Heidi S. Bonner

Factors associated with college students' responses to rape-disclosure scenarios: influence of gender, rape characteristics, and opinions about health professionals

ABSTRACT Few studies examine the role of friends in victims’ decisions to seek help from health professionals. This study used a sample of college students (N = 637) to examine the factors that may influence whether students would advise a friend to seek help from health professionals. After providing an open-ended response to a vignette, students answered a series of questions about formal support providers, attitudes toward women and rape victims, and their background. Findings suggest a gender divide on the advice given, and more students who responded to an acquaintance-rape scenario recommended that a victim contact health professionals in comparison to those whose scenario depicted an intimate partner rape. Implications are discussed, focusing on the role of friends and campus policy in minimizing the impacts of victimization.

Race, ethnicity, and prison disciplinary misconduct

ABSTRACT It is well known that racial and ethnic minorities (both male and female) have felt the effect of increased incarceration more than Whites, and a large amount of prior research has investigated the factors that influence higher levels of inmate misconduct, including the influence of race/ethnicity. This body of research has produced mixed results. Using recent data from one of the largest state prison systems, this study sought to determine the level of racial and ethnic disparity in the commission of inmate misconduct. Results indicate that Black inmates were significantly more likely than other inmates to commit general rule violations, serious rule violations, and assaultive rule violations. Correlates of inmate misconduct and policy implications stemming from the findings are discussed.

Research partners in criminal justice: notes from Syracuse

Academics and practitioners recognize that research partnerships can benefit both research and practice. Many such partnerships, of varying scope and duration, have been formed over the past 20 years. However, while we have learned some lessons about such partnerships, we have much yet to learn about how research partnerships can be sustained and put to their greatest use. In this paper, we describe the functions that comprise the research partner role, and we draw from our experience as a research partner in one city – Syracuse, NY – to illustrate the performance of those functions and to reflexively distill from that experience some lessons for the development and maintenance of research partnerships. We discuss the factors that we believe shaped the success with which the partnership has operated, and the challenges that we confronted.

Operation Safe Corridor: An Outcome Evaluation

Exposure to crime occurs when an individual’s activities place them in vulnerable situations. A collaborative problem-solving approach to address student victimization in one area of the city of Ashton resulted in the development of a safe passageway initiative, Operation Safe Corridor (OSC). OSC applies the logic of crime and place research by focusing efforts that seek to modify behavior and reduce opportunities for criminal behavior in the corridor. Despite concentrated deployment of resources in a relatively small area, OSC has not had the expected impact on student victimization. Although OSC was introduced as a measure whose primary focus was to combat personal crimes, particularly street robberies, the intervention appears more successful with respect to property crime. Thus, despite efforts to raise awareness regarding personal safety, college-aged individuals are still making themselves vulnerable as targets and OSC seems instead to have had an effect on would-be offenders. The program appears to have been successful at hardening a location (the corridor) but was not successful in modifying victim behavior.

The decision process: police officers’ search for information in dispute encounters

ABSTRACT The police officer decision-making process is a complex one, subject to multiple informational inputs from a variety of sources. Policing scholars have spent a significant amount of time investigating which of these inputs contribute to decisions made by police but our ability to explain how police officers decide on a non-arrest course of action is still limited. This research utilises a mixed methods approach to examine the process of police officer decision-making in dispute encounters. Both qualitative (analysed using content analysis) and quantitative data from the Project on Policing Neighborhoods are used to examine both the process and outcome of police decision-making in dispute encounters. In particular, this research seeks to determine the variation across officers in terms of type of information needed to determine a final outcome, the variation in terms of the outcomes reached, and the variation in terms of the depth of information search, which provides some insight into whether offices use a compensatory or non-compensatory decision-making process. The analysis of officer decision-making process revealed that officers, on average, utilise less than half of the information available to them in an encounter and, further, that officers often make interim decisions before deciding on a final outcome. The most common disposition was to take no further action; the second most common was to arrest. Further, the analysis reveals that officer decision-making strategies in the field appear to be non-compensatory, which has implications for how decision-making behaviour should be modelled and tested in the future.

Procedural Justice and Citizen Review of Complaints Against the Police: Structure, Outcomes, and Complainants’ Subjective Experiences

People who file complaints against the police tend to experience objectively unfavorable outcomes, for most complaints are not sustained. But features of citizen oversight might be expected to enhance the procedural justice of the complaint review process and, hence, provide positive subjective experience despite the outcomes. Using data collected through interviews with complainants about their experience with complaint review in a city that provides for citizen oversight, we examine the factors associated with complainants’ subjective experiences. We find that complainants’ subjective experiences are shaped mainly by outcomes, while features of the process that might be expected to enhance its procedural fairness have little or no effect on complainants’ judgments.

Prison Homicide: An Extension of Violent Criminal Careers?

This study investigated prison homicide perpetrators through the lens of the career criminal perspective. Prison homicide, while a rare event, has critical implications for the prison environment. Despite its importance as a form of institutional violence that must be addressed, only four studies in the past five decades have explored the characteristics of homicide perpetrators/victims, the motives, and circumstances of the crime. The goal of the current study was to develop a better understanding of prison homicide by examining 54 perpetrators who committed 37 inmate homicides over 40 years in a mid-Western state prison system. Results showed that prison homicides typically involved a younger male inmate perpetrator, acting independently, murdering an older inmate, in his cell, by stabbing or beating the victim during an altercation. Perpetrators, in comparison with victims and prisoners in general, had a record indicating more prior community homicides, elevated institutional risk scores, and higher rates of serious and assaultive prison misconduct, all indicative of prior community and prison maladjustment. Consistent with career criminal research, prison homicide perpetrators constitute a small but distinct subset of habitually deviant criminals that perpetrate high rates of criminal and violent behavior regardless of context.