Crime Scene
Inside Interrogation: The Lie, The Bluff, and False Confessions
Jennifer Perillo & Saul Kassin
Law and Human Behavior, August 2011, Pages 327-337
Abstract:
Using a less deceptive variant of the false evidence ploy, interrogators often use the bluff tactic, whereby they pretend to have evidence to be tested without further claiming that it necessarily implicates the suspect. Three experiments were conducted to assess the impact of the bluff on confession rates. Using the Kassin and Kiechel (Psychol Sci 7:125-128, 1996) computer crash paradigm, Experiment 1 indicated that bluffing increases false confessions comparable to the effect produced by the presentation of false evidence. Experiment 2 replicated the bluff effect and provided self-reports indicating that innocent participants saw the bluff as a promise of future exoneration which, paradoxically, made it easier to confess. Using a variant of the Russano et al. (Psychol Sci 16:481-486, 2005) cheating paradigm, Experiment 3 replicated the bluff effect on innocent suspects once again, though a ceiling effect was obtained in the guilty condition. Results suggest that the phenomenology of innocence can lead innocents to confess even in response to relatively benign interrogation tactics.
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Effect of prefrontal transcranial magnetic stimulation on spontaneous truth-telling
Inga Karton & Talis Bachmann
Behavioural Brain Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Brain-process foundations of deceptive behaviour have become a subject of intensive study both in fundamental and applied neuroscience. Recently, utilization of transcranial magnetic stimulation has enhanced methodological rigour in this research because in addition to correlational studies causal effects of the distinct cortical systems involved can be studied. In these studies, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex has been implied as the brain area involved in deceptive behaviour. However, combined brain imaging and stimulation research has been concerned mostly with deceptive behaviour in the contexts of mock thefts and/or denial of recognition of critical objects. Spontaneous, "criminally decontextuated" propensity to lying and its dependence on the activity of selected brain structures has remained unexplored. The purpose of this work is to test whether spontaneous propensity to lying can be changed by brain stimulation. Here, we show that when subjects can name the colour of presented objects correctly or incorrectly at their free will, the tendency to stick to truthful answers can be manipulated by stimulation targeted at dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Right hemisphere stimulation decreases lying, left hemisphere stimulation increases lying. Spontaneous choice to lie more or less can be influenced by brain stimulation.
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Estimating the Willingness to Pay to Avoid Violent Crime: A Dynamic Approach
Kelly Bishop & Alvin Murphy
American Economic Review, May 2011, Pages 625-629
Abstract:
The hedonic model, which has been used extensively in the Environmental, Urban, and Real Estate literatures, allows for the estimation of the implicit prices of housing and neighborhood attributes, as well as households' demand for these non-marketed amenities. A recognized drawback of the existing hedonic literature is that the models assume a myopic decision-maker. In this paper, we estimate a dynamic hedonic model and find that the average household is willing to pay $472 per year for a ten percent reduction in violent crime. In addition, we find that the traditional, myopic model suffers from a 21 percent negative bias.
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Amie Nielsen & Ramiro Martínez
Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, August 2011, Pages 342-360
Abstract:
We seek to help move the criminological literature beyond studying racial dichotomies and crime by assessing individual-level relationships between immigration/race/ ethnicity and violence. We examine whether immigration status predicts likelihood of arrest for robbery relative to aggravated assault, violence types that differ in seriousness, motive, and other ways. Immigrant status is examined relative to the native-born and then is disaggregated by country of origin. Using data from Miami, logistic regression results indicate that net of controls, immigrants overall and almost all groups identified are less likely than natives to be arrested for robbery. Race/ethnic differences are also found.
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Striking at the Roots of Crime: The Impact of Welfare Spending on Crime during the Great Depression
Price Fishback, Ryan Johnson & Shawn Kantor
Journal of Law and Economics, November 2010, Pages 715-740
Abstract:
During the Great Depression contemporaries worried that people hit by hard times would resort to crime. President Franklin Roosevelt argued that the massive government relief efforts "struck at the roots of crime" by providing subsistence income to needy families. After constructing a panel data set for 81 large American cities for the years 1930-40, we estimate the effect of relief spending by all levels of government on crime rates. The analysis suggests that a 10 percent increase in relief spending during the 1930s reduced property crime by roughly 1.5 percent. By limiting the amount of relief recipients' free time, work relief may have been more effective than direct relief in reducing crime. More generally, our results indicate that social insurance, which tends to be understudied in economic analyses of crime, should be more explicitly and more carefully incorporated into the analysis of temporal and spatial variations in criminal activity.
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Rules of the Game: Dominance Hierarchies and Generalized Exchange in a Gang Homicide Network
Andrew Papachristos & Kevin Lewis
Harvard Working Paper, February 2011
Abstract:
Gang members frequently refer to street life as a "game" (or, simply, The Game): a social milieu in which social status is lost or won by the manner in which individuals and groups manage their reputations. Like other games, successfully participating in the street game demands adherence to certain rules, such as the willingness to violently redress a threat, the avoidance of "weak" behaviors, the protection of one's friends, and so on. This paper combines ethnographic data and detailed police records to ascertain which rules of the street game described by gang members in fact contribute to the relative social standing of groups. Networks of violent exchanges between an entire population of gangs are analyzed using exponential random graph models to identify the processes responsible for the observed network pattern of violence. Then, ethnographic data are used to explain these rules and to explore how they resonate with gang members' perceptions of the street game. Findings provide little support of the idea that violent exchanges among gangs generate any strict status ranking among groups. Rather, a pattern of generalized exchange that run counters to many of the rules espoused to by gang members generates cycles of violence that perpetuate a street game that is continually played but is never truly won.
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Masculinity, Marginalization and Violence: A Case Study of the English Defence League
James Treadwell & Jon Garland
British Journal of Criminology, July 2011, Pages 621-634
Abstract:
In this article, we use three case studies, undertaken with young, white, working-class men involved in the English Defence League, to examine how they construct a specific form of violent masculinity. We argue that these accounts demonstrate that violence is socio-structurally generated but also individually psychologically justified, because these young men turn experiences of acute inequality and disenchantment into inner psychological scripts that justify their own ‘heroic' status when involved in violent confrontation. We suggest that these feelings of disadvantage and marginalization prompt resentment and anger in young males who feel their voices are not being heard. This disenchantment manifests itself through externalized hostility, resentment and fury directed at the scapegoat for their ills: the Islamic ‘other'.
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Heterogeneity in the composition of marijuana seized in California
James Richard Burgdorf, Beau Kilmer & Rosalie Liccardo Pacula
Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 1 August 2011, Pages 59-61
Background: Marijuana contains multiple cannabinoids. Most attention is given to delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) which produces euphoria and in some cases anxiety and panic reactions. Research suggests that another cannabinoid, cannabidiol (CBD), may offset some of these effects. Thus, there is growing interest in the health consequences of the THC to CBD ratio for marijuana.
Methods: Using data from over 5000 marijuana samples in California from 1996 to 2008, we examine changes in the median THC-level, median CBD-level, and median THC:CBD-ratio.
Results: The median THC-level and median THC:CBD-ratio have dramatically increased for seizures in California, particularly north of the Mexican border.
Conclusion: Research on the consequences of the THC:CBD ratio should continue, especially as more attention is devoted to thinking about how to regulate marijuana for medical and recreational use. Researchers should also consider the lack of uniformity in the chemical composition of marijuana when evaluating its health effects.
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Does the Internet Reduce Corruption? Evidence from U.S. States and across Countries
Thomas Barnebeck Andersen et al.
World Bank Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We test the hypothesis that the Internet is a useful technology for controlling corruption. In order to do so, we develop a novel identification strategy for Internet diffusion. Power disruptions damage digital equipment, which increases the user cost of IT capital, and thus lowers the speed of Internet diffusion. A natural phenomenon causing power disruptions is lightning activity, which makes lightning a viable instrument for Internet diffusion. Using ground-based lightning detection censors as well as global satellite data, we construct lightning density data for the contiguous U.S. states and a large cross section of countries. Empirically, lightning density is a strong instrument for Internet diffusion and our IV estimates suggest that the emergence of the Internet has served to reduce the extent of corruption across U.S. states and across the world.
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Repulsed by violence: Disgust sensitivity buffers trait, behavioral, and daily aggression
Richard Pond et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many models of aggression include negatively valenced emotions as common elicitors of aggressive behavior. Yet, the motivational direction of these emotions is not taken into account. The current work explored whether sensitivity to a negative emotion associated with behavioral avoidance-disgust-will predict lower levels of aggression. Five studies tested the hypothesis that disgust sensitivity predicts less aggression. In Study 1 (N = 92), disgust sensitivity predicted less trait physical and verbal aggression. In Study 2 (N = 268), participants high in disgust sensitivity were less likely to behave aggressively towards a stranger on a reaction-time task. In Study 3 (N = 51), disgust sensitivity was associated with less intimate partner violence inclinations. Study 4 (N = 247) replicated this effect longitudinally. In Study 5 (N = 166), each domain of disgust (i.e., moral, sexual, and pathogen disgust) had a buffering effect on daily aggression when daily experiences activated those specific domains. These results highlight the usefulness of considering the motivational direction of an emotion when examining its influence on aggression.
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Neuroimage Evidence and the Insanity Defense
N.J. Schweitzer & Michael Saks
Behavioral Sciences & the Law, forthcoming
Abstract:
The introduction of neuroscientific evidence in criminal trials has given rise to fears that neuroimagery presented by an expert witness might inordinately influence jurors' evaluations of the defendant. In this experiment, a diverse sample of 1,170 community members from throughout the U.S. evaluated a written mock trial in which psychological, neuropsychological, neuroscientific, and neuroimage-based expert evidence was presented in support of a not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) defense. No evidence of an independent influence of neuroimagery was found. Overall, neuroscience-based evidence was found to be more persuasive than psychological and anecdotal family history evidence. These effects were consistent across different insanity standards. Despite the non-influence of neuroimagery, however, jurors who were not provided with a neuroimage indicated that they believed neuroimagery would have been the most helpful kind of evidence in their evaluations of the defendant.
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Age and sexual assault during robberies
Richard Felson & Patrick Cundiff
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System to examine the effects of offender and victim age on whether male offenders commit sexual assault while robbing women. Restricting analyses to robberies reveals the offenders' age preferences since it allows one to control for the effects of opportunity. We find that robbers of all ages are most likely to sexually assault women at ages 15-29 years, ages when their reproductive potential is highest. However, in contrast to the idea that rape is a direct adaptation, victims are no more likely to be raped than sexually assaulted at these ages. The age of the offender is also a strong predictor of sexual assault. The likelihood that a robber commits a sexual assault increases from age 12 years until he reaches his early thirties when it begins to decline. This age pattern corresponds, to some extent, to age differences in the male sex drive.
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Psychopathic Personality Traits, Genetic Risk, and Gene-Environment Correlations
Kevin Beaver et al.
Criminal Justice and Behavior, September 2011, Pages 896-912
Abstract:
There is a great deal of evidence indicating that psychopathy and psychopathic traits represent some of the strongest correlates to serious violent criminal behavior. As a result, there has been a recent surge of behavioral genetic studies examining the genetic and environmental factors that may be related to the development of psychopathy. The current study extends this line of research by analyzing a sample of kinship pairs from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to estimate the extent to which genetic factors relate to measures of psychopathic personality traits created from the five factor model. Moreover, the authors also test for a series of gene-environment correlations between genetic risk for psychopathic personality traits and measures of parental negativity. The results of the analyses revealed that genetic factors explained between .37 and .44 of the variance in measures of psychopathy. Additional statistical models indicated the presence of gene-environment correlations between parental negativity and genetic risk for psychopathic personality traits.
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The Influence of fMRI Lie Detection Evidence on Juror Decision-Making
David McCabe, Alan Castel & Matthew Rhodes
Behavioral Sciences & the Law, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the current study, we report on an experiment examining whether functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) lie detection evidence would influence potential jurors' assessment of guilt in a criminal trial. Potential jurors (N = 330) read a vignette summarizing a trial, with some versions of the vignette including lie detection evidence indicating that the defendant was lying about having committed the crime. Lie detector evidence was based on evidence from the polygraph, fMRI (functional brain imaging), or thermal facial imaging. Results showed that fMRI lie detection evidence led to more guilty verdicts than lie detection evidence based on polygraph evidence, thermal facial imaging, or a control condition that did not include lie detection evidence. However, when the validity of the fMRI lie detection evidence was called into question on cross-examination, guilty verdicts were reduced to the level of the control condition. These results provide important information about the influence of lie detection evidence in legal settings.
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Jennifer Matjasko
Journal of School Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Based on the stage environment and the person environment fit perspectives, the current study examined the relation between school disciplinary policies and offending from adolescence into young adulthood. Using Waves I and III of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (a.k.a., Add Health), hierarchical multinomial logistic regression models were utilized to test whether school disciplinary policies were related to offending patterns during adolescence and young adulthood. Descriptive results suggest that, overall, severe school policies were not associated with the course of offending. However, relations between individual characteristics (i.e., inattention and impulsivity) and offending patterns did appear to differ depending on the severity of disciplinary policies. Within schools with more severe policies, adolescents scoring higher on inattention were more likely to be in the adolescent-limited offender group over the persistent offender group. On the other hand, adolescents with high levels of impulsivity were more likely to be in the persistent group over the non-offender group within schools with more severe policies. The results suggest that severe policies may not be effective for all students and the policies, alone, may not be promising avenues for the prevention of offending during adolescence and young adulthood.
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Anne Gregory, Dewey Cornell & Xitao Fan
American Educational Research Journal, August 2011, Pages 904-934
Abstract:
This study examined the relationship between structure and support in the high school climate and suspension rates in a statewide sample of 199 schools. School climate surveys completed by 5,035 ninth grade students measured characteristics of authoritative schools, defined as highly supportive, yet highly structured with academic and behavioral expectations. Multivariate analyses showed that schools low on characteristics of an authoritative school had the highest schoolwide suspension rates for Black and White students after statistically controlling for school demographics. Furthermore, schools low on both structure and support had the largest racial discipline gaps. These findings highlight the characteristics of risky settings that may not meet the developmental needs of adolescents and may contribute to disproportionate disciplinary outcomes for Black students.
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A randomized controlled trial of different policing strategies at hot spots of violent crime
Bruce Taylor, Christopher Koper & Daniel Woods
Journal of Experimental Criminology, June 2011, Pages 149-181
Abstract:
Focusing police efforts on "hot spots" has gained acceptance among researchers and practitioners. However, little rigorous evidence exists on the comparative effectiveness of different hot spots strategies. To address this gap, we randomly assigned 83 hot spots of violence in Jacksonville, Florida, to receive either a problem-oriented policing (POP) strategy, directed-saturation patrol, or a control condition for 90 days. We then examined crime in these areas during the intervention period and a 90-day post-intervention period. In sum, the use of POP was associated with a 33% reduction in "street violence" during the 90 days following the intervention. While not statistically significant, we also observed that POP was associated with other non-trivial reductions in violence and property crime during the post-intervention period. In contrast, we did not detect statistically significant crime reductions for the directed-saturation patrol group, though there were non-significant declines in crime in these areas during the intervention period. Tests for displacement or a diffusion of benefits provided indications that violence was displaced to areas near the POP locations, though some patterns in the data suggest this may have been due to the effects of POP on crime reporting by citizens in nearby areas. We conclude by discussing the study's limitations and the implications of the findings for efforts to refine hot spots policing.
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Caitlin Novero, Ann Booker Loper & Janet Warren
Criminal Justice and Behavior, August 2011, Pages 761-778
Abstract:
The authors investigated whether prisoners who had a parent in prison, "second-generation prisoners," had poorer rates of adjustment compared to those inmates who did not report a history of parental incarceration. Among a sample of 459 men and women in prison, approximately half reported having had a parent in prison or jail. There was considerable self-reported childhood adversity within the entire sample, with relatively higher levels reported by the second-generation prisoner group. Second-generation prisoners self-reported more anger and prison violence and demonstrated a greater presence of institutional rule breaking in comparison to first-generation prisoners. Results were maintained after statistical control for the high rates of adversities in childhood. Post hoc analysis revealed differences on adjustment variables between first-generation prisoners and individuals with a mother incarcerated or with both parents incarcerated, suggesting the pronounced impact of maternal incarceration on long-term well-being. Results indicate that the negative effects of parental incarceration are evident within the prison community and have a significant relationship to inmates' adjustment while incarcerated.
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Haeil Jung
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Summer 2011, Pages 499-533
Abstract:
The sharp rise in U.S. incarceration rates has heightened long-standing concerns among scholars and policymakers that lengthy incarceration permanently harms the future labor market outcomes of prisoners. If true, then lengthy prison sentences will not only punish criminals for crimes committed, but will also make it far more difficult for ex-prisoners to reenter society as productive citizens. To investigate this claim I examine how increase in duration of incarceration affects subsequent earnings and employment. Comparing long-serving prisoners with short-serving ones in the Illinois state prison system, I find that the length of incarceration is positively associated with earnings and employment, even though these effects attenuate over time. The positive effects are stronger for individuals convicted of economically motivated and less violent crimes (such as property- and drug-related offenses) than for those convicted of violent crimes (such as person-related offenses). The effect is also stronger for prison entrants with self-reported drug addiction problems. The deterrent effect of lengthy incarceration and rehabilitation during incarceration are possible reasons for this positive effect. However, because this paper analyzes men who served less than four years in Illinois prison and excludes the population of men who served their terms exclusively in jail, readers should be cautious about generalizing findings of this paper.