Dr. Matthew S Crow

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.

In the wake of several recent high-profile incidents involving police shootings, public interest in and demand for police body-worn cameras (BWC) has reached new heights. Following the release of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing that concluded there is a role for technology to play in building trust and accountability, President Obama requested $75 million in new federal spending to help pay for 50,000 BWCs. Police departments around the country are quickly adopting BWCs, despite a relative dearth of information regarding community or officer perceptions of the costs and benefits of this technology. Pilot studies in the UK and US are suggestive that BWCs can potentially reduce the prevalence of police use-of-force and complaints against officers (Goodall, 2007; Ariel & Farrar, 2013; White, 2013) and a survey of officers in central Florida suggests officers are generally supportive of the technology (Jennings et al., 2014). In order to increase knowledge in this area, this poster reports findings from two waves of officer and resident surveys conducted in two distinct jurisdictions.

In the wake of Blakely v. Washington (2004) and United States v. Booker (2005), sentencing guidelines are at the forefront of political and judicial debate. These Supreme Court decisions will likely return more discretion to sentencing judges in the federal and several state courts. Little is known regarding the effect of moving from restrictive guidelines to less restraining sentencing policies. In 1998, Florida transformed its sentencing policy from the 1994 Sentencing Guidelines, which were similar to the types of policies recently deemed problematic by the Court, to the Criminal Punishment Code (CPC). The CPC removed the upward limits on judges’ sentencing discretion and introduced more punitive lower limits. This paper analyzes the determinants of sentencing outcomes under each policy in an effort to explore the impact of policy change on the effects of a defendant’s race and ethnicity.