The question of how to reduce the recidivism rates among IPV offenders is one that plagues criminologists to this day. Though a difficult issue to address, educational treatment programs have started to gain popularity as one idea to achieve this reduction. By examining the dataset from the “Domestic Violence Experiment in King's County (Brooklyn), New York, 1995-1997,” conducted by Robert C. Davis et al. (2000), it was found that the results of the educational program showed a great promise in reducing recidivism rates. Though it is important to focus on and analyze the results from this study, it is also important to extrapolate from them by running and examining specific models and variables with the dataset. Focusing on specific variables within the dataset allows researchers to find different themes and results in smaller ideologies of research, versus trying to find one overall answer on how to reduce recidivism.

By examining specific variables such as length of relationship, I wonder how length of relationship between an IPV offender and victim impact recidivism rates? This thesis will discuss IPV history and theoretical perspectives, history of educational programs, length of relationship, and the dataset conducted by Davis et al. (2000).

This thesis examines how the likelihood of IPV recidivism is effected by length of relationship, the different length of treatment programs (overall, eight-week, or twenty-six-weeks), and the interaction between length of relationship and the different treatment programs. The results show overall that length of relationship slightly decreases the rate of recidivism for IPV. When length of relationship is ran in the models with the separate treatment programs, it is found that the overall treatment and twenty-six-week programs have drastic and significant reduction results on recidivism, but that the eight-week program actually increases recidivism rates slightly. The results also indicate that when examining the interaction between length of relationship and the different treatment programs, length of relationship slightly moderates the reduction of the recidivism rates for the individuals enrolled in the overall treatment and eight-week programs, but slightly increases the rates for those in the twenty-six-week program.

Although much has been done to examine the relationship between unemployment and crime, little consideration has been given to the impact neighborhood-level factors such as informal social control may have on the strength of unemployment as a predictor of crime. The present study seeks to fill this gap by assessing whether the declining crime rates over a period of surging unemployment under the financial crisis are due to unchanged levels of informal social control. To examine these relationships, the present study utilizes data from Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), calls for service to the police, and the United States Census and American Community Survey. These data are longitudinal in nature covering the period 2007-2011 and are all related to Glendale, Arizona. The results indicate that the financial crisis predicts lower rates of property crimes as well as lower rates of calls for service relative to UCR crimes. Additionally, the present study finds that unemployment is a significant predictor of increases in UCR property crime, UCR violent crime, and engagement in each of my measures of informal social control.

This study is an in-depth examination of thirty-one commercial marijuana growers in four states in the United States. Presently, federal law prohibits marijuana production, but twenty-five states and the District of Columbia allow some provision for marijuana production. Despite massive federal campaigns against marijuana growth, the growers themselves have received comparatively little attention. This study investigates three questions: 1) to what extent do commercial marijuana growers meet life-course criminology’s expectations of offenders; 2) how do growers learn the requisite norms, knowledge, and skills to be successful; and 3) to what extent do growers comply with state laws, and why? The results find little-support for life-course variables. While social learning theory is supported, the results also indicate that independent learning through trial and error and learning through various media are relevant to knowledge and skill acquisition. Respondents adopted a variety of strategies regarding state laws, with partial-compliance in order to minimize risk being the most common. Implications for both theory and policy are discussed.

Individuals with high levels of neighborhood attachment provide a multitude of positive factors to neighborhoods. Research has demonstrated that increases in informal social controls, maintaining a well-kept area, and positive social ties are improved with higher levels of neighborhood attachment. Identifying the factors that lead to higher levels of neighborhood attachment has thus become an area in the literature that scholars have frequently studied. One aspect of neighborhood life that has been neglected in research is the role of police on neighborhood attachment. This study addresses the gap by exploring the role of police in influencing levels of neighborhood attachment. Data from the Seattle Neighborhood and Crime Survey are used to examine perceptions of police effectiveness on overall levels of neighborhood attachment, and the three different sub-concepts of neighborhood attachment. Results demonstrated that perceptions of police effectiveness had a positive relationship on all forms of neighborhood attachment. Suggestions for the roles of police in developing neighborhood attachment will be discussed, as well as the theoretical applications for future testing of neighborhood attachment. This study demonstrates the influence of police on daily neighborhood life.

There has been a rise in heroin use throughout the United States due to doctors increasingly prescribing painkillers to patients with chronic pain (Kanouse & Compton, 2015; Compton, Boyle, & Wargo, 2015). Individuals get addicted to painkillers and, when their doctor will no longer prescribe them, turn to alternative methods of relief; heroin is often their cheapest option (Kolodny, Courtwright, Hwang, Kreiner, Eadie, Clark, & Alexander 2015). Heroin users are three to four times more likely to die from overdose than other types of drug users (Darke & Hall, 2003). The purpose of this study is to determine the likelihood that heroin users successfully reenter the community upon release from prison in comparison to other types of drug users. There are several re-entry outcomes that can be considered “success”; this study measures success as an index of the quality of the returning offender’s familial relationships as well as recidivism. The data used for this analysis is the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (SVORI). The sample consists of male offenders, aged 18 years and older, who have been convicted of and imprisoned for a serious or violent crime. Findings suggest familial social support does not have an effect on heroin use, but heroin use increases the risk of recidivism. These findings will provide a context for rehabilitation of heroin offenders and will launch future research focusing on the differences between heroin users and other types of drug users.

Recent events in places such as Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, have focused the public's attention on citizen deaths during arrest encounters with officers in police departments across the United States. Riots and protests have broken out across the nation and resulted in a recent President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing to address some of these major issues. Arrest-related deaths (ARDs), however, are not a new phenomenon and have long generated controversy among the public. Despite the reoccurring nature of ARDs, no publicly available, central national registry of ARDs exists to allow for an in-depth analysis of such cases, as well as the development of training and policies to decrease police and citizen harms. In an effort to fill this gap, the current study conducts a retrospective, open-source, web-based search of media reports to explore the prevalence and nature of all types of ARDs that occurred through the United States in 2005 and 2006. The purpose of the study is to investigate ARDs, but to also assess the reliability of media reports as a source of data. The study finds that media reports are not adequate for identifying the prevalence of ARDs, but are useful when investigating circumstances surrounding deadly police-citizen encounters to an extent.

Police misconduct is a relatively rare event, though typically, it is a male dominated event. As such, research on police misconduct has largely ignored women. Generally, research examines differences in misconduct by using sex as a control variable, or has focused on small samples of female officers using qualitative methods. Neither of these methods is able to explore or explain the possibility that factors related to officers' decisions to commit misconduct may differentially impact males and females. As a consequence, we are left with a shallow understanding of when and why women commit misconduct.

This research fills this gap by a large sample (N=3,085) of matched police officers in the New York City Police Department, half of which committed career-ending misconduct between 1975 and 1996. Additionally, unlike previous research, this data includes a large sample (N=435) of females. Research has determined that some factors, such as having children or employment problems, are risk factors for misconduct regardless of sex; likewise, other factors, such as age and higher education, create protection against misconduct. Using logistic regression and split-sample z-score comparisons, analyses will focus on examining how the predictors differentially explain the likelihood of police misconduct for men and women.

As expected, some predictors of misconduct that are salient for women, such as getting divorced, are not statistically significant for men; likewise, some variables that are significant for both men and women have a larger effect size for one sex, such as citizen complaints, which are of more predictive value for women than for men. These findings yield important theoretical, empirical, and policy implications. Notably, there is evidence that a gendered theory of police misconduct may be necessary. Additionally, conceptualizations within mainstream criminological theories may need to be rethought; for example, divorce was found to be a protective factor for women in this study, rather than a risk factor as both strain and life-course criminology would indicate. The findings also demonstrate the need for gender-specific models when studying police misconduct. Finally, the results of this study yield important policy implications, such as the utility of gender-specific hiring considerations and early-intervention "red flags."

Criminologists have directed significant theoretical and empirical attention toward the institution of marriage over the past two decades. Importantly, the momentum guiding this line of research has increased despite the fact that people are getting married far less often and much later in the life course than in any point in American history. The aim of this dissertation is to address this disconnect by focusing attention to nonmarital romantic relationships and their instability during emerging adulthood. To do so, it uses data from the Pathways to Desistance Study, a longitudinal study of 1,354 at-risk males and females who were adjudicated from the juvenile and adult systems in Phoenix and Philadelphia between 2000 and 2003. The project focuses attention to the following issues: (1) the effect of romantic dissolution on aggressive and income-based offenses; (2) the extent to which strain
egative emotionality and peer influence/exposure account for the effect of romantic dissolution on crime; and (3) the extent to which certain relationship and individual circumstances moderate the effect of romantic dissolution. The models reveal a few key findings. First, romantic dissolution is strongly related to an increase in both aggressive and income-based crime, but is more strongly related to income-based crime. Second, the effect of romantic dissolution is reduced when measures of strain
egative emotionality and peer influence/exposure measures are added to models, but the peer influence/exposure measures account for the strongest reduction. Finally, romantic dissolution does not serve as a positive life event among these at-risk youth, but its effect is exacerbated under a number of contexts (e.g. when an individual is unemployed). This study closes with a summary of these findings as well as its key limitations, and offers insight into potential policy implications and avenues of future research.

Knowing that disorder is related to crime, it has become essential for criminologists to understand how and why certain individuals perceive disorder. Using data from the Perceptions of Neighborhood Disorder and Interpersonal Conflict Project, this study uses a fixed photograph of a neighborhood, to assess whether individuals "see" disorder cues. A final sample size of n=815 respondents were asked to indicate if they saw particular disorder cues in the photograph. The results show that certain personal characteristics do predict whether an individual sees disorder. Because of the experimental design, results are a product of the individual's personal characteristics, not of the respondent's neighborhood. These findings suggest that the perception of disorder is not as clear cut as once thought. Future research should explore what about these personal characteristics foster the perception of disorder when it is not present, as well as, how to fight disorder in neighborhoods when perception plays such a substantial role.

Effectiveness and efficiency of the police have been contentious topics from the public perspective. Police departments have developed policies to help better their patrol officers' effectiveness on the streets in both quality and timeliness. Although there have been few recent studies about the response time of officers to calls for service, this is a subject that should not go overlooked. As an important aspect to the patrol officer's repertoire, response time can have effects on the community and its perception on the police. This study uses a multi-level modeling approach to examine the effects of incident and neighborhood factors on police response time within a medium size Southwest city. Police departments use a scale to determine the priority of a call for service, commonly referred to as the PRI. This index scale was found to have the most effect on the response times, while a few cyclical patterns were obtained of level 1 variables. Neighborhood characteristics showed significant effects, measuring structural disadvantage, however, caution should be used in generalizing these findings to other public jurisdictions.