The quality of doctoral programs in deviance,criminology, and criminal justice: An empirical assessment

While information regarding the doctoral programs in any discipline is of obvious and considerable relevance both to those in the discipline and to those seeking access to the best possible sites for graduate training, our knowledge about the quality of doctoral programs continues to be based on little more than speculation and highly ambiguous measures of institutional or departmental prestige. This study attempts to fill this gap for those who have special interests in the related fields of deviance, criminology, and criminal justice by ranking the thirty-six most significant doctoral programs in the nation by means of data derived from the Social Science Citation Index. Perhaps the most striking of our findings—and certainly to us the most distressing finding—is that those departments ranked by our measures as being the highest quality are consistently those which exist within the broader structure of departments of sociology. Given our firm conviction that the discipline of criminology is far, far more than that aspect of it which is closely related to issues of substantive significance to the field of sociology, we can only speculate that those in leadership positions in the growing number of independent schools or departments of criminology or criminal justice are not meeting their obligations to the discipline whose vitality and prospects depend so heavily on the quality of their judgment.     

Ultimate opinion proscriptions: A cosmetic fix and a plea for empiricism

In recent years, ultimate opinion testimony given by mental health experts in insanity trials has come under strident criticism as an unwarranted incursion into the legal arena. This article examines the merits of such criticism and concludes that attempts to eliminate such testimony will not achieve their intended goals but will obscure more substantive issues inherent in insanity evaluations and subsequent testimony. The article then recasts problems in expert testimony in a broader conceptual basis buttressed with empiricism.     

Decision making by parole interviewers: The effect of case and interview factors

Nonverbal behavior of 103 inmates was coded during their parole interviews, and additional information was obtained from their case files. These data were related to interviewers' pre-and postinterview judgments of the inmates' likelihood of completing parole successfully and to interviewers' ratings of the inmates' honesty during the interview. Results showed that information obtained during the interview significantly affected the interviewers' postinterview judgments. Perceived honesty during the interview was affected significantly by the severity of the inmates' crime and by how much information the inmates' volunteered, how polite they were to the interviewers, and how much the inmates fidgeted during the interviews. Results suggest that the interviews did not improve, and may have lowered, interviewers' accuracy at predicting inmates' success on parole.