Thesis (M.S.)--Youngstown State University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 59). Also available via the World Wide Web in PDF format.

Thesis--Hamburg. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 95-102).

Thesis--Brandeis University. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Bibliography: leaves 122-133.

During the past decade, China has accepted and extensively adopted probation as a type of community-based sanctions. Since 2003, the number of offenders granted probation in China has greatly increased. However, few empirical studies have focused on the impact of probation, the effect of environments that probationers re-enter or what factors are associated with better probation outcomes. This study fills this gap by evaluating probation outcomes over a one-year follow up on a sample of 250 male probationers. The primary aim of this exploratory study is to examine what factors make probation work better from the social learning perspective. This study tests interaction effects between the person and the social environment in which the probationers’ learning occurs. This study also categorizes potential variables into a theoretical framework of static and dynamic risk factors. This study poses two main research questions: (1) Does probation lower the likelihood of reoffending? (2) What specific factors explain whether probationers reoffend during their probation? This study uses unique, first-hand, self-report data from 250 male Chinese probationers. Probationers were interviewed with a structured questionnaire at the start of the study and revisited 12 months later and asked about their probation experience. Probation outcomes were measured by self-reported reoffending behaviors, including recidivism and technical violations. This was triangulated by reports from probation officers. Bivariate and multivariate analyses were used to assess the effects of static and dynamic risk variables on self-reported probation outcomes. Logistic regressions demonstrated that age, employment status, contact with antisocial companions, leisure status, family/marital circumstance, and relationship with probation officers were all significantly associated with probation outcomes. Logistic regressions also demonstrated that leisure status and contact with antisocial companions were critical factors explaining probation success and failure. The main implication of the findings is that personal and interpersonal factors are important in explaining probationers’ reoffending behaviors. Finally, this study also has implications for social services for probationers from relationship and structuring perspectives. / published_or_final_version / Social Work and Social Administration / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

No description available.

This thesis explores, and seeks an historical interpretation of, representations of women both as victims and perpetrators of crime in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Moving beyond how criminal offences were defined, perceived and disciplined, the analysis highlights their broader social and cultural contexts and effects. Focusing primarily on media accounts and literary narratives of "sensational" and serious cases, it argues that the treatment of crimes of spousal murder, sexual violence and infanticide can be read for cultural and political meanings. At a time when the technological and commercial abilities to satisfy the public appetite for crime stories were rapidly expanding, these narratives became a significant arena in which social preoccupations, anxieties, and conflicts were symbolically explored. As forms of cultural production, therefore, crime narratives constituted, communicated and contested social and political values relating, for example, to issues of class and gender, morality and character, public order and the body. At the heart of this study, therefore, lies the opportunity to explore how the female figures of such accounts, whether murdering women or rape victims, related to their wider world. Unlike court proceedings and legal records, which were accessed by a small minority only, many of the sources on which this analysis is based were produced for popular consumption; they were available to an increasing audience. Thus, local newspaper reporting of Assizes cases are examined alongside the national press, the writings of middle class reformers and social commentators, and a range of literary texts including broadsides, melodramas, "respectable" novels and cheap, sensational fiction. Graphic illustration provides an additional site of representation, particularly influential as it could be read by everyone including the wholly illiterate. However, crime narratives cannot be treated as simple windows into the past - they constitute particularly constructed images, fashioned in accordance with journalistic practices, commercial enterprise and literary conventions as well as the cultural and power dynamics of the period. Female criminals and victims of crime in early Victorian society were defined as damaging and damaged; in order to explore the wider social meaning of these representations close textual analysis of primary sources is allied with a detailed identification and contextualisation of the specificities of the different narrative forms.

Is it what adult violent offenders think or how they think that discriminates them most from non-offenders? This study investigates whether violent and criminal sentiments, attributional biases and violence based grievance resolution strategies represent dynamic criminogenic risk factors. The results indicate that it is what offenders think that discriminates them more than how they think. The participants were 546 adults comprising 105 violent offenders, 238 university students and 203 men and women from a stratified random community sample. Using interview data from high-risk violent offenders, two scales were specifically developed to measure the variables of interest. The differences between offenders and non-offenders in violent attitudes was measured by expanding the scope of the Criminal Sentiments Scale. The differences in attributional biases and problem solving was assessed by a second scale developed for this study. The results showed that offenders were clearly different from non-offenders with the offenders endorsing significantly higher criminal and violent sentiments with an effect size of h2 =.46. The offenders also reported a significantly higher level of violence-based resolution strategies to end grievances than non-offenders. However, the surprising finding was that the adult male high-risk offenders did not demonstrate more pronounced hostile attributional biases than either adult men and women students or men and women from the community. The results imply that believing violence is acceptable and being prepared to use violence is more criminogenic than how you interpret the social behaviour of others. These findings have important implications for our understanding of why grievances escalate and the development of more effective intervention programs.

Friedrich Wilhelms Universität (Berlin), Thesis (doctoral) / Includes bibliographical references. - OCLC, 13811716. - Reproduction of original from Harvard Law School Library

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2005. / Adviser: Richard M. Lerner. Submitted to the Dept. of Child Development. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 133-152). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Thesis (B.A.Hons. 1973)-- Dept. of History, University of Adelaide, 1972.