Recently in Studies Category

Factors in Death Sentencing

January 30, 2012 9:19 AM | Posted by Kent Scheidegger | 1 Comment
In this week's NCJRS Weekly Accessions List, we find a study that appears to be good news, at least from the abstract (emphasis added):

In the Poisson models for the full sample, several criminal-career variables were significantly associated with subsequent death sentences. These variables included an early onset of antisocial behavior as measured by juvenile arrests and prior rape, robbery, and molestation offending. In both models, which focused on separate instant offenses and the violent and property offenses, prior prison sentences predicted subsequent death sentences. These findings suggest that violent, recidivistic offenders who are routinely incarcerated throughout their life course might be sentenced to death for a capital offense. This pattern is consistent with the behavioral continuity that is a cardinal feature of criminal careers research. The number of murdered victims significantly predicted death sentences, which supports prior research that found multiple homicide victims was the strongest predictor of receiving a death sentence. An offender's race had no predictive effect on death sentences in the current sample; however, the coupling of criminal career information and race-dyad effects is an important issue for future research.

The study is Monic P. Behnken, Jonathan W. Caudill, Mark T. Berg, Chad R. Trulson, Matt DeLisi, Marked for Death: An Empirical Criminal Careers Analysis of Death Sentences in a Sample of Convicted Male Homicide Offenders, Journal of Criminal Justice Volume:39 Issue:6 Dated:November/December 2011 Pages:471 to 478.

So murderers are sentenced to death or not depending on how many people they kill and what crimes they have committed before, not depending on their race.  That is exactly how it should be.  That last part has to be hedged, of course, to allow for the possibility of a strained race-based argument in the future.

Junk Science

January 30, 2012 8:31 AM | Posted by Kent Scheidegger | 2 Comments
Christina Hoff Sommers has this op-ed at the Washington Post on a study by the Centers for Disease Control that is completely off the wall.

How many people are raped each year?  That is a difficult question to answer.  The FBI's Uniform Crime Report tells us that 84,767 rapes were reported to law enforcement in 2010, but of course not all rapes are reported.  Not even a majority.  The National Crime Victimization Survey, which calls up a sample of people Gallup-style and asks them, estimates more than twice as many -- 188,380.  But now the CDC claims there are nearly seven times that many rapes and seventy times that many incidents of sexual violence.

How do they figure?  According to Sommers, "It found them by defining sexual violence in impossibly elastic ways and then letting the surveyors, rather than subjects, determine what counted as an assault."  How bad does it get?
Continue reading Junk Science.

Defining Rape

January 6, 2012 1:38 PM | Posted by Kent Scheidegger | No Comments
Jerry Markon reports in the WaPo:

The Obama administration on Friday announced a significant expansion of the FBI's definition of rape, which will now cover several forms of sexual assault and include male rape.

Justice Department officials said that the revision would make reporting of the crime more accurate and would provide a better understanding of its effects on victims.

Since 1929, rape has been defined as "the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will." That definition, which included only men having sex with women without their consent, excluded other forms of sexual assault, such as oral penetration and rape of men.

The change is valid, IMHO, but there is one downside of changing a definition in statistical surveys that we need to be aware of.  Broadening the definition of a category of crime will cause an increase in the number of crimes reported in the category, even though there has been no actual increase in crimes committed.  Studies done on the data by researchers who are unaware of the change and fail to account for it can potentially mislead us.

Study on Truth-in-Sentencing

January 6, 2012 8:01 AM | Posted by Kent Scheidegger | No Comments
Some years back, "truth in sentencing" laws were passed in many jurisdictions to ensure that criminals or a defined subset of criminals actually served all or most of the prison time they were sentenced to.  These laws were and remain controversial.  A new report from Arizona supports the crime-reducing impact of that state's TIS law and of such laws in general.  The full report is over 500 pages and will take some time to digest. The Maricopa County* Attorney has this press release.  Bearing in mind that press releases about studies must always be taken with a grain of salt, here is the first paragraph:

Arizona has prevented more than a million crimes since 1994 by incarcerating its most dangerous criminals, according to a major research study released today. Titled Prisoners in Arizona: Truth-in-Sentencing, Time Served and Recidivism, the study concludes that Arizona's Truth-in-Sentencing (TIS) laws, which ensure that convicted criminals serve at least 85% of their sentence, led to a 17.7% drop in reported crime over a fifteen year period after TIS laws were enacted in 1994.

*Phoenix and vicinity, with over half the population of the state.

Ideology Ratings

December 29, 2011 11:19 AM | Posted by Kent Scheidegger | No Comments
This report by Jeffrey Jones of Gallup is only marginally on-topic, but ideology and politics are intertwined with criminal justice policy.  The report also implicates the limitations of models and labels.
Continue reading Ideology Ratings.

The fault, dear Brutus...

December 29, 2011 8:00 AM | Posted by Kent Scheidegger | 1 Comment
Peter Kuitenbrouwer reports for the National Post (Canada):

Police in Chatham-Kent, Ont., announced Wednesday that, of 1,986 people arrested so far this year, 203 were Aries, whereas just 139 were Sagittarius.
*                              *                            *
Criminologists and astrologists dismissed the list -- released by the police on an otherwise slow day for both crime and news -- as not comprehensive enough to portray any patterns of crime. Then again, so did the police department.
*                              *                            *
Const. Pearce, who produced the data, concedes, "Next year the list could be completely different unless we arrest the same people."
Actually, given what we know about recidivism, the latter possibility is substantial.

D'oh, Never Mind

December 28, 2011 7:36 AM | Posted by Kent Scheidegger | No Comments
Christopher Wanjek of Vitals (MSNBC) recalls the top five science journal retractions of 2011.  Two of them are crime-related.
Continue reading D'oh, Never Mind.

Booze, Teens, and Crime

December 18, 2011 9:24 AM | Posted by Kent Scheidegger | No Comments
The second thing we should do is kill all the headline writers.

Here we go again.  Christine Hsu has this story in Medical Daily.

While alcohol has frequently been linked to criminal activity among adults, a new study finds that there is a strong association between childhood drinking and criminal activity.

Researchers at the University of Miami found that the relationship between drinking and criminal activity is not just limited to perpetrating a crime, but also to criminal victimization, for both males and females.
Note that the article is careful to say "association" and "relationship," not that the booze necessarily caused the increase, which a correlational study cannot tell us.  Headlines are generally not written by the reporters who write the stories, and this important distinction was completely missed by the headline writer.  "Underage Drinking Boosts Criminal Activity: Researchers."

Whoever wrote the headline should have to stay after school and write 100 times on the blackboard:

Correlation does not prove causation.
Correlation does not prove causation.
Correlation does not prove causation.
Correlation does not prove causation.
Correlation does not prove causation.
Continue reading Booze, Teens, and Crime.

Models Behaving Badly

December 14, 2011 9:43 AM | Posted by Kent Scheidegger | 1 Comment
"All models are wrong, but some are useful," goes a saying attributed to George Box.  "Models Behaving Badly" is the title of a book by Emanuel Derman, who was originally trained as a physicist but has also worked on Wall Street.  Burton Malkiel, author of "A Random Walk Down Wall Street," has this review in the WSJ.

Derman contrasts mathematical models about human behavior with models about physics.  They are fundamentally different.

In short, beware of physics envy. When we make models involving human beings, Mr. Derman notes, "we are trying to force the ugly stepsister's foot into Cinderella's pretty glass slipper. It doesn't fit without cutting off some of the essential parts." As the collapse of the subprime collateralized debt market in 2008 made clear, it is a terrible mistake to put too much faith in models purporting to value financial instruments.
Models about crime and justice are, of course, models about human behavior.  They therefore fall into the same category as the financial models that Derman cautions us not to place too much faith in.
Continue reading Models Behaving Badly.

Methamphetamine and Psychosis

December 1, 2011 5:52 AM | Posted by Steve Erickson | 1 Comment
It is well known in mental health circles that stimulant drugs are linked with bad behavior and mental problems when abused.  Now comes a new study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry linking methamphetamine abuse with schizophrenia.  The study, Methamphetamine Use and Schizophrenia: A Population-Based Cohort Study in California is notable for its sample size: over 42,000 people were examined. 

The study confirmed the suspicions that many researchers had long suspected:  abuse of methamphetamine is associated with severe mental illness.  The study also confirmed a growing literature finding a link between marijuana and psychosis.
  
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Even Babies Think Crime Deserves Punishment

November 29, 2011 1:44 PM | Posted by Kent Scheidegger | 3 Comments
Stephanie Pappas reports at LiveScience, "Babies as young as 8 months want to see wrongdoers punished, a new study finds."

A recurring philosophical debate among criminal law theorists involves retribution versus utilitarianism.  Do we punish people to achieve practical goals such as deterrence or rehabilitation, or do we punish because the slimeball just plain deserves it?  (Among my friends in academia, Robert Blecker is the chief retributivist, while Doug Berman is more of a utilitarian.)

The belief that punishment for wrongdoing is right in itself, regardless of whether it produces any practical benefit, is a deep-seated one.
Continue reading Even Babies Think Crime Deserves Punishment.

Study Shows Studiers Can Show Anything They Want

November 21, 2011 7:57 AM | Posted by Kent Scheidegger | 2 Comments
Joseph Brean reports in the National Post:

[A] new report in the journal Psychological Science, which claims to show "how unacceptably easy it is to accumulate (and report) statistically significant evidence for a false hypothesis."

...[T]wo scientists from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and a colleague from Berkeley, argue that modern academic psychologists have so much flexibility with numbers that they can literally prove anything.

Continue reading Study Shows Studiers Can Show Anything They Want.

Link Discovered Between British Football and Crime Rates

November 19, 2011 4:58 AM | Posted by Kent Scheidegger | No Comments
A new study from across the pond:

Exeter Devon, UK: The results of a one year psychological study conducted by Dr. M. Shuttlecock, a noted London psychologist, has been published in the Surrey Psychological Observational Obsessive Functions (SPOOF) journal. The study investigated whether there is a relation between British football (soccer) and crime.
Continue reading Link Discovered Between British Football and Crime Rates.

Fatherhood and Crime

November 18, 2011 10:04 AM | Posted by Kent Scheidegger | 1 Comment
Propensity for crime changes with age, in part because of physical changes and in part because of experiences we have along the way.  One major attitude-changing life event is having children.  Is parenthood a factor in the decline of criminality with age?  So find Kerr, Capaldi, Owen, Wiesner, and Pears in Changes in At-Risk American Men's Crime and Substance Use Trajectories Following Fatherhood, Journal of Marriage and Family, v.73, pp. 1101-1116 (Oct. 2011).  Here is the abstract:
Continue reading Fatherhood and Crime.

Fake Studies

November 3, 2011 4:16 PM | Posted by Kent Scheidegger | No Comments
The Broken Windows Theory, famously advanced by our friends and advisors James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, contends that disorder in society, the small stuff, leads to higher rates of more serious crime.

In the Netherlands, Diederik Stapel of Tilburg University compiled data showing a connection between disorder and prejudice.  That's an interesting variation.  There is just one small problem with his data, though.  He made it up.

Joel Achenbach has this post at the WaPo.  Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine has this article, reprinted by Scientific American.

Continue reading Fake Studies.
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