Criminology Commons^™

Prison Stories: A Qualitative Study Of Women’S Experiences In Prison, Lizeth Chapa

Honors Theses

The purpose of this study to provide a meaningful profile of women offenders that will deliver a comprehensive understanding on the problems women face while in prison so that treatment can address these issues. Qualitative methodology, specifically the use of an open-ended questionnaire is used to examine the lives and issues that women in prison face. The sample consists of females who have previously been incarcerated in the state of Texas. They completed a semi-structured open-ended questionnaire in order to assess their perceptions of: (a) factors that contributed to their criminal behaviors, (b) how being incarcerated has positively or negatively …

The Inaugural Issue Of Dignity, Donna M. Hughes

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Sensitivity To The Ferguson Effect: The Role Of Managerial Organizational Justice, Justin Nix, Scott E. Wolfe

Criminology and Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

Purpose

We argue that the police have been adversely impacted by Ferguson-related negative publicity in ways beyond the supposed increase in crime (e.g., reduced motivation and increased perception of danger). Further, we suggest that organizational justice is a key factor that influences officers' sensitivity to such Ferguson Effects.

Methods

We used a sample of 510 sheriff's deputies surveyed 6 months after the incident in Ferguson. We explored whether organizational justice is associated with deputies' sensitivity to several manifestations of the Ferguson Effect using OLS and ordered logistic regression models.

Results

The results demonstrated that deputies who believed their supervisors were …

Fitting Eyewitness Identification And Confidence To A Diffusion Model Of Processing, Brittany Nicole Race

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

It is necessary to better serve justice to understand the mechanisms behind eyewitness identification and reports of confidence. The material contained within attempt to fit eyewitness identification to a diffusion model of processing, RTCON (Ratcliff & Starns, 2009). Participants saw eight mock crime videos and were then tasked with using eight showups or eight lineups to identify the suspects within the video. Half of the presentations were target present and half were target absent. Additionally, participants were either presented with biased or unbiased instructions. Strangely, unbiased lineups led to higher hit rates which is contrary to most findings in the …

Social Identities And Meanings In Correctional Work, Caitlin C. Botelho

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study focuses on correctional officers’ values and perceptions of their workplace, the people they work with and for, and members of the general public. Although prior research has investigated correctional staff members’ feelings about their occupation, far fewer studies have implemented a comprehensive qualitative, microsociological approach. The author conducted 20 in-depth interviews with current and former correctional officers (COs) in public-supported facilities. Additional data were collected through two public Facebook pages designated for COs and citizens interested in the criminal justice system. The study offers insights about the significance of COs’ feelings about their work and how the correctional …

A Prospective Investigation Of Behavioral Risk Factors And Sexual Victimization Outcome In College Females, Tara E. Casady

Dissertations

The current study was a prospective examination of the potential predictors of sexual victimization in women with and without sexual victimization histories. Utilizing a longitudinal design, we investigated sexually risky behavior, sexual sensation seeking, and substance use disordered behavior with regard to the later experience of sexual victimization during 2-­‐‑, 6-­‐‑, and 12-­‐‑month follow-­‐‑up periods. As reported previously, Time 1 data suggested that women with victimization histories were more likely to engage in sexually risky behaviors, engage in substance use disordered behavior, and were more likely to endorse higher scores of sexual sensation seeking. A statistically significant relationship was not …

Street By Street: Cross-Site Evaluation Of The Ojjdp Community-Based Violence Prevention Demonstration Program, Kathleen A. Tomberg, Jeffrey A. Butts

Publications and Research

In 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) launched the Community-Based Violence Prevention (CBVP) program to reduce youth violence through targeted community-level initiatives. The program offered grants to cities for implementing evidence-based strategies, such as Cure Violence and the Boston Gun Project, to address high-risk youth involvement in violence. The John Jay College Research and Evaluation Center evaluated the program’s impact on five recipient cities: Brooklyn, NY; Denver, CO; Newark, NJ; Oakland, CA; and Washington, DC. The evaluation focused on the effectiveness of these interventions in reducing violence among youth and young adults.

The School-To-Prison Pipeline: How Roles Of School-Based Law Enforcement Officers May Impact Disciplinary Actions, Kathy Martinez-Prather, Joseph M. Mckenna, Scott W. Bowman

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"The presence of law enforcement officers in schools has generated an overwhelming amount of concern among educators, parents, researchers, and policy-makers. It is believed their mere presence in schools is associated with the school-to-prison pipeline (STPP), which suggests that the use of police criminalizes minor student behavior and pushes them into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. However, it remains unclear as to what impact law enforcement officers truly have on this phenomenon. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of law enforcement officers on the STPP in relation to the roles they are assigned. We argue …

The Emergence Of Contemporary Bestiality Law: Applying The Integrative Conflict Model To The Enumclaw Case, Jason S. Ulsperger, Kristen L. Ulsperger, Cole Smith

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"This article examines the social construction of bestiality law in the United States using the Integrative Conflict Model of law formation. With qualitative findings from a media content study including newspaper articles, a documentary transcript, and a variety of online data sources, it explores the dynamics behind the formation of bestiality law in the state of Washington. The research specifically uses the circumstances surrounding the death of Kenneth Pinyan, and the subsequent Enumclaw horse sex scandal that took place in the summer of 2005, to support the idea that bestiality law can emerge due to specific factors: structural foundations, perceptions …

Lois Presser And Sveinung Sandberg (Eds), Narrative Criminology: Understanding Stories Of Crime, Adam Veitch

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Over the last two decades there has been an epistemological push in the social sciences to bring narrative into the methodological fold. Narrative social science is steeped in theories of humans as story tellers. The foreword to Narrative Criminology argues that this theoretical line of thought originates in Jean-Paul Sartre’s belief that people are fundamentally storytelling creatures, or “homo narrativus.” The guiding thought here is that stories are central to understanding how and why we act in society. We are all storytellers, and we enjoy sharing tales with an audience. Furthermore, the way that we construct stories of our social …

Fugitive Safe Surrender: A Qualitative Analysis Of Participants’ Reasons For Surrender And Anticipated Outcomes To Inform Program Evaluation, Joseph D. Galanek, Janelle Duda, Daniel J. Flannery, Jeff Kretschmar, Frederick Butcher

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"The Fugitive Safe Surrender (FSS) program is a means for individuals with outstanding warrants to turn themselves in at a non-law-enforcement setting. Challenges remain in evaluating FSS program outcomes. Based on n = 211 participants’ demographic data and qualitative, open-ended written responses collected during an FSS event in a mid-sized Midwestern city, we analyze participants’ reasons for surrendering and anticipated outcomes of surrendering. Utilizing inductive thematic analysis of participants’ responses, we identify individual-level program outcomes that can be used for evaluating FSS. We additionally identify the intersection of codes amongst participant responses to demonstrate the inter-connectedness of FSS participants’ reasons …

Framing Legitimacy: A Qualitative Analysis Examining Local Print-Media Portrayals Of An Immigrant Family Detention Center In Texas, Layne Dittmann, Jurg Gerber

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Research suggests that media portrayals can impact the opinions of adults (Dizard, 2000). However, media reports on aspects of our criminal justice system, such as corrections, are an understudied topic (Marsh, 1989), especially regarding the use of private prisons. The current study examines a sample of 12 local Texas newspapers that reported on the T. Don Hutto Facility in Taylor, Texas, between January 1, 2000, and December 31, 2013. This facility was once a state prison for males and local jail inmates before being converted into an undocumented immigrant family detention facility and later into a detention center for undocumented …

“Explaining Similarities And Variations In Program Structures And Professional Roles In Midwestern Mental Health Courts” By Monte D. Staton And Arthur J. Lurigio, Monte D. Staton, Arthur J. Lurigio

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"For nearly twenty years, legal and mental health professionals have created mental health courts (MHCs) for responding to the increasing numbers of criminally involved people with severe mental illnesses (PSMI) who are entering the criminal justice system. This article presents findings from qualitative analysis of survey and ethnographic data collected at nine MHCs established in a Midwestern state between 2004 and 2008, exploring how professionals who operated the MHCs organized the programs and conducted roles at the work sites. Findings revealed that professionals established very similar models of mental health court organization at each of the nine sites. The data …

Andrea S. Boyles, Race, Place, And Suburban Policing: Too Close For Comfort, Brian P. Schaefer

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"The struggles of African Americans with police in urban environments are well documented in criminological and sociological research. Andrea Boyles in Race, Place, and Suburban Policing offers new perspectives by introducing readers to the relationship between African Americans and the police in Meacham Park, a suburban enclave of affluent Kirkwood, Missouri. The focus on suburbia depicts how race and place shapes interactions and sheds doubt that African Americans can escape the harms associated with living in low-income urban environments by relocating to the suburbs. Boyles spent two years conducting fieldwork and interviewed over thirty adults at length. Her findings provide …

Susan J. Terrio, Whose Child Am I? Unaccompanied, Undocumented Children In U.S. Immigration Custody, Francisco J. Alatorre

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Whose Child Am I? is by Susan Terrio, Professor of Anthropology at Georgetown and author of two other books about issues of juvenile delinquency. Focusing on the wretched and dangerous experiences of Latino youth desperately traveling to and reaching El Norte, and then experiencing detention and incarceration, Terrio interrogates the American dream and American ideals of inclusion, as both are seriously abused in this international transborder tragedy. Terrio conducts her inquiry into how undocumented children are sent north, how they survive, and what happens to them by relating the process chronologically. She describes the children finding their way “home” …

Exploring Young Males' Vulnerability To The Sex Trafficking Industry In A Rural State, Kevin Shankle, Matt Belcher, Emily Macfarland

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Exploring Young Adult Males’ Vulnerability to the Sex Trafficking Industry in a Rural State

Matt Belcher, Emily MacFarland, Kevin Shankle

Dr. Elizabeth B. Perkins, Ph.D.

Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Criminology

Morehead State University

Currently there are between 27 and 30 million slaves in the world, 22% of those are trapped in the sex trafficking industry, 2 million of the sex trafficking victims are children. That being said, it is incredibly important to recognize that trafficking occurs here in Kentucky as well (Sex Trafficking. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.ijm.org/casework/sex-trafficking).

Our research project focuses on data collected through interviews with 50 …

Revolution And Education, Lilia D. Monzó, Peter Mclaren

Education Faculty Articles and Research

Denied the right to recognize patterns of violence and their relationship to class and specifically to the capitalist mode of production through an institutionalized historical amnesia, we live our lives as mere passengers on a train that stops at death’s door. In the self-proclaimed greatest super power, the United States, the mythical alliance to democracy serves to obfuscate its systematic plundering of life and earth in service to the transnational capitalist class. We have been brainwashed through state and corporate-sponsored lies, myth, and a national zealotry to forget and continue to repeat the atrocities of our past. We have been …

Welcome To Dignity, Donna M. Hughes

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Crime In The Built Urban Environment: Exploring The Impact Of Road Networks And Land Use On Residential Burglary Patterns, Kathryn Wuschke, Justin Song, Valerie Spicer

Criminology and Criminal Justice Faculty Publications and Presentations

For decades, environmental criminology theory has emphasized the connections between the built urban environment and criminal activity. The urban landscape determines both the origins and destinations of everyday journeys from home to work, school, shoppingor entertainment areas, and it provides the pathways on which residents travel. As such, the built environment guides and limits the locations that offenders may search within in order to identify potential criminal opportunities. For these reasons, access and proximity to major roads, as well as key local activity nodes such as shopping malls, transit stations and schools, have been frequently found to be an important …

Fish, Christine Stark

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.