Emily J. Salisbury

Diverting Victims of Commercial Sexual Exploitation From Juvenile Detention Development of the InterCSECt Screening Protocol

Identifying victims of commercial sexual exploitation in the juvenile justice system is a challenging complexity requiring concerted organizational commitment. Using a three-tiered, trauma-informed screening process, a 3½-month pilot intervention was implemented in Clark County Juvenile Court (Washington) to identify victims in an effort to connect them to community youth advocates and sexual assault resources. A total of 535 boys and girls ages 9 to 19 were screened during intake; 47 of these youth reported risk factors associated with commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) and were subsequently referred to community advocates. Six youth (all girls) were confirmed CSEC victims and were successfully diverted from juvenile detention. Study results suggest that despite the lack of reliable data surrounding the prevalence of CSEC, juvenile justice agencies need to become educated on the risk factors to triage victims to services.

Is Downsizing Prisons Dangerous

Research Summary Recent declines in imprisonment raise a critical question: Can prison populations be reduced without endangering the public? This question is examined by testing the effect of Californias dramatic efforts to comply with court-mandated targets to reduce prison overcrowding using a pretest-posttest design. The results showed that Californias Realignment Act had no effect on violent or property crime rates in 2012, 2013, or 2014. When crime types were disaggregated, a moderately large, statistically significant association between Realignment and auto theft rates was observed in 2012. By 2014, however, this effect had decayed and auto theft rates returned to pre-Realignment levels. Policy Implications Significant reductions in the size of prison populations are possible without endangering public safety. Within just 15 months of its passage, Realignment reduced the size of the total prison population by 27,527 inmates, prison crowding declined from 181% to 150% of design capacity, approximately

Introduction to the Special Issue Expanding the Global Boundaries of Risk Assessment

453 million was saved, and there was no adverse effect on the overall safety of Californians. With a mixture of jail use, community corrections, law enforcement and other preventive efforts, California counties have provided a comparable level of public safety to that previously achieved by state prisons. Nevertheless, sustaining these policy objectives will require greater attention to local implementation, targeted crime prevention, and sentencing reform.

Expanding the Feminist Pathways Perspective beyond the United States: A Profile of Federal Women Prisoners in Argentina

With interpersonal violence currently a leading cause of death (World Health Organization, 2004), the world’s prison population at more than 10 million (Walmsley, 2013) and the number of inpatient beds in forensic psychiatric hospitals on the rise (Priebe et al., 2008), establishing valid and reliable methods of identifying individuals who are likely to commit criminal acts is an important public health and safety issue. One approach to identifying future offenders is through the use of risk assessment—structured and unstructured methods of predicting the likelihood of antisocial behavior. Although unstructured clinical judgments of dangerousness remain common in practice, numerous structured risk assessment instruments, the manuals of which claim high rates of reliability and predictive validity, have been introduced in recent decades (Bonta, 2002). The investigation of these measures’ psychometric properties has produced a sizable literature (Desmarais & Singh, 2013). However, this literature has largely been circumscribed to North America, Western Europe, and Australasia (Singh, grann, & Fazel, 2011). Nevertheless, violence risk assessment is a global phenomenon. A recent international survey focused on the practical application of violence risk assessment methods (Singh et al., 2014) attracted a number of respondents from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Norway, and Eastern Europe. These regions’ risk assessment practices are currently a “black box,” with either little or non-existent literature in English. Hence, researchers, clinicians, and policymakers interested in getting involved in these regions currently do not have available to them overviews of current risk assessment guidelines and policies in these areas. This special issue of Criminal Justice and Behavior (CJB) begins to open the black box of violence risk assessment in non-Western countries. First, representing Scandinavia, Stål Bjørkly, Pål Hartvig, John Olav Roaldset, and Jay P. Singh discuss both the historical development and current practices of forensic risk assessment in Norway. Interestingly,

Mapping the Implementation Landscape: Assessing the Systemic Capacity of Statewide Community Corrections Agencies to Deliver Evidence-Based Practices

A large body of knowledge within the criminological discipline has demonstrated that women and girls have distinct social and psychological risk factors that contribute to both their initial onset, and continued engagement, in offending behavior. However, most of this research has focused on U.S. samples of women offenders. Using mixed methods, the current research investigated the offense dynamics and possible risk factors for women’s imprisonment with incarcerated women (246 survey respondents; 12 interviewees) in the Argentine federal penitentiary system. We find that there are some similarities in the characteristics of women prisoners in Argentina and the characteristics of women prisoners in the United States, but also some distinctions, primarily in the prevalence of prior victimization. In addition, our results indicate that federal women prisoners in Argentina who reported serious prior abuse were more likely to have committed crimes against persons in comparison to women without abuse histories. Such a distinction supports the ongoing research investigating women offender profiles beyond U.S. samples.

The Limitations and Strengths of the Evidence-Based Practice Attitude Scale as a Measure of Correctional Employees’ Attitudes: A Psychometric Evaluation

ABSTRACT Treatment quality is a critical moderator for programs to successfully reduce recidivism. Yet the implementation of any new initiative occurs within an organizational context. This study provides results from a process evaluation measuring implementation capacity to deliver evidence-based practices in the state of Oregon. Using the ImpleMap interview procedure, findings from 10 county-level community corrections agencies demonstrated how systemic, actionable implementation can be facilitated. Aggregate statewide patterns of organizational capacity emerged, as well as individual variation in the strengths and gaps of implementation among each county, revealing that sustainable implementation requires purposeful attention to systemic capacities beyond training and coaching. To advance the science and practice of offender rehabilitation, we need to broaden our focus to organizational process, structure, and context.

Program integrity and the principles of gender-responsive interventions: Assessing the context for sustainable change

Evidence-based practices (EBPs) hold tremendous potential for improving the outcomes of corrections interventions. The implementation of EBPs requires support from staff at all levels of an organization; however, the study of correctional staff attitudes toward organizational change and EBPs is in its infancy. The current study examines the psychometric properties of the Evidence-Based Practice Attitude Scale (EBPAS), an instrument originally designed for mental health professionals, to measure correctional employees’ readiness to implement EBPs. The results indicate mixed conclusions regarding the use of the EBPAS with correctional staff. We found that the total scale and subscales are reliable and exhibit high internal consistency. However, the results of an exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis failed to replicate the factor structure from previous research with mental health providers. The findings indicate potential drawbacks regarding the construct validity of the EBPAS for use with correctional personnel.