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Sex offender registration and notification act (SORNA) offenders are a source of scholarly study across the social, behavioral, forensic and legal sciences with the bulk of literature focusing on the legal standing and deterrent value of sexual offender registries. Less research focuses on the offending careers of current SORNA offenders relative to other types of sexual offenders whose current offense is not SORNA. The purpose of the current study is to examine this issue empirically.

Using cross-sectional data from a census of male federal offenders who ever perpetrated a sexual offense from the central USA between 2016 and 2020, the current study used t-tests, logistic regression and negative binomial regression to compare current SORNA offenders to other federal correctional clients in terms of their lifetime offending history, sexual violence and compliance on federal supervision.

Current SORNA offenders are significantly more severe and versatile in their sexual offending, have more extensive criminal careers and criminal justice system involvement, and exhibit significantly increased odds of revocation on supervised release despite controls for age, race and ethnicity. However, sensitivity models that specified the federal Post-Conviction Risk Assessment reduced the effects of SORNA status to non-significance in all models.

SORNA offenders are potentially a significant offender group with evidence of both and given their versatile and specialized lifetime offending and noncompliance on federal supervision. However, current SORNA status is rendered spurious once a risk assessment is controlled suggesting more research is needed to evaluate whether sex offender registries posit greater crime control benefit.

The classification of criminal acts as violent or nonviolent should be a keystone of actuarial predictors of violent recidivism, as it affects their outcome measure and scoring of criminal history, thus influencing many decisions about sentencing, release and treatment allocation. Examination of existing actuarial and clinical violence risk assessment tools and research studies reveals considerable variation in the classifications used. This paper aims to use large samples to develop an alternative, empirically grounded classification that can be used to improve actuarial predictive scores within the offender assessment system (OASys), the tool used by the National Offender Management Service of England and Wales to assess static and dynamic risk.

Two analytical steps are implemented. First, to identify offences that frequently involve violent acts, 230,334 OASys cases are analyzed for indicators of violent content. Second, the ability of dynamic and static risk factors to predict reoffending for various offence types is investigated, analyzing 26,619 OASys cases that have official recidivism data.

The resulting empirical classification of violent offences adds public order, criminal damage, threats/harassment, robbery/aggravated burglary and weapon possession offences to the central group of homicide and assault offences. The need to assess risk of sexual recidivism separately is discussed.

This study has successfully produced an offence classification for use in a new predictor of violent recidivism. The use of empirical methods to select these offences helps to maximise predictive validity.

Much has been written about intimate partner homicide (IPH), but empirical examinations have been less rigorous and mostly descriptive in nature. The purpose of this paper is to provide an exploration of the characteristics of fatal intimate partner violence (IPV) cases.

A direct comparison of fatal IPHs with both a matched sample of non-fatal IPV cases and a random selection of non-fatal IPV cases is made on a number of offence, offender, victim characteristics and risk-relevant variables.

Despite assertions that domestic homicide is different than domestic violence, in general, few notable differences emerged among the groups. Prior domestic incidents differed between the matched fatal and non-fatal cases, where a greater proportion of the homicide perpetrators had a prior domestic incident. Other differences that were found revealed that more non-fatal perpetrators had substance abuse problems, younger victims and been unemployed at the time of the offence. However, differences were minimal when fatal and non-fatal IPV perpetrators were matched on demographic features and criminal history.

This study highlights that there may be few features that distinguish IPH and non-fatal violence. Rather than be distracted with searching for risk factors predictive of fatality, we should evaluate IPV risk using broad-based approaches to determine risk for reoffending and overall severity of reoffending.

Police misconduct is a grave matter undermining public trust in law enforcement and police professionalism. While research has specified major forms and causal theories of police misconduct, especially regarding corruption and excessive force, scientific attention to police sexual misconduct (PSM) has been more limited and is addressed here. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue.

The current study was commissioned to examine PSM incidents (n = 50) between 2000 and 2009 in a large, metropolitan, police department in the USA. Data were extracted from agency internal affairs case files, personnel records and disciplinary histories for involved officers.

Analyses identified common factors and trends across officers, complainants and sexual misconduct events that were dichotomized per case substantiation and observed on a severity continuum from unobtrusive to criminal conduct.

Though findings did not evidence a deviant subculture often implicated in the police literature, specific opportunities to reduce officer misconduct, including intensifying administrative sanctioning and other perceptual deterrence measures, were identified.

The idea that criminal behavior is a function of the offender's personality, also called the Homology hypothesis, has a long history in forensic psychology and criminology. This assumption, however, has been decried as lacking empirical support. In spite of much social concern relative to sexual offenses, there is virtually no research looking at the stability of offending pattern in sex offenders of adult women. This paper aims to fill some of the gaps.

Latent structure analyses were conducted on a secondary dataset including 145 serial rapists. A cross‐sectional, discrete time‐series design was used including a sequence of three offenses.

Moderate support was found for the three main assumptions underlying the Homology hypothesis. Offenses tended to share a relatively similar underlying structure, with the victimology and aggression components being more prominent than the sexual dimension. The three primary profiles identified, labeled “Passive”, “Stranger‐aggressive”, and “Antisocial”, were found to be about 50 percent stable across the sequence. Finally, the presence of significant dysfunction in the family of origin predicted membership in the “Antisocial” class, as well as increased the specificity and stability of this profile. The presence of early maladjustment was not related to any of the states.

Based on the results, it is proposed that future research incorporates contextual‐environmental elements in order to increase the validity of the findings.

This study represents a unique attempt at documenting patterns of stability and variations across incidents of rape, using an institutional sample. Furthermore, it illustrates the use and potential benefits of latent structure models in criminological research.

This chapter presents four theories that hypothesize race/ethnicity disparities in sentence outcomes. Empirical studies assessing the relationship between defendant’s race/ethnicity and sentence severity are discussed.

I focus on federal sentencing in terms of support or non-support of the theoretical perspectives.

Sentence disparity linked to defendant’s race/ethnicity are observed as net main effects, as a component in joint-conditioning effects with other extralegal defendant characteristics, and as a variable that conditions the effect of process-related mechanism of discretion, and legally relevant case characteristics, and as indirect effects.

Theories share substantial conceptual overlap in specifying the relationship between defendant’s race/ethnicity and predictions of the effect of defendant’s race/ethnicity on sentence severity.

This study aims to use a novel data set of 636 murderers sentenced to death in California to investigate homicide offenses that are committed but not prosecuted or officially solved, a concept known as the dark figure of crime.

Uaing appellate records from the Supreme Court of California, which contain extensive information about the offender’s background, criminal offense history and mental health diagnoses, it was revealed that one-third of the offenders in the sample have additional homicide offenses for which they likely bear responsibility, but were not prosecuted.

Most of these involve one or two additional homicides, though a wide range was observed spanning 0 to 93 additional victims. Those with a dark figure of murder and unsolved homicides had substantially more prior arrests, convictions and prison incarcerations and were higher in psychopathy, sexual sadism, homicidal ideation and gang involvement than offenders without a dark figure. Psychopathy and homicidal ideation were the most robust predictors of both the presence and magnitude of a dark figure of murder and unsolved homicides, whereas sexual sadism was inconsistently associated.

A disproportionate amount of the unsolved murders in the USA are likely perpetrated by the most pathological types of offenders, those with extensive antisocial careers and severe externalizing psychopathology.

The purpose of this paper is to assess if federal judges have sentenced criminal corporations to fines that are consistent with the seriousness of the offense and the blameworthiness of the organization, which would be in line with the directives from the US Sentencing Guidelines. This paper will also use the focal concerns framework to measure organizational blameworthiness.

This paper uses secondary data from federal sentencing documents, collected by the US Sentencing Commission, for cases that were adjudicated between October 1, 2010 and September 30, 2017.

Results showed that the focal concerns framework can be used to define potential constructs for blameworthiness and that an organization’s culpability score was a significant predictor in whether the company received a higher fine.

The data are unable to examine two of the three measures of focal concerns. Cross-sectional data limits the ability to draw conclusions regarding cause and effect between blameworthiness and monetary fines.

Results imply that judges are sentencing corporations that have higher culpability scores to more severe fines, in accordance with both the federal Sentencing Guidelines and focal concerns framework.

This study is one of the first to apply the focal concerns framework, usually used to examine the sentencing of individuals, to the sentencing of corporations. It is also one of the first to attempt to empirically define blameworthiness.

The paper aims to consider whether social enterprise, who are growing in number and seemingly a politically popular alternative to mainstream employment are a potential conduit for social change. Discussions relating to the value of (stable) employment in reducing and preventing (re)offending are not new. For many ex-offenders, a multitude of barriers stand between them and access to the labour market. As a potential conduit for social change, social enterprises are a growing and seemingly politically popular alternative to mainstream employment.

Focusing on the qualitative lived experiences of young people (aged between 16 and 18) with criminal convictions enrolled in one such enterprise, this paper examines the extent to which work-integrated social enterprise can assist in overcoming existing barriers to the labour market.

The paper highlights the value of social enterprise(s) in addressing the complex needs and precarities of criminalised youths, promoting social inclusion and assisting with progression into future employment. The paper also discusses the limitations of social enterprise(s) in overcoming external structural barriers to meaningful employment for those with an offending history and the implications for young people who aspire to more than precariat work.

Justice-orientated social enterprises are allowing young people with criminal records the opportunity to build social capita and access precarious work, previously unattainable for many. By focusing on the concept of “precarity”, this paper builds upon existing research on the collateral consequences of criminal convictions offering insights into the various challenges facing criminalised youths attempting to build a positive pro-social work identity within contemporary labour markets

This study set out to advance knowledge on the reporting of police shootings in print media. Media is the main source of information on criminal justice issues for most citizens. Thus, understanding the presentation of police-involved shooting incidents is important for determining the manner in which media might shape the opinions of readers.

The current study content analyzed relevant newspaper articles gathered from a large database of journalistic documents compiled by Lexis Nexis. Articles pertaining to police shootings published between January 1, 2014 and April 30, 2015, were identified and coded to document various dimensions of how these encounters are portrayed in print media.

Results indicate that explicit racialization of the stories was limited, which is contrary to what was expected. Neither the race of the suspect or officer was mentioned in most stories, making it difficult to assess explicit reporting bias of these incidents. However, results indicate that implicit bias might play a role in shaping the content portrayed in print news accounts of police-involved shootings.

The current study represents one of the first – if not the first – content analysis of news stories centered on police-involved shootings. Given the significant role media plays in delivering information about crime and justice topics to the citizenry, a working knowledge about the media’s portrayal of these events is important for understanding how media consumption may shape citizens’ opinions about police-involved shootings.