ADHD and criminality: A primer on the genetic, neurobiological, evolutionary, and treatment literature for criminologists

Objective

This state of the art review of 102 studies is a primer on ADHD and its major comorbidities for criminologists unfamiliar with the genetic, neurobiological, and evolutionary literatures.

Materials and methods

Neurological, genetic, medical, and criminal justice data bases were keyword searched for articles on ADHD and/or articles using ADHD as a major independent variable.

Results

ADHD is a disorder that is closely connected to externalizing behaviors, conduct problems, and criminal behavior across the life course.

Conclusions

To date, ADHD research has been carried out primarily by biomedical researchers and de-emphasized by criminologists whose training is overwhelmingly in the social sciences. The special expertise of criminologists in uncovering environmental correlates of antisocial behavior can benefit biomedical researchers who in turn can assist criminologists in uncovering the individual-level correlates of antisocial behavior.     

Management research in criminal justice: Exploring ethical issues

While there has been a steady increase of management research in criminal justice organizations in recent years, far too little attention has been devoted to the dilemmas surrounding these research efforts. The first dilemma is associated with the treatment of information or data while the second is associated with the treatment of human subjects. The purpose of this paper is to begin the debate in this sensitive area by exploring the primary ethical issues of each dilemma which must be constructively dealt with by management researchers if they are to avoid potential harm to their subjects, while at the same time, assure the validity of their results. Finally, several strategies which appear useful in addressing these ethical issues will be considered.     

Unmasking the Crimes of the Powerful

Even in formally open, liberal, democratic states, a series of barriers exist as obstacles to critical criminologists who wish to conduct research that scrutinises the activities of powerful states and corporations. Much evidence suggests that in the current political climate, the barring of access to sources of data, neo-liberal re-configurations in the funding of research, and the narrowing of publishing and dissemination opportunities to counter-hegemonic voices are severely limiting the ability to conduct critical research. This article reports on recent experiences of researchers concerned with unmasking the crimes of the powerful and argues that, despite the obstacles power sources use to obscure and mystify the illegal and violent practices engaged in by states and corporations, there remains fertile space around research agendas, and in universities, for critical researchers to exploit. To gain insight from the ways in which researchers can, and do, establish alternative agendas, this article seeks to explore some of the principles that might inform and encourage those forms of resistance, and to establish how critical criminologists might continue to subject the powerful to scrutiny. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A Community Divided: Defense Attorneys and the Ethics of Death Row Volunteering

When death row inmates elect to waive appeals and proceed directly to execution a series of problematic legal and ethical questions are raised. This article examines the ethics of volunteering from the perspective of death row inmates'defense attorneys. Studying attorneys is important for two reasons: since they are charged with protecting their clients'interests they must resolve the difficult question of whether death is ever in someone's best interest; and perhaps more important, most death row defense attorneys are themselves against the death penalty and must thus negotiate between their clients'desire for execution and their own personal value systems. Interviews were conducted with 20 attorneys who have participated in representing would-be volunteers. Qualitative analysis suggests that most are faced with profound ethical dilemmas, both professional and personal, when a client elects to waive appeals. This article explores how attorneys interpret, experience, and resolve those dilemmas.     

‘There were ethical dilemmas all day long!’: harrowing tales of ethnographic researchers in criminology and criminal justice

While there have been many ethnographies published within the disciplines of criminology and criminal justice, very few studies have examined actual field researchers who have successfully employed this qualitative technique. In this exploratory study, we identified and conducted phone interviews with a sample of eight scholars who have used variations of the ethnographic method to study aspects of life which relate to crime, deviant behavior, and social control. Respondents revealed to us their colorful stories, as well as the risks, rewards, and ethical dilemmas they experienced while attempting to balance the delicate roles of being insiders, outsiders, researchers, and participants. They specifically discussed how they negotiated the personal and professional obstacles of being thrust into criminal worlds (as well as criminal justice worlds) and ultimately managed to thrive while conducting fieldwork in perilous places.     

Ethics in hospital and health administration

Until recently, hospital and health administrators had no formal code of ethics, despite growing ethical dilemmas within the field. This essay defines those ethical issues as set forth in the 1941 Joint ACHA-American Hospital Association Committee's code of ethics. The present ACHA Ethics Committee is also described.     

ACTIVIST CRIMINOLOGY: CRIMINOLOGISTS’ RESPONSIBILITY TO ADVOCATE FOR SOCIAL AND LEGAL JUSTICE

Similar to many criminologists, my interest in pursuing this career was driven by a desire to improve responses to injustices, on both small and large scales. I believe that among criminologists, this dedication to effect changes in social and legal justice disproportionately drives those of us historically kept out of the academy due to our race, gender, class, sexual identity, and/or other marginalizations. Fortunately, there is a growing diversity among criminologists and this has had a powerful impact on expanding the scope and depth of the field. At the same time, I am concerned that academic training and university climates frequently work against our commitment to advancing social and legal justice changes, what I refer to as “criminology activism.” This address is a call to action, stressing criminologists’ responsibility to advocate for social and legal justice on small and large scales. Numerous types of criminology activism are identified (e.g., in research, service, and teaching), including the requisite to continue diversifying the representation of criminologists.     

Non-Response Bias with a Web-Based Survey of College Students: Differences from a Classroom Survey About Carrying Concealed Handguns

Internet-based and e-mail surveys represent viable administrative methods for efficiently collecting data. These methods appear to be particularly well-suited for studying college student populations, a group that has gained attention from criminologists interested in testing theories. An important concern with administering surveys with the Internet and via e-mail is that of non-response bias. Despite the appeal of online surveys, nonresponse bias associated with these methods has not been sufficiently investigated. The study described here estimates nonresponse bias associated with a web-administered survey that measured opinions about changing concealed handgun carrying laws on college campuses, items likely to elicit polarizing opinions. Results show important substantive differences between web-administered and in-class versions of the survey. Students who responded to the web survey expressed more extreme opinions and behavioral responses to a proposed policy that would allow concealed handgun carrying on campus. Survey researchers who utilize web-based administrative methods should consider using multiple sources of leverage when soliciting participation and must carefully evaluate sample representativeness.     

Empty Ethics and Reasonable Responsibility: Vocabularies of Motive among Law and Business Students

Despite professional nonns of being socially responsible and providing service to the underprivileged, the attitudes of law students toward ethical duties and public service bear similarities to those of business students. Using data from multiple interviews with luw and business school students at one university, 1 find that these attitudes develop in response to the expectations of peers and professors during school experiences. Ethics courses are marginalized by the schools, and courses focus on such pragmatic issues as the professional code of conduct (law school) or how the appearance of social responsibility affects the bottom line (business school). Provided with little guidance on what they might do when they encounter real ethical dilemmas, students karn vocabularies of motive concerning how lawyers and managers should balance profits, cany out responsibilities to various stakeholders, and weigh ethical concerns, and they then moderate their own expressions of extreme self-interest or self-sacrifice. Both groups learn to maintain social responsibilities only within reason, emphasizing the separation of work from personal convictions. These elements have implications for the perfonnuwe of public service in their future careers, as well as for a scholarly understanding of professionalism.     

The ethics of promulgating principles of research ethics: the problem of diversion effects

There is an important distinction between ethical standards for the conduct of research with human subjects and the ethics of promulgating principles of research ethics. Those who promulgate ethical standards for the conduct of research have an ethical responsibility to consider the consequences to which those promulgations give rise. In particular, they must consider whether their promulgations will give researchers incentives not to conduct research or not to conduct research in locales in which participants would benefit from participation. I first show how such ‘diversion effects’ are possible and then examine four principles of research ethics in that light. I then consider several objections to the argument that those who promulgate principles of research ethics should consider diversion effects.     

Dreams and Nightmares: Practical and Ethical Issues for Patients and Physicians Using Personal Health Records

Electronic health records for patients, personal health records (PHRs), have become increasingly popular among policy makers and purchasers, but uptake among patients and physicians has been relatively slow. PHRs have varying uses that might make them more or less appealing to different stakeholders. The three core uses for PHRs — promoting communication, data use, and patient responsibility — each raises a set of potential practical and financial dilemmas. But some ethical concerns are also at play, some of which are rarely recognized as values-based barriers to the use of PHRs. Recognizing these ethical issues, and addressing them explicitly in PHR design and policy making, would help PHRs to achieve their promise.     

A review of the life-events calendar method for criminological research

This review presents an overview of the life-events calendar method for criminologists. In recent years researchers in the health and social sciences have increasingly adopted the life-events calendar method to examine a range of topics. Most of these applications have occurred across disparate disciplines outside of criminology. Criminologists may therefore be unaware of the life-events calendar method's advantages for studying offending. Compared to traditional surveys the life-events calendar method facilitates recall more effectively and measures temporal ordering, co-occurring events, and other complicated data more accurately. Respondents with unstable lives and cognitive difficulties respond favorably to the life-events calendar method's interactive mode of administration and use of visual and mental cues, and using the life-events calendar method to gather retrospective longitudinal data from offenders is cheaper and potentially more practical than implementing traditional panel designs. For these reasons the life-events calendar method should be regarded as a viable option for criminologists.     

The ethical identity of law students

This paper uses measures of values, moral outlook and professional identity to explore the ethical and professional identity of law students. We do so in two jurisdictions, surveying 441 students studying in England and Wales and 569 students studying in the US. The survey covers the first and final years of an undergraduate law degree and the postgraduate vocational stage in England and Wales, as well as students in all years of the JD programme in the US. We explore whether law students towards the end of their legal education have ethical identities predictive of less ethical conduct than those at the beginning of their legal education; whether law students intending careers in business law have values and profiles consistent with less ethical conduct than those intending to work for government or individuals; and what factors might explain these differences in ethical outlook. Our findings suggest that ethical identity is strongly associated with gender and career intentions. They also suggest weaker moral identities for students intending to practise business law. Ultimately, our findings support a conclusion that is more nuanced than the predominant theses about the impact of legal education on student ethicality which tend to suggest legal education diminishes ethicality.     

THE NEGLECTED SITUATION: A CROSSNATIONAL STUDY OF THE SITUATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CRIME*

Although it is generally recognized in the social sciences that the “situation” is indispensable for understanding behavior, thus far criminologists have not devoted systematic attention to situational analysis. This paper contributes to the development of a situational perspective on crime by defining the concept of situation, developing four hypotheses about the situational characteristics of selected personal contact crimes, and then testing those hypotheses using victimization survey data from the United States and Venezuela. The research shows that coercive crimes are less situationally clustered than noncoercive crimes and that instrumental crimes are more situationally clustered than character crimes. Despite tremendous differences in crime rates for the two countries, substantial similarity is found in situational crime patterns. The implications of the research for criminological theory are discussed.     

Cultural Criminology and the Politics of Meaning

Cultural criminology focuses on situational, subcultural, and mediated constructions of meaning around issues of crime and crime control. In this sense cultural criminology is designed for critical engagement with the politics of meaning, and for critical intervention into those politics. Yet the broader enterprise of critical criminology engages with the politics of meaning as well; in confronting the power relations of justice and injustice, critical criminologists of all sorts investigate the social and cultural processes by which situations are defined, groups are categorized, and human consequences are understood. The divergence between cultural criminology and other critical criminologies, then, may be defined less by meaning than by the degree of methodological militancy with which meaning is pursued. In any case, this shared concern with the politics of meaning suggests a number of innovations and interventions that cultural criminologists and other critical criminologists might explore.     

Comparing Juvenile Justice Systems: Towards a Qualitative Research Project in East Asia

This paper contrasts the assumptions and methods used by quantitative criminologists with the approach to comparison pursued by the interpretive tradition in sociology. Whereas quantitative studies tend to conceal distinctive legislative or institutional responses in particular countries, interpretive studies make it possible to address internal debates about policy issues, as well as how practitioners exercise professional judgement. The paper considers a variety of ways in which the interpretive traditions of symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology have approached comparison. It also considers the conceptual and practical issues that might arise in conducting a qualitative comparative study about juvenile justice within East Asia focusing on Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Whereas quantitative studies tend to ask questions that interest Western researchers, interpretivism makes possible a dialogue between countries that have different institutions, philosophies and cultures.     

Social and Scientific Influences on the Measurement of Criminal Victimization

The National Crime Victimization Survey has been informed by decades of methodological research on the measurement of victimization. Yet most criminologists have little knowledge of the process or outcomes of this research or its effects on the characteristics of the survey. Using in-house reports, conference papers, agency memoranda, and other documents, this paper describes some of the important methodological research that has taken place since the 1992 redesign of the survey. Much of the more recent research is the consequence of new initiatives for the survey, such as the measurement of hate crime victimization and victimization among the developmentally disabled, as well as periodic supplements. This research finds that the current characteristics of the NCVS reflect decisions made on the basis of methodological research, broader social and political factors, and budgetary constraints.     

The Life of an Academic: Examining the Correlates of Job Satisfaction Among Criminology/Criminal Justice Faculty

This research examined job satisfaction among members (N?=?1,057) of the American Society of Criminology (ASC) and the Academy of Criminal justice Sciences (ACJS). In particular, the research looked at what factors are related to job satisfaction (enjoyment). We explored substantive personal and professional correlates such as stress, family life, and scholarly productivity. A host of demographic factors including gender, race and income, were also included in the analysis. The multivariate analysis revealed that those criminologists with more journal article publications, and devote more time to family and friends, had high job satisfaction. Conversely, criminologists living in the south had low job satisfaction compared to those living in other parts of the country. The paper ends with a call for the continuing exploration of the personal and professional correlates of job satisfaction among criminologists.     

Cross-Cultural Reflections of Organized Crime

The authors discuss the phenomenon of organized crime and why it appears to be a uniquely American problem. Comparing and contrasting ten cultural and/or socio-political variables, the authors demonstrate that American organized crime is uniquely related to its historical heritage, and that the inability of British society (inclusive of the media, researchers, and police officials) to officially recognize organized crime may be a result of “perceptual impairment” as opposed to its non-existence. The authors conclude that the study of the organizaion of crime deserves increased emphasis among criminologists, particularly with respect to the phenomenon of organized crime.     

Ethical concerns expressed by forensic psychiatrists

A survey was made of American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS) forensic psychiatrists to evaluate whether there is concern among them about potential ethical problems in criminal justice work. Of the respondents, 93.8% had encountered such problems. The main concerns indicated were about those psychiatrists who become a "hired gun," become an advocate, do not give an honest opinion, or have problems with confidentiality. The need for ethical guidelines and further debate about ethical issues is presented.