Criminology & Criminal Justice Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2758

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End date: 2019Subject: search.filters.subject.Public policy

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Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    The Effects of Marijuana Legalization on Adolescent Alcohol Consumption
    (2019) Montano, Ashley Nicole; Dugan, Laura; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Among researchers, there has been a long-standing debate on the issue of whether alcohol and marijuana are used as substitutes or complements of one another. In other words, does the increased usage of one decrease the usage of the other (substitution) or does usage of both substances simultaneously increase (complements)? The primary purpose of this study is to identify whether a suggested substitution or complementary effect exists among adolescent drinking patterns following the recent emergences of increased marijuana legalization. To explore these effects, data is used from 38 different states included in the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System between the years 1995 and 2017. The primary analysis finds limited support for a substitution effect and no evidence of a complementary effect among adolescents. This study also includes a supplementary analysis providing implications for the direction of future research on the apparent relationship between alcohol and marijuana usage patterns.
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    Exploring the Link between Prison Crowding and Inmate Misconduct: A Panel Data Analysis
    (2016) Glazener, Emily Morgan; Nakamura, Kiminori; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Research on the impact of prison crowding on inmate misconduct is mixed, with studies finding positive, negative, and null results. These inconsistencies may be due to the use of data restricted to one specific point in time as previous studies have heavily relied on cross-sectional methods. These cross-sections may or may not be representative of longer-term trends, and they do not allow for the examination of changes over time. To address this limitation, the current study utilizes state prison panel data to examine monthly within-institution changes. Using modern data gathered from January 2012 through December 2014 from a large state correctional system, this study demonstrates the utility of examining this research question longitudinally. Findings demonstrate that prison crowding leads to increases in misconduct rates, although this relationship diminishes after crowding reaches a certain threshold. However, our data did not support the expected relationship between crowding and violent misconduct specifically. Other time-varying factors were found to consistently predict misconduct and violence. Policy implications and future directions are discussed.
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    UNDERSTANDING THE PROCEDURAL JUSTICE IMPLICATIONS OF MACRO-LEVEL POLICE POLICIES: EVIDENCE FROM LONGITUDINAL POLICE AND JUVENILE OFFENDER DATA
    (2016) Collins, Megan Eileen; Loughran, Thomas A; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In response to a series of high profile conflicts between police and the communities they serve, President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing recommended that law enforcement agencies adopt procedural justice as a guiding principle to inform their policies. While there is general agreement about the importance of procedural justice in shaping an individual’s view of their encounters with police, it remains unclear how the many police policies that are already in place affect citizens’ perceptions of police procedural justice. This dissertation seeks to understand how a common police policy—sending more officers to the areas with the most crime—impacts perceptions of procedural justice, so that policies formed with the goal of enhancing perceptions of procedural justice might be better informed. This study exploits quasi-experimental conditions that resulted from the selective implementation of the Philadelphia Police Department’s 2008 Crime Fighting Strategy (CFS) in only nine of their twenty-three police districts. In doing so, the effect of sending more police officers to high crime areas on perceptions of police procedural justice can be estimated. While many have sought to estimate the impact of more police on offending and delinquency externalities, this particular question has not yet been researched. Further, this research focuses specifically on the perceptions of serious adolescent offenders; this is critical, as offenders were ostensibly the intended target of the CFS, many of whom experience frequent and high stakes interactions with police. Findings indicate that serious adolescent offenders’ perceptions of procedural justice based on personal experiences do not operate in tandem with perceptions based on vicarious experiences, with the two measures displaying opposite signs when correlations with district level crime and socio-economic factors were estimated. The CFS did not appear to influence significant changes in adolescents’ perceptions of procedural justice when the treatment and control districts were compared, or when within-individual changes were estimated. Further, perceptions did not necessarily update as a function of moving from one district to another, as many of the individuals who remained in a single district also updated their perceptions. Implications and limitations of these findings are discussed.
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    Pathways to assistance for victims of intimate partner violence
    (2015) Stabile, Rebecca Michelle; Dugan, Laura; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Efforts to understand disclosure of abuse for victims of intimate partner violence have largely focused on characteristics of disclosure rather than the consequences of disclosure. Past research has found that disclosure of abuse to formal and informal sources of support is common among victims of intimate partner violence (Fanslow & Robinson, 2010), however little research exists that attempts to explain the effect that disclosure has on a victim’s ability to survive abuse. This thesis draws upon arguments from Edward Gondolf’s survivor theory (Edwards & Gondolf, 1988) and contends that the act of disclosing is an important step in seeking help from public services in order to escape or reduce abuse. It posits that the effect of disclosure of abuse varies across a number of characteristics. Using National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey data, this thesis finds that the effect of disclosure on the likelihood that a victim receives needed services varies across type of support to whom the victim discloses, type of service needed, and seriousness of violence.
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    TRANSFORMING VACANT LOTS: INVESTIGATING AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH TO REDUCING FEAR OF CRIME
    (2015) De Biasi, Alaina Marie; McGloin, Jean; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Vacant lots deserve criminological attention insofar as their disorderly conditions create opportunities for a host of negative outcomes including “fear of crime.” The present study considers whether incorporating fundamental standards of Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED) into traditional urban greening practices of vacant lots provides added value with regard to fear of crime above and beyond the traditional endeavor. This study conducted an experiment (N=523) from a sample of undergraduate students. Research participants were asked to report their level of fear of crime in regards to one of three randomly assigned computer-adjusted images: 1) A disorderly lot; 2) A traditional greened lot; and 3) A CPTED lot. This study found that on average participants who viewed a CPTED lot had lower levels of fear of crime than all other participants. This study discusses the implications of this finding for future research.
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    The Impact of Returning Technical Parole Violators to Prison: A Deterrent, Null, or Criminogenic Effect
    (2014) Bucklen, Kristofer Bret; Paternoster, Raymond; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    As a result of the significant U.S. prison population build-up over the past several decades, a large number of inmates are now being released from prison and returned to the community. One mechanism for facilitating this transition to the community is for inmates to be conditionally released under parole supervision. Once on parole, a parolee is subject to certain rules and conditions that, if violated, can result in a return to prison, even if not a criminal act. These types of non-criminal parole violations are typically referred to as Technical Parole Violations (TPVs). Many states return a large number of TPVs to prison each year, and TPVs contribute significantly to the prison population in many states. However, there is virtually no existing research examining what impact returning TPVs to imprisonment has on their subsequent rates of re-offending. While a large body of literature examining the overall impact of incarceration on recidivism has mostly concluded that imprisonment has a null or even slightly criminogenic effect, this overall finding is not necessarily generalizable to all sub-populations within the prison population. Strong theoretical cases can be made each way, for the impact on recidivism of incarcerating TPVs. This dissertation examines the impact on recidivism of sanctioning TPVs to imprisonment versus an alternative sanction, and also examines the dose-response impact on recidivism of varying lengths of stay in prison for a TPV, using a large sample of TPVs in one state (Pennsylvania). The bulk of the evidence supports the conclusion that recidivism rates are mostly lowered by using incarceration in response to first TPV violations. However, the evidence also suggests that the specific mechanism for lowering recidivism rates among incarcerated TPVs is largely attributable to aging and exposure time rather than to deterrence. The findings on the dose-response impact of differential lengths of stay in prison for TPVs who are sanctioned to imprisonment are more mixed. Generally the evidence suggests somewhat lowered recidivism rates attributable to longer lengths of stay in prison for a TPV violation, yet the effect sizes are generally smaller and in some cases statistically insignificant. It again appears that the particular mechanism for reduced recidivism rates associated with longer lengths of stay in prison is associated with aging and exposure time rather than with traditionally formulated deterrence mechanisms. A few contingencies of these findings are noted. First, the effect of imprisonment on recidivism among TPVs is likely highly contingent upon the swiftness, certainty, and perceived fairness of sanctioning, yet measures of these factors were not available for this study. Second, this dissertation only focuses on the first TPV violation instance after release from prison, and also is mostly limited to higher risk TPVs. Third, lower overall recidivism rates for TPVs sanctioned to imprisonment, and sanctioned for longer periods of time in prison, were influenced heavily by lower re-incarceration rates, whereas re-arrest rates did not significantly differ in any of the models. Since re-incarceration rates not only include new criminal activity but also new technical violations, it is unclear whether imprisonment for a first TPV reduces serious criminal behavior or rather mostly reduces additional technical violations and minor crimes. Future research must address these contingencies.
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    What Matters: An Analysis of Victim Satisfaction in a Procedural Justice Framework
    (2014) Fisher, Cortney; Simpson, Sally S; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The discipline of criminology and criminal justice tends to focus on the offender. However, the victim's cooperation with authorities, which often begins with a willingness to report the crime, is central to a successful investigation and prosecution. Yet, the crime victim exists today on the outskirts of the criminal justice system, limited in their role by the same authorities that need them to help. Despite increasingly retributive policies toward offenders, victims remain as unsatisfied with the criminal justice system as they were prior to the policy changes. This study explores the different policies and practices of criminal justice system actors that contribute to satisfaction for the victim. Using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression, elements of procedural justice are examined to determine if providing victims with procedure and a consistent sense of process creates satisfaction. Procedural justice is then examined in conjunction with distributive justice to determine if there are independent or interactive effects between the two. Study participants included 1,308 victims of violent crime, who experienced a range of violent crimes. Victim satisfaction was measured as a scale variable, averaging the victim's level of satisfaction across four distinct periods of the criminal investigation and prosecution. As expected, components of the system that granted the victim representation and a sense of accuracy in the process created a higher level of satisfaction for the victim. Also as expected, these variables remained important to the victim's satisfaction even when distributive justice variables were included. Unexpectedly, however, the variables that measured ethicality were unrelated to the victim's satisfaction, nor was sentence severity. Theoretical and policy implications, as well as directions for future research, are offered. Study limitations, including the limited generalizability of the sample, also are discussed.
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    Do Cellmates Matter? A Study of Prison Peer Effects under Essential Heterogeneity
    (2014) Harris, Heather Michele; Reuter, Peter; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This study examines prison peer effects in an adult prison population in the United States using a unique dataset assembled from the administrative databases of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. The members of a first-time prison release cohort were identified and matched to each of the cellmates with whom they shared a double cell. These data were then linked to arrest history data from the Pennsylvania State Police. Criminological theories of social influence expect unobserved and difficult to quantify factors, such as criminality, to affect criminal behavior both independently and through intermediate decisions, including the choice to maintain prison peer associations. Those theories, therefore, implicitly assume the presence of essential heterogeneity, which helps to account for the response heterogeneity observed in studies of social influence. This study introduces the concept of essential heterogeneity to criminology and is the first to apply a method to address it, local instrumental variables, to estimate causal social interaction effects. The analyses presented in this study demonstrate that there is considerable response heterogeneity in prison peer effects. That response heterogeneity is attributable to essential heterogeneity, as implicitly expected by criminological learning theories. However, the null average effects estimated do not accord with the predictions of criminological learning theories, including differential association, balance, and prisonization theories, each of which expects peers who are, on average, more criminally experienced to exert criminogenic effects. The presence of essential heterogeneity indicates that estimating average prison peer effects does little to adequately characterize the relationship between social interactions with cellmates and releasee reoffending behaviors. Within the null average prison peer effect estimates lies tremendous variation in marginal prison peer effects. Some marginal prison peer effects are significantly criminogenic, while others are significantly crimino-suppressive. That substantial variation in the measured effect of prison peers on reoffending persists despite rigorous analysis and the inclusion of robust theoretically relevant controls suggests that future work should focus on creating constructs more appropriate to the task of determining who is harmed and who is helped as a result of interactions with prison peers.
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    General and Specific Displacement Effects of Police Crackdowns: Criminal Events and "Local" Criminals
    (2014) Mazeika, David; Sherman, Lawrence W; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Geographically focused police crackdowns have widely diffused amongst larger American police departments in the past decade and have been recently cited in a Police Executive Research Forum survey as the most commonly used tactic to combat violent crime. Evidence from a number of randomized control trials, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses suggests that these interventions have the ability to reduce crime without displacing it to nearby locations. However, virtually every study of crime displacement in response to a geographically concentrated police intervention focuses on small buffer zones immediately surrounding the intervention location. While crime may not displace just around the corner, to date, few studies have tested displacement beyond this limited geographic constraint. During the summer of 2011 the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington D.C. implemented a geographically focused arrest-driven police crackdown called the Summer Crime Initiative (SCI). The current work aims to examine the impact of the SCI on the volume and placement of robbery through a quasi-experimental research design. By developing a theoretically informed framework, a broader set of hypotheses regarding local and non-local crime displacement are tested. The results of this study confirm prior research on crime displacement. Despite reductions in robbery, there is no evidence that these offenses or offenders were displaced within or beyond two blocks of the intervention sites.