Police Use of Less Lethal Force: Does Administrative Policy Matter?

Scholars have long theorized that constraining police officer discretion via organizational policy improves decision-making. Empirically, prior research shows that more restrictive lethal force policies result in a reduction in the number of police shootings and in racial disparity. Yet, researchers have never examined the impact of less lethal force policies in relation to the full spectrum of less lethal force tactics. In addressing this research void, we examine 3,340 use of force incidents from three US agencies, each varying in terms of policy direction and restrictiveness. The results consistently show that officers working within the most restrictive policy framework used force less readily than officers who operated within more permissive policy environments. Hence, police administrators wishing to reduce coercion should consider the potential effect that a more restrictive policy may have on such behavior.     

Does Fault Matter?

In this article, I try to go beyond the traditional objections to strict liability public welfare offenses and confront other possible justifications for punishing non-culpable conduct. Specifically, I consider the following arguments:

• Penalties for public welfare offenses are punishment by name only, thus traditional justifications for punishment are not needed;
• Even if those penalties are punishment, punishing those who produce or threaten significant harm to others is not necessarily unjust; and
• Even if such punishment is not entirely just, it is consistent with other widely accepted criminal law doctrines.

     

Empty Homes and Acquisitive Crime: Does Vacancy Type Matter?

American Journal of Criminal Justice - Research suggests that vacant homes are associated with a variety of negative outcomes for communities, including higher rates of some crimes. A few studies...     

Peer Group Delinquency and Sexual Victimization: Does Popularity Matter?

Though a large body of research has found that peer social network characteristics influence both offending and victimization, relatively little is known about the influence of social network characteristics on adolescent sexual victimization. Attractiveness and sociability largely indicate popularity for teenage females, which in turn leads to earlier onset of dating, greater dating options, and potential risk of sexual victimization—an observation not tested in the criminological and criminal justice literature. We suggest and evaluate 2 competing hypotheses: that popularity within a network insulates females from sexual victimization and that popularity may increase exposure to delinquent others and facilitate sexual victimization. Results suggest that popularity does not have a consistent effect but instead that its role is conditioned by the deviance of the network. Popularity is associated with an increase in the likelihood of victimization when peer deviance is high but with a decrease when peer deviance is low. We further demonstrate that an interaction between a female's own drinking and the proportion of her friends that are male strongly affects her likelihood of sexual victimization. Implications for policy and future research are explored.     

The Convention Method Revisited: Does It Have a Future and Does It Matter?

Scholars have argued that the convention method has democratised the process of treaty reform and increased the legitimacy of EU constitutionalisation. This article finds that the convention method has contributed to a slightly more democratic process, but has not, in any fundamental way, improved the democratic status of the EU's treaty reform process. We should accordingly not be too concerned over the future fate of the convention method. From a democratic perspective, we should be more worried over the possible scenario that future changes to the EU's institutional structure will come about through implicit constitutional change without any formal changes being made to the treaties. The often cumbersome ratification process could thereby be bypassed, but this would also deprive EU citizens of the only real opportunity they have of influencing decisions on the overall design of the integration project.     

Does Treatment Quality Matter?

Research Summary

The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice has implemented a process to evaluate the treatment quality of interventions provided statewide in all long‐term residential programs. In the current study, we examine the predictive validity of this treatment quality component in the prediction of recidivism of youth (N = 2,397) who completed juvenile justice residential programs from July 1, 2013 to June 30, 2014. We use hierarchical linear modeling to assess the effects of treatment quality (as youth are nested within programs), controlling for demographic and criminal history factors. The results indicate that higher average treatment quality scores of interventions received within a residential program decreased the likelihood of subsequent arrest, conviction, and reincarceration, whereas the highest treatment quality score of any specific intervention provided within the program decreased the odds of reincarceration only.

Policy Implications

In this study, we confirm the importance of fidelity and implementation quality in the provision of crime prevention treatment interventions to serious, deep‐end juvenile offenders. Additionally, our results shed light on the ability of a juvenile justice agency to measure treatment quality in a substantively meaningful way with the use of limited additional resources. The services provided to keep communities safe, prevent future offending, and rehabilitate juvenile offenders must be held accountable for producing such outcomes, and one method of measuring such compliance is to evaluate the quality of the interventions with respect to staff training, fidelity adherence, evaluation, and corrective action processes.     

Mug Shot Exposure Effects: Does Size Matter?

This research tested whether mug book size moderates mug shot exposure effects. Witnesses to a simulated theft searched either a small, a large, or no mug book, followed by a perpetrator-absent lineup containing a critical foil from the mug book. Contrary to predictions of a transference effect, critical foil lineup identifications did not differ across conditions. To test for a commitment effect, only participants who selected the critical foil in the mug book were considered; there was evidence of a commitment effect in the large mug book condition. Finally, there were more lineup-correct rejections in the large mug book condition; this was explained in terms of the criterion for making mug book choices carrying over to lineup choices.

Violent Crime,Residential Instability and Mobility: Does the Relationship Differ in Minority Neighborhoods?

This study examines the reciprocal relationship between violent crime and residential stability in neighborhoods. We test whether the form of stability matters by comparing two different measures of stability: a traditional index of residential stability and a novel approach focusing specifically on the stability of homeowners. We also examine whether the racial/ethnic composition of the neighborhood in which this stability occurs affects the instability—violent crime relationship. To test the simultaneous relationship between residential mobility and crime we estimate a dual multivariate latent curve model of the change in the violent crime rate and the change in the rate of home sales while controlling for neighborhood socioeconomic and demographic characteristics using data from Los Angeles between 1992 and 1997. Results indicate that the initial level of violent crime increases the trajectory of residential instability in subsequent years, whether the instability is measured as homeowner turnover specifically, or based on an index of all residents. However, the effect of instability on violent crime is only apparent when measuring instability based on an index of general residential turnover and not when including the presence of owners in this measure, or when measuring it based on homeowner turnover. We consistently find that stable highly Latino communities exhibit a protective effect against violence.     

Residential Mobility and Delinquency Revisited: Causation or Selection?

Objectives

To assess the role of selection in the observed association between residential mobility and delinquency among adolescents.

Methods

This study draws on a sample of adolescents from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). We first examine whether adjusting regression models for several well-established determinants of moving attenuates the association between mobility and delinquency. We then employ propensity score methods to estimate the effect of residential mobility on delinquency among a sub-sample of movers and non-movers who had similar likelihoods of moving.

Results

The association between mobility and delinquency is significant and positive in regression models, although it is somewhat attenuated by additional control variables that are rarely considered in prior work. However, the distribution of mobility determinants differs substantially across movers and non-movers, potentially biasing these estimates. After covariate balance is achieved using a propensity score approach, we observe no differences in delinquency between groups.

Conclusions

Results suggest that certain adolescents are more likely to move than others, explaining the observed association between mobility and delinquency. Future research should therefore be mindful of selection when trying to account for differential outcomes between mobile and non-mobile adolescents.     

Can a Woman Rape a Man and Why Does It Matter?

Under current UK legislation, only a man can commit rape. This paper argues that this is an unjustified double standard that reinforces problematic gendered stereotypes about male and female sexuality. I first reject three potential justifications for making penile penetration a condition of rape: (1) it is physically impossible for a woman to rape a man; (2) it is a more serious offence to forcibly penetrate someone than to force them to penetrate you; (3) rape is a gendered crime. I argue that, as these justifications fail, a woman having sex with a man without his consent ought to be considered rape. I then explain some further reasons that this matters. I argue that, not only is it unjust, it is also both a cause and a consequence of harmful stereotypes and prejudices about male and female sexuality: (1) men are ‘always up for sex’; (2) women’s sexual purity is more important than men’s; (3) sex is something men do to women. Therefore, I suggest that, if rape law were made gender neutral, these stereotypes would be undermined and this might make some (albeit small) difference to the problematic ways that sexual relations are sometimes viewed between men and women more generally.     

Does Hypocrisy Matter? National Reputational Damage and British Anti-Corruption Mentoring in the Balkans

In the late 2000s, numerous prominent public commentators raised concerns that corruption scandals were harming Britain’s ability to play a leadership role in anti-corruption initiatives abroad. With a view to contributing to critical criminological scholarship on international policy transfer and double standards in criminal justice policy and practice, this article explores the extent to which reputational damage curtailed Britain’s appeal as an anti-corruption mentor in South-East Europe during the 2000s. Challenging the common presumption that stronger states tarnished by corruption scandals will face ‘hypocricy costs’ abroad, this article finds that a range of factors work to insulate stronger states from the potential ramifications of reputational decline.     

Does Co‐Regulation Strengthen EU Legitimacy?

Abstract:  Within the Better Regulation programme of the EU, co-regulation is promoted as an important strategy to improve the regulatory environment within Europe. It is assumed that co-regulation can enhance the legitimacy of EU governance in the field where this strategy is used. The purpose of this article is to assess the truth of this premise and to analyse whether co-regulation strengthens the legitimacy of EU governance. To this end, the criteria of input and output legitimacy are applied to the European social dialogue as a form of co-regulation in the EU policy area of social law. In this article, a link is made between the tendency to prescribe co-regulation as a specific regulatory strategy in EU legislative policy and the existing knowledge on the purposes and effects of co-regulation and the conditions under which co-regulation can function as a regulation strategy.     

Students’ Feeling of Safety in School: Does Frequency of Victimization Matter?

One consistent finding in the area of school violence is that students that have been victimized at school are more likely to feel unsafe. This finding is based primarily on analysis of dichotomous measures of victimization. Little attention has been given to the effect of repeated victimization experiences on the feeling of safety. We used a nationally representative sample of 2199 Israeli Jewish and Arab students to explore this issue with reference to multiple experiences with the same type of victimization as well as experiences with different types of school violence. Our study confirms that being a victim of school violence decreases the feeling of safety, but suggests that a single experience may be more significant for this relationship than multiple victimizations.     

“Does Contain” vs. “Does Not Contain”: Does it Matter which GMO Label is Used?

An analytical framework where heterogeneous consumers are imperfectly informed about product content is used to investigate the welfare effects of a public labeling system. Although a mandatory label that reads Does Contain or one that reads Does Not Contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs) provides information for both the labeled and the unlabeled goods, there is no reason why these labels should cause the same welfare effects. This paper shows that the two labels imply different distortions due to the associated cost of labeling. It is shown that the label Does Contain should be used if the ratio of consumers with a strong reluctance for consuming GMO goods to indifferent consumers is high, while the label Does Not Contain should be used if this ratio is low. Given the findings, the authors argue that current labeling differences in various countries need not be the result of protectionist trade regulations.     

Does Nationality Matter? A Comparative Assessment of Perceptions Related to Litigiousness among Americans and Germans

Prior research has examined the salience of civil rights and freedom, core tenets of American life, and their impact on court accessibility and litigiousness. We extend this research by using a nationally representative sample of US and German residents to examine the impact of reported civic involvement and the perceived effectiveness of these activities on three outcomes related to litigiousness – use of a lawyer, seriously considering suing, and actually suing. The findings indicate that, with the exception of boycotting, civic involvement is not a significant predictor of litigiousness. Those who believe litigating is an effective way to participate in public life are more likely to litigate. Notably, Americans also are less likely than Germans to see litigation as effective and are substantially less likely to sue.     

Choice of Law in International Child Support Obligations: Hague or Vague, and Does it Matter?- An American Perspective

This article explores, through American eyes, the choice oflaw rules associated with the child support aspects of the proposedHague Convention on the International Recovery of Child Supportand Other Forms of Family Maintenance. It considers the rolethese rules play in capturing the "construct" that is the "family"for the purposes of child support by implicitly determiningwho is an acceptable claimant and who is an appropriate obligor.In addition, the rules determine which jurisdiction's law willestablish the amount of support and thus, implicitly, they determinewhich jurisdiction sets the standards for family "performance".American constitutional law demands a connection between theindividual to be burdened and the jurisdiction imposing thatburden. The proposed rules seem designed to take this into account,but doing so requires the scheme to abandon a preference forrelying on the law of the creditor's habitual residence. Americanchild support proceedings use pre-established guidelines todetermine the amount of any child support award. These guidelines,which are premised on economic conditions in the individualstates, are not suited to dealing with international disputes.The cases suggest that American courts are reluctant to abandonthe efficiency of the guidelines in favor of detailed fact basedanalysis, even if the result is an "inappropriate" order –certainty comes at a price.     

Marriage and Desistance from Crime in the Netherlands: Do Gender and Socio-Historical Context Matter?

Over the last two decades, research examining desistance from crime in adulthood has steadily increased. The evidence from this body of research consistently demonstrates that salient life events—in particular, marriage—are associated with a reduction of offending across the life course. However, previous studies have been largely limited to male samples in the United States. As a result, questions regarding the universal effect of these relationships remain. Specifically, research is needed to assess whether the desistance effect of life events like marriage varies by gender and/or socio-historical context in countries other than the U.S. The present research addresses these gaps by examining the relationship between marriage and criminal offending using data from the Criminal Career and Life Course Study (CCLS). The CCLS includes criminal conviction histories spanning a large portion of the life course for nearly 5,000 men and women convicted in the Netherlands in 1977. Because we assess change over multiple observations within and between individuals, we utilize hierarchical models to estimate gender and contextual effects of marriage on criminal offending (i.e., any, violent, and property convictions). Overall, we find consistent support for the idea that marriage reduces offending across gender and socio-historical context. Notably, we find that the reduction in the odds of offending due to marriage is significantly greater for individuals in the most contemporary context. The implications of these findings are discussed.