UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item When “Tough” Cops Divert and “Soft” Cops Charge: Trait Attitudes vs. State Situational Narratives in a Focal Concerns Process of Police Decision-Making(2019) Slothower, Molly P; Sherman, Lawrence; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Research Question Do police officers’ overall “tough” or “soft” attitudes toward crime and defendants determine how they handle discretionary cases, or does each officer look at the elements in each case to see whether they should act “tough” or “soft” in the given situation? This study tests whether police decisions to divert cases from prosecution into diversionary out-of-court disposals are driven by “trait attitudes”—each officer’s overall “tough” or “soft” attitudes toward defendants, which are stable characteristics of each officer regardless of the situation—versus officers’ “state attitudes”—their narratives about the meaning of specific elements present in each case as they make decisions. Methods Thirty-four officers in a large urban force completed attitudinal surveys and 20 case study vignettes. For each vignette, officers recorded: each relevant element (e.g. criminal history, alcohol involvement); whether each element pushed them toward prosecution or diversion, and why; and whether they would prosecute or divert the case. Officers recorded 2,241 elements across 645 case responses. Using primarily hierarchical logistic regression models, this study tests the impact of trait attitudes versus state narratives on recommended case outcomes. Results Officer decision-making was more influenced by officers’ interpretations of whether elements signaled each defendant was “reformable” or “incorrigible” than by their overall “tough” or “soft” attitudes. Officers often disagreed on how they interpreted the same elements in the same cases, leading to different outcomes. State narratives were strong predictors in most models regardless of officers’ overall attitudes, including predicting diversion. Trait attitudes had little or no impact in most models, except for one subset of officers—officers in the “toughest” quartile of attitudes were more likely to perceive defendants as incorrigible and less likely to divert. Implications This study provides evidence against the theory that officers are primarily driven by their overall attitudes toward defendants, and instead suggests their narratives interpreting case elements are important drivers of differences between officers in decision-making—officers try to pick the "correct" outcome in each case using these narratives. Therefore, research and police departments should explore officers’ interpretation of situational elements, and test mechanisms to provide feedback regarding accuracy of assumptions.Item THE CRIMINAL CONDUCT OF RADICAL ENVIRONMENTAL AND ANIMAL RIGHTS GROUPS: A RATIONAL CHOICE PERSPECTIVE(2010) Carson, Jennifer Varriale; LaFree, Gary; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I examine whether members of radical environmental and animal rights groups are deterred by legal sanctions, morality, both, or neither. From a rational choice framework, I hypothesize that members of these groups weigh costs and benefits and act based on expected utility. I measure an increase in costs through three federal sentencing acts targeted at reducing the criminal behavior of these groups and hypothesize that this legislation decreased the total, serious, and ideologically-specific activity of extremists. I also contend that two terrorist events, the nearly fatal tree-spiking of George Alexander and the assassination of Hyram Kitchen, also increased the costs of criminal conduct for members of radical eco-groups. I evaluate interviews with twenty-five activists and analyze a database of 1056 incidents through both time-series and series hazard modeling. The interviews yield support for the rational choice perspective, particularly in regards to micro-level considerations of legal sanctions and morality. My quantitative findings indicate that the legislation was influential, albeit varying in direction by the method employed. Specifically, the time-series models yield significant increases in the frequency of criminal conduct after the legislation, while the series hazard analyses demonstrate a decrease in the hazard of an attack. I also find that the two major terrorist events did not significantly impact the criminal conduct of these groups. I conclude that members of radical environmental and animal rights groups are rational actors whom consider the moral evaluation of a given act and are susceptible to an increase in costs as measured through legislative efforts, but not as operationalized as a response to high profile attacks.