<p> The purpose of this project was to develop a program that decreases juvenile crime rates in Long Beach, California Included in the project was identification of potential funding sources and writing a grant application. The proposed program will target non-violent juvenile offenders ages 14&ndash;17 years of age, residing within the Long Beach Unified School District. Intervention will take place at the individual, familial, and community levels. Implementation will be in three 12-week cycles a year, serving 10-15 adolescents per cycle. Programing will include (a) weekly Functional Family Therapy sessions, (b) weekly group psychotherapy sessions, (c) rock climbing activities, (d) case management/ resource referrals and, (e) adult allies. The actual submission of the grant application was not a requirement for this thesis.</p>

<p>The forensic artists who create suspect composite drawings of wanted criminals for law enforcement agencies are frequently exposed to the details of traumatic events. The manner and degree to which this exposure to details of violence affects the perceptions and lives of these artists comprise the basis of this phenomenological study. Interviews with 8 experienced forensic artists include inquiries about their background and training and their perceptions of the most disturbing type of crimes, and also about how they subjectively process the traumatic material received via the cognitive interviews that they conduct with victims and witnesses of violent crime. Perceptions of a more comprehensive effect of violence on society are also explored. Other pivotal aspects of this study include the manner in which memories of criminal cases are evoked, and specifically the way in which specific facial features that these artists have imaged in composites may act as triggers to these memories. The results of this inquiry reveal the varied degrees to which these forensic artists are conscious of the effects of this repeated exposure to traumatic detail. However, conscious revelations of such an impact on their lives occur frequently during the research interviews due to the narrative process of specific cases with which they had been involved. Recommended future research includes further exploration of specific facial features as triggers to traumatic memory and of the gender of the forensic artist may have on the perception of facial features and their translatable meanings within the context of a suspect composite interview. </p>

This dissertation examines the role of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy--the pardoning and mitigating powers of the Crown--in the Victorian criminal justice system. Its principal source has been the hitherto confidential collection of files in the Home Office 144 and 45 Series at the British Public Record Office. These files not only review the process of trial and conviction in homicide cases but also contain the correspondence between the judges and the Home Office on their degree of culpability. The study has had useful results in three poorly interrelated fields of historiography, 19th century legal history, institutional history and Victorian cultural history. In the field of legal history it traces the progressive, if piecemeal, centralization and specialization of the criminal justice system as a whole. These were trends which served to strengthen the forces of law and order at the expense of those were prosecuted. The trend was reinforced by a parallel development in legal doctrine where a stricter construction of the concept of 'mens rea' occurred. The development of a professional Home Office bureaucracy and the gradual limitations which it imposed on ministerial power is an important theme in the history of government that is illustrated from the files. In the close relations which this bureaucracy developed with the legal profession it is also possible to observe an emergent legal and bureaucratic establishment in whose hands the new 'national' criminal justice system was used, and used effectively, to constrain the traditional violence of pre-industrial and pre-urban England. The privileged correspondence between judges and civil servants reflects the attitudes and preconceptions of this establishment. It is complemented, however, by petitions from the public, appeals from prisoners and by contemporary press comment. This dialogue as a whole makes an important contribution to some much debated aspects of 19th century social and cultural history. These topics include Victorian attitudes to normal and deviant behavior, to the definition and treatment of insanity and towards women and children, as offenders or victims. The Prerogative of Mercy survived as the only official mechanism of mitigation in the criminal justice system. Its exercise laid upon the civil servants of the Home Office the responsibility of adapting an absolute law to shifting community ideas about justice. This study suggests that, as the century drew towards its close, the gap between establishment values and those of the community at large was narrowing. The mass of 'respectable' Victorian England had come increasingly to share the morality of its civil service.

Automated video surveillance is a field in rapid expansion. Our research goal is to build a 3D person tracker for indoor video surveillance. In order to put our work in context we review various vision-based techniques for tracking people and detecting abnormal behaviours. The approaches are presented in bottom-up fashion starting from low-level algorithms to segment foreground objects, to trackers and action recognition systems. We also present a model-based camera localization technique. Our contribution is a 3D tracking system that can be subdivided into three modules: background subtraction, camera pose estimation and the tracker itself. The background subtraction algorithm uses the Discrete Cosine Transform coefficient blocks of JPEG encoded images as observations to compute the most likely state of each block with a Hidden Markov Model. Camera pose estimation is implemented as an edge-based CAD model registration technique using a particle filter. Finally, the tracker uses the registered model to perform 3D tracking from monocular images by assuming that the feet of people touch the floor. It's able to estimate the position and speed of tracked people at 2Hz, the maximum frame rate of the network camera. This tracker is in fact a blob-based tracker combined with a particle filter estimator. Preliminary results demonstrate that this system works well in its application context: hallway monitoring. Existing systems that use the output of trackers to recognize activities are reviewed. Finally we propose a few ideas on how to use a 3D tracker to classify scenes in order of interest with the most unusual first.

<p> Homicide followed by suicide is a relatively rare event in which one individual kills another and subsequently dies by suicide, usually shortly after the homicide (Barraclough &amp; Harris, 2002). Intimate Partner Homicide-Suicide (also IPH-S and Murder-Suicide) occurs when a person kills an intimate partner&mdash;a current or former romantic partner or family member&mdash;and then kills him or herself. The goals of this proposal and subsequent dissertation are to determine the quality and accuracy of the <i>media coverage</i> of intimate partner homicide-suicide, along with identifying the <i> geographic distribution</i> of dyads or linked cases of intimate partner homicide-suicide. Relying on data collected from the Internet through digitized media reports on intimate partner homicide-suicide, I expect to conduct scientific analyses of paired cases or dyads to assess or examine the quality and quantity of coverage. These analyses will explore how accurately and comprehensively the media portrays the intimate, violent relationship. In addition, geographic site data will be analyzed using ESRI, software that will establish geographic distribution across the United States.</p>

<p> The Matrix- Predictive Uniform Law Enforcement Selection Evaluation Inventory (M-PULSE) is an actuarial instrument used to predict job performance and liability risk of police officer candidates. Leark and colleagues created the INC Scale to detect inconsistent responding on the M-PULSE. This study examined the ability of the INC Scale to detect inconsistent responding to items on the M-PULSE. This study utilized archival data provided by MHS, Inc., publishers of the M-PULSE. A random sample of 3,392 from the M-PULSE's normative full sample was used as the control group and the experimental group consisted of 500 randomly assigned subjects. An independent t-test was conducted to determine if there were statistically significant INC Scale mean score differences between the control group and the experimental group. Post-hoc analyses were conducted to determine internal reliability and validity of items on the INC Scale. Mean scores for the INC Scale were statistically significantly higher than mean scores for the normative data set indicating that the INC Scale was able to correctly identify inconsistent responses (t= 86.967, df =3890, p &lt; .01). This study indicates that the INC Scale is able to detect inconsistent responding to items on the M-PULSE, thereby improving the validity of the M-PULSE.</p>

<p> Burnout among police officers has been recognized as a problem by organizational psychologists, other social scientists and practitioners. In one analysis, policing represented 2% of the occupations that were researched to establish a relationship with burnout. New lines of research are being developed to examine the contribution of management and supervisory behaviors to stress and burnout. This study investigates the relationship between transformational leadership styles of police sergeants and burnout in their subordinate officers. Burnout was measured across three dimensions: Emotional exhaustion, Depersonalization, and Diminished Personal Accomplishment using the Maslach Burnout Inventory - Human Services Survey (MBI-HSS, 1991). Transformational leadership was measured using the Transformational Leadership Questionnaire, Public Sector Research Version (TLQ-PSRV, 2001). This instrument assesses leadership using 6 scales: Showing Genuine Concern, Networking and Achieving, Enabling, Being Honest and Consistent, Being Accessible, and Being Decisive. Leadership scores were correlated with the dimensions of burnout and Networking and Achieving as well as Being Honest and Consistent were found to be significantly related to Diminished Feelings of Accomplishment at the p = .05 level.</p>

<p> The purpose of this project was to design a program, identify and establish potential funding sources, and write a grant proposal to fund a program that would assist women who had been previously incarcerated by providing job readiness skills and tools for employability. The proposed program would focus on areas such as: reentry services, education, vocational training and employment. In addition, the program will also focus on providing a spectrum of skills training addressing stress management, money management, socialization skills, and environmental awareness. The program was created with the gender specific needs of these women in mind.</p><p> The objective of the program would be to prevent recidivism by offering assistance with employment opportunities and employment sustainability. The Rosenberg Foundation was selected as the best available funding source for this project. The actual submission and/or funding of this grant was not a requirement for the successful completion of the project.</p>

<p> This dissertation explored the opinions and practice of therapists who treat individuals with pedophilia regarding the role of motivation in pedophilic acts. The generic qualitative study involved eight therapists currently treating pedophiles in private practice, or affiliated to a civil commitment agency. The study participants were interviewed and the data collected analyzed by inductive thematic analysis. The results show that, although the therapists state that the cognitive behavioral approach is the best form of treatment in this context, it is necessary to augment it with other strategies in order to obtain more cognition and, therefore, control pedophilic behavior. None of the participants was able to ascertain that therapy actually prevents pedophilic recidivism due to the fact that they don't have means to find out whether the treatment of their patients was successful. There was a general consensus that the pedophilic urges may never disappear, only the behavior controlled. Finally, the results reveal that the participating therapists do not perceive the motivational factors leading to pedophilia as an essential component in therapy that should be deeply studied. Instead, the value appears to be given to stopping behavior as soon as possible. </p>

<p> The research question posed within this study is "What are the primary ecological factors that impact successful reentry of ex-offenders from incarceration to civil society?". This question is answered through a thorough study of the literature that investigates the complex relationship between the individual ex-offender and their interfacing ecological system(s). Information gleaned from secondary research will be analyzed using a thematic analysis approach. Thematic analysis is a research approach that provides a framework for identifying relevant resources and outcome information, comparing and contrasting these sources of information, and reporting on themes discovered within this extant literature. For the purpose of this study, thematic analysis was used to describe and organize the data collected and provided a framework to interpret the multifarious factors influencing prison reentry outcomes. Against the current trends of deficit-based and fragmented explanations for the growing trends in poor prison-reentry outcomes, this study introduces and promotes alternate explanations that offer a holistic approach which includes both the ex-offender and ecological system factors as relevant influences to be considered when addressing the social problem of prison reentry. Future recommendations emphasizing the vital role that psychologists play in developing policies and practices that improve prison reentry outcomes are offered, including efficacious approaches that are relevant to each level of the espoused ecological system.</p>