Bryanna Hahn Fox

Trauma changes everything: Examining the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and serious, violent and chronic juvenile offenders

Among juvenile offenders, those who commit the greatest number and the most violent offenses are referred to as serious, violent, and chronic (SVC) offenders. However, current practices typically identify SVC offenders only after they have committed their prolific and costly offenses. While several studies have examined risk factors of SVCs, no screening tool has been developed to identify children at risk of SVC offending. This study aims to examine how effective the adverse childhood experiences index, a childhood trauma-based screening tool developed in the medical field, is at identifying children at higher risk of SVC offending. Data on the history of childhood trauma, abuse, neglect, criminal behavior, and other criminological risk factors for offending among 22,575 delinquent youth referred to the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice are analyzed, with results suggesting that each additional adverse experience a child experiences increases the risk of becoming a serious, violent, and chronic juvenile offender by 35, when controlling for other risk factors for criminal behavior. These findings suggest that the ACE score could be used by practitioners as a first-line screening tool to identify children at risk of SVC offending before significant downstream wreckage occurs.

Creating Burglary Profiles Using Latent Class Analysis A New Approach to Offender Profiling

This research creates a new criminal profile for burglary by establishing the link among certain offender traits, past criminal behavior, and crime scene features. Utilizing latent class analysis (LCA) to identify underlying groups within the offender and offense characteristics, the relationship between certain offense styles and the most likely offender may then be established. These offense–offender profiles may be used by police to predict traits of an unknown offender based on information from a crime scene alone. Based on a sample of 405 burglaries committed between 2008 and 2009 in Florida, four criminal history groups, four offender types, and four offense styles were identified using LCA. A significant relationship was found among the offense styles and offender trait types, as well as between the offender trait and criminal history categories. This study serves both theoretical and practical purposes, as the findings have important implications for academia and law enforcement alike.

Can they recover? An assessment of adult adjustment problems among males in the abstainer, recovery, life-course persistent, and adolescence-limited pathways followed up to age 56 in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development

Much research has examined Moffitts developmental taxonomy, focusing almost exclusively on the distinction between life-course persistent and adolescence-limited offenders. Of interest, a handful of studies have identified a group of individuals whose early childhood years were marked by extensive antisocial behavior but who seemed to recover and desist (at least from severe offending) in adolescence and early adulthood. We use data from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development to examine the adult adjustment outcomes of different groups of offenders, including a recoveries group, in late middle adulthood, offering the most comprehensive investigation of this particular group to date. Findings indicate that abstainers comprise the largest group of males followed by adolescence-limited offenders, recoveries, and life-course persistent offenders. Furthermore, the results reveal that a host of adult adjustment problems measured at ages 32 and 48 in a number of life-course domains are differentially distributed across these four offender groups. In addition, the recoveries and life-course persistent offenders often show the greatest number of adult adjustment problems relative to the adolescence-limited offenders and abstainers.

Behavioral Consistency Among Serial Burglars: Evaluating Offense Style Specialization Using Three Analytical Approaches

This study evaluates the behavioral consistency in offending styles among a sample of serial burglars from the United States. Three popular specialization analyses—Jaccard’s coefficient, the forward specialization coefficient (FSC), and the Diversity (D) index—are used to compare if, and how much, variation exists in the behavior of serial burglars committing different styles of offenses, among the three analyses. Results show that there is variation across the analyses, with the FSC and D index suggesting serial burglars are relatively consistent in their burglary offense styles. However, burglars with organized and disorganized offense styles are more consistent in behavior across offenses than burglars who committed opportunistic and interpersonal style offenses. These findings have important methodological implications for criminological research, and practical implications for policing and crime linkage analysis.

An Experimental Evaluation on the Utility of Burglary Profiles Applied in Active Police Investigations

This study evaluated the effect on burglary arrest rates when using statistically derived behavioral profiles for burglary offenses and offenders in active police investigations. To do this, an experiment was conducted where one police agency that used the profiles was compared with three matched police agencies that did not. Burglary arrest rates were studied 4 years before and 1 year after the profile was implemented. Results show that the arrest rates for the treated agency increased by 3 times as compared with the control agencies. The interaction effect between treatment/control agency and pretest/posttest arrest rates was significant, showing that the experimental intervention had an effect, after controlling for pre-existing differences between the agencies. These findings on the utility of offender profiling, the first to be derived from an experiment conducted in active police investigations, suggest that the statistically based behavioral profiles could be a useful tool in increasing arrest rates for police.

How to Write a Methodology and Results Section for Empirical Research

Understanding how to properly present and discuss the methods and results from an empirical study is an essential skill for researchers in any field of work. The methodology and results sections are often considered the most important parts of a manuscript, as the information in these sections are what readers use to evaluate the quality, validity, and replicability of the study. Unfortunately, certain elements are often omitted, and the methodology and results of a paper can become cluttered, repetitive, and generally uninformative on what took place in the study and why, and how valid the study’s conclusions actually are. It is therefore critical that the content of these sections is presented clearly and precisely so readers can accurately evaluate and replicate the research. This article aims to provide researchers in criminology and criminal justice, and other social or behavioral sciences, with a detailed road map on how to prepare and write an organized, informative, and properly formatted methodology and results section for an empirical article.

From Criminological Heterogeneity to Coherent Classes: Developing a Typology of Juvenile Sex Offenders

Although juvenile sex offenders (JSOs) are a pressing topic among researchers and juvenile justice practitioners, empirically driven typologies of JSOs using U.S. data are lacking. Here, we develop the first statistical typology of male and female JSOs using data from the United States selected from a sample of 4,143 JSOs referred to the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice. Significant predictors of juvenile sex offending (age of criminal onset, criminal history, impulsivity, empathy, depression, psychosis, and childhood sexual abuse) derived from the literature were used as grouping covariates to develop a profile of male and female JSOs using a latent class analysis (LCA). Results of the LCA show four unique subtypes of male JSOs and two subtypes of female JSOs exist within the data. These groups had differential compositions for key features such as criminal history and onset, psychopathologies, empathy and impulsivity, and sexual abuse victimization. These differences may be critical toward developing more tailored and effective correctional and treatment responses that balance containment and therapeutic approaches depending on the individual needs of the JSOs based upon their profile. Other practical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Public servants or police soldiers? An analysis of opinions on the militarization of policing from police executives, law enforcement, and members of the 114th congress U.S. house of representatives

Abstract Despite the dramatic rise in use of militarized weapons, equipment, and tactics by police departments across the nation, no study has examined the opinions of those responsible for designing, funding, and implementing police militarization in the United States. Therefore this study collected and analyzed opinion data from 465 key stakeholders from the 114th Congress U.S. House of Representatives, law enforcement executives, and local police officers regarding police militarization. Results suggest that while most practitioners and policymakers favor police militarization, Congress and law enforcement differ in support of critical issues such as oversight of military procurement programs, use of surplus military weapons and vehicles, and overall support for the militarization of policing in the United States.

Is the Development of Offenders Related to Crime Scene Behaviors for Burglary? Including Situational Influences in Developmental and Life-Course Theories of Crime

Developmental and life-course (DLC) theories of crime aim to identify the causes and correlates of offending over the life span, focusing on the within-individual variations that result in criminal and delinquent behavior. Although there are several notable theories in the field, few contain both developmental and situational factors related to offending, and none explain why individuals commit crimes in different ways. This study aims to address these issues by developing typologies of burglars based on developmental and situational characteristics to help identify the various criminal career paths of the offenders, and how these different criminal careers may relate to the commission of offenses. Results of this study indicate that there are five different criminal career paths among the sampled burglars and four different styles of committing the same offense, and that burglars with certain criminal career features tend to commit a specific style of burglary. Through this research, we aim to extend DLC theories to create a more practical and contextual explanation of the relationship between criminal careers and the commission of offenses, and increase the level of within-individual explained variance in criminal behavior.

The effects of temperament, psychopathy, and childhood trauma among delinquent youth: A test of DeLisi and Vaughn's temperament-based theory of crime

Recent interest among criminologists on the construct of temperament has been fueled by DeLisi and Vaughns (2014) temperament-based theory of antisocial behavior. Their theory suggests that core self-regulation capacity and negative emotionality are the most salient temperament features for understanding the emergence and maintenance of antisocial and violent behavior, even among offending populations. The present study tests the relative effects of these temperamental features along with psychopathic traits and trauma in their association with violent and non-violent delinquency in a sample of 252 juvenile offenders. Results from a series of negative binomial regression models indicate that temperament was uniformly more strongly associated with violent and non-violent delinquency than psychopathic traits and childhood traumatic events. Exploratory classification models suggested that temperament and psychopathy possessed similar predictive capacity, but neither surpassed prior history of violence and delinquency as a predictor of future offending. Overall, findings are supportive of DeLisi and Vaughns temperament-based theory and suggest temperament as conceptualized and measured in the present study may play an important role as a risk factor for violent and non-violent delinquency.