Stephanie M. Cardwell

The Unpredictability of Murder: Juvenile Homicide in the Pathways to Desistance Study

There is minimal research that has investigated the characteristics distinguishing youth who commit murder to other juvenile offenders. Of the research that has been done, scholars have identified a wide variety of factors that distinguish these offenders, including poor family environments, emotional and social problems, poor mental health, and behavioral disorders. Using data from Pathways to Desistance, a study of 1,354 serious youthful offenders, we examined how 8 demographic characteristics and 35 risk factors distinguish between those youth who were charged with some type of homicide and those youth who were not charged with any type of homicide. We find that only 18 (1.33%) youth were charged with a homicide offense. Among the predictors, age, intelligence quotient (IQ), exposure to violence, perceptions of community disorder, and prevalence of gun carrying are significantly different across the two groups. Results from a rare-events logistic regression that simultaneously examined the relationship between these five risk factors and their ability to distinguish between the two groups indicate that only lower IQ and a greater exposure to violence were significant. Finally, a higher number of risk factors were associated with a higher likelihood that youth would be charged with homicide.

Adapting to Prison Life: A Qualitative Examination of the Coping Process among Incarcerated Offenders

Research on general strain theory has demonstrated the impact of strain on decisions to engage in crime and delinquency. However, people differ in their responses to strain and only some resort to crime or delinquency. There remain gaps in our knowledge of when, and under what conditions, individuals will react to strain with offending behavior. We rely on interviews with 40 incarcerated men to understand how they cope with specific prison strains, and why they make such coping choices. We find considerable variation in inmates’ coping responses. They use a variety of coping strategies—behavioral, cognitive, and emotional—and only some of these strategies involve offending. Our findings indicate that responses to prison strain are partly a function of past experience with strains, including prior experimentation with coping techniques. Results highlight the unfolding nature of the coping process and expose factors that deserve further attention in tests of GST.

Accounting for Identity Theft The Roles of Lifestyle and Enactment

White-collar offenders are thought to be particularly adept at excusing and justifying their crimes. Whether this is due to their personal backgrounds or the characteristics of their crimes is, as of yet, unknown. To shed light on this issue we explore the various justifications and excuses given by identity thieves. Using data from semistructured interviews with 49 federally convicted identity thieves we show that they all provided numerous accounts for their crimes, with denial of injury being the most common. We also find that the use of accounts varies by the lifestyles these offenders live. That is, those seeking to live as conventional citizens call forth different accounts than those who have a criminal lifestyle.

Variability in Moral Disengagement and Its Relation to Offending in a Sample of Serious Youthful Offenders

Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement (MD) refers to the freeing of oneself from moral or ethical standards to engage in wrongdoing. Little is known about heterogeneity in MD among serious adolescent offenders, how MD changes over time in the transition from adolescence to early adulthood, and how such heterogeneity corresponds to offending. We used data from the Pathways to Desistance study, a longitudinal study of a sample of serious youthful offenders followed for 7 years, to examine trajectories of MD as well as the relationship of these trajectories to offending. Furthermore, we assessed whether MD varied by demographic and individual characteristics. Results indicated the presence of three trajectories: low, moderate, and high patterns. Females and Whites were more likely to be in the low-MD trajectory, whereas Hispanics were more likely to be in the high-MD trajectory. Respondents in the moderate or high-MD trajectories had more re-arrests at the 7-year follow-up relative to those in the low-MD trajectory, net of controls.

h-Index and m-Quotient Benchmarks of Scholarly Impact in Criminology and Criminal Justice: A Preliminary Note

Because Scopus and metrics like the h-index and m-quotient have become increasingly popular for assessing the impact of social science scholarship, criminology and criminal justice (CCJ) departments may be tempted to use those metrics when making important decisions like tenure and promotion. However, since no discipline-wide standards based on those metrics yet exist, CCJ departments have no comparative basis for interpreting the results of citation analyses of a particular faculty member’s scholarship. To identify what a set of disciplinary standards might look like, we used Scopus and calculated mean and median h-index and m-quotient values for faculty members (n = 504) in CCJ Ph.D. granting departments (n = 35) by rank and for editorial board members (n = 91) of Criminology, Justice Quarterly, and the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. Our results illustrate how comparative disciplinary standards could be developed and used by those in CCJ departments to assess the impact of faculty members’ scholarship.

The Effects of Criminal Propensity and Strain on Later Offending

Recently, Agnew has narrowed the focus of General Strain Theory by arguing certain factors must converge for criminal coping to occur. Specifically, individuals must have certain crime-related traits, experience strains that are perceived as unjust and high in magnitude, and occur in situations that encourage criminal coping. A longitudinal sample of serious adolescent offenders was used to assess the impact of direct and vicarious victimization on later offending among those with higher and lower criminal propensity. Regardless of their criminal propensity, youth who experienced victimization were more likely to engage in antisocial behavior compared with those who were not victimized. The results are mixed regarding Agnew’s thesis and suggest that victimization experiences may push justice-involved youth into further crime.

How well do the adolescent risk factors predict re-arrest frequency across race/ethnicity among serious adolescent offenders?

Abstract The field of criminology has devoted considerable time and attention to assessing the main risk factors associated with delinquency and criminal behavior. This line of research consistently documents that certain individual, familial, and situational risk factors are related to offending especially in adolescence. At the same time, there are two limitations to this line of work. The first is that most studies do not consider the extent to which these relationships hold across demographic groups, especially with respect to race/ethnicity. The second has been the reliance on general population/non-offender-based samples. This study aims to fill these two gaps. Using longitudinal data from the Pathways to Desistance, a study of serious adolescent offenders processed in two juvenile court systems, we investigate the extent to which a wide array risk factors relate to the frequency of re-arrests in a seven year follow-up across white, black, and Hispanic offenders.

Changing the Relationship Between Impulsivity and Antisocial Behavior: The Impact of a School Engagement Program:

This study examines the extent to which a third-party policing experiment designed to prevent truancy in disadvantaged adolescents is able to weaken the effect of impulsivity on self-reported antisocial behavior over time. Data are used from the Ability School Engagement Program (ASEP), a randomized controlled trial of 102 high truant youth from Brisbane, Australia who were followed for 2 years postrandomization. We find that ASEP weakened the effect of impulsivity on the diversity of self-reported antisocial behavior throughout the study for those in the experiment. This study provides evidence that an intervention that was designed to prevent truancy has the additional benefit of hindering the relationship between impulsivity and self-reported antisocial behavior variety.

Does violence in adolescence differentially predict offending patterns in early adulthood

Previous research is mixed on whether the commission of a violent offense in adolescence is predictive of criminal career characteristics. In the current study, we addressed the following: (a) What factors predict the commission of serious violence in mid-adolescence? and (b) Does involvement in serious violence in mid-adolescence lead to more chronic and/or more heterogeneous patterns of offending in early adulthood? Data were obtained from the Pathways to Desistance Study, a longitudinal study of serious adolescent offenders in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Phoenix, Arizona. Prior arrests, violence exposure, and gang involvement distinguished adolescents who engaged in violence at baseline. A violent offense at baseline was not predictive of a higher frequency of rearrests but was associated with membership in the low offending trajectory. In conclusion, violent offending in adolescence might be a poor predictor of chronic and heterogeneous patterns of offending throughout the life course.

The gendering effects of co-authorship in criminology & criminal justice research

Abstract Historically, research from various fields has indicated that females are underrepresented in academic papers. Not only are females less likely to publish relative to males, but they are also less likely to be sole-, co-, and first-authors in journal publications. While this gender discrepancy has become smaller in recent decades, males are still disproportionately represented in academic papers. The current study reviews author characteristics of articles published in the top fifteen criminology/criminal justice journals over a forty-year period (1974–2014). Among the 11,348 articles in the study, results indicated that while female sole- and first-authorship increased throughout the study period, 26.6% of sole-authors were female while 32% were first-authors and composed 33.3% of all co-authors. Further, females were less likely to be sole- and first-authors, less likely to have co-authors, and more likely to publish with other female co-authors.