Natasha A. Frost

Doctoral Education in Criminology and Criminal Justice

With more than half of all doctoral programs in criminology and criminal justice admitting their first doctoral student after 1990, growth in doctoral education in criminology and criminal justice in recent years has been substantial. Using seven years of data from annual surveys of all institutions known to offer the doctorate in criminology and criminal justice, we document and explore the contours of that growth in doctoral education in criminology and criminal justice. To the extent that growth in doctoral education is indicative of the emergence of a distinct discipline, the expansion documented in this article suggests that criminology/criminal justice is well on its way to establishing itself as such. Profiles of newly admitted students, enrolled students, and graduate faculties, are provided. * An early version of this article was presented by the first author at the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Annual Meeting, Baltimore, MD, in March 2006. The authors would like to thank the representatives of member institutions of the ADPCCJ who have completed the annual survey each year.

The mismeasure of punishment Alternative measures of punitiveness and their (substantial) consequences

Over the past few decades, scholars of punishment and social control have increasingly lamented the punitive turn in criminal justice policy. The perpetually growing size of prison populations has typically been portrayed as the end result of (indeed evidence of) an increasingly punitive criminal justice response. Although many recognize that the size of prison populations ultimately depends upon both the flow into and out of prisons, the vast majority of empirical work has relied on imprisonment rates, based on one-day counts of prison populations, as the dependent variable indicative of increasing punitiveness in imprisonment. In this article, state-level variations in imprisonment rates and in the determinants of those rates — admissions and length of stay — are explored. The findings demonstrate that state punitiveness rankings shift substantially depending on the measure of punitiveness and that the use of imprisonment rates as the sole measure of punitiveness masks substantial state-level variations across the functional determinants of those rates. The empirical findings suggest that social scientists studying punitiveness theoretically or empirically should distinguish the propensity to imprison from penal intensity. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for theoretical and empirical work.

Productivity of Criminal Justice Scholars Across the Career

From the moment young scholars enter the academy, they are cautioned that they should be prepared to “publish or perish.” Because a demonstrable record of scholarly publication is arguably the most important consideration at most universities and colleges that award tenure, junior faculty would be advised to heed that caution. But is there a reduction in pressure post‐tenure, and if so, does this result in a reduction in the publication productivity of faculty members? In this study, we collected and coded data on the publications of criminology and criminal justice scholars over time to determine whether tenure and promotion negatively impact publication productivity. The data, drawn from a random sample of ASC and ACJS members, were coded annually, and careers were tracked in 5‐year increments. Our findings indicate that, contrary to popular belief, the productivity of criminal justice scholars tends to initially increase post‐tenure and then stabilize as the career progresses. The findings also suggest that those affiliated with research‐oriented universities are more productive (in terms of publications) than are those at other types of institutions, and that highly productive scholars have a substantial influence on the average publication rates of scholars at research‐oriented institutions.

New Directions in Correctional Research

Research in the area of corrections is expansive in its breadth, impressive in its depth, and grows with each year that passes. We know so much more about the correctional enterprise than we knew even just a decade ago, and yet there is still so much uncharted territory and so much we could learn. In this article, we review key research findings in the four areas of mass incarceration, community corrections, institutional corrections, and prisoner reentry. We focus specifically on the past 10 years and, with an eye toward mapping uncharted or underexplored territory, we offer directions for future research in these areas. Although it is impossible to provide a comprehensive roadmap for future corrections research, we hope to have identified sufficient new directions to further (and perhaps even complicate) understandings of corrections in the broader context of justice research.

Talking Heads: Crime Reporting on Cable News

In this study, we examine the extent to which criminologists and other academics participate in newsmaking criminology as guests on cable news shows. Building on earlier examinations of print media, we explore the ways in which crime is portrayed on popular cable television news programs (airing on CNN, FOX, MSNBC). Specifically, we examine 180 segments devoted to crime on cable news that aired from June to August 2006, with an emphasis on the role of the 347 guests appearing in those segments and their perspectives on crime causation and crime control. We find that criminologists and other academic experts infrequently appear on these programs, and that guests—regardless of type—only rarely address crime causation or crime control when appearing.

Smiling and Relative Status in News Photographs

Abstract To test the hypothesis that lower social status is associated with more smiling, the authors used newspaper photographs and their associated news stories as the basis for scoring the smiling and relative social status of the 2 individuals in each photograph. Independent raters judged smiling and 5 dimensions of relative status for 496 individuals in 248 newspaper photographs. There was no relation between status and smiling, although status and smiling were both related to other variables such as gender, age, and story valence. These findings add to a growing body of evidence that there is no generalized relation between smiling and status.

Understanding mass incarceration as a grand social experiment

Prison populations in the United States have increased in every year since 1973 – during depressions and in times of economic growth, with rising and falling crime rates, and in times of war and peace. Accomplishing this historically unprecedented penal pattern has required a serious policy agenda that has remained focused on punishment as a goal for more than a generation. This paper seeks to understand that policy orientation from the framework of a social experiment. It explores the following questions: how does the penal experiment – which we have called the Punishment Imperative – compare to other “grand” social experiments? What were its assumptions? What forms did the experiment take? What lessons can be learned from it? What is the future of the grand social experiment in mass incarceration?

Cognitive-behavioral programming and the value of failed interventions: A propensity score evaluation

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship suggests treatment effects from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) based interventions can significantly reduce rates of prison misconduct. However, these findings may overestimate CBT treatment effects due to publication bias towards positive results and limitations of nonexperimental methodologies. This study used propensity score matching (PSM) to evaluate the effectiveness of a CBT-based substance abuse program in reducing misconduct at a northeastern correctional facility. Disciplinary outcomes were compared between program graduates (n = 156) and non-graduates (n = 482). Despite observable differences between groups before PSM, results indicated no significant treatment effects on misconduct after matching. Research and policy implications are discussed.