Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Criminology; Law; Sociology'

With overwhelming public support, pressure has been mounting on police departments to improve accountability and public trust by equipping their officers with body worn cameras (BWCs) to reduce police violence and hold officers responsible for excessive use of force, unjustified shootings, and other forms of misconduct. As police departments have begun to employ BWCs, however, concerns have risen regarding the application of this new technology and its potential to benefit police officers more so than the communities they serve. This study focuses on the city of Chicago’s recently implemented Body Worn Camera Pilot Program. The goals of this study were to determine if racial demographics could predict which of Chicago’s 22 police districts received BWCs during its pilot program, and whether and to what extent BWCs and the racial makeup of those districts influenced the arrest to crime ratios within them. A preliminary analysis revealed crime rates were not a statistically significant predictor for whether a district received BWCs. There was, however, an association between race and BWCs, where majority white police districts were much less likely to receive the technology. Standard multiple regressions indicate that as the white population percentage increases, arrests decrease. This finding was statistically significant at the .05 alpha level while controlling for the crime rate and BWC implementation. Three-way mixed ANOVA models were run to compare arrest to crime ratios pre- and post-BWC implementation for overall crime, serious crime, violent crime, non-index crime, and property crime. Although no significant two- or three-way interactions were found in any of the ANOVA models, when plotting the pre- and posttest arrest ratios there were noticeable differences between control and experimental groups across race.

Since deinstitutionalization, the responsibility for mentally ill members of society has shifted to the criminal justice system in a process of trans-institutionalization or “criminalization of mental illness” (Slate & Johnson, 2013, p. 28). Though various groups have been studied to ascertain their perception of mentally ill individuals and offenders, previous research focuses largely on students of psychology, social work, and medicine. Little research has been conducted regarding the perceptions of criminal justice students toward mental illness, despite the increasing involvement of the criminal justice system in treating and handling mentally ill individuals in the past thirty years. This exploratory research serves as a replication to a study which was conducted by Thompson, Paulson, Valgardson, Nored, and Johnson (2014).

The problem addressed through this program evaluation was that no formal study had been conducted regarding the implementation and effectiveness of the BlueTeam Program (BTP) within the law enforcement agency (LEA) serving as the study site. The BTP is a program that utilizes a computer application to track officer behaviors and alert administrators to potential trends in officer misconduct and complaints against officers. The program evaluation was guided by the process and product segments of Stufflebeam's (2003) content, input, process, and product model.

To conduct the evaluation, the researcher used a mixed methods approach for analyzing both qualitative and quantitative data. The perceptions of LEA stakeholders regarding the BTP, such as the sufficiency of staffing, budget, training, and ongoing support for effective implementation, were first collected. Quantitative data, consisting of archived, deidentified indicators of officer misconduct and complaints against officers acquired through the BTP, were then analyzed.

Findings of the study were that the BTP was effective in reducing incidents of officer misconduct and complaints against officers and for use in identifying which alerts were valid indicators of misconduct and complaints against officers. The one concern of stakeholders involving the BTP was limited nighttime vision; the recommendation for program improvement is that this shortcoming be addressed to determine possible solutions. Recommendations for future research involve the need for initial determinations, as well as formative evaluations, pertaining to the following three areas: (a) ascertaining the way in which the early intervention system will be used, (b) identifying the indicators of misconduct that will be tracked, and (c) determining the threshold at which the system will issue an alert.

Responses to sex offenders often involve collective campaigns that target political and criminal justice systems rather than individual offenders. Scholars have described these community responses as part of a broader moral panic, but that interpretation generally overlooks differences in the form of responses across places. This dissertation uses data from case studies of three California towns to examine how local political and legal contexts contribute to variation in community responses to violent sex offenders. I argue that communities' orientations to authority shape how they respond to perceived injustices.

I introduce my main arguments and overarching concepts in chapter one. Then, in chapter two, I explore why communities deploy moral authority in service of their collective goals. Moral authority is an endogenous source of community power, and moral claims emerge within formal institutional contexts that allow for and even encourage morally based arguments. Because these institutions limit the effectiveness of moral claims, communities sometimes turn to other mobilization strategies. Chapter three shows how an orientation to political authority as a source of entitlement contributed to one community rallying around political mobilization. I contrast this case with a second community in which an orientation to political authority as a source of alienation contributed to ambivalence toward political strategies. In chapter four, I argue that the third community's orientation to legal authority as a source of protection contributed to litigation as the centerpiece of their response. I compare this case to the second community in which legal authority was perceived as a source of control, which facilitated indifference toward legal mobilization.

This research contributes to a new perspective on participation in moral panic as a contemporary form of civic engagement. By illuminating the social processes underlying the relationships between communities and formal institutions, my findings have implications for understanding community responses to crime, legal and political mobilization, collective action, and social control within communities. More practically, this research can inform discussions about how community members should be involved in decision-making about sex offender reintegration.

Life course criminology seeks to explain the factors that lead and deter individuals from engaging in persistent later-life criminality. However, the cultivation of marijuana has yet to be tested by life course related means. This thesis uses data from both the Marijuana Growers' Survey and the Belgian Marijuana Growers' Survey to examine the extent that life course related variables are associated with transitions within marijuana growers. Results suggest little support for life course related variables, and instead suggest that motivations are more important in dictating transitions associated with an increase in profit and operations. Implications of these results are discussed and policy recommendations are made.

Since the passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, which amended the Civil Rights Act of 1964, female law enforcement officers have battled obstacles and barriers, both external and internal in their effort to gain equality and assimilate into the role of police officer. The problem examined in this qualitative study was the low percentage of women in sworn law enforcement positions of all ranks. Thirty-six sworn female officers currently serving in the state of Arizona were selected to participate in focus group discussions to assist in the phenomenological examination of low representation of women in law enforcement. The female officers were asked a series of questions to facilitate discussion in an effort to explore their experiences and possibly reveal underlying police cultural factors that may lead to limited opportunities for women who choose law enforcement as a career. The qualitative design fostered a sharing of the stories of these female officers and provided an in-depth understanding of their experiences both on and off the job related to their choice of career. Information-rich data provided by the participants served to inform the Arizona law enforcement community concerning the experiences and career choices of women in law enforcement. Discovered through focus group discussions were the reasons women choose law enforcement as a career as well as why they remain in the profession. The excitement of the job coupled with job security, and salary factored into the decision making processes. Data addressing promotion, leadership, and role models were also revealed with female officers advising an inequitable promotional process, yet one in which they believed women needed to participate to improve the profession for others. Recommendations of formal mentoring and succession planning were made along with changes in the recruitment process. Future study should include male participants as well as female participants. Funding sources or sponsoring organizations should be explored in an effort to expand the scope of future study. Conducting focus groups discussions in different parts of the state and for longer periods of time would permit individuals from different areas of the state an opportunity to participate.

The Matrix- Predictive Uniform Law Enforcement Selection Evaluation Inventory (M-PULSE) is an actuarial instrument used to predict job performance and liability risk of police officer candidates. Leark and colleagues created the INC Scale to detect inconsistent responding on the M-PULSE. This study examined the ability of the INC Scale to detect inconsistent responding to items on the M-PULSE. This study utilized archival data provided by MHS, Inc., publishers of the M-PULSE. A random sample of 3,392 from the M-PULSE's normative full sample was used as the control group and the experimental group consisted of 500 randomly assigned subjects. An independent t-test was conducted to determine if there were statistically significant INC Scale mean score differences between the control group and the experimental group. Post-hoc analyses were conducted to determine internal reliability and validity of items on the INC Scale. Mean scores for the INC Scale were statistically significantly higher than mean scores for the normative data set indicating that the INC Scale was able to correctly identify inconsistent responses (t= 86.967, df =3890, p < .01). This study indicates that the INC Scale is able to detect inconsistent responding to items on the M-PULSE, thereby improving the validity of the M-PULSE.

This research provides original data on the study of obsessive-compulsive personality traits in law enforcement. The study explored prevalence of obsessive-compulsive personality traits (OCPT) in law enforcement (compared to the general population) in association with the occupational need for such characteristics in that profession (orderliness, organized, attentive to detail, display restricted affect, adhere to laws and regulations, and assume leadership roles). While many studies seek to explain police personality, no literature could be found regarding prevalence of OCPT in sworn peace officers. Degree of OCPT was measured by the total mean score on the Five Factor Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory (FFOCI) and compared using a one-tailed independent samples t-test. Differences between two groups across 12 subscales were analyzed retroactively using a MANOVA for qualitative descriptions of each group. Research revealed, with statistically significant results (p<.01), that prevalence of OCPT is significantly higher overall in law enforcement peace officers when compared to non-law enforcement participants. Results from this study contribute meaningfully to police psychology within the field of forensic psychology. Results have the potential to influence supplemental assessment for peace officer candidacy screening.

In American juvenile law, the judicial transfer decision, or waiver of jurisdiction, is a legal maneuver by which young offenders are diverted away from the juvenile justice system and subsequently processed and adjudicated within adult systems of law. Although transfer decisions have a long history in modern American jurisprudence, social science has largely neglected to perform a comprehensive inquiry of the social psychological underpinnings of judicial waivers. The extant social psycholegal research hints to potential links between transfer decision-making and three categories of variables: (a) terror management and social information-processing, (b) uncertainty management and attributional reasoning, and (c) statutory and nonstatutory sources of influence. Two social theories (i.e., the dual-process theory of proximal/distal defenses and uncertainty avoidance/causal attribution theory), as well as the literature on judicial waivers, provided three alternative predictions about the nature of the transfer decision-making process. The first theory predicts that implicit mortality salience (MS) cues activate the experiential system, including terror-reducing distal defenses. The processing of vulnerability cues by legal decision-makers could undermine their inferences about a given case and encourage biased decision-making via extralegal analysis. The second theory presumes that the social context of legal decision-making is inherently inexact or uncertain. To the extent that cases are perceived as ambiguous, legal decision-makers could be prompted to apply attributional reasoning styles designed to manage uncertainty, manage crime and improve the likelihood of identifying satisfactory decision-making outcomes. Finally, in contrast to both social theories, research purports that transfer decisions emerge from a reconciliatory-type process which differentially weighs a wide array of statutory and nonstatutory sources of influence. In order to examine the three variable-categories within the context of an ambiguous waiver of jurisdiction hearing, a two-part experimental approach was adopted. Most legal decision-making studies that have applied terror management theory have relied on traditional mortality salience (MS) induction methodologies (e.g., death essays) without consideration of natural "social ecologies" wherein MS processes occur. Study 1, a simple four-group experiment with 192 college student participants, compared the impact of traditional MS cues (i.e., death essays) versus ecological MS cues (i.e., death-laden prosecutorial statements) on mock-juror behavior. In Study 2, a mock-waiver hearing vignette was embedded in an experimental-based survey. Sixty-four juvenile court judges provided data regarding the relations between ecological MS induction, social information-processing mode, uncertainty management, attributional reasoning orientation, legal considerations (e.g., the Kent Guidelines), extralegal factors (e.g., punishment attitudes) and judicial transfers. In Studies 1 and 2, the Smith-Cribbie-Bonferroni adjusted partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) estimator was applied for all central statistical analyses. Findings from both studies indicate that legal decision-making is not affected by vulnerability concerns. Study 1 also failed to uncover evidence that the traditional and ecological MS cues were similar (compared to control conditions) in their effects on mock-juror decision making, calling into question certain assumptions about the methods commonly used in legal-related terror management studies. Finally, data from Study 2 do not support the contention that uncertainty-managing attributional processes were active during the transfer decision-making process. Instead, waiver decisions appear to emerge out of complex interactions involving particular legal and extralegal sources of influence. These sources of influence include global and specified retributive and deterrent-based attitudes, the degree of legal experience, the perceived utility of specific Kent Guidelines and perceptions toward both the prosecution and juvenile offender. The closing chapter reviews the limitations and implications of the entire investigation.

The following dissertation examines the role of ecological structures in juvenile justice systems, specifically during risk assessment, prosecution, and sanctioning. This analysis of system behavior considers religious establishments, public housing, and liquor stores as the ecological indicators and views them as stigmatizing. Quantitatively, the following examination sought to (a) determine associations between social ecology and risk assessments, prosecutions, and residential sanctioning, and to (b) determine if juvenile probation officers and judges are more stringent and judgmental toward delinquents from neighborhoods that have greater concentrations of religious establishments, public housing, and liquor stores. All adjudicated juvenile delinquents whose cases have been decided by the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice in calendar years 2006, 2007 and 2008 were included in the analysis. Secondary data from the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, the Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco Bureau of Licenses, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, American Church List and the United States Census were used to address the research questions.

The databases were used to support the researcher's overall tenet that certain areas are perceived as disorganized, which leads to stricter expressions of risk assessment, prosecutions, and residential sanctions. It is hypothesized that, (1) risk assessment levels are higher in areas with more religious establishments, public housing, and liquor stores; (2) zip codes with more prosecutions will consequently be those with more of the stigmatized ecological structures; and (3) an increase in religious establishments, public housing, and liquor stores will generate an increase in residential sanctions.

It was expected that the relationship between the independent and dependent variables would be significant, over and beyond demographic and legal factors. In the analysis, area demographics of population density; and juvenile demographics of age, race, ethnicity, and gender, along with current and prior legal history, were controlled for to determine the predictive value of the independent variables of religious establishments, public housing, and liquor stores on the dependent variables of risk assessment, prosecutions, and residential sanctions. Prior to statistical analysis, the data was merged and aggregated by zip code to reflect area composition, resulting in a dataset of 298 zip codes and 21 variables. To examine these relationships, analyses were done on a bi-variate and multi-variate level. Multi-variate analysis was performed using hierarchical regression. Three models were designed, considering demographics, and then adding legal variables, followed by ecological structures, to make the complete model.

This paper proposes that legislation should be used to reduce the occurrence of courthouse violence. It begins with a review of what is known about the nature and costs of court targeted and non-targeted violence, drawing on published materials of the U.S. Marshals Service, the U.S. Secret Service, the Center for Judicial and Executive Security, and others. Previously unpublished materials are also reported. Court security efforts made in response to the violence are described. In the absence of empirical studies of the effectiveness of court security laws, the paper suggests that theories of criminology be used as guides for assessing the effectiveness of existing legislation and formulating new legislation. Criminological theories, including classical theory, rational choice theory, strain theory, and routine activity theory are discussed as models appropriate for use in evaluating court security legislation. Existing state and federal laws on paper terrorism, including false liens and U.C.C. filings; address confidentiality programs; and enhanced punishments for crimes against those involved in the judicial process are described, catalogued, and analyzed.

This study describes police officers’ perspectives of Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training. Ethnographic interviews were used to gather data, and Transformational Learning Theory guided this study. Implications of CIT training indicate that CIT officers are a part of a subculture within police culture, and respond differently to mental health calls differently than their non-CIT counterparts. Outcomes of these different response styles include decreased criminalization, decreased injury to officers/consumers, decreased use of force, and increased confidence in responding to mental health calls for officers who are CIT trained. Implications of this study are discussed in relation to sustainability of partnerships between law enforcement officers and mental health professionals.

Abstract

Nationell kriminalstatistik tyder på att ungdomar är den mest brottsaktiva åldersgruppen i samhället. Ett förhållande som främst gäller pojkar och unga män, även om brottsligheten ökar något bland flickor och unga kvinnor. Eftersom ungdomar är samhällets framtid är det viktigt att vetenskapligt utrymme skapas och belyser de förebyggande insatser som kan göras för uppkomsten och fortskridningen av ungdomskriminalitet. Med anledning av detta har vi gjort en studie inriktad på Laholms kommun och vilka samhälleliga risker som kan ligga till grund för kriminalitet bland unga.

Studien baseras på kvalitativa intervjuer med personer inom olika sociala verksamheter i Laholms kommun som berör ungdomar och kriminalitet på ett eller annat sätt, samt ungdomar i åldrarna 15-20.

Utifrån analys av sociologiska och kriminologiska teorier av bland annat Zygmunt Bauman, Pierre Bourdieu, Erwing Goffman och Jerzy Sarnecki lyfter vi fram olika eventuella bidragande samhällsrisker i Laholms kommun så som arbetslöshet, konsumtion, fritid och sysselsättning, avsaknaden av grupptillhörighet och avvikelse.

Nyckelord: Ungdomskriminalitet, Laholms kommun, förebyggande arbete, arbetslöshet, avvikelse

Targeted U.S. domestic sex trafficking of Native peoples has been documented since the time of Custer (Deer 2010, Smith 2005, Smith 2003). According to a few, geographically specific studies this practice continues today (Juran, et al 2014, Minnesota Indian Women's Sexual Assault Coalition 2011, Pierce and Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center 2009). The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA), it’s subsequent reauthorizations and the Violence Against Women’s Act (VAWA) 2013 reauthorization have encouraged activists in Indian Country, defined broadly, to believe that a change is possible within the system if they continue to raise the issue. But what if that strategy is flawed? Despite increasing awareness, it is clear that the United States policy environment has not yet experienced any significant change since the introduction of anti-trafficking law in 2000—especially for Native America. Using a tribal, feminist, critical race perspective alongside Native Nation (re)Building theory and a grounded, interdisciplinary focus, this study explores prominent public policy perceptions about how widespread the targeted domestic sex trafficking of Native peoples is in the United States. The first of its kind, this study reaches across broad geography and perspectives to locate synergies and ruptures that may also present opportunities for Native self-determination in creating effective Indian Country solutions. It also offers United States public policy suggestions helpful in addressing anti-trafficking legislative inefficiencies beyond Indian Country generally.