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The primary purpose of the current study was to assess the role of organizational justice in understanding prison staff job stress. Specifically, the authors surveyed 322 correctional employees across two prisons located in Guangzhou, China to explore the effects of distributive, procedural, informational, and interpersonal justice on work stress. Results from ordinary least squares analysis revealed significant contributions from three dimensions of organizational justice in explaining stress from work among prison workers. Prison personnel who had higher perceptions of interpersonal, distributive, and procedural justice in the organization were less likely to report being stressed. In addition, men were more likely to report higher levels of work tension than women.

Officers are a valuable resource for prisons across the globe. Working in corrections is a demanding job with a higher-than-average risk of job burnout. Most prison burnout studies have focused on staff working in Western prisons, particularly those in the U.S. These studies have generally found an association between work attitudes and burnout among prison officers. However, a key question is whether the associations are universal or contextual, varying by nation . The current study examined the link between the major work attitudes of job involvement, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment and the burnout dimensions of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and feeling ineffective at work among staff at two Chinese prisons. According to the results of ordinary least squares multivariate regression tests, job involvement, and job satisfaction had significant negative effects on emotional exhaustion, but commitment did not. Only job involvement had significant negative effects on depersonalization. Job involvement and organizational commitment had significant negative effects on feeling ineffective, while job satisfaction had nonsignificant effects. The results indicate that the major work attitudes are negatively linked to job burnout for the studied Chinese prison staff; efforts should be undertaken to build these work attitudes to reduce burnout since burnout is linked to negative consequences for officers, inmates, and the prison. Based on previous research and current findings, some of the effects of work attitudes appear to be universal, and others appear to be contextual.

The bulk of the limited research on prison staff life satisfaction has been conducted in Western nations, particularly in the U.S., and only two studies have explored the relationship between organizational justice and life satisfaction, both of which only examined two of the four dimensions of justice. The current study investigated how all four dimensions of organizational justice (informational, interpersonal, distributive, and procedural) were related to life satisfaction among Chinese prison staff. The ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis indicated that informational, procedural, and distributive justice had significant positive effects on life satisfaction. Interpersonal justice had an insignificant effect.

Appropriate supervision strategies are the backbone of community corrections. The success of community supervision is dependent upon the attitudes of both officers and offenders. Despite this, research on offenders’ attitudes toward community corrections supervision is surprisingly very limited. The current study investigated attitudes of officers and offenders toward and predictors of four different community supervision strategies based on data collected in Hubei, China, in 2103 and 2016. The study found that among demographics, community variables, and value factor, the mutual trust value factor was the most important predictor of community supervision strategies by both officers and offenders. Additional findings and policy implications are discussed.

Organizational trust includes both supervisor trust and management trust. Additionally, the three main work attitudes are job involvement, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. The objec...

The integration of smart grid and Internet of Things (IoT) has been facilitated with the proliferation of electric vehicles (EVs). However, due to EVs’ random mobility and different interests of energy demand, there exists a significant challenge to optimally schedule energy supply in IoT. In this paper, we propose a secure game theoretic scheme for charging EVs supplied by mobile charging stations (MCSs) in IoT, considering the dynamic renewable energy source. Firstly, the charging system composed of MCSs is developed to implement the charging service. Secondly, when the secure charging scheme of EV users is designed, the utility function of each entity in the charging system is formulated to express the trading relationship between EV users and MCSs. Moreover, with consideration of the competition and cooperation, we propose a Stackelberg game framework with sub-noncooperative optimization. Thirdly, the existence and uniqueness of both Stackelberg equilibrium (SE) and Nash equilibrium (NE) are theoretically analyzed and proved. Through the presented distributed energy scheduling algorithm, we can achieve the optimal solution. Finally, numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposal through comparison with other existing schemes.

Carjacking calls for a specialized analysis because it occurs at lightning speed within very brief windows of opportunity. This article describes the geographic distribution of carjacking in Campinas, Brazil, and then compares this pattern with Detroit, Michigan. We learn that raw numbers of carjackings are widely dispersed in both cities. Although these cities differ greatly in daily transportation systems, in both cities the carjacking risk estimate is greatest where motorists stop for other reasons—at gas stations or corners (Detroit); on short street blocks (Campinas). We make very limited inferences about carjacking around the world due to the limited number of cities studied thus far. However, we do suggest that carjacking reduction is most amenable to product-based forms of situational crime prevention.

Views of organizational justice among correctional staff (i.e. whether they perceive that their employing organization treats them fairly) impact both staff and prisons. The two major dimensions of...

Scholars often compare China and Western societies in terms of dichotomous forms of control-formal and informal. Recent research indicates a nuanced form of social control-semiformal. Using a survey data collected during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic in China, this study investigated the prevalence and importance of semiformal organizations, formal organizations, and informal groups participating in social control and social service and the predictors of the perceived importance of these three forms of social control mechanisms. Findings from this study revealed that formal organizations, the semiformal organizations, and informal groups all participated in community control and service. Semiformal organizations had the highest level of participation. This study found that education and age are the two major predictors of the views on the importance of formal, informal, and semiformal control and control mechanisms.

Objectives: This research examines whether SES-crime relationships in Detroit, Michigan, are influenced by including or excluding the highest and lowest one per cent of neighborhoods in SES from co...

We extend the existing group-based trajectory modeling by proposing the network-based trajectory modeling based on judicious design and analysis of a spatio-temporal parse network (STPN) as a representation of neighborhood structure that evolves in time. The STPN offers a principled qualitative specification for an explicit paradigm framework to deal with complex real-world problems. The framework is completed by developing a quantitative specification of latent field representation to merge seamlessly on or alongside the established STPN via hierarchical modeling. The models adopt spatial random effects to characterize the heterogeneity and autocorrelation over the locations where nonlinear trajectories were observed. The trajectories are then investigated in the presence of the operational constraints of the dependence structure induced by the spatial and temporal dimensions. With the framework, complex developmental trajectory problems can be discerned, communicated, diagnosed and modeled in a relatively simple way that interpretation is accessible to nontechnical audiences and quickly comprehensible to technically sophisticated audiences. The proposed modeling is applied to address the challenges of the trajectory modeling of nonlinear dynamics arising from a motivating criminal justice empirical process.

This analysis of data collected from a nationwide survey in 2021 focused on the prevalence and importance of different forms of social control particularly semiformal social control in community order maintenance within rural China. Scholars have a growing interest in China's semiformal control. However, prior studies lack quantitative research on the prevalence and importance of this semiformal control. Employing quantitative analysis, this study found that China uses a trinary (formal, semiformal, and informal) control system to maintain social order as contrasted with a Western binary (formal vs. informal) control system. Overall, semiformal organizations-village committees-are more prevalent and important than formal control mechanisms such as government and police and informal control mechanisms such as

Considerable empirical research has shown that work-family conflict has a negative effect on the job satisfaction and organizational commitment of United States correctional staff. This study is the first to examine the effect of work-family conflict on job satisfaction and organizational commitment for staff at Chinese prisons. Findings from ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses indicated that strain-based conflict, behavior-based conflict and family-on-work conflict had negative effects on the job satisfaction of Chinese prison staff. Also, strain-based conflict and behavior-based conflict had negative effects on organizational commitment. Overall, the results support the conclusion that work-family conflict was generally perceived as stressful by Chinese prison staff and negatively impacted their job satisfaction and organizational commitment, as has been found among United States staff.

In this paper, a novel hybrid optimization approach, namely, gravitational particle swarm optimization algorithm (GPSOA), is introduced based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) and gravitational search algorithm (GSA) to solve combined economic and emission dispatch (CEED) problem considering wind power availability for the wind-thermal power system. The proposed algorithm shows an interesting hybrid strategy and perfectly integrates the collective behaviors of PSO with the Newtonian gravitation laws of GSA. GPSOA updates particle’s velocity caused by the dependent random cooperation of GSA gravitational acceleration and PSO velocity. To describe the stochastic characteristics of wind speed and output power, Weibull-based probability density function (PDF) is utilized. The CEED model employed consists of the fuel cost objective and emission-level target produced by conventional thermal generators and the operational cost generated by wind turbines. The effectiveness of the suggested GPSOA is tested on the conventional thermal generator system and the modified wind-thermal power system. Results of GPSOA-based CEED problems by means of the optimal fuel cost, emission value, and best compromise solution are compared with the original PSO, GSA, and other state-of-the-art optimization approaches to reveal that the introduced GPSOA exhibits competitive performance improvements in finding lower fuel cost and emission cost and best compromise solution.

Offenders’ attitudes toward supervision models are critical for the success of supervision practices in community corrections. It is surprising, however, that there is a general lack of research on offenders’ attitudes toward supervision models or strategies in community corrections. Using a sample of 351 offenders serving community corrections in City W, China, the current study found that the majority of the respondents positively perceived rehabilitation supervision and the environmental supervision strategies. The punishment supervision strategy was supported by the respondents but with a lower degree, relative to the support for other supervision strategies. Institutional factors were the most important predictors of the offenders’ attitudes.

A novel transformer fault diagnosis method using self-powered radio frequency identification (RFID) sensor tag, deep belief network (DBN), and multiple kernel support vector machine (MKSVM) is presented. The self-powered RFID sensor tag is applied to measure transformer vibration signals, which has advantages of convenience, long-term monitoring, low power consumption, and fast location. Then, the DBN is employed to extract features from the measured signals, and the DBN method’s extraction performance is improved by optimizing its learning rates and momentum factors. The extracted features of the same fault are highly centralized, and the features of the different faults are obviously separated. Based on the features, the MKSVM is utilized to construct a transformer fault diagnosis model, and the MKSVM’s penalty factor and kernel weights are optimized through a quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization (QPSO) algorithm. Finally, a mean signal deviation (MSD) metric is presented to locate the fault position. In this experiment, a 10 kV transformer is used to demonstrate the proposed transformer fault diagnosis procedure, and the diagnosis results reflect that the proposed method can effectively measure the transformer vibration signals, extract the essential features, construct an accurate diagnosis model, and locate the fault position.

In 2003, the Chinese government began the use of community corrections to guide the reeducation and reform of offenders. Scholarly research within the field of community corrections has since begun, but the development of Chinese community corrections research is still in its infancy. There is little information about offenders and community corrections’ institutional organization and staffing. There is a dearth of comprehensive studies on the administrative process of community corrections, particularly pretrial investigation, transition of offenders, supervision, and a reward and punishment system. Thus, this study explored these flaws and omissions through research on offender profiles and the supervisors responsible for the development of Chinese community corrections.

No corner of the world is completely safe from terrorist attacks. Both India and the United States have suffered horrific acts of terrorist-inspired violence. While views of terrorism vary for different reasons, culture certainly plays a role. A total of 918 undergraduate college students, composed of 434 Indian students and 484 U.S. students, were surveyed on their views of terrorism, responses to terrorism, and appropriate punishment of terrorists. Ordered ordinal regression results indicated a significant difference on 20 of the 26 items by nationality. Indian participants were more likely to express strong views on the problem of terrorism for society and to see terrorists as more similar to common criminals than their U.S. counterparts. Indian students were also more likely to feel that the government should do whatever was necessary to win against terrorists, while U.S. students were more likely to view winning against terrorists as difficult. Further, Indian respondents were more likely to feel that terrorists needed to be punished harshly and the death penalty would deter them, while U.S. respondents more likely to feel convicted terrorists should be able to appeal their sentences. The results suggest that culture plays a role in shaping terrorism views.

Staff are an obvious and important resource for correctional organizations across the globe. One important area that concerns staff is job involvement (i.e., the psychosocial bonds between staff members and their jobs). The majority of the limited research on how work environment factors affect correctional personnel has examined U.S. staff. To fill this void, the current study used the job demands-resource model to explore how various personal characteristics and work environment variables affected the job involvement of staff at two prisons in southern China. The specific personal characteristics were age, tenure, gender, educational level, and assigned prison. The job demand variables were fear of victimization and role overload, and the job resource variables were instrumental communication, job autonomy, transactional justice, procedural justice, distributive justice, job variety, and supervision. Tenure, fear of victimization, transactional justice, distributive justice, job variety, and supervision had significant effects on job involvement in a multivariate regression analysis, while the other variables did not. Except for fear of victimization, which had a negative association, the other significant variables had positive associations with job involvement.

The importance of understanding crime in the United States assumed enhanced protrusion in the wake of the increased crime rates year by year in certain cities. Neighborhood social demographic variables have been largely used to measure their associations with crime. Other than those social factors, street lighting is a feature of urban and suburban settlement which is widely thought to be a necessary element in preventing crime. Previous research has drawn mixed conclusions about the relationship between street lighting and crime, and the effect of streetlights on neighborhood crime is not entirely definitive. To address this challenge, we examined the spatial associations between street light density, neighborhood social disorganization characteristics and crime (e.g., burglary, vehicle theft, weapons offenses, etc.) in Detroit, Michigan in 2014. Using the street lighting data from the Detroit Public Lighting Authority, crime data from the City of Detroit, supplemented with Census 2010 data, we conducted a Generalized Least Squares model of neighborhood crime in 879 census block groups to test the random effects of the spatial variables and different hours of day on crime. The results show an inverse relationship between street light density and crime rates across census block groups in Detroit and the effects of time period of a day vary according to different types of crime. These findings provided more credible evidence for researchers and policy makers to effectively optimize scarce public safety resources, such as improving street lighting in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Working in prisons is a demanding career. While a growing number of studies have explored the predictors of job stress, job involvement, and job satisfaction, very few studies have examined how job stress, job involvement, and job satisfaction effect prison staff life satisfaction. Moreover, past studies on prison staff life satisfaction have all been conducted among those working in the United States. The current study examined how job stress, job involvement and job satisfaction were associated with satisfaction with life among surveyed staff at two Chinese prisons. Job involvement and job satisfaction had positive effects on life satisfaction, while job stress had a negative effect.

While both forms of organizational justice are important, the empirical literature indicates that procedural justice generally has wider and greater effects on job attitudes compared with distributive justice. Regression analysis of self-reported survey data from 322 staff at two Chinese prisons in Guangzhou suggests that, while both forms of organizational justice were important for Chinese correctional staff’s organizational commitment, distributive (but not procedural) justice had significant positive associations with both job involvement and job satisfaction. This emphasis on distributive justice differs from what has been empirically found for U.S. correctional staff.

China’s current Criminal Law has 46 death-eligible offenses, and China executes more people than any other country in the world. However, there is a lack of study of attitudes toward capital punishment for specific offenses, and no death penalty view comparison between college students and regular citizens in China was found. This study was taken to address these limitations. Using a sample of 401 respondents from Zhejiang, China, in 2016, the present study found that more than 72% of respondents favored the death penalty without any specification of crime types. Level of death penalty support differed by various specific crimes. As expected, relative to college students, general population citizens were more likely to support capital punishment. Both groups had the highest death penalty support for murder. The study also revealed similar and different reasons behind death penalty attitudes between college students and regular citizens.

Although the past two decades have witnessed a fast growth in studies on occupational attitudes and experiences among correctional officers, such research is rare in China despite the country's strong push for community corrections since 2003. Drawing on interview survey data collected from a province in China, the study assessed the relationships between job and organizational characteristics and job and role stress among Chinese community corrections workers. The results indicated that agency formalization, supervisory support, and coworker integration reduced role ambiguity and/or conflict, whereas job dangerousness, role ambiguity, and role conflict increased job stress among Chinese correctional staff. Workers with stronger punishment orientations also reported higher levels of job stress. Implications for future research and policy are discussed.

There has been limited research on the correlates of organizational commitment among community correctional staff, regardless of the nation. Using data from 225 community correction officers from Hubei, China, this study examined community correctional staff commitment to their agencies and its predictors. The study found the majority of the respondents had commitment to their organizations. Organizational structure variables were more powerful than job characteristics in explaining the variance of the organizational commitment. All relationships between organizational structure variables, job characteristics, and organizational commitment were mediated by job satisfaction.

As of this writing, South Korea (officially, the Republic of Korea) is an abolitionist-in-practice nation; capital punishment is legal, but no death sentences have been carried out since a moratori...

Staff are critical for the proper functioning of a prison; empirical research into the forces that affect salient organizational attitudes of staff, such as organizational commitment, is equally important. A survey instrument measuring affective commitment and personal (i.e. gender, tenure, age, and educational level), job (i.e. perceived dangerousness of the job, job variety, and supervision), and organizational variables (i.e. instrumental communication and input into decision-making) was completed by 322 employees in two prisons in southern China. The results of ordinary least squares regression showed that job and organizational variables of perceived dangerousness of the job, job variety, supervision, instrumental communication, and decentralization explained 54% of the variance in the dependent variable organizational commitment and were much stronger predictors than personal characteristics. Among the significant variables, decentralization had the largest sized effect, followed by perceived job dangerousness, job variety, and instrumental communication. Except for the organizational variable of perceived supervision quality, the job and organizational predictors of affective commitment for these Chinese prison staff appear to mirror those typically found for staff in US prisons.

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) has been proven to show good performance for solving various optimization problems. However, it tends to suffer from premature stagnation and loses exploration ability in the later evolution period when solving complex problems. This paper presents a sequential hybrid particle swarm optimization and gravitational search algorithm with dependent random coefficients called HPSO-GSA, which first incorporates the gravitational search algorithm (GSA) with the PSO by means of a sequential operating mode and then adopts three learning strategies in the hybridization process to overcome the aforementioned problem. Specifically, the particles in the HPSO-GSA enter into the PSO stage and update their velocities by adopting the dependent random coefficients strategy to enhance the exploration ability. Then, the GSA is incorporated into the PSO by using fixed iteration interval cycle or adaptive evolution stagnation cycle strategies when the swarm drops into local optimum and fails to improve their fitness. To evaluate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed HPSO-GSA, the simulations were conducted on benchmark test functions. The results reveal that the HPSO-GSA exhibits superior performance in terms of accuracy, reliability, and efficiency compared to PSO, GSA, and other recently developed hybrid variants.

Past research among U.S. correctional staff has found that work–family conflict has negative outcomes such as decreasing job satisfaction, decreasing organizational commitment, and increasing job stress. Little empirical research has addressed the association of the specific types of work–family conflict with job involvement. The present study contributes to the literature by separately analyzing the relationship of the four specific major types of work–family conflict (time-based conflict, strain-based conflict, behavior-based conflict, and family-on-work conflict) with job involvement among surveyed staff at two Chinese prisons. Job involvement varied by the type of work–family conflict. Specifically, time-based conflict and strain-based conflict had nonsignificant association with job involvement, but behavior-based and family-based conflicts had significant negative associations.

Job stress, which has been found to have numerous negative effects on U.S. correctional staff, occurs as a result of stressors in the work environment. Recent research in the U.S. suggests that work–family conflict (e.g. time-based conflict, strain-based conflict, behavior-based conflict, and family-based conflict) may contribute to job stress for correctional staff. This exploratory study examined how different dimensions of work–family conflict were associated with job stress by surveying 322 staff at 2 Chinese prisons, 1 for male inmates and 1 for female inmates, in Guangzhou. An Ordinary Least Squares regression equation was computed with the job stress index as the dependent variable, and the personal characteristics (i.e. age, tenure, gender, educational level, and marital status) and the four work–family conflict variables as the independent variables. The independent variables explained about 49% of the observed variance in the job stress variable. The personal characteristics, time-based ...

Job satisfaction has been linked to many positive outcomes, such as greater work performance, increased organizational commitment, reduced job burnout, decreased absenteeism, and lower turnover intent/turnover. A substantial body of research has examined how work environment variables are linked to job satisfaction among U.S. correctional staff; far less research has examined prison staff in non-Western nations, especially China. Using survey data collected from two prisons in Guangzhou, China, this study investigated the level of job satisfaction among prison staff and how personal characteristics (i.e., gender, tenure, age, and educational level) and work environment variables (i.e., perceived dangerousness of the job, job variety, supervision, instrumental communication, and input into decision making) affect job satisfaction. The findings from ordinary least squares regression equations indicated that the work environment variables explained a greater proportion of the variance in the job satisfaction measure than the personal characteristics. In the full multivariate regression model, gender was the only personal characteristic to have a significant association with job satisfaction, with female staff reporting higher satisfaction. Input into decision making and job variety had significant positive associations, whereas dangerousness had a significant negative relationship with job satisfaction.

Gender is a strong predictor of death penalty support and views in the United States, with men being more supportive and punitive than women. This exploratory study was undertaken to determine whether these same differences would be present in Japan, a nation that also imposes the death penalty. Students at a Japanese university and a U.S. university were surveyed. While the proportion of students supporting the death penalty in the United States and Japan were similar, U.S. women were less supportive and less punitive than U.S. men, while Japanese women were more likely to support the death penalty and hold more punitive views than Japanese men.

This study focuses on two primary control orientations in corrections—punishment and rehabilitation. Based on data collected from 225 community correctional officers in Hubei, China, in 2013, officers’ control orientations toward offenders and the effects of job characteristics, agency characteristics, and sociodemographics on these orientations were investigated. The research found that Chinese community correctional officers integrated punishment and rehabilitation orientations. Agency characteristics and rehabilitation views affected the officers’ views, while only one (age) of the job characteristics and demographic variables was significant.