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A large body of scholarship has focused on the factors that lead to improved prison social order and prisoner reentry outcomes. Research suggests that one such factor, social ties, are especially salient for helping individuals manage...
Sentencing systems throughout the United States have experienced great change over the past 30 years. Sentencing policy is often the target of reform as policymakers, judges, and other judicial decision makers grapple with the issues of...
Purpose: There is a rich history of research investigating victimization and juvenile offending. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the relationship between childhood victimization and juvenile reoffending in a sample of...
Prior research has noted the unique interpersonal, affective, lifestyle, and antisocial factors associated with psychopathic personality traits (Hare, 1990; Cooke & Michie, 2001; Hare, 2003; Hare, 2010; Skeem & Cooke, 2010). In line with...
The purpose of this dissertation is to examine factors that affect sentencing decisions of Latino and Haitian immigrants. Although scholarly research has consistently demonstrated that foreign-born populations are less likely than native...
Rooted in the cultural, social, and material circumstances of the last forty years, there appears to have been an increase in the insecurities and anxieties that are being experienced by many in the working and middle class. The source...
Decades of research from numerous academic fields has provided unequivocal support that both genes and the environment are critically involved in shaping human behavior. More recently, researchers have begun to explore the manner in...
Beginning in the 1970s, an ideological, political, and legal shift toward more punitive policies to address crime occurred. The punitive turn can also be seen inside of prisons, and one example is the expanded use of extended restrictive...
At the end of 2016, approximately 1.5 million people were incarcerated in state and federal prisons (Carson, 2021), and more than half of these prisoners are parents of at least one minor child (Maruschak et al., 2021). Upon their...
Judicial decision-making has been a long-standing subject of criminological inquiry. It has been the explicit focus of theory (e.g. Steffensmeier, Ulmer, & Kramer, 1998; Albonetti, 1991; Farrell & Holmes, 1991) and is implicit in...
Where There's Smoke, Is There Always Fire?: Exploring the Relationship between Substance-Related Health Strain and Criminal Arrest in a Partial Test of General Strain Theory
A strong connection between substance use and other criminal behaviors like violent and property crimes has been demonstrated by prior research (Bennett, Holloway, & Farrington, 2008), but the exact interconnections of this relationship...
During the last 20 years, efforts to "get tough" on crime in America has resulted in the initiation of a number of punitive sanctions designed to send a message to criminal offenders and society. This new message has been "if you do the...
As the incarceration rate expanded in the late 20th century, social threat theory was increasingly utilized to explain this growing punishment trend. While primarily finding support, this research has gone only so far as to examine the...
The impact of victim SP on the outcomes in a given criminal events has rarely been examined or fully understood. This study develops a new theory of victimization, which I will refer to as the Power Advantage Theory (PAT), that holds...
Informal labels and formal labels were hypothesized to impact short-term and long-term delinquency, even when controlling for the effect of other types of labels in the same model. Reflected appraisals were separated by the source of the...
Prior neighborhood crime research has sought to explain differences in crime between black and white communities using such criminological theories as social disorganization and concentrated disadvantage. While supportive in their...
White-collar crime accounts for billions of dollars in annual losses but traditionally has been viewed as less serious and less deserving of harsh punishment compared with street crime. This pattern can be observed in public opinion...
Mass incarceration has led to an increased interest in prison experiences and, specifically, their effects on inmate behavior. Drawing on prior scholarship, this study examines whether the distance inmates are placed from their home...
Decades of sentencing research have demonstrated that there are discrepancies in punishment outcomes based on race and ethnicity, gender, age, and social structures, net of legally relevant factors. These findings have led to increased...
Prior empirical research has shown that a large proportion of a city's total crime arises from a relatively small number of locations within its jurisdiction. Drawing from results of research on the distribution of crime in a handful of...
Unpacking the Sources of Racial Disparities in U.S. Imprisonment Rates: A County-Level Assessment of Historical Origins and Contemporary Social, Economic, and Political Conditions
Relatively neglected in the literature on law and society has been the growing racial disparity in imprisonment observed during the era of mass imprisonment and the considerable geographic variation in the magnitude of this disparity....
The theoretical literature on courtroom organizations and focal concerns, in conjunction with social threat perspectives inform this contextual analysis and evaluation of determinate sentencing practices in the state of Florida. Drawing...
The research explores whether perceptions of environmental threat influence support for environmental controls. To fulfill this purpose, the research builds on social threat and social control theory, which initially emphasized the...
The incarceration boom of the late 20th century led to a concomitant rise in prison construction. Over two thousand state and federal prisons are currently in operation across the United States, and these prisons are considerably varied...
Research on attentive publics has worked towards identifying who is considered attentive, how the attentive public is different from the general public, and how policy makers should take their views into consideration (Devine, 1970;...
Previous research links antisocial traits with criminal involvement and contact with the criminal justice system. In line with these findings, an emerging body of research has begun to explore if antisocial traits and persistent criminal...
Over the past 30 years, scholars have increasingly focused on the individual-level factors that explain criminal behavior. This line of research has revealed that myriad factors influence the onset of a criminal career, the maintenance...
A large body of research has identified the importance of the family environment for influencing child development. Nonetheless, variation in the exposure to environmental risk factors is typically characterized as a random phenomenon, ...
Social threat theory argues that the dominant group can be threatened in a variety of ways by minorities. Illegal immigrants are an example of one such group that has been described as posing a threat. Illegal immigrants have been...
The impact of jobs on working American youth has not been examined thoroughly and the mechanism between employment and delinquency is not fully understood. Many prior studies that addressed the issue of youth employment and crime...
In an effort to determine the dominance of the maternal role in offspring pre-dispositional criminality, two families were selected. An intergenerational study was conducted with two families that appeared to share certain...
Women currently comprise the fastest growing population of those being sentenced to prison. Many criminologists contend that increases in the population of incarcerated women are due, not to changes in criminal involvement, but to...
Governments have long relied on private entities to assist with the implementation of correctional punishments, treatments, and services. In the United States, reports of privatized corrections can be traced back to Colonial America....
Until the past few decades, criminological research has almost exclusively focused on examining the link between various environmental risk factors and criminal behavior. Since then, an emerging body of research has developed exploring...
This dissertation contributes to an emerging literature in criminology on sentencing and contextual effects, first by unpacking the direct and conditioning effects of social context on sentencing decisions, and then by examining whether...
A wealth of research has documented the association between low self-control and child victimization. However, the conditions under which low self-control has the greatest impact on victimization have rarely been examined and, more...
Punitive measures taken by the United States criminal justice and juvenile justice systems have expanded over the past thirty years. With punitive policies and practices in place, many Americans continue to express strong support for the...
The core American values of liberty, egalitarianism, and individualism have been shown to be in constant tension with one another. This project sought to address the current state of public opinion on liberty as a core American value....
Over the last three decades, a steady flow of research has explored the factors that explain the spatial distribution of interracial homicides in America. However, despite the many advances made in the interracial homicide literature, ...
The primary goals of this research were (1) to test the tenability of null associations between perception and reality of punishment and (2) to determine whether the effects of actual risks of punishment on perception of punishment are...
Dr. Matthew Robinson (2004) proposed a new inclusive theory of human criminal behavior, entitled Integrated Systems Theory. This theory put forth by Robinson (2004) and later Robinson and Beaver (2009), hypothesizes that human behavior...
Researchers have explored two competing ideas as to why people obey the law. Some research has taken the instrumental approach--the belief that the prospect of rewards and punishments drive behavior. Others have taken the normative...
The general purpose of this research is to contribute to the efforts in understanding the effect of maternal incarceration on young adult well-being outcomes, and the factors that may buffer or exacerbate any negative effect. There is a...
In recent years, criminologists have increasingly focused on understanding stability and change in crime over the life-course. Transitions such as marriage, work, and military service are considered to be potential turning points in the...
Since the mid-1970s, the modern U.S. animal rights movement has grown in size and influence. Membership in People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the world's largest animal rights organization, for instance, has grown from...
The Effects of Child Maltreatment on the Likelihood of Committing Violence in at-Risk Youth: A Family Systems, Trauma Theory, and Need to Belong Framework
One of the most concerning effects of child maltreatment that has been of interest to researchers and practitioners over the past few decades is the documented increased risk of victimized children engaging in violence during childhood...
The shift from indeterminate to determinate sentencing policies over the past three decades and the ensuing decline in the use of parole for monitoring inmates’ transition back into their communities has led to the development of...
The extraordinary breadth of the current home foreclosure crisis has made it a regularly discussed topic across the United States. Few cities can claim they have been unaffected by it as 94 of the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas...
Theory and research suggests that criminal courts operate as organized communities, where both bureaucratic influences and court actor action systems play an important role in case processing (Eisenstein & Jacob, 1977; Eisenstein, ...
The prior literature addressing delinquency and education while diverse consistently documents the relationship between poor school performance and delinquent behavior. However, the specific causes for the poor school performance of...
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
