American Journal of Criminal Justice最新文献

The study examined job stress as experienced by community corrections employees in a Western U.S. state. We employed the job demands and resources model to examine the impact of job demands (dangerousness, role ambiguity, role conflict, and role overload) and job resources (training views, job variety, job autonomy, and formalization) on community corrections officers’ job stress, while controlling for demographic characteristics (sex, age, education, tenure at the job, race/ethnicity). Survey data from 227 community corrections employees in a Western U.S. state were included in the analysis. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression models indicated that perceptions of dangerousness of the job and role overload significantly contributed to higher job stress, while job autonomy was associated with lower job stress. Surprisingly, while job variety was included as a job resource, it was associated with higher job stress. Among demographic variables, only tenure had a significant association, suggesting that longevity at the job may contribute to job stress among community corrections employees.

Reentry optimism, reflecting an individual’s motivation and perceived ability to address reentry challenges, may be an important determinant of successful reentry. The experience of interpersonal racial discrimination (IRD), however, may undermine reentry optimism by eroding trust in others. We investigated whether IRD is related to reentry optimism among a sample of persons of color at a local correctional facility located in the Southeast. Additionally, we examined if this relationship is mediated by hostile world beliefs and if the relationship is moderated by neighborhood environment. Our results indicate that IRD is negatively related to reentry optimism. While hostile world beliefs are negatively associated with reentry optimism, we did not find evidence that they mediate the relationship between IRD and reentry optimism. Finally, we found that IRD is more strongly related to reentry optimism among respondents that lived in neighborhoods with high perceived informal social control. The relationship between IRD and reentry optimism highlights how racial stratification and inequality may engender racial inequities in reentry, and points to the need for trauma informed care that is informed by the lived experiences of racism and the psychological harm it causes.

The United States experienced a substantial and sustained policy shift towards more punitive policies in the late twentieth century. While public punitiveness has been identified as key to understanding these changes, the exact role of public attitudes in promoting these and similar policies remains contested. Two key arguments explaining the punitive turn and the relationship between public views and political dynamics are the elite manipulation thesis and the democracy-at-work thesis. Using data from the American National Election Survey, this study examines how the proximity of the presidential election affects public punitiveness. As the presidential election nears, we expect that respondents will indicate higher levels of punitiveness (represented by support for the death penalty), since politicians are more active closer to the election and their rhetoric may be heard by more people. We find that respondents who were interviewed closer to election day were generally no more or less punitive than those interviewed further away from election day. These results indicate that election proximity does not broadly influence punitiveness but may trigger changes in attitudes for specific sectors of society, such as Republicans and Non-White individuals.

Historical shifts and existing empirical research leave unclear the extent to which juveniles on probation may be supervised differently from adults. To assess the divergence between juvenile and adult probation, this study compared probation officers’ preferences for the amount of supervision and justifications for supervision between juvenile and adult clients. Using a hypothetical client vignette, the study also randomly manipulated the client’s offense, compliance with supervision, criminogenic need, and non-criminogenic need to explore the effects of these characteristics on probation officers’ judgments. Findings revealed that probation officers preferred different probation supervision for juveniles versus adults, but these differences were not to the extent or always in a manner that would be predicted by traditional characterizations of the separate legal systems or renewed perceptions that “children are different.”

Debate is ongoing between scholars of group identity regarding why individuals support systems disadvantageous to their social ingroups. Both system justification theory and the social identity model of system attitudes have been offered as explanations for this conundrum. At present empirical investigations into either have been quantitative, using close-ended responses. In this study, I employ template analysis as a qualitative technique to explore rationalizations for obedience to police among "real world" interviewees speaking, in open-ended format, of their attitudes toward local authorities in Cleveland, Ohio, and Newark, New Jersey, United States. A sample of 92 interviewees had been arrested, prosecuted and/or incarcerated in the two years before interviewing. As criminalized, economically marginalized, and mostly racial minority individuals, they identified with groups disadvantaged by the criminal legal system represented by their local police. I find that interviewees mostly adhere to an obligation to obey police, regardless of group- versus individual-level conceptions of their police encounters, their positive or negative perceptions of police, or their identification or perceptions of their neighborhood and community ingroups. Those who more expressly identified with one or more of these disadvantaged social ingroups gave myriad reasons why they nonetheless obeyed the police, primarily based on either safety and preservation rationales or support of the law and policing as idealized in abstraction. These justifications often occurred alongside negative perceptions of current policing authorities. I conclude by discussing avenues for future research.

Items from two measures of antisocial cognition (moral neutralization and cognitive impulsivity) served as indicators in a series of confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) and random intercepts cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) analyses. Two samples of middle school children served as participants in this study: 824 (392 boys, 432 girls) youth (mean age = 11.21 years) from the Pocono Bullying Study (PBS) and 2,550 (1,213 boys, 1,337 girls) youth (mean age = 12.13 years) from the Gang Resistance Education and Training (GREAT) study. One- and two-factor CFAs revealed that fit was significantly better in the two-factor model where moral neutralization and cognitive impulsivity were treated as separate constructs. There were no significant differences in fit between a one-factor model and two-factor model in which items were randomly assigned to factors. An RI-CLPM analysis was performed to test for reciprocity over three separate time periods. Eight out of eight cross-lagged correlations involving moral neutralization and cognitive impulsivity achieved significance across two samples of early adolescent respondents. These results provide evidence of a prospective bidirectional relationship between within-person latent variable measures of moral neutralization and cognitive impulsivity that have potentially important theoretical, practical, and policy implications.

The tragic school shooting in Uvalde, Texas in 2022 reignited attention to gun violence and school safety and was followed shortly after by what has been described as the most significant federal gun legislation in decades. This study leveraged natural language processing techniques to identify topics in the social media discourse around the shooting in the month after the shooting and prior to the passage of the federal Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Leveraging Multiple Streams Framework, analysis of the content of the social media discourse revealed multiple problem definitions and proposed policy solutions but a central focus on gun violence. The variation in public discourse provided evidence of the political necessity of compromise in federal legislation, suggesting a path for future school safety policy.

Parental incarceration is an important societal issue; yet little is known about the longterm impacts on mental well-being and very little is known about race and ethnic group variability on long-term effects. Using longitudinal data from Waves I -V of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health survey and linear-mixed effect regression models, we fill this gap by investigating the influence of parental incarceration on mental health by race and ethnic groups and exploring possible moderating mechanisms, such as social support, that may decrease inequalities across the life course. We find parental incarceration is associated with greater levels of depression symptoms over time and this association does not vary by race and ethnic minority groups. In addition, one of the four indicators of social support in adolescence did moderate the effect of parental incarceration. Our results indicate that the relationship between parental incarceration and depression is more complicated than the current literature suggests.

Sudden crises can challenge routine work assumptions, values, and practices, and allow more fundamental organizational changes to emerge. We conducted thirty-five semi-structured interviews with local prosecutors and their staff in a jurisdiction in the United States and identified the changes they experienced due to the COVID-19 pandemic, including how they made sense of these changes. Our findings suggest that prosecutors’ traditional conceptions of their role and purpose help explain why initial changes to increased telework and virtual court appearances, charge reductions, limits to pre-trial detention, and more lenient plea offers, did not seem to have endured post-pandemic. More generally, our study highlights some obstacles to prosecutorial reforms that try to create a less adversarial and punitive criminal legal system. Based on prosecutors’ experiences, we conclude with some policy implications that could contribute to more comprehensive changes in the future.

The Dark Web represents a unique part of the Internet where anonymity is used for both good and nefarious acts. While existing research indicates Dark Web use is correlated with cybercrime victimization and offending, there is a lack of research into what traits and characteristics might lead to Dark Web use. Using survey data collected from a sample of 226 college students (66 unique Dark Web users and 160 non-users), results show that both low self-control and the Dark Triad are positively associated with Dark Web use. Additionally, this study paints a clearer picture of what a Dark Web user looks like with respect to demographics and computer skills. Limitations and recommendations for future research, including a unique validation technique for Dark Web users, are discussed.