Dr. Matthew S Crow

This research note provides an exploratory analysis of a remarkable - and broadly available - set of documents from the early twentieth century. This preliminary study examined one month of police call logs and warrant books from Pensacola, Florida, in December 1912. Combining perspectives from history, geography, and police practice, the authors integrated these records with digitised spatial data using Geographic Information System (GIS). The analysis revealed significant racial disparities in arrest patterns, unexpected temporal trends in policing activity, and compelling spatial concentrations of law enforcement interactions. This project suggests the potential of applying modern analytical techniques to historical police datasets in order to yield meaningful insights into the evolution of policing practices and their societal impacts. It highlights the wealth of untapped historical arrest records available for similar studies across the United States, suggesting avenues for future comparative research that bridges historical analysis with contemporary policing concerns.

The demographic diversity of the federal bench has emerged as a salient issue for the American public. Although research has examined the impact of judges’ race and sex on various court outcomes, including sentencing, for several decades across different levels of courts, findings remain mixed. Race and sex diversity of the U.S. District Courts has increased in recent years, coinciding with the transition from mandatory to advisory sentencing guidelines. The current study examines the impact of changes in the race and sex composition of federal trial courts on district-level sentencing outcomes for different demographic groups of offenders. The findings provide evidence that the race and sex composition of the District Courts impacts sentencing outcomes in both expected and unexpected ways.

Analysis of scholarship in the physical, biological, and social sciences has discovered that peer-reviewed journals publish a much larger proportion of articles with statistically significant findings compared to articles with null results. Publication bias in criminology and criminal justice (CCJ) has received very little attention, however. The current study is an exploratory analysis of research in leading CCJ journals across 2 years to determine the current state of null findings in contemporary CCJ scholarship. Our findings are consistent with studies in other disciplines; null results are rare in leading CCJ journals. We explore the context of our findings, outline the importance of examining publication bias to improve CCJ research and better inform policy, and discuss the limitations of our approach.

Disparity in sentencing outcomes continues to garner considerable attention in the research literature. Much of the extant literature focuses on the impact of case-level, and to a lesser extent, court-level characteristics on individual sentencing outcomes. At the federal level, recent research by the United States Sentencing Commission (USSC), however, demonstrates significant disparity across U.S. District Courts in aggregate-level outcomes. Specifically, there is considerable disparity in the rates of judge-initiated guidelines departures across U.S. District Courts. The current study examines whether judicial composition and caseload characteristics impact this disparity using panel data. Results indicate that judicial sex and political composition of districts influence judge-initiated guidelines departure rates.

Purpose: Much of the prior literature examining the impact of judge race and sex on case-level sentencing outcomes remain mixed. There is a lack of research investigating how the composition of the judiciary influences sentencing. The current study attempts to fill this gap and examines the influence of the race, sex, and political composition of U.S. District Courts for two offense categories.Methods: Using data from the United States Sentencing Commission Monitoring of Federal Criminal Sentences and the Federal Judicial Center Biographical Directory, district-level sentencing outcomes for drug and economic offenders processed between October 1, 2007 through September 20, 2016 were analyzed.Results: Results indicate that judicial racial composition influences the percentage of economic cases sentenced to prison and average sentence length for both economic and drug cases, but in opposite directions. Political composition impacted the percentage of economic cases sentenced to prison while gender composition was not found to be a significant predictor.Conclusions: These findings highlight that in order to obtain a clearer picture of how judicial racial composition impacts sentencing, it is necessary to examine offense categories separately and beyond case-level outcomes.

Undergraduate students often struggle to produce clear and concise written assignments. Faculty in criminal justice often struggle with how to help them. The current study describes how a fully online introduction to criminal justice course was modified to be writing intensive. Students completed five writing assignments related to course content along with workbook exercises focused on grammar and syntax, formal writing, APA formatting and citations, and plagiarism. The first and final writing assignments included the same topic choices, but the final paper requirements included additional references and content. Students were encouraged to incorporate the feedback from the first assignment into the final paper. We examined whether students improved their written communication from the first writing assignment to the last. Our findings suggest that incorporating instruction on writing in an introduction to criminal justice course can produce positive outcomes for students, both lower-level and higher-level students.

This research examines the impact of participation in a federal reentry court program on supervision violations, revocations, and re-arrest. We evaluate a federal reentry court that utilized random selection and random assignment of participants to treatment groups and random selection for control groups. Outcomes examined include: number of supervision violations, non-technical violations, and re-arrests; and relative risk of supervision violation, non-technical violation, supervision revocation, and re-arrest. Negative binomial and Cox regression models suggest that participation in reentry court had little impact on supervision outcomes or re-arrest. Specifically, although the reentry court participants had more supervision violations compared to the control group, on average, there were no other differences based on reentry court participation. The survival analysis revealed no statistically significant differences in supervision outcomes or re-arrest for reentry court participants compared to other study groups. This study contributes to the scant and conflicting literature on reentry court programs.

Examining an academic discipline’s scholarship is a valuable endeavor to understand both the norms and the evolution of a field of study. In criminology and criminal justice (CCJ), a growing body of literature has emerged exploring a range of issues, including prevailing methodologies, authorship trends, and institutional impact. Little is known, however, about the role and impact of research funding within published CCJ scholarship (see Dowdy, 1994, for an exception). The current study explores this issue.
In this study, a team of six student researchers and two faculty mentors coded 786 journal articles on key variables, which will be discussed.

Prior research finds that correctional officers (COs) often report high levels of stress, poor mental and physical health and are at an increased risk of suffering work-related injuries. However, little is known about the causes of such injuries. In an attempt to fill this large gap in the literature, the current study used qualitative data to explore the perceived causes of work-related injuries according to COs and their executive staff. Officers identified the reasons for injuries as either within their control or outside of their control. Injuries resulting from factors within CO’s control were perceived to be related to complacency and corruption. Injuries stemming from circumstances outside of CO’s control were perceived to be related to the nature of the job, the mental health of inmates, minor events escalating, and what are known as inmate “check-ins.” In consideration of these findings, policy implications and directions for future research are also reviewed.