Regionalized personnel development for criminal justice employees

The Dayton/Montgomery County Criminal Justice Center is a first attempt at systematic personnel development for an entire criminal justice system on a regional level. Through its work in training and education, communications, career pathing and development, and system change, the Center has promoted the idea of an improved, symbiotic relatioship among the major branches of the criminal justice system, and has acted as a catalyst for needed systemic change.     

Gender and cultural patterns of suicidal behavior: young Hindustani immigrant women in the Netherlands

Patterns of suicidal behavior vary among cultures and along gender. Young Hindustani immigrant women attempt suicide four times more often than young Dutch women. This article explores multi-disciplinary explanations for suicidal behavior in this group. The interconnection of Durkheimian concepts of social integration and regulation with ecological insights into family relations and psychological and psychiatric theories on individual distress are relevant. It is suggested that young Hindustani women who display suicidal behavior possess certain personality and cognitive constellations that are interlocked with specific parenting styles in stressful family environments. These families are embedded in a context of moral transformations resulting from migration to a Western culture and may be facing difficulties accompanying the transitional processes encountered in the West, particularly those regarding gender roles. Durkheimian fatalistic and anomic suicides elucidate this. The Hindustani women who appear most at risk are those facing contradictory norms and overregulation, which prevent them from developing autonomy.     

Exploring Some Analytical Characteristics of Finite Mixture Models

Finite mixture models have become increasingly prevalent in criminology over the past two decades. Yet there is no consensus about the appropriate criterion for model selection with finite mixture specifications. In this paper, we use simulation evidence to examine model selection criteria. Our focus is on mixture models for event count data like those often encountered in criminology. We use two indices to measure model selection performance. First, we examine how often each criterion chooses the correct specification. Then, we investigate how closely the finite mixture models selected by these criteria approximate the true mixing distribution used to simulate the event count data. We consider three sets of simulations. In the first set, the underlying model is itself a three component Poisson-based finite mixture model. In the two other sets of simulations, the underlying distribution of the Poisson rate parameter follows a continuous distribution. The analysis shows that both AIC and BIC perform well under certain sets of circumstances likely to be encountered by criminologists.