Criminal Justice and Behavior

This study focused on the outcomes of juvenile delinquents (N = 140) following their conviction, commitment for residential placement, and return to the community on parole. Participants were followed for a period of 1 year postrelease. A random stratified sampling procedure was used to select participants from urban, suburban, and rural sites. Ratings of poor parole adjustment (73%), as well as observed rates of parole violation (73%) and reoffending (40%) across the entire sample reflected a substantial proportion of unfavorable outcomes during follow-up. Stepwise regression yielded significant predictive capacity for offense, school, and family variables toward parole violation (R = .30) and parole adjustment (R = .41), and a trend toward significance in the prediction of reoffending (R = .31), although the modest size of these coefficients would limit practical utility. The results are discussed in the context of intervention and risk-reduction planning throughout residential placement and postrelease community living.

Perspectives of adolescent offenders were examined, especially how they define, interpret, and in some cases justify their delinquent behaviors. Grounded theory methodology was used to examine the cognitive, affective, moral, sociocultural, and situational components that influence how and why adolescents commit crimes. A total of 24 adolescent males were interviewed. A theory of delinquent crime contexts emerged. This article focuses on three of these crime contexts: the emotion-driven violent assault, the belief-driven violent assault, and the mixed-motive mixed-crime contexts.

Over the past 20 years, an increased understanding has been developed of what interventions do and do not work with offenders. Treatment programs that attend to offender risk, needs, and responsivity factors have been associated with reduced recidivism. There is also a recognition that sanctions without a rehabilitative component are ineffective in reducing offender recidivism. This study evaluates a cognitive-behavioral treatment program delivered within the context of intensive community supervision via electronic monitoring (EM). Offenders receiving treatment while in an EM program were statistically matched on risk and needs factors to inmates who did not receive treatment services. The results showed that treatment was effective in reducing recidivism for higher risk offenders, confirming the risk principle of offender treatment. The importance of matching treatment intensity to offender risk level and ensuring that there is a treatment component in intensive supervision programs is reaffirmed.

This study investigated moral intelligence in a sample of 22 incarcerated females, comparing their performance to that of 20 incarcerated males and to a community sample of 23 women. Volunteers completed four self-report measures, including a demographics measure, Adult Nowicki-Strickland Internal-External Control Scale, Hogan Empathy Scale, and the Socialization, Responsibility, and Self-Control subscales of the California Psychological Inventory, plus three moral dilemmas. The main findings were as follows: (a) With respect to moral character, female inmates more closely resembled their male counterparts than they did the community women; (b) with respect to moral reasoning, female inmates were more apt to embrace an ethic of care versus justice than either of the other two groups; (c) discriminant function analysis revealed that the three groups were best distinguished by their scores on the socialization measure; and (d) females convicted of violent offenses had higher self-control scores than did other participants.

The Self-Appraisal Questionnaire (SAQ) is a recently developed self-report questionnaire designed to predict violent and nonviolent offender recidivism. This 67-item, six-subscale tool measures quantitative criminogenic risk-need areas. The SAQ was administered to 303 federally sentenced Canadian male offenders. The total scale test-retest reliability coefficient was .95 and ranged from .69 to .93 for the subscales. Coefficient alphas ranged from .42 to .87. All the subscales with the exception of one had a one-factor solution. The SAQ subscales correlated with other instruments assessing similar constructs and with other measures of recidivism. Offenders with high SAQ totals and subscale scores committed significantly more offenses than did those with low SAQ scores. Similarly, offenders with a history of violence had higher SAQ total scores than the offenders with no history of violence. These preliminary results support the further study of the SAQ as an instrument for predicting violent and nonviolent recidivism.

Experiencing acute stress is inherent in police work. The inability to cope effectively with stressful events can result in undesirable psychological and somatic outcomes, leading to chronic stress, burnout, and quitting the profession. Surprisingly, however, understanding the coping process in police stress and identifying effective coping strategies in response to stressful events has received only scant attention in the research literature. The purposes of this article are (a) to review the coping process in police stress, (b) to identify adaptive and maladaptive coping styles in police work, and (c) to suggest coping strategies that reflect the coping model to reduce both chronic and acute forms of stress and to improve job satisfaction and performance among police officers. The model consists of officers' detection of stressful events or stimuli, their cognitive appraisal of the events or stimuli, and their application of approach- or avoidance-coping dimensions, and cognitive- and behavioral-coping subdimensions.

This study describes historical, personality, behavioral, and situational factors of law enforcement-assisted suicides, which are also known as suicide-by-cop (SbC) subjects. These factors were then used to compare differences between SbC subjects who successfully forced officers to shoot them and those subjects who were unsuccessful. SbC subjects appear to share several risk factors with other suicide victims. This study detected some differences in the characteristics of the SbC subjects who were successful in forcing the officers to intervene with lethal force and those who were not. Substance abuse, previous suicide attempts, stressful life events, length of residency in the location of the incident, and homicidal conversation during the SbC incident did have weak relationships with the outcome of the incident.