<p>This dissertation aims to contribute to our understanding of contemporary state strategies targeting social movements by examining the case of Occupy Oakland. Emphasizing how state strategies, both tactical and discursive, dynamically evolve through their iterative relation to movement strategies, it presents a detailed empirical account that is disaggregated into three ?moments?, each of which are characterized by the predominance of a distinct state strategic repertoire. The objective is to highlight an underlying transformation through which the state?s strategies evolve from being highly reactive, indiscriminate and vulnerable to spectacularization to becoming increasingly pre-emptive, targeted and discursively buttressed. The first ?moment? commences with the movement?s occupation of Oscar Grant Plaza. Faced with Occupy Oakland?s highly disruptive tactics and its firm rejection of any forms of negotiation or cooperation with City officials, the state resorts to a strategy of Naked Coercion (reactive, indiscriminate violence that is highly vulnerable to spectacularization) which backfires and results in an internationally televised disaster on the evening of October 25th. This creates an extraordinary window of opportunity for the movement, dramatically increasing public support and enabling it to undertake the first general strike in the U.S. since 1946. This fuels a process of adaptation as the struggle proceeds into the second ?moment?, and the state shifts to a strategy of Targeted Repression that is increasingly pro-active, targeted and discursively buttressed so as to diminish the danger of its spectacularization. The new strategy succeeds in permanently dislodging the occupation of Oscar Grant Plaza, as well as criminalizing the tactic of occupation and excising it from movement?s repertoire. Still unsatisfied with the repression it had achieved, in the third and final ?moment? the state introduces a strategy of Pre-emptive Neutralization that is pre-emptively oriented, targeted at high ?risk? populations and discursively buttressed by powerful spectacles of ?risk?. This enables a thorough incapacitation of the movement ? fully neutralizing its potential for collective action by rendering Occupiers a target population that could no longer even publicly assemble without inciting highly militarized police responses that were now pre-emptively justified by the risk of ?violence? they collectively posed.

<p> Victimization by its very nature poses serious psychological harm to those who suffer from it. There are many ways one can end up victimized, including cyberbullying, which is bullying conducted via electronic mediums. This study analyzes the likelihood of being bullied and cyberbullying as well as detrimental effects on juveniles from lowered grades to suicides in extreme cases and will use strain theory to explain the correlation between cyberbullying and negative coping methods such as truancy. Using data from the 2013 National Crime Victimization Study's School Crime Supplement (n=9,552), findings suggest that bullying in general indeed has a profound effect on fear of school, grades, and truancy. However, while cyberbullying significantly influences avoidance of online activity and truancy, in other models, it pales in comparison to the impact of traditional bullying. Limitations to the study and implications for the future are also discussed.</p>

<p> In the context of policing, an officer&rsquo;s risk perception of felonious death and likelihood of using deadly force as a risk response are paramount among police concerns in the United States. Prior research on these topics has predominantly involved macro-analytical methodologies under a mono-disciplinary approach, with limited emphasis on theoretical-based perspectives. Risk perceptions and responses were examined using a quantitative, interdisciplinary correlational methodology. Its purpose was to examine whether the Social Amplification of Risk Framework applied to a specialized occupational population of Missouri police officers. The methodology included a pilot study of an adapted instrument designated the Cognitive Appraisal of Felonious Death Risk questionnaire (CAFDR), followed by a full study using the final form of the CAFDR. The participants were full time Missouri police officers. A total of 192 surveys were completed, from which 154 surveys were randomly selected for analyses. Key findings indicated that only two of the 30 permutations of the analyses reached statistical significance. Those two outcomes equated with extant literature while the remaining results largely contradicted the contemporary literature on the influence of these covariates. The result was that Social Amplification of Risk Framework did not explain the relationships between risk perceptions and risk responses in this specialized occupational population. What was discovered concerns the influence that socio-cultural, legal, and psychological influences from controversial police shooting events may have on these Missouri officers. Results of the debriefing questionnaire portion revealed significant psychological resilience among the officers, but raised the possibility that a stigma associated with accessing mental health services was present within police cultures. Practical application recommendations involved the development of policies and training paradigms that recognize/mitigate aberrations in risk perception and response, bench-marking force tendencies and unconscious risk bias among officers as a management tool, and use of these findings under an interactive educational tool for police-community outreach. Future theoretical research opportunities include a hypotheses-testing model under Social Amplification of Risk Framework employing a qualitative methodology, and exploration of perception/response anomalies as a form of occupational delinquency under Differential Association.</p>

<p> <i><b>Objective:</b></i> The objective of this dissertation is twofold. The first objective is to summarize the literature on poly-victimization (PV) with a focus on what relationships have been tested and how poly-victimization has been operationalized in the field. The second objective is to replicate and expand the literature by empirically testing the effect of poly-victimization on delinquency.</p><p> <i><b>Design, Data, and Participants.</b></i> This dissertation employs a mixed method approach made up of a systematic literature review and secondary data analysis. The systematic literature review summarizes 59 poly-victimization articles published between 2007 and 2017 that contain the terms &ldquo;poly-victim&rdquo; or &ldquo;poly-victimization&rdquo; in its title and/or abstract. The secondary data analysis is based on a nationally representative sample of 6,364 10 to 17-year-olds who self-reported their lifetime victimization experiences and their past-year delinquency involvement. The pooled dataset used in this dissertation is based on the aggregation of three repeated assessments collected in 3-year intervals between 2008 and 2014, the National Survey of Children&rsquo;s Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV). NatSCEV is a cross-sectional, U.S. based, national telephone survey conducted in English and Spanish.</p><p> <i><b>Broader Impacts.</b></i> This dissertation seeks to provide evidence-based knowledge that will inform both the imminent research agenda and the practical and clinical strategies designed to respond to poly-victimization. The systematic review will contribute to these objectives by identifying the gaps that exist in the poly-victimization literature and by summarizing the measurement issues surrounding its operationalization. The secondary data analysis will contribute to this by providing practitioners and clinicians the evidence needed to develop and implement the policies, practices, and strategies that can positively affect the dynamic relationship that exists between violence exposure and violence perpetration.</p><p> <i><b>Results and Conclusion-Literature Review.</b></i> Although much of the work has focused on evaluating the effect of PV on a host of adverse mental health outcomes, some work has been done to advance our understanding of adverse behavioral and social outcomes. The systematic literature review shows that most studies have focused on quantitatively evaluating the direct effects of PV using cross-sectional designs, adolescent respondents, and non-probability samples. The field can benefit from designing qualitative and/or mixed method studies that can complement each other and supplement what we already know about PV. Efforts should also be made to incorporate mediating and moderating factors into our research, thereby starting to explore more complex relationships. When quantitative efforts are pursued, focusing on obtaining probability samples and incorporating longitudinal designs will be most helpful given the current state of knowledge. Lastly, having multiple respondents can help triangulate information and address the ongoing debate on proxy interviews.</p><p> <i><b>Results and Conclusion-Secondary Data Analysis.</b></i> Ample evidence was found to conclude that poly-victimization predicts a variety of deviant, delinquent, and rule breaking behaviors. PV&rsquo;s predicted 13 different types of delinquent behaviors. It was also found to be a stronger predictor of any delinquency, as compared to 10 other categories of victimization, namely property crime, physical assault, child maltreatment, sexual victimization, kidnapping, bullying victimization, online victimization and exposure to family, school, and community violence. The policy and practice implications of these findings are extensively discussed.</p><p>

<p> Since deinstitutionalization, the responsibility for mentally ill members of society has shifted to the criminal justice system in a process of trans-institutionalization or &ldquo;criminalization of mental illness&rdquo; (Slate &amp; Johnson, 2013, p. 28). Though various groups have been studied to ascertain their perception of mentally ill individuals and offenders, previous research focuses largely on students of psychology, social work, and medicine. Little research has been conducted regarding the perceptions of criminal justice students toward mental illness, despite the increasing involvement of the criminal justice system in treating and handling mentally ill individuals in the past thirty years. This exploratory research serves as a replication to a study which was conducted by Thompson, Paulson, Valgardson, Nored, and Johnson (2014). </p>

<p> The general public knows very little about the criminal justice system overall, which can result in an assorted, often negative, opinions of the criminal justice system. The public's confidence in the criminal justice system is imperative to the operation of the criminal justice system. Our criminal justice system relies on the participation from the community in order to work. One speculation as to why the public has a less than favorable opinion of the criminal justice system is that the system is viewed a mystery. The public has no idea how each component of the criminal justice system works because the majority of the public has had no direct contact with the criminal justice system. Most information obtained about the criminal justice system, the public gathered from what they hear and see from the media or from other people. Using secondary data from a national survey, this dissertation analyzed mass media, specifically TV news, newspapers, and TV judge programs, to determine these variables have an influence on the relationship of the courts and public opinion in the United States. This dissertation can be viewed as ground zero in terms of how the media began to influence the public's opinion of the criminal justice system, especially the court component. For this study, a quantitative approach using a descriptive survey design was used. It was determined that the respondents were not as influenced by mass media as anticipated. The findings of this study were more consistent with the international literature than domestic literature on this topic. This dissertation offers a better understanding of the connection between mass media, even without the more modern aspects of the media such as the internet, and the public's views of the courts. This dissertation presents valuable information for satisfaction with the courts and attitude toward the courts that has not been seen in the current literature on this subject. In conclusion, recommendations were provided offered to further advance the research in this area.</p>

<p> The school-to-prison pipeline is a phenomenon that is occurring in public schools across the country. This study investigates if the presence of a School Resource Officers (SRO) has an effect on the rate of expulsions experienced in schools. My data is from a secondary data set from the 2009-2010 School Survey on Crime and Safety. I use the presence of an SRO or security personnel, percentage of white student enrollment, school urbanicity, and percentage of students that score below the 15th percentile on standardized tests as independent variables. My dependent variable is expulsion rates for disobedient behavior. I create one model using OLS regression to run the dependent variable against all of the independent variables. The results yielded that the presence of security personnel or an SRO has increased the rate of expulsions due to disciplinary infractions. I also found that race decreased the expulsion rate; this means that as the percentage of white students goes up, the expulsion rate goes down. These findings suggests that the disproportionate amount of African Americans in this country&rsquo;s prison system could be starting in our school systems.</p>

The ancient and picturesque sport of cockfighting has persisted in the United States, Latin America, and parts of Asia. In the United States this activity is popularly regarded as deviant, and is, indeed, a legally proscribed behavior in most jurisdictions. The persistence of cockfighting is explicable due to the existence of a deviant recreational subculture. / The deviant recreational subculture allows cockfighters a supportive setting in which to reinforce and affirm the disvalued cultural identity of its practitioners and, thus, serves as a boundary maintenance device. This particular deviant subcultural type is unique due to the fact that it possesses the following characteristics: (1) no criminal self-concept for members; (2) a religio-teleological rationale concerning the nature of the activity; (3) a strong overt identification with the existing socio-political order; and, (4) a high degree of intrastate, interstate, and international communication on topics of subcultural interest, and commerce in "tools of the trade." Furthermore, the cockfighting subculture has other attributes of a deviant behavior system consistent with the subcultural thesis proposed herein: its own rules, argot, customs, networks of obligation and reciprocity, and recruitment patterns. / The cockfighting subculture may be seen in an additional dimension--as an instrumental-expressive anachronistic voluntary deviant association. This means that cockfighters reject conformative and alienative attitudes toward dominant social values in favor of an anachronistic world-view. / Moreover, in terms of the dominant method by which it hopes to achieve its objectives, the subculture is both instrumental and expressive, hence the appelation "instrumental-expressive." Instrumental groups want to defuse or remove threatening legislation, thus removing or reducing stigma, while expressive groups are more concerned with providing recreational, social, and informational activities for their members. Expressive groups exist to furnish activities for their members while instrumental groups exist to resist or promote change. The cockfighting subculture has definite attributes of both types of groups. / This work suggests that the models of the deviant recreational subculture and the instrumental-expressive anachronistic voluntary deviant association might prove of heuristic value when applied to other socially and legally problematic deviant subcultures. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-02, Section: A, page: 0552. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 40-09, Section: A, page: 5195. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1979.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between architectural and environmental factors and incidence of inmate violence within four correctional institutions in the Southeastern United States: Dade and Union Correctional Institutions, Florida State Prison, and Talahassee Federal Correctional Institution. The study investigated overcrowding, types of housing, amount of living space available, location of assaults, and seasonal influences in relation to the propensity for and frequency of noncollective (inmate-to-inmate or inmate-to-staff) violent incidents. The prisons differ structurally and architecturally--two are medium and two are close custody (maximum) security prisons--and the study examined differences, if any, in the inmates propensity toward violence at the two types of institutions. / Research issues in the study were: (1) Is there a relationship between the increase in prison population and the number and rate (per 100 inmates per prison) of incidents of violence? (2) Is there a relationship between the total number of square feet of living space and the number and rate (per 100 inmates per prison) of incidents of violence? (3) Is there a significant relationship between the number and rate of incidents of violence and the type of housing available in each prison? (4) Is there a relationship between the type of violent incidents committed in the prison and the location of the incident? (5) Is there a relationship between the number and rate of violent incidents and seasonal influences? / The data for the study included official disciplinary reports of violence. A violent environment questionnaire (VEQ) was administered to a sample of inmates and was designed to elicit their perceptions of the degree of violence, privacy, and safety within the prison. Staff interviews were also conducted which provided familiarization with the prison's administration and physical plant during initial site visits. / The results of the study determined what, if any, influence the architecture and design of the four prisons had on the frequency and character of noncollective inmate violence. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-03, Section: A, page: 0933. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.