Interestingly, while research on desistance from crime has been a recent focus in criminology, certain work had examined crime over the life-course... ]]> Michael Rocque http://iris.lib.neu.edu/criminal_justice_diss/8 http://iris.lib.neu.edu/criminal_justice_diss/8 Wed, 09 Jan 2013 09:44:04 PST A growing body of research reveals that there is an overlap between offenders and victims. That is, they share similar demographic and individual-level characteristics, are often involved with both offending and victimization, and their experiences can adequately be predicted by the same set of variables. While this literature is growing, there is still little known about the generality of the victim-offender overlap. This dissertation uses data from the second International Self-Report Delinquency Study (ISRD-II), a large (over 50,000 cases) school-based sample of adolescents in grades 7-9, to investigate the generality of the overlap among offending and victimization. Using six clusters... ]]> Chad Posick http://iris.lib.neu.edu/criminal_justice_diss/7 http://iris.lib.neu.edu/criminal_justice_diss/7 Wed, 09 Jan 2013 08:42:43 PST The purpose of this study was to investigate the victimization experiences of children with autism spectrum disorders in the U.S. Autism is a neurological, lifelong developmental disorder that affects 1 in 88 children in the United States. The defining characteristics of autism are impaired social interaction and communication skills, features that have been linked to increased vulnerability among people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Using the subject recruitment services of the Interactive Autism Network, this study involved the administration of the Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire to 262 parents of children with autism, as well as follow-up interviews with 40 parents. Almost... ]]> Rebecca Pfeffer http://iris.lib.neu.edu/criminal_justice_diss/6 http://iris.lib.neu.edu/criminal_justice_diss/6 Tue, 03 Jan 2012 12:52:49 PST Prison misconduct and specifically prison violence generate serious problems in prisons across the United States. Most of the research on prison misconduct has focused on static rather than dynamic characteristics of prisoners. This study examined a dynamic personal attribute, prisoners' ability to cope. The research tested whether prisoners' ways of coping affect their involvement in serious prison misconduct and violence. The study also examined the traditional predictors of serious prison misconduct and violence and their relationship to ways of coping.

The research used a mixed methods design and a concurrent data collection strategy. The quantitative data collection, which was the... ]]> Ann Marie Kelley Rocheleau http://iris.lib.neu.edu/criminal_justice_diss/5 http://iris.lib.neu.edu/criminal_justice_diss/5 Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:25:42 PDT Levels of public confidence in police vary greatly internationally, yet little is known about the causes of this variation. At the same time, studies demonstrate that public confidence in the police is a requirement for police effectiveness. It is therefore critical to develop a better understanding of the factors that influence public perceptions of the police. In this dissertation, I investigate public confidence in the police and seek to identify country-level factors which contribute to its variation cross-nationally. I approach this study from Rawls' conception of political legitimacy. I hypothesize that level and stability of democracy in government increase confidence... ]]> Camie Sloan Morris http://iris.lib.neu.edu/criminal_justice_diss/4 http://iris.lib.neu.edu/criminal_justice_diss/4 Mon, 17 Oct 2011 10:24:58 PDT A challenge for criminological theorists has been to explain both why females are so much less likely to offend than males and why they differ from males in types of crimes they do commit. By integrating general strain theory with gender socialization theory, the current research proposes a framework for understanding both of these gendered patterns of offending. More specifically, the conceptual model proposes that gender conditions the strain-delinquency pathway, leading masculinely and femininely socialized adolescents to differ in their perceptions of, and emotional responses to strain. These in turn affect the likelihood of a delinquent response and the type... ]]> Jenna Morgan Savage http://iris.lib.neu.edu/criminal_justice_diss/3 http://iris.lib.neu.edu/criminal_justice_diss/3 Tue, 04 Oct 2011 09:54:18 PDT Genocide has a long history of occurring from pre-historic times to the present day. Unfortunately, the study of genocide has remained elusive in the field of criminology. Criminological scholars have left the `crime of crimes' to political scientists, historians, sociologists, and others without engaging with it themselves. As an interdisciplinary field, criminology is well suited to combine the knowledge we have on genocide from these disparate fields to develop one coherent theory of genocide as a crime. John Hagan (2009) recently presented a collective action theory of genocide based upon his research in Darfur. This dissertation tests Hagan's theory on... ]]> William Robert Pruitt http://iris.lib.neu.edu/criminal_justice_diss/1 http://iris.lib.neu.edu/criminal_justice_diss/1 Fri, 10 Sep 2010 12:01:45 PDT Domestic violence has been mistreated by the criminal justice system for years. These cases were ignored by police officers and neglected by courts. Hardly viewed as criminal, domestic violence was treated as a private family matter. Laws governing the criminal justice system response to domestic violence changed through the passage of mandated arrest and prosecution policies. While arrest rates, for domestic violence, increased throughout the 1990s and 2000s, these cases continue to receive lenient treatment by our courts. Most of these cases are resolved with dismissals. The purpose of this study is to explore if the court community literature can... ]]> Kathleen Erin Currul-Dykeman