, and observational research. I draw on the rich body of …

When Is Hacking Ethical?, Sharif Rezazadehsaber

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This thesis examines situations in which computer hacking might be considered ethical. It addresses fundamental questions regarding the motivation and consequences of ethical hacking. The paper is organized into three sections. The first section discusses the history of hackers, classifies them according to their motivational background. The second part of the paper comprehensively describes the features of the ethical or “white hat” hacker group, and explores the positive and negative behaviors of ethical hackers in relation to their ethical principles. In the final section of the paper, I discuss hacktivist groups, their unique ideologies, and the risks they face, including …

Framing A Narrative Of Discrimination Under The Eighth Amendment In The Context Of Transgender Prisoner Health Care, Sarah Halbach

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

This Comment looks closely at the reasoning behind two recent federal court opinions granting transgender prisoners access to hormone therapy and sex-reassignment surgery. Although both opinions were decided under the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, which does not expressly prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, a careful look at the courts’ reasoning suggests that they were influenced by the apparent discrimination against the transgender plaintiffs. This Comment argues that future transgender prisoners may be able to develop an antidiscrimination doctrine within the Eighth Amendment by framing their Eighth Amendment medical claims in terms of discrimination based on …

Trevino V. Thaler: Falling Short Of Meaningful Federal Habeas Corpus Reform, Cristina Law

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Prisoners face many barriers when petitioning for federal habeas corpus relief, especially when asserting ineffective assistance of trial counsel claims. The Supreme Court’s decision in Trevino v. Thaler attempted to lower these barriers by carving out a narrow exception to the procedural default rule. Although a step in the right direction, this narrow exception fell short of meaningful habeas corpus reform. This Comment argues that although the Supreme Court’s decision in Trevino appears to guarantee habeas corpus petitioners the ability to raise ineffective assistance of trial counsel claims in federal court, it is unlikely to provide prisoners meaningful opportunities to …

Investigating The Programmatic Attack: A National Survey Of Veterans Treatment Courts, Julie Marie Baldwin

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Veterans treatment courts (VTCs), a recent emergence from the specialized court movement, target the population of veterans in contact with the criminal justice system. Due to the contemporary nature of their dissemination, published empirical research on VTCs is only beginning to materialize. Additionally, national surveys of specialized courts are rare and typically occur decades after the courts emerge. This Article presents descriptive results regarding the establishment, policy, structure, and procedures of VTCs using data from the first national survey of these courts, conducted in the early stages of their emergence. A national compendium of VTCs (N = 114) was created. …

Examining The Sources Of Correctional Officer Legitimacy, Benjamin Steiner, John Wooldredge

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Correctional officer legitimacy has been linked to prison safety and order, and it may also be relevant for inmate well-being and facilitating behavioral change. Yet few studies have examined the sources of correctional officer legitimacy. Findings from analyses of survey data collected from over 5,500 inmates housed throughout forty-six facilities in Ohio and Kentucky revealed that inmates’ perceptions of the treatment they received during their most recent encounters with correctional officers (procedural justice) impacted the strength of their beliefs regarding the legitimacy of those officers. The analyses also revealed that background factors such as inmates’ age and race were relevant …