Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Printout. Vita. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-02, Section: A, page: 0438. Adviser: Rose Mary Cordova-Wentling. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 158-164) Available on microfilm for ProQuest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, San Francisco, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Adviser: Howard Pinderhughes.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Criminal Justice and Folklore and Ethnomusicology, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Feb. 8, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-05, Section: A, page: 1792. Advisers: Philip C. Parnell; Henry H. Glassie.

The purpose of this project was to empower the incarcerated women at the Jefferson Correctional Institution in Monticello, Florida, through the use of a faith-based program, 'Empowered to Endure Hardship.' The project consisted of sixteen (16) consecutive weeks of group participation, involving 75 women who were divided into two groups. Group A, the target group, consisted of 45 women who completed the questionnaires and participated in all of the group sessions and activities. Group B, the control group, consisted of 30 women who only completed the questionnaires. The sessions in which the target group participated included video and audio preaching tapes, live preaching, group interaction and discussions, prayer and a short devotional period at each session. All of the sermons contained one common thread: How to overcome or endure hardships in life. Practical examples were given for endurance and overcoming techniques were demonstrated. The overall hypothesis was as a result of Group A's participation in an organized structured group, the participants would receive fewer disciplinary reports, corrective counseling reports, and confinement visitations than those in Group B. While this goal was attained by Group A, there was not enough significant difference in Group B to merit any real attention. This does not mean the project was a failure. For in the ensuing weeks after the project was completed, the members of Group B continued to ask that another group be formed in which they could participate to receive the same empowerment that Group A had received. This model of ministry for the women at Jefferson Correctional Institution is ongoing and allows for additional components of ministry as future needs arise.

Research has shown that women perceive, use, and experience space differently than men, in part, because of gender issues and fear of victimization for violent crimes. Recent research has focused on the built environment, violence against women, and the social context of a university. The research study described here investigated women's perception of and actual safety from assault and rape on The University of Arizona campus. Sites perceived as safe and unsafe were identified from responses of 100 women students and administrators. Police reports of 132 campus assaults of women were used to identify sites of past rapes and assaults. Two outdoor sites were assessed in a preliminary study of two environmental audit methods. Findings from this study indicated that respondents perceived the campus as being very safe during the day but unsafe at night. Sites of previous assaults on women overlapped little with the areas women associated with fear.

Research on repression and protest policing has increasingly attempted to unpack the social, political and cultural factors that affect the policing of public protest events. This dissertation contributes to that collective scholastic enterprise by examining protest policing in the United States, and particularly within New York State, from 1960 to 1975. However, unlike existing "static" approaches, which largely focus on protest and protester characteristics, and existing "dynamic" approaches, which focus on the changing interests of political elites, this dissertation argues that students of protest control must examine the independent causal effects of the agents of repression. In the U.S., this leads to an emphasis on local, civilian law enforcement agencies, culminating in this dissertation in a "police-centered" approach. Using quantitative analyses including logistic, multinomial logistic and negative binomial regressions, this dissertation evaluates the explanatory power of existing approaches to protest policing in addition to elements of a police-centered approach. Findings reveal that some existing approaches to protest policing, such as the threat approach, provide important explanatory leverage. However, other approaches such as weakness received only mixed support and still others such as the threat and weakness interaction approach and stable political opportunity structures approach received no support. As well, the volatile political opportunities approach received only limited support. The same models also evaluate three prongs of the police-centered approach and find significant support for new "police threat" hypotheses with more mixed support for the effects of police agency and police field characteristics. In addition to these theoretically important findings, the quantitative models also innovate where measurement and modeling is concerned. Qualitative analyses further develop on the police-centered perspective by examining the development of and competition between approaches to protest policing in the 1960s and 1970s. Using new institutionalist theory, this dissertation focuses on internal and external institutional forces in explaining the rise of and competition between protest policing approaches. Specifically, four key institutions are discussed: policing, professionalism, law-making, and protest. While all of these institutions exerted important influences on the development of and/or competition between approaches, the professional reform movement within policing played a critical role.

The value concept is regularly employed by sociologists and social psychologists. Despite the ubiquitous nature of the concept, values are not a relevant theoretical construct in much social theory and the concept remains difficult to measure. This project tackles both theoretical and methodological shortcomings in the study and application of values. Two cutting edge methods of value measurement are used--the Schwartz Value Survey and the factorial survey method--and their results compared to assess the validity of these measures. There is little convergent validity with these two methods, perhaps due to some of the difficulties encountered when measuring values in the first place. In terms of content validity, both measures of values demonstrate a relationship between people's values and their deviant behavior. Surprisingly, this result has been difficult to obtain in the criminological literature. A theory that specifies a direct mechanism between values and deviance--cultural deviance theory--is tested. Evidence supports the notion that people who are more likely to be deviant, are also more likely to place a higher priority on "subterranean" values for wealth, aggression, competition, and beating the system, while simultaneously placing a low priority on "mainstream" values like trustworthiness and equality. Results could also apply to other criminological theories that have previously ignored values as an important theoretical construct.

There has been a dramatic increase in the number of juveniles who have had contact with the legal system over the past 10 years. However, there is a dearth of research investigating the forensic services provided to juvenile offenders by psychologists. The goal of the present study was to assess the types of forensic services psychologists provide to pre-adjudicated juvenile index offenders. One hundred and thirty-seven registrants of the National Register of Health Service Providers in Psychology (NR) replied to one of three versions of a questionnaire. Data were obtained regarding demographic and professional characteristics of respondents, whether they conduct forensic evaluations, and whether they provide forensic interventions. Results indicated that the majority of psychologists who provide forensic services to juvenile offenders are Caucasian males, approximately 51 years of age, who work in private practice or do private consultations, and who have been in practice for approximately 19 years. Furthermore, the majority of these psychologists are members of the American Psychological Association, received their Ph.D. degree from a graduate program in clinical psychology, and received no formal or supervised predoctoral or postdoctoral training in forensic psychology. The frequent legal/forensic questions psychologists are asked to address when conducting forensic evaluations are placement recommendations, followed by competency to stand trial, treatment recommendations, and whether a juvenile should be transferred to adult criminal court. Regardless of the type of legal/forensic question asked, psychologists frequently use the following assessment methods: juvenile and/or parent interview, a Wechsler Scale of Intelligence, the MMPI, and the Rorschach. They also review archival data on the juvenile, such as educational and psychological records and police reports. Reducing the risk for recidivism is the primary reason why psychologists are asked to provide forensic interventions, and the most common intervention provided is cognitive-behavioral therapy. The most commonly used outcome measure assessing treatment progress is a behavior checklist or rating scale. The results of the present study were compared to the existing literature on psychological services provided to juvenile offenders. Limitations of the present study and suggestions for subsequent research are also discussed.

Nowhere is the tendency to typologize in criminological research more evident than in the area of white-collar crime research, which is often aimed at distinguishing white-collar criminals and their crimes from other types of criminals and their offenses. This study incorporates a test of the applicability of Gottfredson and Hirschi's self-control theory to white-collar crime--a form of criminal conduct to which the theory's critics assert it is inapplicable. For those who attribute more planning and sophistication to white-collar crime than to other forms of offending, explanations for white-collar offending that reference impulsivity and inattention to the consequences of action are decidedly unsatisfactory. Analyses of survey data, collected as part of the Tucson Youth Project, indicate that self-control is a significant predictor of workplace offending. From an operational standpoint, the relative merits of behavioral versus attitudinal measures of self-control were considered. These findings suggest that behavioral measures of self-control are better predictors of offending. Although possibly a measurement artifact, the findings also suggest that attitudinal self-control is only spuriously related to offending. The perceived need to distinguish white-collar crime stems from the dissimilarities between white-collar crime and "ordinary" street crime. These crimes are often separated along spatial lines, and their perpetrators are often separated along race and socioeconomic status lines. Testing the validity of these distinctions was another objective of this study. Analyses were performed to determine whether the patterns of association between offending and known correlates of offending are similar for both white-collar and non-white-collar crime. The results indicate that offending in the workplace and offending beyond the workplace are more similar than not. One important finding is that self-control explains less of the variation in white-collar offending than in non-white-collar offending. One plausible explanation for this finding is that criminal opportunity plays a relatively more important role in workplace deviance than in other contexts. The mechanisms by which organizations affect the behavior of individuals are, of course, still a matter of theoretical conjecture, and an important subject for future research.

The purpose of this study was to empirically assess the validity of legal assumptions regarding the use of physical punishment by Mexican parents with their children. Three legal assumptions were identified and tested in the studied Mexican legal framework: (1) parents always act in the best interest of their children; (2) non-severe physical punishment is an adequate and nonharmful strategy for rising children; and (3) parents discriminate between moderate/corrective punishment and severe child abuse. One hundred-fifty mothers living in the Northwestern Mexican State of Sonora were interviewed regarding their use of physical punishment with their children, their knowledge of the law regarding their and their children's' rights and duties, their perceptions of their legal obligations in regard to their disciplinary practices with their children, their disciplinary beliefs, their monitoring of their children, the frequency of maltreatment they received from their parents, their levels of depression/anxiety, their antisocial behaviors, and their alcohol consumption levels. In order to validate the legal assumptions, three structural models were specified and tested. The first model tested the assumption that physical punishment is used in the best interest of children. In this model, the perception of a legal prerogative to use physical punishment was found to increase violence against children. In contrast, parental knowledge of child and parental rights and obligations was inversely related to punitive disciplinary beliefs, while such beliefs were positively associated with child punishment and negatively associated with child monitoring. The second model estimated the effect of a history of mothers' vicitimization during childhood on their adult behavior. It was found that being maltreated as a child was associated positively with antisocial behavior and depression/anxiety, which in turn affected positively alcohol consumption and harsh parenting. The third model estimated the covariance between moderate punishment and severe punishment. Results showed that the correlation between them was higher than the factor loadings between each latent construct and their corresponding observed variables. This finding indicates that parents do not discriminate between moderate and severe punishment, invalidating the assumption that parents are aware of limits between what can be considered abuse and disciplinary punishment. The implications of these findings are discussed.