AYSPS Masters Theses

The purpose of this study is to replicate and extend prior research by Dhingra et al. on factors affecting moral disengagement in adjudicated juveniles. After replicating prior research, I then examine additional theoretical factors in the causes of moral disengagement, specifically the effects of social learning and self-control. I also extend prior cross-sectional research by analyzing longitudinal data. Data for this paper comes from the Pathways to Desistance study, a multisite study of over 1300 adjudicated juveniles. Exact replication of the prior Dhingra study was not possible, but similar results were obtained. The additional regressions then added measures indexing self-control and association with delinquent peers, both of which were found to be predictive of moral disengagement in juveniles. Next, a longitudinal regression analysis was run to address the issue of causal order using the first and second waves of Pathways data. The results show that past moral disengagement was predictive of future moral disengagement in the study sample. Further, the longitudinal results do not provide any evidence that moral disengagement develops in juveniles in response to social factors, contrary to the conclusions of the Dhingra study. Rather, the findings suggest that moral disengagement during adolescence is driven instead by Factor 1 psychopathy, in addition to prior levels of moral disengagement.

These longitudinal findings are important because they call into question the role of social factors and suggest that interventions designed to disrupt moral disengagement may benefit from an increased focus on the treatment of early psychopathy.

Recent research demonstrates the need to examine the concepts of moral injury and professional quality of life (compassion fatigue, compassion satisfaction, and burnout) in police officers. Building on these findings, the current study aims to determine the prevalence of these psychological concepts in a large municipal police department, as well as potential group differences in the prevalence of these concepts. Further, the study explores whether the psychological concepts of moral injury and compassion fatigue, also known as secondary traumatic stress, are associated within the sample of police officers. Finally, the study examined the potential of moral injury being a significant predictor of compassion fatigue (Papazoglou & Chopko, 2017). Initial Spearman’s correlation coefficient analyses found significant relationships between moral injury and compassion fatigue. Exploratory linear regression analyses determined that moral injury and burnout consistently predicted compassion fatigue, even while controlling for sex, education level, and years of experience.

Research on the effectiveness of mental health and drug courts often does not consider issues with selection effects. Selection effects can occur if there are differences between the target population, those referred, and those accepted. This leads to results that could be biased and not generalizable across jurisdictions. The current study utilizes a Probit model to examine the likelihood of referral and the likelihood of acceptance into mental health and drug court based on court specific eligibility criteria. The sample consisted of 28,058 probationers across four court circuits wherein 240 were referred, and 135 were accepted to either mental health or drug court. The analysis examining the probability of referral reveals differences between the target population and referrals based on criminal history. This presents issues with the alignment between the accountability courts goal (i.e., target population) and who in practice is referred. The analysis examining the probability of acceptance reveals differences between referrals and acceptances based on risk and need. This directly impacts research that utilizes referred but not accepted comparison groups, drawing into question the validity and generalizability of results on effectiveness. Together, these findings highlight the importance of knowing who accountability courts are effective for when interpreting results of effectiveness research. However, the small number of individuals referred and accepted demonstrates the small overall impact of mental health and drug courts.

Coercive control victimization, a type of intimate partner violence involving Manipulation and subjugation through maladaptive relationship tactics, has begun to garner research attention. In part, research has identified that history of violence, sexual assault, and previous abuse are risk factors for coercive control victimization. What has been less explored is whether personality traits, such as impulsivity and aggression, are linked to victimization. To investigate this possibility, data were obtained from the Biopsychological Correlates of College Victimization Study, a survey of 1,211 U.S. college students attending one university in the Southeast. Students were asked about their coercive control experiences and given assessments to measure dimensions of impulsivity, aggression, and other risk factors. The findings in this study indicate that there is a relationship between coercive control victimization, aggression, and impulsivity. A discussion of implications for policy and prevention is included.

Criminal justice research is dominated by social learning, strain, and control theories to determine the factors involved in motivating an individual to commit a crime. These theories have provided insight to the effectiveness of deterrence, restraint, and the overall impact strain has on an individual’s attitude and their perspective of not only society, but of the law and entities which govern them. However, not many studies in this field have evaluated the impact of an adjudicated juvenile’s susceptibility or resistance levels on their criminal habits, the impact of procedural justice perceptions on criminal habits, and further determining joint effects between these two concepts and gun-carrying habits. This study employs ordinary least squares and robust regression methods to determine potential interactions between resistance levels and perceptions of procedural justice. The impact of a variety of factors were also evaluated on subgroups rooted in gang-involvement and location specific models. Results indicate that high resistance levels and positive perceptions of procedural justice reduce a male juvenile’s frequency of violent offending. Several control variables also exhibit significance, which highlights the multifaceted nature of factors which influence crime habits in juveniles.

In recent years, high-profile cases of police violence have garnered national debate around the future of policing and how it will address racial/ethnic bias. Current police recruiting campaigns target diversity, hiring racially and ethnically diverse officers, as a solution to the ongoing tensions between officers and the ethnically/racially diverse communities they serve. Consequently, bias is present in all Americans, as race has culturally constructed American society. This research questions the reliability of an officer's racial/ethnic status as catalysts of change for biases present in police organizations and police practices. More so, this research prompts using diverse experiences from childhood and adolescence as markers of possible implicit bias and internalized prejudice. Police officers from a southeastern city are assessed on their exposure to diversity as children/adolescents. Officers are also assessed using the Harvard Race Implicit Association Test (IAT), which evaluates their levels of implicit racial bias. The Exposure to Diversity Scale (EDS) is constructed to identify diverse experiences throughout childhood and adolescence (primary socialization) that may influence an individual's internalization of prejudice and impact their implicit bias scores. The relationship between the EDS and Harvard's Race Implicit Association Test (IAT) is investigated using bivariate analysis. In conclusion, officers with more diverse experiences tended to have lower levels of implicit racial bias. Experiences with Black police officers, Black businessmen and women, and Black community leaders were negatively significant with IAT scores.

Police violence in the United States has reignited calls for police reform in the past 10 to 15 years. Violent encounters captured on video have reinforced the claims that the current state of the American police needs to be reexamined, given how widespread reform efforts have been published and varied efforts to embrace reform have been implemented. Common reform themes have focused on police transparency, accountability, and training. Some research has examined citizen encounters or the role that community has in a community policing framework. However, citizen complaints have not been utilized or systematically examined as much as they could be. Part of the issue stems from the lack of data or quality of data that is available. This thesis examines citizen complaint data against officers in the New York City Police Department alongside a review of police reformist literature to highlight the gaps in prior research to discuss how reform efforts can benefit from the use of citizen complaint data.

Income inequality in the United States has been rising significantly in recent decades, and there is a growing body of research that examines the economic, political, and policy factors influencing this phenomenon. Criminal justice policy and mass incarceration are critical but understudied elements of the relationship between public policy decisions and economic inequality. Crime policy may have a significant impact on the income distribution because its effects reach far beyond those who have direct contact with the criminal justice system. This paper seeks a better understanding of this relationship by examining the impact of the incarceration rate on the share of income going to the bottom 50 percent of earners in the United States from 1962 – 2014. Through time series regression analysis, I find that increases in the incarceration rate lead to significant decreases in the share of income going to the bottom 50 percent, even after controlling for other critical factors, including the crime rate, unemployment rate, union membership, partisan composition of Congress, and percentage of Americans with a college degree. This finding demonstrates that criminal justice policy should play a more prominent role in the conversation surrounding income inequality and shows that policies seeking to reduce the incarceration rate can create a more equitable income distribution.

Most prior examinations on the influence of incarceration on labor market outcomes find that the criminal justice system excludes people from employment. This study examines the nexus of the criminal justice and child support systems’ influence on labor market outcomes while examining a contrast of traditional labor market exclusion: the threat of incarceration for child support nonpayment, which may push fathers with child support debt to accept low-wage work. Using data from The Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, this study utilizes variation between cities to examine how child support policies affect noncustodial parents in terms of their employment and wages in a replication of the work of Zatz and Stoll (2020). This study provides support for the theory that punitive child support enforcement policies negatively impact the wages of noncustodial fathers with arrears who are most vulnerable to the threat of punishment for nonwork but does not find significant relationships between child support enforcement and employment.

The relationship between perceptions of police legitimacy, collective efficacy, and the willingness to report crimes is examined using street segments as units of analysis. Survey data from 2008, collected in three mid-sized California cities, serves as the basis for assessing how trust in law enforcement and community cohesion shape reporting behaviors at different incident severity levels. Trust in police shows a significant association with higher rates of reporting across all severities of incidents. Indicators of collective efficacy, which represent strong community bonds and shared accountability, correspond with more significant reporting, particularly in emergencies. Demographic variables exhibit limited influence, underscoring the greater importance of community-wide perceptions of police legitimacy and social cohesion. The findings highlight the value of community trust in law enforcement and social cohesion as key drivers of public engagement in maintaining neighborhood safety and strengthening the incident-reporting process.

Purpose: The understanding of sociodemographic variables and drug court completion is well documented in the drug court literature, but the application of theoretical predictors is often neglected, leading to a gap in theory and practice. To fill this gap, this study examined the utility of social support theory in explaining the differences between those who complete the drug court program and those who fail to do so. Using Cohen’s definition, social support was conceptualized as social networks, supportive behaviors, and perceived support.

Methods: Participant survey data and drug court data from the National Institute of Justice’s Multi-Site Adult Drug Court Evaluation (MADCE) was used to construct seven scales of social support that proxy the Index of Socially Supportive Behaviors (ISSB) and Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS). Several random-effect, multi-level logistic models were used to calculate the probability of drug court completion, controlling for participant and drug court level effects. There were two hypotheses: (1) Social support is positively associated with drug court completion, and (2) drug court completion varies by the type of social network and the type of supportive behavior.

Results: Consistent with Cohen’s hypothesis and previous empirical research, the combination of informal and formal social support, including supportive behaviors and perceived social support, significantly predicted drug court completion at 18-months. Formal expressive and formal perceived social support were correlated with completion, even when level-2 programmatic controls were added to the models. However, formal instrumental social support did not predict completion. Likewise, expressive, instrumental, and perceived informal social support from family remained insignificant throughout all models. Suggestions for implementing changes in the drug court model based on these results are discussed.