Criminology Commons^™

The Rabble In The Suburbs: An Examination Of Jail Reentry In A Non-Metropolitan County, Matt Richie

Theses and Dissertations

The rabble was a term first used by Irwin (1985) to describe the detached individuals that are incarcerated in America’s jails. These individuals are not overly violent or malicious, rather these are the people that the rest of society would rather not have on their streets. Irwin’s (1985) work was completed in San Francisco in the late 1970s and early 1980s. However, since then there has been very little replication of his work. This study examines a more contemporary jail population to see if Irwin’s analysis is still relevant. Moreover, this study examines a jail population in a non-urban area. …

An Intersectional Examination Of Criminally Involved Women Of Color With Mental Illness, Cailin Rosemary Mcdermott

Theses and Dissertations

Women, people of color, and people with mental illness are fast growing populations in the criminal justice system. However, research tends to overlook the women of color with mental illness who exist at the intersection of these statuses. The current thesis attempts to apply an intersectional framework to the analysis of the narratives of these multifaceted women to explore the ways that their varying positions in society interact to shape unique life experiences. I analyzed a secondary data set of semi-structured life-course interviews with 65 women on a Seriously Mentally Ill (SMI) probation caseload. Implementing a grounded-inspired approach, the interviews …

Police Body-Worn Camera Perceptions Pre/Post Deployment, Aaron Veerman

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine if officers’ perceptions of Body-Worn Cameras (BWCs) changed over the course of a six-month pilot program. Officers from a Midwest police department were surveyed prior to or shortly after receiving their BWCs (Pre-Test) and again approximately six months later (Post-Test). Once completed, independent samples t-tests, mean comparisons, and Pearson’s correlations were used to analyze the data. This study did not produce many significant differences in officers’ perceptions over the course of the study, according to t-test results. However, several significant differences were found after each shift was analyzed separately. Overall, less than …

Do College Students’ Perceptions Of The Police Differ By Education Level And Major?, Lashanti Wilson Brown

Theses and Dissertations

Little is known about the impact that higher education has on students’ perceptions of the police, especially with respect to justice education. This study examines perceptions of the police among college students at Illinois State University. It questions how differences in education levels, major, race, age, and gender affect student perceptions about the police. A 55-question online survey was administered to 451 students at Illinois State University.

Results revealed that those with more education did not have significantly different contact with police officers than those with less education, however, they were significantly more likely to report negative attitudes towards the …

Down By Law: A Demographic And Geographic Analysis Of Those Killed By Police, Scott W. Murrah

Theses and Dissertations

After the rebellion over the killing of Michael Brown, the US Justice Department reported that over-policing for the sake of monetary extraction was taking place in Ferguson, MO, with non-White and people in poverty being disproportionately targeted at the hands of the police. And while it has been shown to be present within the Ferguson community, this extraction and targeting by police is not a geographically isolated occurrence. Based on previous research, a racialized, economic-based system of oppression goes hand-in-hand with policing. But how do the qualities of these geographies affect the prominence and location of police violence on a …

Media Effects And Criminal Profiling: How Fiction Influences Perception And Profile Accuracy, Asha Bolton

Theses and Dissertations

The objective of this dissertation was to investigate whether media and fictional information that is observed daily can influence perception to build a criminal psychological profile. Staggering between a distinguished art and science, the term profiling has been known by several different names – including criminal profiling, psychological profiling, offender profiling and more. Bandura (2009) believed that exposure to television and other media feeds into a socially constructed reality, where the audience is inevitably influenced by the beliefs and cognitions of observed media. The researcher believed that exposure to media can either influence criminal profiling and investigations with increasing accuracy …

The News Through Facebook: Discovering The Prevalence Of Rape Myths In User Comments, Leigh Anne Clay

Theses and Dissertations

This study attempted to ascertain the prevalence value of rape myths located within social media user comments on the website Facebook. Research using existing Internet-based comments may provide insight into current attitudes and beliefs surrounding sexual violence. Using a quantitative content analysis, this study gauged the prevalence of rape myths in user comments by referencing a preset code list created with rape myths from the Acceptance of Modern Myths About Sexual Aggression scale (AMMSA) and the Updated Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance Scale (IRMA) and by locating emergent codes in the dataset.