Fear of crime

Diversion of children in conflict with the law has been practiced in South Africa since the early 1990s. From that time, the number of referrals and the scope of programmes burgeoned despite the absence of legislation to regulate diversion. The Child Justice Act (CJA) came into effect on 1 April 2010 and provides measures for assessment, referral and management of children who are eligible for diversion. It also stipulates the options for diversion intervention. This study investigates the theoretical foundations, methods, value and limitations of four diversion strategies, namely lifeskills training, mentoring, outdoor intervention and family group conferencing. Attention is also paid to the interventionsâ potential to realise the diversion aims of the CJA. Qualitative methods guided the research, in particular case study designs. A series of semi-structured interviews were conducted with the providers of the targeted diversion strategies. Programme documentation was also obtained in the form of training manuals and annual reports. In addition, interviews were conducted with Criminology and Social Work lecturers to further explore the theories that guide diversion strategies. Diversion programmes demonstrate particular understandings of the aetiology of child offending. The assumptions they make about the phenomenon to a large extent inform the methods used in the intervention process. Their assumptions include inadequate socialisation and personal abilities, absent and inimitable role models, negative life experiences and trauma, and reconciliation and reparation. Despite their unique assumptions, strategies appear to accommodate a fairly uniform profile of child offender. This raises questions about the assumptions of approaches regarding criminal behaviour vis-à-vis the risk factors they aim to address. Furthermore, parents feature as an important facilitator and inhibitor of diversion intervention. Their disinterest in or absence during significant intervention phases could restrict the outcomes and credibility of diversion programmes. Strategies that accommodate child offenders in groups are seemingly more inclined to exclude parents during the actual intervention. They may also fail to meet the individual intervention needs of participants as programmes are structured around a common goal for the group. Individual approaches, however, lack opportunities for vicarious learning. The time frames of diversion programmes and ad hoc followup procedures appear insufficient to optimally impact on criminal behaviour. Children who engaged in crime must acknowledge guilt for the offence in order to be diverted. Practice suggests that some children abuse the system in attempts to avoid formal prosecution. This could, in turn, compromise accountability which is a central aim of the CJA. Strategies show varying abilities to reintegrate diverted children with their families and communities. Moreover, only approaches that are fundamentally restorative in nature meaningfully involve the victims of offences. The lack of victim participation in diversion strategies fails to give effect to the reconciliation and reparation objectives of the CJA. Stigma stemming from contact with the criminal justice system appears difficult to avoid given the fixed location of service providers and some of the activities participants engage in. Despite these shortfalls, diversion shows promise in dealing with child offenders outside the ambit of formal justice procedures. It also prevents those who successfully complete the programmes from receiving a criminal record.

School represents a critical phase of an individualâs life. Apart from educational gain, learners are socialised to become productive members of society. Violence in the school environment holds a range of adverse consequences for learners and educators alike. Efforts have been launched across the globe to determine, manage and prevent the complexities of school-based violence. South African institutions have added to this literature, although several aspects of school-based violence remain outside the academic spotlight. Even though the nature and extent of school-based violence has received substantial attention in recent years, studies are marked by methodological differences which make comparisons difficult. Research on coping strategies used by adolescents is still in its infancy. This also pertains to the lack of evidence on factors influencing the use of different strategies, in particular from a gender perspective. Democratic change necessitated changes in the education system, which inevitably had an impact on the manner in which school administrators manage and prevent school-based violence. However, little is known about the disciplinary methods and violence prevention strategies applied by educators, along with challenges they may face in this regard. In order to address these shortfalls, an investigation was launched to ascertain how schools deal with violence, with particular focus on learnersâ coping and school administratorsâ management strategies. Subsequently, the dissertation set out to describe and explore the nature, extent, coping strategies and management of school-based violence in two schools in Moakeng, Kroonstad, Free State province. The study stems from a partnership between the Centre for Health Systems Research and Development (CHSR&D) and the Department of Criminology (both from University of the Free State), and the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP). In order to accommodate different target groups (learners and educators) and different sources of information, a mixed methods approach was utilised. The research design was a partially mixed sequential dominant status design that consisted of a survey and personal interviews. The self-administered survey was conducted among 710 learners with a structured questionnaire, while six educators took part in semi-structured personal interviews. Mixed methods research inherently guarantees a level of triangulation, which promoted the validity and reliability of the data. The results confirm the presence of violence in the selected schools. Higher levels of violence were recorded among the learners when compared to other South African studies. Different types of violence were identified, both between learners and between learners and educators. The causes of violence featured across all six levels of the ecological systems theory model. The study identified numerous long-term consequences for learners who are victimised by school-based violence. Learners applied different coping strategies, although it appears that problem-focused coping was used more often. Little differences were found between male and female victimsâ use of coping strategies, with the exception of emotion-focused strategies. In light of the high levels of violence, the results suggest that learners have little confidence in their schoolsâ administrators to effectively manage and prevent violence. An overall lack of learner supervision in the schools was reported, along with a lack of physical security measures. Educators were found to follow official guidelines relating to disciplinary methods, even though corporal punishment was widely used in the schools. Finally, the schools did not have strong relationships with stakeholders such as the local police and governmental structures at the district and provincial levels. It was concluded that the schools under scrutiny were marked by different types, causes, effects and reactions to violence. Seen broadly, it was identified that 1) learners apply a range of different coping strategies to deal with victimisation in school, which can be perceived as mostly positive, and 2) that educators lacked skills in managing and preventing the violent behaviour of learners. The findings lay a foundation to further explore aspects of school-based violence, ultimately to inform policy and to ensure an environment conducive to learning.

<p> Over the years, police departments have incorporated various techniques to secure citizen compliance with the law and local authorities. Despite the advancement of policing, support for police has reached a historic low. Research consistently demonstrates that styles of policing are linked to overall perceptions of police legitimacy. Specifically, procedurally just policing or process-based policing generates voluntary compliance with the law and secures trust from citizens. Departments that incorporate the components of procedural justice receive fewer complaints and show reductions in use of force incidents. This study adds to the existing literature regarding citizen perceptions of police through procedurally just policing. It also adds data on modern policing tactics utilized by law enforcement to increase perceptions of legitimacy: body worn cameras. Utilizing data collected from mail-out surveys, the results demonstrate that confidence in police is elevated when officers are trustworthy, open, and perceived as operating in a fair and neutral manner.</p><p>

abstract: Though police-involved homicides have generated controversy and caused community disruptions and riots for many years, few efforts to systematically capture and study these events exist. The lack of research on arrest-related deaths (ARDs) is particularly troubling not only because of the consequences of these events, but also because the nature of how these deaths occur may also be changing. In particular, recent attention has shifted away from incidents where police use firearms to incidents where other less-lethal tools are used but death still occurs (e.g., TASERs). In 2000, the Federal Government sought to address this problem through the creation of the Deaths in Custody Reporting Program (DCRP), a national-level voluntary reporting system managed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. There have been few efforts, however, that have assessed the accuracy and completeness of the DCRP data collection. The current study seeks to accomplish this through a comparison of ARDs in the DCRP to open-source, web-based media reports of ARDs in a stratified, random sample of 12 states during 2005. The study finds that all types of ARDs, not just police-involved homicides, are not accurately and reliably reported. Furthermore, the information provided is not reliably reported or interesting to research initiatives. Improvements in how the data is collected and what type of data is collected are needed. This adds to the scholarly research that advocates for a systematic and reliable national dataset of all deaths that occur in the process of arrest. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Criminology and Criminal Justice 2011

abstract: ABSTRACT Research has shown that the manner in which people are treated in their interactions with agents of the criminal justice system matters. People expect criminal justice officials to treat them fairly and with honesty and respect, which is the basis for procedural justice. When people are treated in a procedurally just and equitable manner they will view the system as legitimate and will be more likely to voluntarily comply and cooperate with legal system directives. People who have personal or vicarious experiences of unfair or unjust interactions with the legal system tend to view the system as less legitimate and are less likely to comply and cooperate when they have contact with representatives of the system. This study examines a random sample of 337 arrestees in Maricopa County, Arizona who have been interviewed as a part of the Arizona Arrestee Reporting Information Network. Descriptive statistics and regression analysis are used to examine views of the procedural justice experienced by arrestees during arrest, perceptions of police legitimacy by arrestees, voluntary compliance to the law, and voluntary cooperation with police. Results of the study show that perceptions of legitimacy work through procedural justice, and that procedurally just interactions with police mediate racial effects on views of legitimacy. Views of procedural justice and legitimacy increase cooperation. No variables in this study were significantly related to compliance. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Criminology and Criminal Justice 2011

<p> Within recent decades, homicide rates in Latin American nations have strongly diverged from those of European nations. The former experienced a sharp increase in the last two decades, while the latter have experienced the oft-characterized &ldquo;modern crime decline.&rdquo; However, few studies have endeavored to explain this divergence, and many that do often attribute any differences to a regional dummy variable said to characterize some unique phenomenon occurring in the region (i.e., machismo) without modeling specifically for levels of said phenomenon. As such, this study uses a panel extension of a well-known homicide model (Land, McCall, &amp; Cohen, 1990) in a long time series (1980-2015) to characterize the differences between these two regions, so as to understand how the effects of social disorganization, strain, opportunity, modernization, and other phenomena impacted homicide rates in these two regions. The project also considers, through a separate exploratory analysis, other theoretical inquiries from the international homicide literature that have been developed since the Land, McCall, &amp; Cohen (1990) publication. As such, the two analyses contribute methodologically and theoretically to the cross-national homicide literature while serving to explain the divergence between homicide rates in both regions.</p><p>

Detecting and locating semen stains is crucial when creating a linkage between the offender and items of evidence. Currently, the two most common methods of semen stain detection used in crime scenes and items recovered from crime scenes are fluorescence and chemical examinations. An alternate light source (ALS), which causes semen to fluoresce under different wavelengths, is an established technique that utilizes converted light for the detection of latent stains. The other method relies on chemically identifying the presence of acid phosphatase activity in semen. Previous studies have concluded that semen optimally fluoresces at 450 nm wavelength with an orange barrier filter. In this paper, the fluorescence of seminal stains under different laboratory conditions is compared in order to investigate the significant factors that may affect semen detection. The variables investigated in this paper include six colors of plain cotton fabrics, three excitation spectra, three semen donors, five semen concentrations and six fabric textures. The intensity of the fluorescence was calculated using the image processing program ImageJ. ImageJ contains a color channel split function that allows photographs to split into 8-bit grayscale images containing the red, green and blue components of the original photographs. Each color channel was individually compared to each other and to the original RGB photographs to determine whether color channel splitting has an effect on the detectability of seminal stain fluorescence. This study suggests that the most significant factor that affects the detectability of a semen stain, aside from the concentration of the stain, is the color of the substrate. The texture of the substrate had no significant effect on the fluorescence and no significant variation in the semen stain fluorescence was observed from the three donors tested; however, future studies are necessary to confirm these findings. Forensic analysts should consider the background color when selecting the excitation light wavelength, and may need to utilize an alternate approach such as a chemical mapping examination, particularly for locating diluted semen stains on a dark background.

abstract: The effectiveness of police behavior on criminal activity has improved over the last thirty years. Yet, some police practices remain ineffective against crime. Because there is the potential for disconnect between their behavior and crime control, the police's legitimacy is threatened. Legitimacy is important because its acquisition is requisite for any organization to exist. Police therefore look to other sources of legitimacy, such as their institutional environment: The network of agencies who share similar challenges, and the collection of entities that influence the form and function of the police (e.g., sovereigns). When the police consider the practices and expectations of their institutional environment through the process of isomorphism, agencies resemble one another despite idiosyncratic exigencies. This process endows them with legitimacy. Largely studied at the interorganizational level, isomorphism can also apply at the intraorganizational level. This study considers the latter level of analysis. Because the study of isomorphism in policing has lacked empirical assessment, the current study borrowed from the field of spatial analysis. This is feasible insofar as police behavior can be understood territorially, including isomorphic processes. By controlling for the most pertinent territorial predictors of police behavior, spatial dependence can be understood as the manifestation of isomorphism. Further, local indicators of spatial autocorrelation in interaction with spatial dependence can be understood as the institutional influence of sovereigns. Considerable attention is spent elaborating these concepts. Across four dependent variables (juvenile arrests made by the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department for 2008 for violent crime, property crime, drug crime, and gun crime), isomorphic processes were overwhelmed by ecological variables for three criteria. For juvenile drug arrests, the behavior of distinct areal units was influenced by several sovereign entities from within the police department. Methodologically, this study introduces a novel empirical way of exploring isomorphism. Theoretically, it enriches the study of isomorphism by introducing the importance of territoriality. In terms of police practice, it suggests an innovative method for police organizational change, a process that is typified by resistance. By engaging sovereign entities in the change process, this resistance can be overcome in a naturally occurring ecological phenomenon. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Criminology and Criminal Justice 2012

<p> Sentencing reform and &ldquo;tough on crime&rdquo; policies have assisted in the inflation of the United States&rsquo; prison population by nearly 400% over the last 50 years. In 2003, justice reinvestment was conceptualized as a way to decrease recidivism and remedy the exorbitant correctional spending by reinvesting funds on rehabilitation and reentry assistance to those leaving custodial institutions. Early implementations of justice reinvestment in Connecticut and Texas achieved both savings and reductions in prison populations. This led to the creation of the Justice Reinvestment Initiative by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance in 2010. Officials of the Justice Reinvestment Initiative sought states who were willing to achieve bi-partisan agreements on reform and reinvestment strategies to assist in the creation and implementation of this new policy. The State of Oregon began this process in early 2012 and completed the process with the enrollment of HB 3194 in July of 2013. Despite the implementation of this policy in 17 states, few evaluations have been performed on the effectiveness of justice reinvestment policy. </p><p> This study employs a quasi-experimental time series analysis of corrections data from the State of Oregon, the high usage county, medium usage county, and the low usage county proxies to assess the effectiveness of the law. Counties were selected as proxies for levels of justice reinvestment grant usage. These data include prison admissions (June 2010&ndash;July 2016), probation admissions (June 2010&ndash;July 2016), and the number of individuals on community supervision (July 2010&ndash;December 2015). Analyses reveal significant changes in all measures. The results of this study have several implications for current and future implementations of justice reinvestment.</p><p>