Criminology & Public Policy最新文献

Research Summary

We quantified the implementation of WA state's domestic violence (DV)-related firearm prohibitions (RCW9.41.800) by the courts and the Regional Domestic Violence Firearms Enforcement Unit (RDVFEU), a regional approach to compliance promotion. We measured implementation, vetting, compliance, and enforcement of firearm prohibitions before (2014–2016) and after (2018–2020) the RDVFEU was implemented using a 55% random sample of granted domestic violence protection orders (DVPOs) in King County, WA (n = 3543). We evaluated differences in judicial orders to surrender firearms and other dangerous weapons (OTSWs), respondent documented compliance, and respondent weapon and/or firearm relinquishment before and after implementation. Compared to DVPOs granted prior to RDVFEU implementation, granted DVPOs after RDVFEU implementation were at least 4.5 times more likely to include an OTSW. RDVFEU implementation was also associated with at least 3.4 times the odds of respondent documented compliance and at least 3.3 times the odds of respondent relinquishment of at least one firearm and/or other dangerous weapon. These findings demonstrate RDVFEU implementation was associated with benefits at each stage of the protection order process with improvements in both judicial enforcement and respondent compliance. Overall, RDVFEU implementation was associated with improvements in granted orders to surrender weapons, respondent compliance, and relinquishment.

Policy Implications

DV-related firearm prohibitions can be supported by interdisciplinary teams within the legal system to promote respondent compliance and enhance safety planning for DV victim–survivors.

Research Summary

We examined the prevalence of experiencing sexual misconduct—rape, contact sexual violence, sexual harassment—in college and whether students reported to Title IX coordinators or campus counseling services by students’ race/ethnicity. Data from the 2019 Association of American Universities survey (unweighted N = 160,387) were used to estimate multilevel logistic regression models. Across this sample, 44.70% of students experienced sexual misconduct victimization; among victim-survivors who contacted a program, 19.85% reported to Title IX and 45.63% contacted campus counseling services. Black students did not significantly differ from White students in their experiences with sexual misconduct, yet Asian students were significantly less likely than White students to experience all types of sexual misconduct. Black and Asian students had lower odds of reporting sexual misconduct to Title IX (though results vary by type of misconduct), but Black students had higher odds of reporting to campus counseling services across all types of sexual misconduct.

Policy Implications

Sexual misconduct victimization is a common experience for American college students. In response, decades of changes to federal and state laws and policies have focused on increasing reporting to campus Title IX coordinators; however, reporting to Title IX remains a rare occurrence. Reporting barriers are greatest among Black and Asian students. Campuses must address barriers in reporting to Title IX and do so in ways that are equitable for all students. Further, campuses must review their current and planned investment in counseling services and culturally centered services to ensure that they have the appropriate resources to serve students.

Research Summary

Supermax prisons exist, according to the policy's driving logic, to address serious disorder problems by isolating people who cause serious disorder. Criticisms of supermax, however, suggest that its use is driven by factors aside from serious disorder problems and that transfers to supermax have a degree of arbitrariness. The current paper uses 10 years of data on one state prison system to disentangle the relationship between “disorder” and supermax utilization by examining (1) the association between a facility's level of serious disorder and supermax transfers (prison-level analysis), (2) the association between a person's level of serious rule breaking and oppositely, “nuisance” behaviors, and the odds of a supermax transfer (individual-level analysis), and (3) whether the influence of a person's behavioral record on the odds of supermax depends upon contextual factors (prison-by-individual interaction). The results suggest that a facility's level of serious disorder does strongly correspond with its reliance on supermax and that indicators of serious rule breaking, and not minor forms of it, are strongly associated with a person's odds of experiencing a supermax transfer. However, a person's misconduct record has a weaker association with the odds of a supermax transfer in facilities that are more disorderly.

Policy Implications

The findings highlight the importance of prison context for dictating who experiences supermax and raises questions about whether prison systems have a uniform “bar” for supermax transfers. This in turn suggests a need for prison systems to reevaluate individual pathways to supermax and consider whether there are consistent metrics used for supermax placements. More broadly, the finding that context shapes who is transferred to supermax raises questions about the fundamental policy logic and suggests a need to investigate other solutions to disorder problems.

The Vollmer Award: The award honoring August Vollmer was first made in 1959. It is meant to recognize outstanding contributions to justice as well as scholarship and professional activity. I am honored to be the 2022 awardee because so many of the previous winners are individuals whose careers and work I have great respect for.

Focus of My Remarks: This essay focuses on many failures in criminal justice policy and research. Costly though they may be, failures have the potential to teach us a good deal and we ignore them at our own peril.

Research Summary

This study employed a microsynthetic control method to evaluate the impact of the newly introduced bicycle patrol unit in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, which is well-known as a major drug market. The findings reveal that the bicycle patrol unit led to a notable reduction in social disorder crimes, which was one of the primary objectives of the patrol officers. However, it also resulted in a significant increase in the number of narcotic crimes, violent person crimes, and shooting offenses. The amount of total crimes and property crimes remained unchanged.

Policy Implications

Bicycle patrols can effectively reduce street-level disorder and increase police efforts to arrest drug offenders and remove drugs from the streets. However, the introduction of this police activity may disrupt the normal operation of drug markets, which can lead to increased violence from instability in the street-level drug business. Therefore, departments should conduct detailed crime analyses and gather intelligence alongside directed patrols to better understand and respond to the potential consequences of their interventions.

Summary

Sextortion is a form of image-based sexual abuse in which an offender threatens to distribute sexually explicit images, videos, or information to gain victim compliance. In some sextortion incidents involving minor children, offenders are adult strangers who coerce victims into self-producing child sexually abusive materials (CSAM). Despite the growing concern regarding minor victims of sextortion, there is a lack of empirical investigation of adult offenders who exclusively target minor children for the production of CSAM and the steps and decisions these offenders take to commit sextortion. Utilizing a sample of 130 minor-focused sextortion cases gathered from news media and court documents, the current study employed crime script analysis and inductive qualitative methodology to investigate how adult offenders commit sextortion. The results indicated that adult offenders specifically targeting minor children move through several crime scripts: preparation, entry, instrumental actions, crime commission, and exit.

Policy Implications

Minor-focused sextortion perpetrated by adult offenders is executed in stages, each with accompanying preventive solutions. Investing in education that teaches youth to recognize grooming, develops safety practices online, and removes barriers to reporting should be a priority for schools and parents. Increased adoption of technology and policies that would allow social media platforms to detect CSAM, remove fraudulent accounts, and streamline reporting would also disrupt these crimes.

Research Summary

Originated nearly two decades ago in Hawaii by Judge Steven Alm, a community supervision-court model known as “Project HOPE” proposed to reduce probation failure by responding to violations with immediate but short jail terms. Despite negative evidence from Lattimore and colleagues’ 2016 Demonstration Field Experiment (DFE) across four locations, advocates continued to trumpet programs based on Project HOPE's core principles of swift, certain, and fair (SCF) sanctions, arguing that these deterrence-oriented interventions—now known under the acronym SCF programs–reduce recidivism. To assess this claim, a meta-analysis was conducted of 18 studies reporting on 24 separate evaluations of programs falling under the Project HOPE/SCF umbrella. The analysis revealed that the intervention had a statistically significant but substantively small impact on recidivism (the main overall effect = −.058). Moderator analyses revealed weak to null findings across variations in methodological and HOPE/SCF program characteristics.

Policy Implications

At present, evaluation evidence is weak and not robust enough to support the continued government funding and implementation of SCF programs in their current form on grounds of recidivism reduction. Such deterrence-oriented programs may be based on a flawed theory of recidivism that fails to identify criminogenic risk factors for change. SCF programs might prove more effective if integrated with treatment modalities, though this remains to be demonstrated. More broadly, a range of community supervision approaches now exist that emphasize building relationships with individuals under supervision and guiding their prosocial development. These alternatives might offer a more promising avenue for reform than current programs based on SCF principles.

Research summary

We compare European and North American radicalization trajectories that led to involvement in terrorist violence (n = 103) with those for which this outcome did not occur (n = 103). Regression analyses illustrate how involvement in terrorist violence is determined not only by the presence of risk, but also the absence of protective factors. Bivariate analyses highlight the importance of considering the temporality of these factors; i.e., whether they are present before or after radicalization onset. The most salient risk factors identified were alignment with a group or movement with an exclusively violent strategic logic, and access to weapons. In terms of protective factors, parenting children during radicalization, self-control, and participation in extremist groups with a strategic logic that was not exclusively focused on violent means were all associated with noninvolvement in terrorist violence.

Policy implications

Different patterns of risk and protective factors influence whether radicalization will, or will not, lead to involvement in terrorist violence. One-size-fits-all radicalization-prevention efforts may therefore be less effective than programs tailored to address a particular outcome. Even when terrorist violence is prevented, the targeted individual is likely to remain radicalized. Preventative efforts must carefully assess whether the measures used to avert terrorist violence in the short-term risk contributing to a longer term societal threat. The efficacy of preventative efforts depends in part on when they are deployed, that is, before or after radicalization onset.

Research Summary

We found that romance fraud was rising year-on-year across every region in England and Wales, increasing 55% during the 3 years between October 2018 and October 2021. Fifty percent of all the romance fraud victims in the period resided in 17% of the places where romance fraud had occurred. A total of 439 locations (outward postcode areas) were identified as the “power few” in the first year of the data set. Of these 439 locations, 162 of them recurred in both of the following years, becoming chronic “hot spot” locations containing more than one in six of all reported romance fraud victims. The demography of victims in repeat locations differed considerably, but hot spots were more frequently predominantly populated by less affluent populations.

Policy Implications

We conclude that the current national one-size-fits-all fraud prevention approach may not be the most efficient or effective way to reach those victims who most require crime prevention advice. The National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, based in the City of London Police, could adopt a tailored approach to providing preventative information to local police forces based on the year-to-year patterns in crime and the associated intelligence provided by sociodemographic data sources such as Acorn.

Research Summary

This research asks whether jail-based immigration enforcement leads to the profiling of Hispanics by municipal police. I leverage a natural experiment to examine the effects of 287(g) jail partnerships on traffic stops and arrests by municipal police in North Carolina in the late 2000s. I find that stops of Hispanic drivers fell in the wake of 287(g) agreements, and show that this fall was driven by changes in Hispanic road use. While I cannot unambiguously disentangle police and driver behavior, I find no evidence that municipal police officers increased pretextual stops and arrests of Hispanic drivers.

Policy Implications

While there is existing evidence of racial profiling under 287(g) agreements by sheriff's deputies, this behavior does not appear to have extended to nonsignatory municipal police agencies. Despite this, the signing of 287(g) agreements appears to have prompted Hispanic outmigration and changes in driving behavior, adding to a growing body of evidence on the ripple effects of local-federal immigration enforcement partnerships in Hispanic communities. This serves as a reminder that changes in demographic composition of the immigrant population may mediate the effects of immigration enforcement efforts on other outcomes.