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Historically, discussions of crime and punishment have focused on an individual lawbreaker and the institutions charged with monitoring and sanctioning him (or, more recently, her). However, over the last decade this scope has widened, with scholars increasingly turning their attention to the impact of incarceration on inmates' family, friends, and neighborhoods. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and survey research conducted with women visiting their partners at northern California's San Quentin State Prison to examine the repercussive effects of maintaining a relationship with a man behind bars. Through their efforts to "do time" with their incarcerated partners, legally innocent women come into close contact with the penal facility and as a result are obliged to comply with the institutional regulation of their appearance and comportment when they are at the penitentiary and to permit correctional supervision and censorship within their homes. Returning to the classic theories of Donald Clemmer's prisonization and Gresham Sykes' pains of imprisonment, I argue that the female partners of inmates undergo "secondary prisonization," a less potent but still powerful form of socialization to carceral norms brought about by prolonged subjection to the surveillance, control, and dictates of the correctional institution. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In similar fashion to the Chicago School, "a return to the field" approach was used to obtain an oral account of South Central, Los Angeles' Hoover Crip Gang. In 1999 and in 2000, the researcher spent 24 days or clocked 170 interview/observation hours within the Hoover Community. The method of entry could be labeled as the domino effect with respect to gangster politics and street protocol. Method of field entry was influenced by concepts derived from Elijah Anderson's code of the street. Method of data collection centers around interviewer as data collection instrument using a flexible structured style. These qualitative methods netted a rich base of information concerning black street gang politics, culture, and routine activities. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this research project is to capture the subjective experience of 11 felony-convicted female offenders suffering from long term drug abuse and a variety of other problems who were enrolled in an adult drug court in Northern California for a period of 6-18 months. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with these women in May 2004. The participants reported that the supportive atmosphere of the drug court, its close monitoring of their progress, and individual and group therapy provided a framework to work through trauma. They considered the court as a forum that helped reverse stigmatization. They explained that as they moved through the three levels of the program, and aftercare, their ability to stay "clean and sober" and control their lives grew and lead to adoption of a more positive outlook. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been much research that has documented the link between alcohol and violence for both adults and juveniles. Policy implications would hold that decreasing the juveniles' access to alcohol may play a part in reducing juvenile violence. This paper presents the results of a study that examined the number of locations in which underage alcohol purchases were permitted. A pre-test post-test method was employed to examine variations in identification requests by sellers of alcohol to participants who appeared below the legal age to purchase alcohol. Using goecoded data on locations, the study also examined possible mediating factors on underage alcohol buying such as neighborhood and type of location. This paper also provides policy implications based on the effectiveness of the experiment used and environmental factors in reducing underage alcohol purchases. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2006, the Police Assessment Resource Center and Vera Institute of Justice conducted a survey of officer and public perceptions of policing in Pasadena, California. The results of this survey yielded data concerning several constructs including police effectiveness, police misconduct and satisfaction with police services. This paper explores both the confluence and divergence of police and public perceptions across these constructs. The goal of this paper is to explore these issues as they exist in Pasadena in an effort to draw broader conclusions for policing as a whole. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While U.S. policy encourages homeownership, obtaining high levels of homeownership is challenging in low-income neighborhoods, partially due to higher levels of crime sometimes found in these neighborhoods. This paper contributes to the housing and economic development literature by testing the extent to which the disamenity of crime is capitalized into the housing markets, in both the volume of houses sold in the neighborhood and the sale price. By providing empirical evidence of some of these costs, the paper also contributes to the growing criminological literature on the costs of crime. Crime imposes direct costs on both victims and indirect costs on non-victims, who alter their routine activities. These costs are investigated by examining the relationships between increases in crime rates and residential decision-making. Much of the existing literature examines the impact of levels of crime rather than changes in crime. In a cross section, it is not surprising to find that house prices for constant-quality houses are lower in higher crime areas. So instead, census tract level panel data for Los Angeles, CA, is used to examine the impact of changes in violent and property crime rates on the housing markets over time. Hedonic regressions are used to estimate house prices as a function of the characteristics of the house, its location, the rate of turnover in the neighborhood, and changes in crime rates. Both the disaggregation of crime rates spatially and into violent and property crime are important. In addition, changes in crime rates over time are important. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines the institutional careers that youth clients take in a juvenile drug court in southern California and how the court's organizational features influence those various pathways. By institutional careers, the paper refers to youth's short- and long-term fates in the court. Based on 12 months of participant observation of staff meetings, court hearings, and staff field-based supervision of youth in their schools, homes and drug treatment programs, the paper focuses on two distinctive organizational features that frame the staff's decision-making processes, which in turn, influence the youth's institutional careers. First, the court operates within a complex institutional environment of legal and therapeutic practitioners who engage in a detailed "collaborative" decision-making process about youth's "treatment." Secondly, the coordinated involvement of multiple institutions allows for close and intensive routine supervision of youth, with information provided on youth's behavior and problems in family, community, school and drug-treatment program contexts. In contrast to classic probation supervision that keyed on episodic summaries of youth behavior and new violations of the law, supervision in juvenile drug courts comes to center on staff's routine assessments of youth's daily behavior within the courts' locally defined notions of "compliance" and "non-compliance." The paper argues that it is primarily these two organizational features that shape youth's institutional careers, more so than youth's individual behaviors per se. With this organizational perspective, the paper builds on current research on drug courts by examining "therapeutic jurisprudence in action. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines at the apparent racial and ethnic disparities in outcomes associated with California's "Three Strikes and You're Out" law. This paper examines the extent to which differences in "strikes" sentences for white, black, and Hispanic defendants can be attributed to discrepancies in the law's application, along with the extent to which racial and ethnic disparities emerge at several separate stages in the criminal justice system prior to sentencing, including arrest, criminal charging, plea bargaining or trial, conviction or acquittal, and the imposition of a sentence of prison, jail, or another alternative. It is necessary to look broadly at the whole California criminal justice system, rather than narrowly at Three Strikes sentencing, as the application of the Three Strikes law is only one step near the end of a long and complex process. The analysis uses a combination of state-level aggregate statistics and individual level data. Aggregate statistics allow for a clear understanding of the extent to which racial and ethnic disparities emerge throughout the California criminal justice system, while individual level data enable rigorous testing of alternatives to a discrimination hypothesis using regression models that include control variables such as specific offense, number of criminal charges, and prior criminal record. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1996, Congress mandated that the Bureau of Prisons conduct a test of private prison operation in the federal system and directed that a contractor be selected to operate a new facility in Taft, California. Abt Associates conducted the evaluation of this experiment. This paper will summarize the findings. These include an analysis of the cost of contracting compared with the estimated cost of the Bureaus operating this prison over a four-year period, an assessment of the contractors performance over six years compared with what the Bureau contracted the firm to do, and a comparison of various performance indicators obtained from the contractor-operated facility and other low-security federal prisons. The paper concludes with some general observations about the implications of these findings for privatization of prisons generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents findings from an ethnographic project on staff decision-making practices in a juvenile drug court in southern California. This paper will focus on one aspect of the project: staff strategies in decision-making. The paper specifically discusses how staff presents and discusses information about youth during their pre-court hearing meetings. In these meetings, the staff must decide by consensus whether the youth is compliant with the program and if not, what corresponding sanction should be imposed. This paper will trace how staff members try to transform a specific bad action committed by the youth into a significant or irrelevant event that merits a court response (or not). This paper is based on 13 months of participant observation of staff meetings, court hearings, and staff field-based work as they check on youth in their schools, homes and drug treatment programs. The larger project looks at how staff gathers information and makes decisions about youth participants and how youth and their parents try to influence and shape that decision-making process. In short, the objective of the project is to discern variations in a drug court clients institutional career and to show how the different actors (e.g. staff, youth, parents) all have a role in creating and shaping those variations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on preliminary findings from a study initiating a pilot project to collect, describe, and analyze data on homicide charges in one large and diverse California county. A major goal of this pilot project is to assess the viability of a statewide initiative that would mandate a similar system of data tracking for all homicides in all California counties. Initial collected data includes: basic case identifying information, counts charged, defendant demographics, victim demographics, co-defendant information, attorneys involved, and disposition information on some of the cases. In this paper, we discuss the significance of tracking such data for the purposes of understanding prosecutor charging decisions in murder cases, with a particular focus on factors associated with capital charges. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of a larger study which aims to provide an in-depth look at the lives, experiences, feelings, and reintegration efforts of young girls who participated in Mission Possible, one of the few gender-specific interventions offered to female delinquents in a Californian secure custody facility. Analyzing the content of letters sent to their former counselor, this study seeks to obtain a better understanding of these girls' perceptions of self, others, and the justice system, to identify ways in which the intervention has helped them succeed outside the facility and to highlight external and internal obstacles that hinder them from remaining trouble-free with the law, their family, and other social institutions. This paper will focus on the concept of empowerment as an explanatory variable, which may complement the propositions of traditional delinquency theories, as well as a frequently stated goal in the mission statements of several gender-responsive programs for females. Anastasia Tosouni, M.S.PhD Graduate StudentDepartment of Criminology, Law & SocietyUniversity of California, Irvineatosouni@uci.edu ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the links between a female offender taxonomy developed though individual assessment and feminist theory, specifically pathways theory. The taxonomy under discussion was developed by assessing the background and behavior of over 700 women imprisoned in California. This assessment was created by combining scales in the Northpointe COMPAS instrument and those from a gender-responsive instrument developed at the University of Cincinnati. Scales included individual behaviors and psych-social risk assessment and measures of trauma, victimization, mental health, intimate relationships, self-esteem and parental stress. Pathways theory argues that gender matters significantly in shaping criminality. This approach is based on a conceptual frame that examines women's experiences as girls and women prior to imprisonment. The most common pathways to crime are based on survival of personal experiences such as abuse, and substance abuse and the "triple jeopardy" of race, class and gender. Typically, the pathway research has used extensive interviews with women to uncover the life course events that place girls and women at risk of criminal offending. This paper examines these conceptual frames within the context of an empirical data set and assesses their application in moving the pathways theory forward. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the results of a pilot test of the validity of the San Diego Risk and Resiliency Checklist for a sample of Probation youth in Los Angeles County. Probation staff interviewed over 1000 youth, stratified by gender and race/ethnicity. A youth's "resiliency score" on the SDRRC (the net sum of risk factors, which have negative values, and protective factors, which have positive values) was significantly related to the youth's 12-month recidivism rate. The Los Angeles Probation Department has implemented a policy to institutionalize the SDRRC, now referred to as the LARRC, and is developing an automated case plan that will build on the LARRC assessment instrument to provide a more consistent and objective foundation for determining appropriate services based upon the needs of the minor. The paper will discuss validation results as well as sampling and testing issues related to subgroup validation and implementing the tool in actual practice. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most recent contribution to risk assessment technology in criminal justice comes from the emerging field of gender-responsive approaches to risk assessment, emphasizing the importance of women's unique "pathways" to crime and their unique needs often overlooked by current risk assessments. Such needs include parenting, relationships, poverty, abuse and trauma, mental health, self-esteem and the confluence of trauma, mental health and substance abuse. This paper reports recent findings from a large-scale study of California women prison inmates that included an innovative gender-responsive instrument developed by Van Voorhis and colleagues at the University of Cincinnati. This new instrument was jointly administered with a gender-neutral fourth-generation risk instrument (Northpointe's COMPAS) on 900 women prison inmates. The goal of this project included, among others, the design of improved prison classification procedures for women offenders regarding risk prediction and treatment relevance. This paper evaluates the reliability and concurrent validity of scales from these two instruments. Criterion indicators include: official records of prison misconducts, prior arrests and parole violations. The findings are highly encouraging, with both instruments making important and significant contributions to the assessment of women offenders and complementing each other in expected ways. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last quarter century the 'tough on crime' movement, accompanied by neoliberalist individualism, has sought to "devolve" responsibility for crime prevention from state agencies to the community through programs like neighborhood watch, community policing, and community-based prevention programs in a process termed responsibilization. Political leaders have increasingly relegated the responsibility for crime prevention to local community-based agencies while advocating a punitive "tough on crime" approach in order to maintain the appearance of power over criminals and offending behavior. This paper presents the results of ethnographic field work examining community-based youth-serving agencies, a crime prevention task force, and policy conferences in Southern California in order to elucidate the degree to which the strategies of prevention and punitive crime control coalesce politically and on the ground. Practitioners of community-based prevention agencies tailor their procedures to correspond to punitive strategies, but also resist these strategies, thus producing a complex and rich environment of control, correspondence, and resistance. The paper suggests that allowing individuals and communities to shape, implement, and manage the state's indirect crime control strategy of prevention actually creates opportunities for community-based practitioners to interject their own, sometimes countervailing, practices and philosophies of prevention. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On November 7th, 2000 voters of the State of California overwhelmingly passed Proposition 36, the Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act of 2000 (SACPA). This law marked a significant change in California drug policy by mandating treatment instead of incarceration for non-violent drug offenders. Between 2001 and 2005, more than 140,000 drug offenders in California were sentenced to probation and entered treatment as a result of this law. This paper will discuss the impact of Proposition 36 on criminal justice agencies in Orange County, CA. It will examine how drug offender sentencing has changed since inception of the law and discuss ramifications of this change. It will also describe how court calendars and probation caseloads have changed over the past several years and explain how law enforcement, judicial, and corrections agencies have coped with and adapted to the changes which resulted from the passage of Proposition 36.This current paper is part of a larger study which is currently ongoing and uses a case study approach to understand how Proposition 36 has changed the case processing and sentencing of drug offenders and the agencies tasked with processing and supervising these offenders. The study includes both time-series analyses of multiple case processing and sentencing outcomes and interviews with practitioners to determine the impact of this much-watched legislation. This presentation will report on some of the preliminary results of the study as they pertain to various criminal justice agencies and discuss the implications for practitioners and policy-makers. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Violence perpetrated by Juveniles incarcerated in detention facilities presents a serious danger to youth and staff. Violence by incarcerated minors presents a wide array of events from benign objections to orders or escalating to large scale riots which jeapordize institutional security. This paper reports on research conducted at 18 juvenile camps and 3 juvenile hall facilities in the Los Angeles County Probation Department. Nearly 4,000 juveniles are incarcerated annually in these facilities.This research is based on analysis of official Special Incident Reports filed between 2004-2005. This unusually ricvh data source provides a valuable understannding of the patterns, nature, and scope of violence within juvenile detention facilities. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Balance theory has been employed in many contexts to explain social processes, but the results with regard to whether balance is achieved are not consistent. This paper will explore the application of balance theory as an attempt to explain the formation of social networks of gangs in Long Beach, California. More specifically, we are interested in answering the following questions: Considering the rivalry and ally relationships as negative and positive ties respectively, is balance theory able to explain the signed graph structure as it is? Are the gangs situated in a balanced network, meaning that the tensions between the gangs are reduced and some stable state is achieved? If the network is imbalanced, is the tension caused by the instability manifested in the form of elevated level of gang violence? Unlike most studies in which balance theory is applied, the present study provides an extreme context to test balance theory where signs of a graph can lead to fatal incidents (e.g., death of members from war between gangs). Hence, it is possible to suspect a strong tendency for the gangs to move toward balance. Our data come from Long Beach Police Department (LBPD). They consist of network data; rivalry and ally relationships among known gangs in Long Beach as of 2004 and the attribute data; race and size of the gangs by the number of members. We first explore whether the probability of balanced triad in the network is higher than by chance, suggesting that the gangs are likely to be embedded in balanced relationships. Then we incorporate the data on ethnicity of the gangs and reexamine the balance of the network. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will present preliminary outcome and impact findings from the evaluation of the Gang Reduction Program in Los Angeles. These findings will focus on the comparison of community level outcomes and gang-related crime in the targeted area of Boyle Heights in comparison to a similar control group neighborhood. Also to be discussed will be the outcomes of a survey of local steering committee members concerning implementation issues and interagency collaboration. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Los Angeles County Jail is known as the largest mental health treatment facility in the world. There are 22,000 inmates housed in the jail at any given time and approximately 10% are under active treatment with Jail Mental Health Services. The Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health and Sheriff's Department have been partnering to create new and innovative programming which makes strides to change this fact. One significant change to the way that jail services are provided is the Assembly Bill (AB) 2034 program, which provides screening, discharge planning and community linkage services to mentally ill inmates both while they are in custody and as they leave the jail. Importantly, the program includes representatives who will pick clients up from the jail, coordinating housing and treatment. Since it's inception in 1999 the program has served 4500 clients statewide leading to 72% decrease in incarceration. With new funds available, under the 2004 Mental Health Services Act (Prop 63), there will be an increase in program slots and the addition of a Jail Outreach and Linkage team at the Los Angeles County Jail. This paper will describe the program and some of the challenges providing and expanding AB2034 services. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While corrections departments across the country often espouse multiple goals within their missions, daily prison operations necessarily privilege safety and security as the facility's top operational priorities. Nonetheless, violence is ever-present and thus a compelling domain for analysis of prison policymaking and management. In addition to its embeddedness within prison culture, violence is symptomatic of central institutional challenges facing today's prisons such as overcrowding, inadequate programming, insufficient surveillance and incongruous staff and administrator visions. More to the point, violence is often interpreted as a visible marker of organizational failure. Research on prison management and prison violence is not new; however, it is preoccupied with understanding the causes and manifestations of violence and lacks an understanding of the complicated ways in which changes in policies come into being (or not). Focusing empirical attention on the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation this paper examines how discourse, policies, and implementation efforts have sought to maintain order against a changing political, legal, and social environment. It does so to provide an understanding of the ways in which prison managers and administrators negotiate often competing organizational and facility level goals and address specific questions, such as: When does the administration's understanding of, and orientation to violence vary, if ever? Given the embeddedness of violence in prison culture, when, why, and how are policies enacted? And ultimately, what is the relationship between prison policy discourse, its enactment, and its implementation? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilizing a sample of 8,785 intimate partner violence cases processed through Sacramento County Distirct Attorney's office between 1999 and 2001, this paper seeks to identify those variables which predict the decision to go to trial and trial outcomes. A logistic regression analysis of the decision to go to trial indicates that eight variables are influential in predicting this outcome. Four variables increase the probability of a trial and, of these, two are measures of offense severity, namely, use (including threats) of a weapon, and the number of victim injuries. The presence of a child and also whether the arrest originated in a warrant (a measure of evidentiary strength) show the same positive relationship. On the other hand, suspect injury and whether or not the suspect is on probation both reduce the likelihood of trial, as do prosecutorial filing of felony charges and a cohabiting relationship. Eight variables also appear to be influential in determining trial outcomes Five variables increase, and three variables decrease, the likelihood of a conviction. Two measures of offense severity -number of injuries to the victim and a felony filing-predict conviction. If the arrest originated in a warrant, the likelihood of conviction also increases. A number of extralegal variables attain significance. Cohabitation increases the probability of conviction as does suspect employment. On the other hand, the presence of a child at the time of the incident makes conviction less likely as does injury of the suspect by the victim and victim substance use. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Systematic data on the correlates and manifestations of inmate-on-inmate violence serves to inform researchers on the comparative dynamics of prison and community violence and guide corrections officials and public policy makers on strategies to develop safer correctional facilities. This presentation reports preliminary findings on a study of violence in prison derived from structured interviews with several hundred inmates from California prisons. Inmate reports provide general descriptive information (e.g., facility location, participant and weapon characteristics) as well as race, gang and other important dynamics in the generation of inmate violence. We conclude this paper with a discussion of the implications of study findings for correctional practice and policy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines case studies of academicians directly informing the content of training and practice within the investigative community in California. Case studies include development of a comprehensive job analysis of the detective position, to include a cognitive task analysis; creation of a job aid that facilitates identification of a suspect's personality qualities in order to customize an interview/interrogation approach for maximum information gain; and development of an advanced homicide investigation course that features the contribution of the array of forensic sciences in case resolution. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how three different jurisdictions in California have responded to the problem of juvenile domestic and family violence. Two counties have developed very different specialized court programs, and the third has no specialized approach. The different approaches have resulted in differenences in the volume and types of cases, as well as intervention strategies. This research is supported by NIJ through a grant to the National Center for State Courts, with the cooperation of the juvenile courts and probation departments in three large urban counties. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In February 2005 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Johnson v. California that the California Department of Corrections' practice of racially segregating inmates in two-person cells in its reception centers is to be reviewed under the highest standard of constitutional review available, namely "strict scrutiny." However, we know very little about how racial segregation is enacted in California's reception centers. For example, what precisely is the role of California's policies and practices using race-based classifications in creating both racialized inmates and racialized prisons? To understand this process-what I will call a "negotiated settlement"-I conducted an ethnography in several reception centers in California. As I argue in this paper, the U.S. Supreme Court's understanding of racial segregation fixates on the perceived threat of the state treating citizens differently on the basis of skin color at the price of ignoring how corrections officials and inmates alike engage in a series of interactions within a highly institutionalized context to produce observable racial segregation. Prison officials embrace and enact a de facto policy of assigning incoming inmates to same-race living environments; at the same time, inmates play a key role in how this process unfolds and what consequences it has. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gang related crime has a broad impact on urban communities. The impact of gangs, either juvenile or adult members, ranges from personal victimization to the steady erosion of neighborhoods. In an effort to augment the complex standards required for Criminal processing, some jurisdictions are implementing Civil Injunctions within specific neighborhoods to reduce gang activity. These Civil Injunctions broaden the scope of offending behaviors and expedite the ability of law enforcement in applying such orders to gang members. This paper reports on the process and impact of Civil Gang Injunctions implemented in the City of Los Angeles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MacArthur Park a 40 acre park located within LAPDs Rampart Division was a hot spot of disorder and crime during the 1990s. Not only was gang violence a serious concern, but the park was widely known to be one of the largest open-air drug markets in Los Angeles. In early 2003, newly appointed LAPD chief William Bratton assigned an innovative police commander to Rampart. Soon after, the Alvarado Corridor Initiative was developed. This initiative combined police problem solving and order maintenance practices with efforts from other city agencies to address crime and disorderly behavior in MacArthur Park. Using data from LAPDs Compstat Unit, this paper utilizes time-series analyses to assess the impact of the initiative on criminal activity in MacArthur Park. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on convergence spaces of youthful offenders. Movement between key activity nodeshome, school, and recreationto some extent dictates where and when youths collide with temptation to violate the law and get into trouble. Therefore, tracing youthful offender travel paths reveals possible convergence places. Data obtained through a survey of 1500 juveniles residing in Riverside County, CA revealed consistent hangout locations and regular pathways. Estimates of time and distance to activity nodes showed varying levels of accuracy. Principle hangout locations included both public and private facilities at a distance from home address. These places may be common activity nodes that are better suited for analysis of journey to crime. Research implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family TIES (Targeted Intervention, Education, and Services) is a reentry program that provides male and female jail inmates in San Diego County with a range of life skill services. The goal of the program is to reduce recidivism by helping inmates gain the skills necessary to successfully transition back into the community. This collaborative effort between law enforcement and community based agencies is based on best practices, and offers inmates being offered a series of classes including domestic violence. anger management, substance abuse, parenting, and pre-employment. Both a process and impact evaluation is being conducted to document how the program was implemented and what outcomes were achieved. Data are being gathered through pre and post knowledge tests, standardized assessments, and criminal history to measure change in knowledge, recidivism, client engagement, and client risk-factors. The project is beginning its second year of a three-year timeline. The current paper will provide data on the above outcomes, as well as describe the challenges and benefits experienced thus far in collaborating with community-based agencies to provide pre-release services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There seems to be a growing ambivalence about the death penalty in the United States. Although a majority of citizens seem to continue their support of the death penalty, there is increasing concern surrounding a multitude of issues with its application. This is evidenced by high levels of support for moratoria and the establishment of death penalty commissions in several states. Issues such as innocence, adequate legal representation, racial discrimination, prosecutorial misconduct, and international relations are paramount in modern death penalty discourse. Little is known about the nature and dynamics of death penalty attitudes in the context of these issues. In an attempt to examine such dynamics and the reception and impact of information about these issues, this paper examines attitudes among college students in the two states which sentence the most people to death: Texas and California. Based on 927 responses to an extensive survey gauging the nature and extent of attitudes reflecting support and opposition to the death penalty, both quantitative and qualitative findings are presented and discussed. Beyond issues related to support and opposition, attitudinal rationale, receptivity of critical information, and mutability of attitudes are examined. Finally, analyses comparing attitudes across these two divergent states are presented. Implications of findings are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DNA databases are playing an increasingly important role in solving crime. But efforts to expand these databases, to make them even more effective, raise important civil liberties concerns. Although most states currently include only violent felons or sex offenders, some have proposed expanding databases to include all felons and all arrestees. This paper will examine efforts to persuade the public to support (or oppose) database expansion using a 2004 California voter initiative (The DNA Fingerprint, Unsolved Crime and Innocence Protection Act) as an example. It will also report survey data on factors that influence public opinion on this topic. Among the issues examined are the actual (and potential) influences of concerns about privacy, racial discrimination, cost effectiveness and the potential for error in shaping public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For centuries practitioners and scholars have sought to improve the criminal justice of their day by making comparisons with other systems. In the modern world most countries pattern their systems either on common law or on civil law models. Using Germany as an example of the civil law inquisitorial system and California as an example of the common law adversarial system, this paper seeks to identify the main points of doctrinal and operational differences in criminal procedure. It will also discuss the practical consequences of these differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates questions about racial disparities in the application and outcomes of "Three Strikes and You're Out," one of California's most controversial and far-reaching sentencing reforms. Using multilevel analysis of individual and county level data, the following research questions are investigated:*Aside from legally relevant variables, what factors influence sentencing decisions in California Three Strikes cases? To what extent do extralegal defendant characteristics, administrative factors, political considerations, and community characteristics affect District Attorneys' policies regarding the handling of Three Strikes eligible cases, and, in turn, the outcomes and disparities that emerge from the charging and sentencing processes?*Does the extent of racial and ethnic disparity vary between jurisdictions? Does county-to-county variation in sentencing outcomes correspond to differences between District Attorneys in Three Strikes policy and implementation? Is the influence of extralegal factors such as defendants' race, sex, and age more pronounced in the absence of strict or clear guidelines regarding how to file Strikes charges? These questions are designed to examine whether racial or ethnic stereotypes are more likely to affect prosecutors' charging decisions when there is greater uncertainty regarding whether to file Three Strikes charges. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the development and validation of a taxonomic classification to unravel the heterogeneity of the female offender population in California Prisons in terms of criminogenic needs and gender responsive factors. The approach uses a comprehensive classification domain that includes gender-sensitive factors (parenting issues, sexual abuse, trauma, poverty, etc) as well as a battery of gender-neutral criminogenic factors from the Northpointe COMPAS Reentry Assessment. Pattern seeking methods were applied to the risk-needs profiles and criminal histories of 718 female offenders. A hierarchical taxonomy with several fairly distinct pathways of female offenders was developed. Three validation approaches were applied: convergence across different quantitative pattern seeking methods, convergence across different samples - using a bootstrapping procedure; and external validation against selected criminal behavior factors. The resulting female offender profile types will be described and their potential implications for both theory and differential treatment briefly noted. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this paper is on questions of gender and power for couples in treatment. Specifically, I qualitatively examine how injection drug using couples manage their drug use and treatment and how gender roles and power are negotiated by couples as they move in and out of treatment. The data come from a longitudinal study of 233 injection drug users in contact with methadone maintenance programs in the San Francisco Bay Area (1990-1993). The qualitative data are analyzed to provide rich, detailed description of the experiences of a subset of 17 couples using content analysis of the in-depth interviews. Findings identify patterns in drug use, treatment, and family relationships. In particular, it is noted that for many of the couples, codependency was the primary identifying nature of the relationship, and it defined both drug-seeking and conventional behavior. Results are discussed in light of the impact empowerment (as individuals and as couples) has in maximizing treatment outcomes. Understanding the interactions of gender and power in treatment contributes to the general fields of gender and health studies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 5 years, Domestic Violence Courts, as defined by the assignment of criminal domestic violence cases to a separate calendar or to a dedicated judge or judicial officer, have grown in popularity as a criminal justice response to domestic violence. Unlike the other problem-solving courts, domestic violence (DV) courts have suffered from the lack of a clearly defined model. The result is not only that the courts develop uncertainly, through trial and error, but also that there may be inconsistencies in operations as the judge struggles with adjudication in the absence of clearly defined goals and principles. A National Portrait of Domestic violence courts is a five-year, joint research project by the Center for Court Innovation and the California Administrative Office of the Courts. This paper will present preliminary analysis of data arising from our in-depth, national survey of over 300 criminal domestic violence courts. Analysis will focus on the best practices in terms of victim and defendant services, case processing, and case dispositions, as well as the evolutionary challenges identified on the survey by dedicated DV court staff and specialized DV prosecutors. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In California, parole returns account for six out of ten admissions to prison annually, but this process is not well-understood by policymakers or the public. This paper explores the process of parole revocation in California through multivariate statistical analyses of state correctional data. We examine the revocation process in two venues through which parolees can be returned to custodyâ??county courts and the parole boardâ??which are distinct from one another in terms of the types of cases they hear, acceptable standards of evidence, and the degree of punishment that can be delivered. Our analyses assess the relative impact of four sets of factors on revocation decisions in each venue: the characteristics of cases, parolees, decisionmaking organizations themselves, and parolees' communities. We find that while case characteristics such as charge severity matter a lot in terms of court and board revocation decisions, so too do the characteristics of individuals, correctional organizations, and the communities where parolees live. Revocation decisions are complex, and our analyses show that the process is actually a multifaceted phenomenon involving evaluations of a prohibited act (or acts), the perceived dangerousness and blameworthiness of the parolee, organizational pressures on decisionmakers, and decisionmakers' conceptions about a parolee's community. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in the mid-1990s, various public policy groups have made recommendations concerning reform of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) parole system. Chief among them is the recommendation to use an actuarial tool to estimate risk of re-offending and to identify treatment needs of offenders. They also pointed out the need to utilize an evidence-based, validated risk assessment tool. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is in the process of validating a risk/needs assessment tool. As part of this effort, the UCI Center for Evidence-Based Corrections has been working with CDCRto develop a risk prediction model based on static risk factors derived from existing data sources at CDCR and the Department of Justice "rap sheets" for use in a parole violation matrix to guide supervision and treatment decisions and possible other structured decision-making tools. Automated criminal history information on over 100,000 released offenders were used to develop and cross-validate a risk assessment tool. This paper discusses some of the practical issues associated with creating tools from automated data as well as how policy decisions regarding scale cutpoints were framed and solved. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on an analysis of resident attitudes toward the police and legal system among predominantly immigrant Latino residents in the city of Costa Mesa, which has been the site of a novel anti-immigrant legal intervention. Costa Mesa was once a healthy city where residents interacted harmoniously. has drastically transformed. Recently, polarization became evident in media reports regarding the large population of immigrants on the Westside of the city. The ongoing increase of Latino residents on the Westside produced a negative reaction among some non-Latino residents and a gradual increase in anti-Latino, anti-immigrant sentiments. In spite of several initiatives to improve resident's relations, critical factors such as a recent law, which allows local police to enforce federal immigration checks on certain classes of detained residents, has transformed this California city into an immigration battleground. This city has also become an epitome of the polarizing consequences of anti-immigrant sentiment and its harmful effects on the process of seeking solutions to issues of immigration. This case study of Costa Mesa will demonstrate the impact of this legal effort to enforce federal immigration laws through local law enforcement, especially regarding the Latino residents' perception of the police by comparing Latino residents' prior attitudes toward the police and the legal system before and after that law was implemented. The research methodology will include pre and post phone interviews face-to-face interviews from 2000 to 2007 and content analysis of newspapers and various documents ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on an analysis of resident attitudes toward the police and legal system among predominantly immigrant Latino residents in the city of Costa Mesa, which has been the site of a novel anti-immigrant legal intervention. Costa Mesa was once a healthy city where residents interacted harmoniously. has drastically transformed. Recently, polarization became evident in media reports regarding the large population of immigrants on the Westside of the city. The ongoing increase of Latino residents on the Westside produced a negative reaction among some non-Latino residents and a gradual increase in anti-Latino, anti-immigrant sentiments. In spite of several initiatives to improve resident's relations, critical factors such as a recent law, which allows local police to enforce federal immigration checks on certain classes of detained residents, has transformed this California city into an immigration battleground. This city has also become an epitome of the polarizing consequences of anti-immigrant sentiment and its harmful effects on the process of seeking solutions to issues of immigration. This case study of Costa Mesa will demonstrate the impact of this legal effort to enforce federal immigration laws through local law enforcement, especially regarding the Latino residents' perception of the police by comparing Latino residents' prior attitudes toward the police and the legal system before and after that law was implemented. The research methodology will include pre and post phone interviews face-to-face interviews from 2000 to 2007 and content analysis of newspapers and various documents ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "Liberation Hypothesis" represents the idea that the level of discretion available to criminal justice agents is inversely related to the severity of the crime under consideration. More directly, this hypothesis has been interpreted to mean that criminal justice agents should rely less on extra-legal and more on legal characteristics of defendants as the severity of the offense increases. In this paper, I explain why OLS (and variants of OLS) fail to adequately test for variable effects of defendants' extra-legal characteristics on criminal process decisions. I propose a more thorough test of the Liberation Hypothesis using data on nearly 10,000 bail decisions in California in the 1990s with a series of quantile regression models that allow for variations in the effects of defendants' characteristics across the full distribution of bail decisions. The results provide mixed support for the Liberation Hypothesis. At lower levels of assigned bail, extra-legal and legal characteristics both have significant effects on bail amounts. However, as the assigned bail amount increases, extra-legal characteristics have increasingly greater effects on bail amounts, while the effects of legal characteristics remain approximately the same. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The so-called "crime victims movement" has been one of the most successful and understudied social movements in the United States in the last several decades. Scholars argue that the "crime victims movement" in the United States is retributive and focused on criminal punishment issues (opposed to restorative and welfarist) because of the unique political traditions and institutional frameworks in this country. Drawing on archival and interview data, this paper argues that the particular political culture, organizational configuration, and institutions in California (not the United States as a whole) produced a unique "crime victims movement," which treated victims and offenders as competitors in a zero-sum game (practices and programs that are good for the offender are bad for the victim, and vice versa). Politicians and state bureaucrats (e.g. Ronald Reagan and Edwin Meese) exported California's version of "victims rights" to the national level. The political traditions and institutions at the federal level allowed these actors to implement the California-style "crime victims movement." ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this presentation, we explore the contours of inmate-on-inmate violence. Structured interviews with a random sample of more than 300 inmates in six California prisons offer detailed descriptions of several hundred sexual and nonsexual violent incidents. Specifically, we compare the characteristics of location, participants and motivating dynamics of the two types of incidents. In addition, we examine the characteristics of inmate violence victims with those who have avoided victimization. We conclude this paper with a discussion of the implications of study findings for correctional practice and policy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Each decade, there seems to be a new focus on certain perpetrators as the cause of most crime problems and most public fear. Since 2001, much of the focus has been on terrorists, but in the 1990s, the focus was on juveniles and gangs. Some cities are again experiencing an upsurge in gang crime. In 1997, we conducted a random digit dial survey of 1000 Orange County, California residents to examine the level and causes of fear of gangs among the public. Prior research has shown that women are much more afraid of crime than men are, so it is important to disaggregate samples and study the causes and consequences of women's and men's fears separately. Using descriptive statistics and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) techniques, this paper will compare women's and men's perceptions of community disorder and diversity, their levels of perceived risk and fear regarding gang crimes, and the behavioral precautions these groups take to protect themselves from gangs. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impacts of Three Strikes on crime in California and throughout the U.S. are analyzed using cross-sectional time series analysis of state-level data from 1987 to 2002. The model includes control variables representing pre-existing crime trends and economic, demographic, and policy factors. Despite limited usage outside California, Three Strikes is associated with faster rates of decline in robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft. However, although California has the broadest and most-frequently-used Three Strikes policy, California's law has not been more effective at reducing crime than other states' more limited laws. The findings support the idea that most of the impact of Three Strikes laws on crime is the result of deterrence. The analyses indicate that the "toughest" sentencing policy is not necessarily the most effective option. Relatively narrowly-constructed and seldom-used habitual offender policies adopted in other states appear to produce crime-reduction outcomes comparable to those observed in California with far lower costs. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In July 2005, a needs assessment survey was distributed to over 2000 identified victim service practitioners within California. The survey inquired about the educational needs of victim service practitioners. Specifically practitioners were asked to determine the knowledge areas and skills that are needed in working with victims. This presentation will specifically focus on the responses given by those who have direct contact with primary and secondary victims. The presentation will address two main points. First, it will provide an overview of the findings from approximately 500 participants. Second, it will detail how the findings from this study can be used to develop and advance education in Victimology. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leadership is a value that police organizations have historically sought, yet only indirectly address in academy training. New and innovative programs directed at training officers to be better leaders, however, have recently challenged this assumption. This research evaluates the effects of expectations and rank on self-reported experiences within the Los Angeles Police Department's West Point Leadership Program. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

California leads the nation in sending people on parole back to prison, and parole violators now represent two-thirds of all admissions to California prisons. Governor Schwarzenegger has made revising parole revocation practices a top priority, but unfortunately, the requisite analysis to guide those reforms does not exist. This project uses quantitative and qualitative analytical approaches to examine the hidden and highly discretionary process of parole revocation in California. We explicitly investigate how parolee behavior, parolee characteristics, organizational dynamics, and community conditions affect the likelihood of different types of recidivism, including recorded violations of the parole agreement, parole revocations, and arrests for new crimes. We have assembled parolees' 2003-2004 administrative records from California Department and Corrections and Rehabilitation databases, as well as relevant data on parole units, parole officers, and the communities into which parolees are released. Using these data, we estimate hierarchical hazard models which measure the effect of individual, organizational and community characteristics on recidivism. The analyses show how unit and community factors contribute to the probability that a parolee will violate parole, have parole revoked, or commit new crimes. The analyses also show whether technical violations are themselves predictive of new crimes, and whether parole agents and units recommend revocation under similar conditions. Our quantitative analyses are complemented by parole staff interviews and field observations. This study makes important contributions to knowledge of the parole violation process, provides foundational information for policy discussions of California parole reform, and contributes to scholarly literature on the use and possible abuse of discretion in justice system decision-making. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]