Untangling the relationship between mental illness and crime

From MinnPost

After graduating from Grinnell College in 2003 with a degree in sociology, Jillian Peterson went right into the heart of the beast: She took a job as an investigator for the Capital Defender Office in New York City with the task of documenting the bio-psycho-social histories of men facing the death penalty.

The St. Paul native and Central High School alum said she was expecting “to meet Hannibal Lecter types, to be afraid, to feel threatened,” she said. “And I didn’t.”

Instead, she said, she began to see the humanity in these “very immature, very young” offenders who were “products of the lives they had led. And there was always mental illness, often a laundry list of diagnoses if you went way back.”

Peterson, who got her Ph.D. in psychology and social behavior at the University of California Irvine and now teaches at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, spent the next decade seeking to more deeply understand the relationship (if any) between mental illness and criminal behavior...

...read the rest of the article here.

& find the full study here.

Most Ex-Inmates Arrested Within Three Years of Release, Says New Federal Study

From The Crime Report, April 22

An estimated two-thirds of prisoners released in 2005 were arrested for a new crime within three years, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics said today in the first major federal study of recidivism in nearly two decades.

More than three-quarters (77 percent) were arrested within five years.

The study covers 405,000 prisoners released by 30 states in 2005. More than one-third (37 percent) were arrested within six months of their release from prison, and more than half (57 percent) were arrested by the end of the first year. That corresponds with earlier research indicating that the highest chances of rearrest are soon after a prison release.
 

Read more here.

Local homicide rate increases cause more elementary students to fail school

WASHINGTON, DC, April 16, 2014 — A new study finds that an increase in a municipality's homicide rate causes more elementary school students in that community to fail a grade than would do so if the rate remained stable.

"This finding is a source of concern because exposure to environmental violence is highly prevalent in contemporary societies and is unequally distributed along socioeconomic lines," said study co-author Florencia Torche, an associate professor of sociology at New York University. "To the extent that children living in poverty are more likely to experience environmental violence, its effect on early educational achievement will contribute to the intergenerational reproduction of poverty."

Titled, "Exposure to Local Homicides and Early Educational Achievement in Mexico," the study, which appears in the April issue of Sociology of Education, relies on data on all elementary schools in Mexico from 1990 to 2010 merged with the annual homicide rate in the municipality where each school is located.

Read the rest here
& the full study available here.

Opinion: Employing Former Felons Will Improve the Economy and Public Safety

Excerpt from Pacific Standard - April 7

Lawmakers in 10 states and over 50 cities have already enacted Ban the Box policies, eliminating the check-box that asks about an applicant’s criminal record. It’s time for Congress to follow suit.

Seven years ago, I hired Ron Sanders, an unemployed, single dad with a felony record, to work in a community health center. Like the majority of those who are incarcerated, Ron had been addicted to drugs and homeless. But even when those days were long over and he had completed a college certificate program to become a community health worker, he still couldn’t get a job. He couldn’t even get an interview.

An overwhelming 65 million Americans with criminal records face significant barriers to employment each day. Most applications for employment include a box that asks, “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” Check the box, and nowadays, the application most likely goes to the trash. In 2009, a team of Princeton and Harvard researchers found that having a criminal record in New York city reduced the likelihood of a callback or job offer by nearly 50 percent. It doesn’t matter if you finished serving your time, committed a crime decades ago, or whether the crime would impact the quality of your work.

Read the rest, here.

Crime and punishment: psychology and book bans

Post excerpted from the Guardian by Dean Burnett:

Chris Grayling, UK justice minister, recently imposed a blanket ban on prisoners in England and Wales being sent books in the mail. Obviously the decision has been defended, being explained as part of a new regime of rewards and punishments (or is it to cut drug smuggling?) but many still see it as a needlessly harsh and unmotivated punishment for prisoners, so it has still backfired somewhat.

The suddenness of it does suggest that not a lot of thought has gone into this. Perhaps the policy is the result of some other factors? Is there a rumour going round that paper and ink are crucial ingredients in a type of moonshine? Has there been a dramatic rise in lethal paper-cuts in prisons? Maybe the policy was meant be the somewhat-obvious but well-meant “under no circumstances should prisoners receive bombs”, but an overzealous autocorrect caught the last word, and they decided to press ahead without proofreading?

Read more here.

'Dying Art?': Forensic Sketch Artists Face a Digital Future

From NBC News: 

The stranger wore scrubs when she plucked the 3-day-old newborn from a Texas hospital and hid her in a handbag. Lubbock police, with the aid of the infant’s family and surveillance, created a computer composite of the suspect for the public.

Then, a call came in. A witness who was there that early March morning in 2007 said the composite was wrong. Police summoned Suzanne Lowe Birdwell, a forensic sketch artist with the Texas Rangers, to help get it right.

“The woman said she was there in the maternity waiting room. She said the image they put on the television, the computer composite, looked like a white woman,” Birdwell recalled.

The suspect — later identified as Rayshaun Parson, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the kidnapping – was black. She had been caught within 24 hours of Birdwell’s sketch going out.

When digital devices fail to deliver, police still turn to the organic alternative of paper, pencil and a personal touch that a forensic sketch artist offers. It’s a skill that artists say has been drawn on less and less in a world where surveillance and cellphone cameras are ubiquitous, and computer programs can be cost-saving measures.

Read more here.

3 inventions that can catch you committing a crime

From Aljazeera's TechKnow Blog

To learn more about innovative crime scene investigation technology for this week’s “TechKnow,” contributor Crystal Dilworth visited John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Founded as the only liberal arts college in the U.S. with a criminal justice and forensics focus, students and professors at John Jay are developing and working with technological innovations that are the future of forensic investigation.

“This is the place to get educated in the field of criminology,” says “TechKnow” producer Mark Teague. “The college not only trains the crime fighters of the future, but their professors develop technologies and processes which law enforcement agencies will certainly use in the future.”
Here’s a look at some of the technology we got to see up close:

[1.] Panoramic 3D cameras
Panoramic 3D cameras are used to photograph the crime scene to capture every detail for further analyses.

...Find the rest here.

Study: Police see black children as less innocent and less young than white children

In a new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers asked college students and police officers to estimate the ages of young children who they were told had committed a crime (both misdemeanors and felonies). In both groups, respondents were far more likely to overestimate the ages of young black boys than young white boys; they were also less likely to view black children as innocent.

“Children in most societies are considered to be in a distinct group with characteristics such as innocence and the need for protection,” study author and professor of psychology at UCLA Phillip Atiba Goff said of the study. “Our research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent.”

Read the rest of the article for Salon Magazine here.


Full study available here.

Climate change may mean more crime

(Story excerpted from the Boston Globe) 

As the global climate changes around us, the potential effects tend to be discussed in familiar environmental terms: warmer average temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, rising seas.

But it can be difficult to imagine how exactly this altered climate will affect day-to-day life—how it might change the social fabric of, say, a relatively prosperous American city like Boston.

Increasingly, researchers are trying to draw out those scenarios, including ones that could come from a rise of just a few degrees in temperature. And a new study by an economist in Cambridge suggests that, even without utterly upending the world as we know it, projected climate change could have very concrete social effects indeed.

 Read the rest here.

Solitary Confinement: 29 Years in a Box

(CNN) -- Robert King still remembers well the dimensions of his cell: 6 x 9 x 12 feet. There was a steel bed and a sink that doubled as a toilet where he would also wash clothes.

King spent 29 years in solitary confinement in Louisiana. He has been free since 2001, but still has difficulty with geographical orientation.

"I get confused as to where I am, where I should be," he said.

King joined researchers and legal experts at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago this month to talk about the mental and physical health consequences of solitary confinement.

Read more here.

International study finds crime levels cut after offenders meet victims

A new study has found putting offenders face-to-face with their victims can reduce future crime levels.

The research involving the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra has found the frequency of repeat offending is down by as much as 55 per cent after criminals meet victims, compared with using the traditional court system.

The ANU's John Braithwaite helped introduce restorative justice conferences to ACT courts during the 1990s.

The sessions involve victims and their criminals agreeing to meet with family or friends present, along with police or other trained moderators to discuss the impact of the crime.

Read more here.

Falling prices, rising crime?

Crime rates fell across the United States in the 1990s. But in counties where Wal-Mart built stores, the decline was slower, a new study finds.

"The crime decline was stunted in counties where Wal-Mart expanded in the 1990s," says Scott Wolfe, assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina and lead author of a new study. "If the corporation built a new store, there were 17 additional property crimes and 2 additional violent crimes for every 10,000 persons in a county."

Read more about the study here.

Study Puts Exonerations at Record Level in U.S.

The number of exonerations in the United States of those wrongly convicted of a crime increased to a record 87 during 2013, and of that number, nearly one in five had initially pleaded guilty to charges filed against them, according to a report to be released on Tuesday as part of a project led by two university law schools.

Nearly half of the exonerations — 40 — were based on murder convictions, including that of a man wrongly convicted and subsequently sentenced to death in the fatal stabbing of a fellow inmate in a Missouri prison in 1983, according to the report by the National Registry of Exonerations. The registry is a joint program of the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law.

Read more here.

Crime & Deliquency Study: Nearly half of black men arrested by age 23

As reported by MSNBC:

Nearly half of all black men and four in ten white men have been arrested for a non-traffic-related crime by the age of 23, according to a new study. 

The study published in “Crime & Delinquency” journal comes from criminal justice professors who studied data collected annually from a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey between 1997 and 2008, and found that while there were differences between the arrest rates of males across race, those gaps virtually disappeared among females. 

By the age of 18, about three in ten black men, one in four Hispanic men and just over one in five white men reported a prior arrest. By 23, those numbers climbed to 49% for black men, 44% for Hispanic men, and 38% for white men.

Women reported significantly lower arrest rates, with 20% of black women, 16% of Hispanic women, and 18% of white women recording at least one arrest by the age of 23.

Read more here.

Released Inmates Need Programs to Meet Basic, Mental Health Needs, Study Shows

Science News - When inmates with severe mental illness are released from jail, their priority is finding shelter, food, money and clothes. Even needs as basic as soap and a place to bathe can be hard to come by for people leaving jail, according to a new study from Case Western Reserve University's social work school.

Reentering the community after a period of incarceration in jail is a complex situation," said Amy Wilson, who researches jail and prison issues, and even more difficult for inmates who suffer from a major mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia.

Read the article here.

& find the full study here.

Despite scandals, nation's crime labs have seen little change

NPR - January 15th

The nation's crime labs are no strangers to scandal. Last year in Massachusetts, bogus testing by former chemist Annie Dookhan called into question tens of thousands of cases and led to the release of more than 300 people from the state's prisons.

There are currently no uniform standards or regulations for forensic labs. Congress could take up legislation this year to improve oversight, but critics are skeptical.

Read and listen to the story here.

'The Poisoner's Handbook' on PBS: Review

Review from LA Times' Television Critic Robert Lloyd

Debuting Tuesday as part of the PBS series "American Experience," "The Poisoner's Handbook" offers a fascinating look back at how the chemical age changed police work.

Based on Deborah Blum's 2010 book "The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York," it is divided into toxin-specific "chapters," (cyanide, arsenic, carbon monoxide, lead, radium, denatured alcohol and so on), but there is nothing particularly instructional about it. A certain sort of viewer might get ideas, of course, but should he watch to the end he will learn that poisoning is a hard crime to get away with anymore.

Some credit for this goes to pioneering main characters Charles Norris, a crusading, visionary New York City medical examiner, and Alexander Gettler, who ran his toxicology labs. They were an unlikely pair, Norris from Philadelphia money but with a healthy sense of noblesse oblige (he paid for equipment and subsidized salaries in his department when money was short); Gettler, a Lower East Side Jew who liked bowling and playing the ponies. But both were dedicated to "a medical-legal justice system" and the rule of science.

Read the rest here.