Recently, numerous high-profile instances of police misconduct and corruption have been thrust into the national spotlight. Hiring police officers who will act with integrity and not betray public trust remains essential. The present research experimentally examines this phenomenon by evaluating pre-employment assessment results against applicant performance on a simulated cheating task (i.e., The Dots Task) in order to derive information to improve contemporary pre-employment screening and selection models. Four case examples are presented which depict malicious actors who possessed privileged access, assumed no one would ever scrutinize their activities, and attempted to leverage a lack of oversight for their personal benefit. A literature review of previous research findings is presented, and results from the current study are discussed. Spearman correlation analyses consistently indicated that participants who cheated were predisposed to moral disengagement via advantageous comparison. Participants who left all or part of their monetary award were less prone to general moral disengagement, particularly displacement of responsibility, while the opposite effect was observed for participants who took more than their earned award. Impression management was positively associated with stealing extra money, and cheating was more common among participants with elevated distorted thought patterns, including obsessional thinking, paranoid ideation, and alienation/perceptual distortion. Stepwise linear multiple regression analyses further substantiated the relationship between cheating and both distorted thought patterns and impression management, as well as provided evidence that (1) internalizing morality as part of one's self-identity and (2) warmth act as protective factors against cheating behavior. Positive relationships between cheating and distortion of consequences were also present within multiple regression analyses. Behavioral models produced from stepwise linear multiple regression analyses offer the potential to predict the likelihood and severity of cheating behavior that an individual may be predisposed to commit based upon their pre-employment assessment data, thereby enhancing pre-employment screening and selection decisions.

There are numerous types of reentry programs available to inmates to help avoid the cycle of recidivism. There is little research on the impacts of reentry programs in jail populations. This current study sought to provide more research in this area by evaluating a local jail reentry program’s effect on recidivism. A quasi-experimental design was used to estimate the program’s effectiveness by comparing the recidivism statistics of inmates that have participated in the reentry program to a control group of inmates that did not. Inmates in the control group were matched according to their gender, age, race, and current offense type in efforts to mirror the type of inmates in the treatment group. Analyses indicated that inmates that completed the Correctional Career Pathways program had lower rates of recidivism when compared to the control group, but this difference was not great enough to be statistically significant.

No description available.

A sample of recruits attending the East Tennessee Regional Law Enforcement Academy were surveyed about attitudes relating to a variety of topics, including their perceived role as police officers, domestic violence, its victims, perpetrators, and police interactions with domestic violence. The recruits completed the survey during their first week at the academy. The recruits completed the identical survey on the last week of academy training. No significant change in attitudes were found following the completion of the Regional Law Enforcement Academy training program. Conclusively, the results of this study show that the training provided at the East Tennessee Regional Law Enforcement Academy does not significantly change the attitudes and perceptions of the recruits toward domestic violence.

The purpose of this study was to analyze local law enforcement's counter-terrorism capabilities as it relates to the varying size of United States local law enforcement agencies. Data for the study came from a study entitled "Impact of Terrorism on State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies and Criminal Justice Systems in the United States, 2004". Statistical analysis revealed that there are large disparities in the allocation of resources to intelligence gathering, analyzing, and sharing between smaller local law enforcement agencies and their larger counterparts. Furthermore, smaller agencies are not interacting with federal agencies in a manner consistent with the interactions between larger agencies and federal authorities. However, the study did reveal officers in smaller local law enforcement agencies have undertaken the duties of homeland security on a level commensurate with those in larger local law enforcement agencies.

A disturbing average of 600 Palestinian children are prosecuted by Israeli military courts every year. Three fourths of the children experience some form of physical violence during their arrest, interrogation, and/or detention. On the contrary, Jewish Israeli children never face the brutality of a military court system with a 99.74% conviction rate of Palestinian minors. The aim of this thesis is to examine the “legal” systems responsible for discriminatorily incarcerating an average of 200 children in military jails on a monthly basis. Central questions to my thesis ask: is this behavior legal and legitimate by Israeli legal standards? Can the same be said about the standards set by international law? What defines and distinguishes a legal system? Finally, how should we punish children, if at all? This thesis argues there is a severe lack of legality and legitimacy behind Israel’s rampant and unrestricted incarceration of Palestinian minors, be it by Israeli or international measures.

The purpose of this study was to determine the amount of training each sheriff's office requires in North Carolina and if that training includes multiagency exercises designed to mitigate a critical-incident response and identify any concerns from those training events. The study also compared departmental strength (number of sworn officers per agency) with county populations and geographic area of the state the agency is located in with the number of hours required annually by each agency. Finally, each agency was asked if it had participated in a multiagency exercise and a multiagency incident and to identify any issues that occurred within that training or response. This research indicated that over half of the sheriffs' offices had completed mandated training beyond what North Carolina requires. Only slight differences between regions of the state (mountains, piedmont, or coastal plain) were detected as well as slight differences within the county populations. However, it was discovered that the size of a sheriff's office did have significance; larger sheriff's offices often required more training than smaller offices. Sheriff's offices that had experienced multiagency exercises and multiagency incidents were more likely to exceed the North Carolina minimum training requirements as well. Finally, respondents who had participated in either a multiagency exercise or a multiagency incident indicated common problems and concerns within those responses. The reoccurring problems and concerns were; communications, training, and organization or combinations of the three.

Females are becoming a prominent population within America’s correctional facilities, which has led to incarcerated females increasingly becoming the popular subjects of more recent research. Along with the growing population of female inmates, the rates of sexual and physical victimization reported by incarcerated females is rapidly growing. The purpose of this project is to evaluate the pre-established correlation between mental health diagnoses, and the prior physical and/or sexual abuse of female inmates within the custody of correctional institutions, outline the current treatment process, and devise a revision of the treatment process in order to improve the future of mental health care for incarcerated females. First, a brief description of the increasing female inmate population, their significant mental health care needs, and the lack of effective mental health care they are actually receiving, followed by the issues that this poses to rehabilitation and the community will be provided. Second, an examination of the commonality of childhood physical and/or sexual abuse among the female offenders that have been diagnosed with mental illnesses will be conducted. Next, a discussion of the most common mental health diagnoses of incarcerated women, what they are said to be caused by, and how they are being treated behind bars will be directed. Finally, a conclusion covering the established relationship between physical and sexual abuse and adult mental illnesses, the issues that the lack of adequate mental health care for incarcerated females poses, and what can be done to change and improve the future will be presented.

This is an exploratory study which focuses on the types of information that deputies assigned to the Department of Public Safety, Multnomah County, Oregon, consider important when making a decision regarding the disposition of a juvenile offender. This empirical study developed as a result of participant observation. The authors spent one year working with deputies as part of police-social worker teams. During the course of the year it became apparent that police use a considerable amount of discretion when determining the disposition of a juvenile offender. The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate systematically: the types of information that deputies believed play the most significant role in the decision-making process in general, the types of information that deputies used when determining which disposition to apply toward a juvenile charged with a particular offense, the personal and occupational characteristics of the individual deputy that might have had a bearing on the dispositions he applied toward a juvenile, if there was agreement between the types of information deputies generally believed were important to disposition of cases and the types of information deputies actually utilized when making a decision in particular cases, if there was agreement among officers with respect to the disposition of a juvenile in particular cases, and the relationship among types of information deputies believed were important in particular cases, the dispositions they applied toward juveniles in that case and the nature of the case presented.

No description available.