Criminology Commons^™

Sentencing And Interbranch Dialogue, Eric S. Fish

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

American legislatures generally delegate primary control over sentencing policy to one of two actors: trial judges or a sentencing commission. In choosing between these actors, a legislature decides between two values: individualization or uniformity. If it empowers trial judges, sentences will be individually tailored to each defendant, but there will be unjust disparities because different judges have different sentencing practices. If it empowers a sentencing commission, sentences will be uniform across cases, but they will not be tailored to each defendant. This Article proposes a different architecture for American sentencing systems, one that relies on interbranch dialogue to transcend this …

Maternal And Paternal Imprisonment And Children's Social Exclusion In Young Adulthood, Holly Foster, John Hagan

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

The United States has entered its fourth decade of high imprisonment levels. It is now possible to assess the impact of parental imprisonment on children who have completed the transition to adulthood. We elaborate the role of parental incarceration from a life course perspective on intergenerational social exclusion in young adulthood. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health [Add Health] representatively sampled the historically unique national cohort born in the 1980s, during the onset of mass incarceration. Four waves of the Add Health survey provide a valuable moving window on incarcerated parents and the transitions of their children from adolescence, …

To Be Judged By Twelve Or Carried By Six? Quasi-Involuntariness And The Criminal Prosecution Of Service Members For The Use Of Force In Combat - A Grunt's Perspective, Lupe Laguna

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Post-9/11 conflicts have altered the way that the United States of America and her allies fight wars. Over the last ten years military commanders have embraced counterinsurgency doctrine as the path to victory in the War on Terror. As they have done so, commanders have been faced with the difficult task of balancing the need to protect local civilian populations with the need to proactively target insurgent fighters. To accomplish this mission, the military has adopted rules of engagement that allow a service member to engage a target when he or she perceives that the target exhibits “hostile intent.” The …

The Psychology Of Workplace Deviant & Criminal Behavior, William Brice, Deborah E. Rupp

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

The 2013 book Deviant and Criminal Behavior in the Workplace addresses the psychological constructs, situations, and environments underlying active counterproductive workplace behaviors. Building on a diverse range of psychological findings, this book highlights that the field of criminology needs to expand outside of the realm of violence and instead look at how deviant workplace behaviors can tie into—and motivate—other types of crime.

Lawful Or Fair? How Cops And Laypeople Perceive Good Policing, Tracey L. Meares, Tom R. Tyler, Jacob Gardener

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Legal authorities and the public live in two separate worlds. One world is suffused with law, and the other world is suffused with people’s lived experiences that support their evaluations of fairness. When legal authorities consider whether police policies and practices are desirable, a framework regarding the lawfulness of the relevant policies and practices dominates the conversation. Police departments, their policies, and police officers’ actions are viewed as right or wrong with reference to constitutional standards, as interpreted by prosecutors, judges, and other legal actors. In contrast, we argue that the public is generally insensitive to the question of whether …

Estimating The Prevalence Of Entrapment In Post-9/11 Terrorism Cases, Jesse J. Norris, Hanna Grol-Prokopczyk

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

How many of the terrorism convictions since September 11, 2001 have been the product of entrapment? Some scholars and journalists have suggested that the number is quite high. One report went so far as to claim that only 1% of terrorism prosecutions involve “real” terrorism. The government’s defenders, at the opposite extreme, come close to saying that entrapment in a terrorism case is a contradiction in terms.

Little empirical basis exists for evaluating these competing claims. Existing literature on terrorism and entrapment is typically based on detailed discussions of a few egregious cases, rather than systematic analysis of the phenomenon. …

Symposium On The Center On Wrongful Convictions: Foreward, Karen L. Daniel

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

No abstract provided.

An Ideological Odyssey: Evolution Of A Reformer, Rob Warden

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

No abstract provided.

Remembering Disputed Sexual Encounters: A New Frontier For Witness Memory Research, Deborah Davis, Elizabeth F. Loftus

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

This paper reviews sources of distortion in memory for sexual encounters, particularly those between intoxicated participants. We review factors leading to initial misinterpretations of sexual consent including the indirect nature of sexual consent communications, misleading cultural sexual scripts, misinterpretation of passivity, and others. In this context, we consider the way in which alcohol can both contribute to initial misunderstanding and promote specific distortions in memory over time. Finally, we discuss additional influences on memory, including motivations related to self-esteem, self-concept maintenance, or litigation, and the effects of social influence from sources such as friends, forensic interviewers or therapists.

The Unindicted Co-Ejaculator And Necrophilia: Addressing Prosecutors' Logic-Defying Responses To Exculpatory Dna Results, Jacqueline Mcmurtrie

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

This article addresses a prosecutor’s development of new and bizarre theories, particularly in cases involving confession evidence, to explain away exculpatory DNA results. In Juan Rivera’s case, the prosecutor’s theory for why sperm found inside the 11-year-old victim on the day she was murdered did not belong to Rivera was that she had sex with someone before Rivera came along and raped (but did not ejaculate) and murdered her. The unnamed-lover theory is used so often by prosecutors that it has a moniker: “the unindicted co-ejaculator.” In the case of the Dixmoor Five, teenagers convicted of the rape and murder …

The Chronic Failure To Discipline Prosecutors For Misconduct: Proposals For Reform, Thomas P. Sullivan, Maurice Possley

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

While most prosecutors adhere to the maxim that their primary task is to obtain just results, there are some who violate their ethical responsibilities in order to rack up convictions. This article describes the distressing, decades-long absence of discipline imposed on prosecutors whose knowing misconduct has resulted in terrible injustices being visited upon defendants throughout the country. Many honorable lawyers have failed to speak out about errant prosecutors, thus enabling their ethical breaches. The silent accessories include practicing lawyers and judges of trial and reviewing courts who, having observed prosecutorial misconduct, failed to take corrective action. Fault also lies with …

Who Could It Be Now? Challenging The Reliability Of First Time In-Court Identifications After State V. Henderson And State V. Lawson, Aliza B. Kaplan, Janis C. Puracal

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Despite the recent advances in assessing the reliability of eyewitness identifications, the focus to date has largely been identifications made pretrial. Little has been written about identifications made for the first time in the courtroom. While in-court identifications have an extraordinarily powerful effect on juries, all such identifications are potentially vulnerable to post-event memory distortion and decay. Absent an identification procedure that effectively tests the witness’s memory, it is impossible to know if the witness’s identification of the defendant is a product of his or her original memory or a product of the extraordinarily suggestive circumstances created by the in-court …

Prohibition, Stare Decisis, And The Lagging Ability Of Science To Influence Criminal Procedure, Wesley M. Oliver

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Science has revealed that, contrary to longstanding intuitions, eyewitnesses are sometimes mistaken and false confessions do occur. The methods police use to obtain identifications and confessions can affect their reliability. Yet criminal procedure does not deter investigatory methods that produce unreliable evidence as thoroughly as it does those methods that produce reliable evidence. If an officer conducts an illegal search of a car trunk, the evidence is excluded and subsequently officers know that they must follow the rules if they hope to admit the fruits of such searches. If, however, an officer creates a suggestive lineup—which risks a false conviction—the …

Prosecutors And Victims: Why Wrongful Convictions Matter, Jeanne Bishop, Mark Osler

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Often, discussions of wrongful convictions focus almost entirely on the wrongfully convicted and ignore two important constituencies: prosecutors and crime victims. Both constituencies have unique connections to wrongful convictions and should be recognized as potentially powerful allies for change. Prosecutors are deeply committed to justice and to the outcomes of their cases; they can help identify and correct wrongful convictions and introduce policies to avoid wrongful convictions in the first place. Wrongful convictions matter to crime victims because convicting the wrong person leaves the real perpetrator free to commit more crimes, creates a new, innocent victim, and drains resources that …

Prison Abolition And Grounded Justice, Allegra M. Mcleod

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article introduces to legal scholarship the first sustained discussion of prison abolition and what I will call a “prison abolitionist ethic.” Prisons and punitive policing produce tremendous brutality, violence, racial stratification, ideological rigidity, despair, and waste. Meanwhile, incarceration and prison-backed policing neither redress nor repair the very sorts of harms they are supposed to address—interpersonal violence, addiction, mental illness, and sexual abuse, among others. Yet despite persistent and increasing recognition of the deep problems that attend U.S. incarceration and prison-backed policing, criminal law scholarship has largely failed to consider how the goals of criminal law—principally deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and …

Influences Of Csi Effect, Daubert Ruling, And Nas Report On Forensic Science Practices, Timothy Patrick Scanlan

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The media exaggerates the capabilities of crime laboratories while it publicizes the wrongdoings of individual forensic scientists. Such portrayals skew the perspectives of jurors and hinder expert witness testimony. Complicating the problem are separate, but related, phenomena that influence how forensic laboratories conduct casework. These phenomena are Cole and Dioso-Villa's conceptualization of the unrealistic expectations of forensic science created by fictional television, known as the CSI Effect; the Daubert ruling on the admissibility of expert testimony; and some federal policy changes as a result of a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report that impacted requirements for the daily operation of …

Parole And Probation Officers' Perceptions Of Management Effectiveness In Baltimore County, Maryland, Valencia Tamir Johnson

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Management practices in the rehabilitation and criminal justice system are primarily concerned with how employees sense, collect, organize, and process information regarding the criminal offender. The purpose of this quantitative study was to measure parole and probation officers' perceptions regarding management support and effectiveness in the workplace, with particular emphasis on communication, collaboration, and conflict resolution. Herzberg's 2-factor theory of motivation served as the theoretical framework for the study, supporting the concept of participatory management as a central factor in job satisfaction. A researcher-designed, Likert-type questionnaire was administered to a randomly selected sample of 31 parole and probation officers in …

Powerlessness Within A Budget-Driven Paradigm: A Grounded Theory Leadership Study From The Perspective Of Michigan Corrections Officers, Timothy Michael Eklin

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This study explored the lived-experiences of 15 correctional officers and 5 sergeants working in adult state-operated prison facilities in Michigan. In particular, this qualitative grounded theory study revealed the impact that budget driven decision-making had on the lives of correctional officers: its effect on institutional custody, security, and safety. The study finds that many recent policy changes resulted in a sense of powerlessness expressed by the participants of the study. Participants found themselves in a precarious position, situated in between the prison population and the administration. Having an understanding of how correctional officers make meaning of their work in relation …

Federal Civil Rights Litigation Pursuant To 42 U.S.C. §1983 As A Correlate Of Police Misconduct, Philip M. Stinson, Steven L. Brewer Jr, Theresa M. Lanese, Mallorie A. Wilson

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

Police officers acting in their official capacity are subject to being sued in federal court pursuant to 42 U.S.C. §1983 for violating constitutional rights under the color of law. Using data obtained in a larger study on police crime in the United States, names of more than 5,500 nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers who were arrested during the years 2005-2011 were checked against the civil case party master name index of the federal courts’ Public Access to Courts Electronic Records (PACER) system. Findings indicate that more than 20% of the police officers who were arrested for committing one or more …

Gate Keeping And The Politics Of Access To Prisons: Implications For Qualitative Prison Research, Janani Umamaheswar

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"In this article, I draw on and contribute to existing literature on reflexivity and access in qualitative research, specifically in the context of prison research. I do this through a critical discussion of the research process involved in conducting a study on women prisoners in the U.S. In addition to describing the obstacles I faced in gaining access to a research site in which to conduct the study, I also discuss the implications of gate keeping for knowledge produced about women prisoners. Finally, I build on Bosworth et al.’s (2005) discussion of prison research using communication by mail. I argue …

Sarah Wilson, The Origins Of Modern Financial Crime: Historical Foundations And Current Problems In Britain, Aneta Spaic, Claire Angelique Nolasco

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"This book traces the roots of financial crime to the Victorian Era roughly between the years 1840-1880. Wilson situates financial crime within the context of the concerns, perceptions, developments, and issues endemic to that period. She attempts to draw the reader to the realities of this particular Victorian era as it was unfolding and explains how financial misconduct within commerce became rampant as construction of the railways spurred the growth of industrialization. The book contributes to existing literature on financial crime by providing a historical analysis of its etymology and creating awareness of its historical origins and prevalence long before …

Legalizing Recreational Marijuana: Comparing Ballot Outcomes In Four States, Kenneth Leon, Ronald Weitzer

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Medical marijuana is now available in 23 states, and its growing acceptance has paved the way for the legalization of recreational marijuana. This article examines four recent campaigns to legalize recreational marijuana–two failures and two successes. Using data from newspaper sources, interviews with key players, and other sources, we examine the factors that influence whether a ballot initiative succeeds or fails. We identify similarities and differences between the four measures, the social forces shaping the debate, their claims and counterclaims, and a set of factors that appear to increase the odds that a recreational marijuana ballot measure will be successful."

An Examination Of The Researcher Guard Role: Bringing Prison Fieldwork Into The 21st Century, Scott Chenault

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"In 1986, James Marquart published a seminal article on qualitative methodology in Justice Quarterly. In that piece he presented the strengths and weaknesses associated with the researcher guard role he used while conducting a prison ethnography in Texas. His method led to data that is still central to our understanding of prison culture. However, in the past 30 years, correctional philosophy and practice have undergone significant shifts in the United States. Despite these shifts, there has been a dramatic decrease in prison ethnography during the same time period. This article presents a modern adaptation of Marquart’s method, based on a …

Editorial, Willard M. Oliver

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Welcome to the second issue of volume two of the Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice & Criminology. Rather than closing with acknowledgments, I would like to start this editorial introduction with them. First and foremost, I would like to thank both the editorial board members and the reviewers for this volume of the journal. Their names are listed at the beginning of this issue for without them, this journal would not be possible. Still further, if it was not for the hard work and dedication of my book review editor, Kevin Steinmetz, who recently accepted an academic appointment at …

Bradley Garrett: Explore Everything: Place-Hacking The City, Kevin F. Steinmetz

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"While most people seem content to enjoy the front-stages of everyday life– going to safe spaces deemed appropriate for occupation–there are those who are enthralled by the backstage spaces of contemporary urban landscapes. In Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City, Bradley Garrett details his research into urban explorers, a subculture that delves into the hidden (or hidden in plain sight) city spaces such as abandoned urban ruins, underground tunnels, and imposing skyscrapers. To date, this work is most likely the definitive study of urban exploration (sometimes referred to as UE) and should be the starting point for anyone from student …

Contreras, Randol, The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, And The American Dream, Robert J. Durán

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Most academics do not live in segregated black or Latino communities that contain higher rates of violence and incarceration. Historically, ethnographers have attempted to bridge this gap, but only a small number of these researchers match the populations they are studying in terms of age, class, ethnicity, and gender. An even rarer ethnographer comes from these same neighborhoods and shares lifelong friendships with the participants. Randol Contreras’s Stickup Kids provides an in-your-face portrayal of a drug dealing crew turned drug robbers in the South Bronx of New York City during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Due to structural changes …

Holloway, Pippa, Living In Infamy: Felony Disfranchisement And The History Of American Citizenship, Gregory J. Fremin

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"In a historical account of the origins of felony disfranchisement in America, Pippa Holloway details how race and regional politics formed the basis for the exclusion of African Americans on the right to vote. Holloway’s Living in Infamy attempts to connect the dots from the past to the present by educating the reader on how America came to utilize felony convictions as a societal class preservation tool to exclude African Americans from voting. Holloway delves deeply into ancient Roman and Greek law and continues through Anglo-European law and ideology to set the stage for how our forefathers in early America …

Nigel South & Avi Brisman (Eds.), Routledge Handbook Of Green Criminology, Gary R. Potter

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"The first articulation of a ‘green’ criminology – that is, a criminology concerned with man-made environmental harm – is usually attributed to Michael Lynch (1990) in his essay The Greening of Criminology: a perspective on the 1990s. Although not the first criminological work on environmental harm, Lynch was one of the first to argue that environmental problems in themselves, and the social harms that so often stem from them, can be seen to be legitimate criminological concerns – and that criminologists, therefore, may be well positioned to contribute to analysis and discussion of the environmental degradation that has become …

Exploring The Roles Of Redemption, Agency, And Motivation In Two Groups Of High-Risk Felony Probationers, Steve Boehm

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Problem-solving courts were developed in the 1980s and 1990s to reduce recidivism and probation revocations. The first problem- solving courts focused primarily on treating drug abuse, but the missions have expanded to include issues such as domestic violence and the problems faced by returning war veterans. Research has found these courts to be generally effective, but there is wide variation in their outcomes, and there are questions about the perceptions of problem-solving court participants compared to other probationers. This study presents qualitative analysis of interview data for a group of problem-solving court probationers (n = 19) and a similar group …

Bill Chambliss, On The Take: From Petty Crooks To Presidents, Gary W. Potter

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"On the Take: From Petty Crooks to Presidents (first published in 1978) was the product of seven years (1962-1969) of observational research in Seattle, Washington (Chambliss, 1988). Chambliss used his background in law and sociology to interpret the things he saw and the stories he heard on Seattle’s skid row. He gained entrée into Seattle’s underworld by posing as an itinerant truck driver. Outfitted in old, worn shirts, khaki slacks and with bearded stubble on his face, he interacted with the bottom echelon of Seattle’s crime entrepreneurs–bar owners, illegal card room and bingo operators, street-level drug dealers and prostitutes. …