Bayesian analysis and the accumulation of evidence in crime and justice intervention studies

In recent years a great deal of attention has turned to the need for policy-relevant research in criminology. Methodologically, attention has been trained on the use of randomized experimental designs and cumulative systematic reviews of evidence to accomplish this goal. Our work here reviews and demonstrates the utility of the Bayesian analytic framework, in the context of crime prevention and justice treatment studies, as a means of furthering the goals of research synthesis and creation of policy-relevant scientific statements. Evidence from various fields is used as a foundation for the discussion, and an empirical example illustrates how this approach might be useful in practical criminological research. It is concluded that Bayesian analysis offers a useful complement to existing approaches and warrants further inclusion in the ongoing discussion about how best to assess program effectiveness, synthesize evidence, and report findings from crime and justice evaluations in a way that is relevant to policy makers and practitioners.

Historical and contemporary views of social control,race, crime,and justice

This volume is a special issue commemorating Black History Month in the United States. The five papers contained in the volume address a wide variety of issues in the area of race, crime, and justice.     

Reporting to the police in western nations: A theoretical analysis of the effects of social context

One of the most consistent findings in empirical studies using victimization data is that the decision to report victimization to the police is determined in large part by the seriousness of the crime. The police will be notified more often of crimes that involve more serious injury or greater monetary loss. These findings, however, may be due to the fact that most studies on reporting have been conducted using victimization surveys that devote a great deal of attention to the crime event and victim characteristics and much less to the social context of that event. As a result, influences on reporting operating at the neighborhood, jurisdiction, or nation level have been neglected. The aim of this paper is to bring social context into the discourse on reporting to the police by presenting a much more inclusive model of crime reporting. In addition, the influence of four aspects of macro-level social context on reporting are tested—the perceived competence of the police, institutionalization of insurance business, norm of conformity, and level of individualism—by merging incident-level data from the International Crime Victims Survey (ICVS) for 16 Western industrialized countries with nation-level data from various sources. Hierarchical logistic modeling is used to analyze the nested data. The perceived competence of the police has a positive effect on whether property crimes are reported.     

Explaining the race/ethnicity–violence relationship: Neighborhood context and social psychological processes

Blacks and Latinos have higher levels of offending than Whites for violent crimes. Researchers have examined a range of explanations that primarily focus on race and have only begun to consider how macro contexts influence individual levels of violence. This study contributes to this literature by including both race and ethnicity, and by examining the role of social psychological processes in mediating the impact of neighborhood contexts on violence. Using the Add Health data, I demonstrate the importance of the neighborhood context, socioeconomic status, and social psychological processes in explaining the relationship between race, ethnicity and violence. Having witnessed and been victimized by violence is by far the most important social psychological process in explaining this relationship.     

White-collar crime and the justice department: The institutionalization of a concept

The sudden and unexpected incorporation of white-collar crime as a top investigative priority of the U.S. Justice Department of the 1970s is the focus of this inquiry. This pursuit of white-collar crime is especially problematic for instrumentalist and structuralist variants of conflict theory, which generally view the origins of law in terms of the interests of a ruling or capitalist class. This apparent contradiction between official concern for white-collar crime and instrumentalist and structuralist theories of law creation is examined in the context of the discovery of white-collar crime by the Justice Department. It is noted that in the process of operationalizing white-collar crime, the Justice Department transformed the traditional (Sutherland) definition of white-collar crime so that targeted offenders are not limited to the economic and political elite, but instead are drawn from all social classes. This modification of the definition has far-reaching implications for assessing the nature of the Justice Department's response to the problem of elite crime and provides insight into the ongoing theoretical debate on the origins of law.     

Schizophrenia: Causes,crime, and implications for criminology and criminal justice

This paper is aimed at criminologists and criminal justicians seeking to understand their role in educating law enforcement and correctional personnel who must deal with the mentally ill. It is motivated by William Johnson's (2011) recent call for rethinking the interface between mental illness, criminal justice, and academia, and his call for advocacy. We concur with his concerns, and insist that this rethinking must necessarily include grounding in the etiology of mental illness (specifically, with schizophrenia) as it is currently understood by researchers in the area. Advocacy must go hand in hand with a thorough knowledge of the condition of the people for whom we are advocating. We first examine major etiological models of schizophrenia, emphasizing the neurodevelopmental model that incorporates genetics, neurological functioning, and immunological factors guided by the assumption that the typical criminologist/criminal justician has minimal acquaintance with such material. We then address the link between schizophrenia and criminal behavior, and conclude with a discussion of the implications for criminology and criminal justice.     

Justifying the use of non-experimental methods and disqualifying the use of randomized controlled trials: challenging folklore in evaluation research in crime and justice

The key limitation of non-experimental evaluation methods is that they require an assumption that all confounding factors related to treatment are identified in the statistical models developed. The key advantage of randomized experiments is that this assumption can be relaxed. In this paper, I describe and explain why this assumption is so critical for non-experiments and why it can be ignored in randomized controlled trials (RCTs). I also challenge what I describe as “folklores” that are used to justify the use of non-randomized studies despite this statistical limitation, and to justify the failure of evaluation researchers in crime and justice to use randomized experiments despite their unique ability to overcome this limitation. I conclude by reinforcing what Joan McCord had argued after a life time of review of evaluations: “(W)henever possible” evaluation studies “should employ random assignment.”     

Breaking the chainlinks of poverty: strategies for social justice

Thanks to support from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies produced an evidence review on the links between poverty and institutional care, summarised in a collection of reviews published by the Foundation (Grimshaw et al., 2014; Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2014).     

Crime and justice in the context of resource scarcity

This concept paper presents a theory of environmental scarcity developed byHomer-Dixon. Homer-Dixon developed a model to describe the consequences of scarcity for sub-national violence in third world countries. This paper hasfour interrelated purposes. First, it presents the model of scarcity developedby Thomas Homer-Dixon in 1999. Second, it assesses the way in which the scarcity model contextualizes criminal justice and criminology research, andby extension, how research in crime and justice processes can broaden the scarcity model. Third, it applies elements of the model to the United States,a goal that represents a generalization of the model from third-world to first-world settings. Fourth, it presents a particular case, the migrationof African-Americans from the rural South to urban centers in the 1950s and1960s and consequent inner-city violence in the 1960s, that displays manyelements of the environmental scarcity model.     

The department of justice merger guidelines: The search for empirical support

This paper examines the Department of Justice Merger Guidelines to determine whether there is any objective support for the critical values they suggest. The conclusion, based on empirical results using Census of Manufacturers data, is that there is nothing to suggest a unique level at which one can suspect collusion will arise that in turn will lead to enhanced profitability of firms within an industry.     

From Poisson to the present: Applying operations research to problems of crime and justice

In the 1830s Siméon-Denis Poisson developed the distribution that bears his name, basing it on the binomial distribution. He used it to show how the inherent variance in jury decisions affected the inferences that could be made about the probability of conviction in French courts. In recent years there have been a number of examples where researchers have either ignored or forgotten this inherent variance, and how operations research, in particular mathematical modeling, can be used to incorporate this variance in analyses. These are described in this paper, as well as other contributions made by operations research to the study of crime and criminal justice.     

Mock trials: A participatory views of the criminal justice process

“The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.” (France, 1881) This quote from The Crime of Sylvester Bonnard, the first novel of the Nobel Prize Winner, Anatole France, emphasizes a primary goal of teaching: awakening and satisfying natural curiosity. While most educators might agree with France’s assessment of educational goals, there seems to be less consensus on how this goal can best be achieved. Just as teachers differ so do teaching strategies. Obviously a variety of strategies can and should be utilized to attain the goal of facilitating learning by students. One of the proven instructional methods which can be utilized is simulation. It offers the opportunity for effective instruction at all levels of education from primary grades through professional schools. In criminal justice education, the use of simulation can provide students with an exciting opportunity to experience “real world” situations in the classrooms. It offers a chance for students to satisfy their natural curiosity through role play. This article describes the development and implementation of a mock trial course at Jacksonville State University.