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Most correctional agenciesâ??jails, prisons, parole departments, probation agenciesâ??utilize risk-need assessment instruments to supervise those under their control. A number of states within the United States utilize the Level of Service Inventory-Revised (LSI-R) (Gendreau and Smith, 2007). The LSI-R also has proven popular with academics, with a multitude of LSI-R studies published in just about twenty years of scholarly attention. While most studies suggest the LSI-R contains great promise, and many notable academic and practitioner consultants seem to have endorsed it, a small number of studies suggest that this instrument has limitations. Although most studies focus on North-American Caucasian males, recent findings that include more diverse samples suggest that non-Caucasian racial/ethnic groups are either over- or under-classified by the LSI-R (Holsinger et. al, 2006; Schlager and Simourd, 2007; Whiteacre, 2006). Holtfreter and Cupp (2007) have also delineated specific problems in utilizing the LSI-R with women offenders. Moreover, a careful examination of the LSI-R evaluations illuminates several other methodological concerns about the LSI-R that warrant discussion. This presentation reviews prior LSI-R scholarship and identifies some commonly employed research methodologies that might result in spurious findings. Implications for theory-building and supervision policy are discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many probation and parole departments utilize actuarial instruments to identify offender risk/need factors and to develop assessment-based supervision strategies. To evaluate the effectiveness of a specific risk/need assessment tool, it is important for departments to validate their instrument on their correctional population to determine if it is predictive of recidivism across the various offenders that they supervise. As part of the Travis Community Impact Supervision Initiative, the Travis County Community Supervision and Corrections department has focused on utilizing risk/need assessment appropriately as part of a larger "top to bottom" re-engineering of the department. In a previous evaluation of the Wisconsin Risk Instrument in Travis County Community Supervision and Corrections, the department found that this instrument predicted re-arrest and incarceration for both male and female offenders over a two-year follow-up period. The current study builds on this earlier study by examining the ability of the instrument to predict specific types of probation violations, re-arrest, and incarceration across various racial/ethnic samples. The discussion will focus on the study results, implications for future evaluations of risk/need assessment tools, and suggestions for developing appropriate data-driven supervision policies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many crimes films offer viewers the opportunity to leave their law-abiding lives behind to pretend that they are criminals. For the duration of the film, viewers are placed into the perspective of the offender, vicariously partaking in criminal offending, and in some cases, if the offender is apprehended and punished, experiencing the consequences of justice. This paper seeks to build on this aspect of crime films through an analysis of films that chronicle miscarriages of justice, where an innocent protagonist is identified as a criminal and punished according to the mores of the society in which the narrative is set. These films allow the viewer to follow the experiences of the protagonist, however, unlike in other crime films, the viewing experience is filtered through a sense of injustice, pessimism, and horror, providing a portrait of what it is like to be wrongly accused and found guilty of a crime. This analysis explores how these types of films include different narrative elements to critique both the formal and informal systems of procedural and vigilante justice. For example, in some films, the protagonist is an investigator such as a reporter or activist who is trying to prove the innocence of the wrongly-accused individual; this style of film analyzes the failings of the system from an analytic distance. The films in which the protagonist is the wrongly-accused person differs in that the viewer experiences the consequences of the failings of the system directly, suffering through police investigation, trial, and sometimes incarceration. This paper also addresses how these films about miscarriages of justice deal with the themes of race, gender, and class differences in their narratives. In films that focus on affluent white males, the experience of being wrongly accused of a crime is an aberrant incident, a coincidence or simple mistake that sets into motion a nightmare that no one could have imagined. Whereas in films that focus on the experience of a wrongly-accused minority (whether race, gender, or even class), the events that transpire are often a continuation of a preexisting pattern of societal prejudice that becomes as much an element of the story as the miscarriage of justice. Finally, this paper examines how films about miscarriages of justice treat the theme of punishment of an innocent party. Films in which innocent protagonists are incarcerated place the characters into environments in which they may come to empathize with the other prisoners, broadening the critique beyond the ability of the system to distinguish guilt from innocence to peek into how the system responds to and treats those who are actually guilty of a crime. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Significant differences in police decisions to stop a vehicle depending upon the race of the driver are documented in the literature. Although much has been written about the effect of race on police decisions to stop, cite, arrest, and search motorists, few studies have examined the important effect of gender on these same decisions. The purpose of this research is to more clearly examine the effect of gender on police officer decision to issue a citation. The study takes into account driver race, context effects, and police officer decision to arrest the driver and / or search the driver and vehicle. To do this, we use data from all jurisdictions in Rhode Island in 2002. We employ a two level hierarchical analysis to measure the relative contributions of driver characteristics and measures of jurisdiction characteristics to the explanation of police officer decision to issue a citation. The results reveal race related gender effects and jurisdiction level effects on the decision to issue a citation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current research indicates that police decisions to stop motorists may be determined by a variety of different factors. Studies are beginning to show that factors such as the severity of the traffic violation, location, time of day, and driver characteristics may influence officer decisions to stop vehicles. The police officers decision to stop a motorist, however, is only one of many decisions during a traffic stop. A second, less frequently examined decision the officer must make is whether to issue a citation or a warning to the motorist. The prior research has identified patterns of disparity in whom the police decide to cite compared to whom they warn which cannot be explained by individual differences in driving behavior alone. Indeed, police tend to treat leniently motorists who are female, Caucasian, of a higher economic status, older, and residents of the municipality or county. Therefore, police appear to be extending a benefit to certain groups based on extra legal variables. This study examines differences in traffic dispositions between municipal police departments in Massachusetts. The departments included in this analysis each have different approaches to traffic enforcement, as evidenced by differences in the total number of traffic stops each department makes and the proportion of stops which result in formal sanction. This study examines the effect of individual motorist characteristics, structural characteristics of the stop itself, and organizational characteristics of the department on the likelihood of receiving a warning versus receiving a civil citation. This study concludes with a discussion of the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]