Police officers play a central role in attaining justice for sexual assault survivors. Disclosing sexual assault is critical to attain justice and foster support, yet survivors often experience negative interactions when disclosing sexual victimization to the police. Police officers' experiences investigating sexual assault have not been explored. Qualitative methods were used to explore the experiences of police officers who respond to reports of sexual assault. Semi-structured interviews with 20 police officers were analyzed in NVIVO software and uncovered four themes, (1) Lack of Sexual Assault Training; (2) Compassion for the Victim; (3) Investigative Process, and (4) Police Distress. The first-hand accounts of police officers uncover opportunities to improve police response to sexual assault and enhance the disclosure experience of survivors.

Though the literature largely recognizes adult drug treatment courts (ADCs) as beneficial to participants, with lower rates of recidivism and drug use, the question remains of how ADCs impact communities and how other institutions (e.g., law enforcement) react to their presence. This study extends previous work estimating higher arrests associated with ADCs, particularly for crimes involving higher degrees of law enforcement discretion. Results indicate lower drug possession arrest rates for White residents in rural communities, and higher in urban areas, generally, but especially for Black citizens. Though the exact source of these changes has yet to be determined, current analysis indicates larger effect sizes for arrests scaled per officer, as compared to per population, pointing toward changes in law enforcement behavior.

Criminologists have recently explored online cybercrime-as-service markets where offenders offer hacking tools and services for a fee. So-called "stresser" or "booter" markets offering distributed reflective denial of service (DRDoS) attacks have been a recent target of international law enforcement action. Few have explored the ways in which these operations continued to function under increased enforcement and sanction. This study attempted to address this gap through a qualitative analysis of online advertisements from 44 booter and stresser operators. The findings revealed operators changed their preferred communications and payment platforms, as well as increased the attack methods available to customers. The implications of this analysis for our understanding of illicit online markets, and the decision-making processes of cybercriminals are discussed in detail.

This study uses open source, public information to examine nation-state and non-nation-state ideologically motivated cyberattacks performed against US targets from 1998 to 2018. We created the Extremist Cyber Crime Database (ECCD) that includes scheme, offender and target codebooks to address gaps in existing research and better inform policymakers. We describe our open source collection procedures, the type of information uncovered, and how we assessed their quality and reliability. We highlight our findings, compare these extremist cyber-crimes to extremist real world violence, and discuss their conceptual and policy implications.

This study examines police officers’ decision-making practices through analyzinghow they determine which offenders are candidates for an 810, or peace bond.This legal tool allows police officers to petition the courts for continuedsurveillance and conditions for offenders postrelease. Little, however, isoffered in terms of assessment guidelines on how to make such determinations. Asa result, police officers discretionary behaviors and additional legal factorsplay a key role in these determinations. Our findings advance the idea that“uncertainty” is the central object to be managed, and further complicate howrisk is constructed and mobilized by suggesting that risk assessments result inover-precautionary practices.

In this paper we examined the impact of the quality of teacher-studentrelationships at age 10 on young people’s delinquency at ages 13, 15, and 17utilizing propensity-score matching. The young people were matched based on 105characteristics, measured at ages 7 to 10. The sample comprised 1483 (49.4%female) adolescents representing around 80 different countries of origin,residing in Zurich, Switzerland. We found that young people who reported abetter relationship with their teacher at age 10, engaged in fewer delinquentacts at ages 13, 15, and 17. These findings suggest that when young peopleperceive a better relationship with their teachers this serves as a protectivefactor against their engagement in delinquency up to 7 years later.

Despite a well-established body of research demonstrating that others' evaluations of a person's physical attractiveness carry significant meaning, researchers have largely ignored how self-perceptions of physical attractiveness relate to offending behaviors. Applying general strain theory and using eight waves of panel data from the Adolescent Academic Context Study, we explore how self-perceptions of attractiveness relate to offending as youth progress through school. Results demonstrate that youth who perceive themselves as more attractive engage in more-not less-offending. Depression, which is treated as a form of negative affect, does not appear to mediate this relationship. We conclude by raising attention to the possibility that being "good-looking" may actually be a key risk factor for crime.

Studies indicated that detainees are not always allocated to treatment programs based on official guidelines. Street-level bureaucracy theory suggests that this is because government employees do not always perform policies as prescribed. This study aimed to assess whether this also applies to the allocation of offenders to treatment in Dutch penitentiary institutions, and aimed to determine which factors influenced this. The proposed questions were addressed by studying a group of 541 male prisoners who participated in the Dutch prison-based Prevention of Recidivism program. Results showed that official guidelines were, in most cases, not leading when referring detainees to programs. Instead, treatment referrals were influenced by a broad range of risk factors, as well as the length of an offender’s sentence.

This article assesses the relationship between imprisonment length and recidivism. The data come from a unique longitudinal and nationwide study of Dutch prisoners, serving an average of 4.1 months of confinement (N = 1,467). A propensity score methodology is used to examine the dose–response relationship for three types of registered recidivism (i.e., reoffending, reconviction, and reincarceration) within a 6-month follow-up period. Findings indicate that length of imprisonment exerts an overall null effect on future rates of recidivism and that this conclusion holds across the various types of recidivism. These findings contribute to continuing scholarly debates over the social and economic costs of imprisonment.

This article disaggregates Donohue and Levitt’s (DL’s) national panel-data models to the state level and shows that high concentrations of teenage abortions in a handful of states drive all of DL’s results in their 2001, 2004, and 2008 articles on crime and abortion. These findings agree with previous research showing teenage motherhood is a major maternal crime factor, whereas unwanted pregnancy is an insignificant factor. Teenage abortions accounted for more than 30% of U.S. abortions in the 1970s, but only 16% to 18% since 2001, which suggests DL’s panel-data models of crime/arrests and abortion were outdated when published. The results point to a broad range of future research involving teenage behavior. A specific means is proposed to reconcile DL with previous articles finding no relationship between crime and abortion.