Christopher D MaxwellMichigan State University | MSU · School of Criminal Justice
Christopher D Maxwell
Doctor of Philosophy
About
83
Publications
16,254
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2,130
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Introduction
I am a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University and a member of MSU's Center for Gender in Global Context (GenCen). My primary research interests include testing for the benefits and costs of sanctions, therapeutic treatments, and police and court services for victims of domestic violence. I also study incidents, etiology, and control of elder abuse and neglect and police use of force (violence).
Additional affiliations
February 2013 - present
August 2008 - August 2014
May 2004 - May 2009
Education
August 1990 - May 1998
Publications
Publications (83)
The progressively lowered stress threshold model suggests that due to impairments in coping, persons living with dementia have a reduced threshold for stress and respond with more behavioral symptoms of dementia as stress accumulates throughout the day. While the propositions of the model have not been evaluated, this model serves as the basis of n...
Aim
To evaluate the progressively lowered stress threshold (PLST) conceptual model as an explanation for behavioural symptoms of dementia and test several of its hypothesized propositions. The PLST model suggests that due to impairments in coping, persons living with dementia have a reduced threshold for stress and respond with more behavioural sym...
Background: Elder abuse, neglect, and financial exploitation (EANF) impacts over five million communitydwelling older adults. Yet, no evidence-based intervention models exist that prevent EANF. Objectives: In this article, we describe the assessment of process outcomes for a Community Complex Care Response Team (C3RT) model developed, via a practit...
To test if the Community Complex Care Response Team (C3RT), a coordinated community response model, impacts the likelihood of abuse, neglect, and financial exploitation among at-risk community-dwelling older adults. One hundred forty-six participants were randomly assigned to receive either the C3RT intervention (n = 74) or the standard practice (n...
There is widespread concern that elder abuse and neglect (EAN) incidents increased during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic due in part to increases in risk factors. Initial reports relying on administrative systems such as adult protective services records produced mixed results regarding whether or not there was a change in EAN incidents. Using...
Background:
Elder abuse, neglect, and financial exploitation impacts over five million community-dwelling older adults in the United States. Although services are available to help these victims, they are often fragmented within communities with service providers having limited means to provide preventative services. The coordinated community resp...
Background:
Elder abuse, neglect, and financial exploitation (EANF) impacts over five million community-dwelling older adults. Yet, no evidence-based intervention models exist that prevent EANF.
Objectives:
In this article, we describe the assessment of process outcomes for a Community Complex Care Response Team (C3RT) model developed, via a pra...
Consistent with a therapeutic jurisprudence framework, court decisions and processes can have a therapeutic or antitherapeutic effect on intimate partner violence (IPV) victims. To maximize therapeutic effects, IPV scholars have advocated for survivor-defined practices that emphasize the importance of engaging with victims in a collaborative manner...
This study examines the relationship between general offending and intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration in young adulthood, using a Dutch longitudinal study. Young adults were followed over four waves, and self-reported data on general offending, IPV perpetration, and a number of individual characteristics were collected. Results of random...
A dozen systematic reviews published since 1978 have sought to clarify the complexities of deterrence theory. These reviews emphasize the general deterrent effects of police presence, arrest, and incarceration on rates of homicide and other serious crimes, such as assault, rape, and burglary. These reviews provide less attention to specific deterre...
Criminologists are increasingly investigating the harmful intersections between humans and the natural environment, largely under the green criminology banner. However, most discourses have largely remained at the macro level and empirical tests are limited. The foci of research had been industry, state/national actors or policy discourses and not...
This study examined how patterns in general offending relate to the occurrence of and likelihood of persistence in intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration in young adulthood. The study used longitudinal data from the cohort of 18 year olds from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods study. Self-reported offending was measure...
Since the mid-1970s, Western-leaning nations have focused on measuring and responding swiftly and punitively to domestic violence in all of its many forms (e.g., child abuse, spouse abuse, elder mistreatment). Within this arena, many advocates, academics, governmental staff, and legislatures have focused their attention on addressing what is now ge...
Understanding the co-occurrence or overlap among multiple forms of elder abuse and neglect (EAN) is important for designing effective interventions. This paper reports patterns of family caregiver’s daily behaviors related to physical assault, psychological mistreatment, and neglect. Majority of participants self-reported at least one EAN behavior...
The stress-process model suggests a variety of factors related to the stress-experience as important in the formation of outcomes including elder abuse and neglect (EAN). Multi-level modeling with days (n=831) nested within caregivers (N=50) was used to evaluate relationships between theoretically-based risk and protective factors and odds of EAN....
Background and objectives:
The purpose of this study was to identify risk and protective factors for abusive and neglectful behavior in the context of daily caregiving.
Research design and methods:
Family caregivers who co-reside with a care recipient with Alzheimer's disease and related dementia, recruited from social media, completed 21-days o...
Procedural justice theorists contend that individuals who see police acting in a procedurally fair manner will more frequently comply with police commands and obey the law. While studies report positive correlations between perception of fairness and compliance with police commands, there is a dearth of research about whether procedural or distribu...
This study examines the relationship between criminal behaviour over the life-course and intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration and general violence in later life. The study uses data on a subsample (N = 585) from the Dutch Criminal Career and Life-Course Study, and combines officially registered longitudinal data on convictions with self-rep...
The caregiver stress theory is suggested as a causal theory for physical and psychological elder abuse (EA) and neglect within dementia, due to the high rate of behavioral symptoms of dementia (BSD) and caregiver stress. The purpose of this micro-longitudinal study is to evaluate the caregiver stress theory among a sample of dementia family caregiv...
This study evaluated the success of researcher-generated recruitment, enrollment, data collection, and safety protocols for field research with victims of elder abuse and neglect (EAN) identified from police incident reports in terms of their success including cost-effectiveness, ability to generate a representative sample, and safety. After review...
This research tests the reproducibility of the neighborhood-level effects of social composition and collective efficacy on community violence that Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls reported in a Science article entitled “Neighborhood and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy.” Based upon data from a resident survey, the U.S. Census,...
This research builds on three decades of effort to produce national estimates of the amount and rate of force used by law enforcement officers in the United States. Prior efforts to produce national estimates have suffered from poor and inconsistent measurements of force, small and unrepresentative samples, low survey and/or item response rates, an...
Types of force used in organizational studies of force.
(DOCX)
Standard errors for Table 6.
(DOCX)
Elder abuse and neglect (EA/N) is a public health and safety epidemic with impacts in emergency department utilization, nursing home placement, mortality, and financial losses. Vulnerability has been shown to be highly correlated with EA/N victimization, yet research is lacking on interventions aimed at decreasing vulnerability. Some preliminary pr...
This chapter provides an overview of the key issues that signify the exceptional nature of American homicide. First, we analyse a unique dataset covering 32 years and 618,080 victims to describe overall trends, the demographic characteristics of victims and offenders, and the circumstances in which these events take place. Second, we discuss two co...
A growing body of environmental justice research consistently demonstrates an association between area race, class and the presence/level of environmental hazards. However, the mechanisms that create these environmental inequities are less understood. In the current study, we draw on criminological research on neighborhood social process to extend...
A growing body of environmental justice research consistently demonstrates an association between area race, class and the presence/level of environmental hazards. However, the mechanisms that create these environmental inequities are less understood. In the current study, we draw on criminological research on neighborhood social process to extend...
A growing body of environmental justice research consistently demonstrates an association between area race, class and the presence/level of environmental hazards. However, the mechanisms that create these environmental inequities are less understood. In the current study, we draw on criminological research on neighborhood social process to extend...
The aim is to conduct a critical analysis of existing family violence literature related to elder abuse homicide, also known as “eldercide.” The focus relates to fatal violence perpetrated by current or former intimates. Men are the most likely victims of homicide, but rarely murdered by partners. Older women are most often killed in the home by a...
A prior review of published research established that once an intimate violence offense results in an arrest, the use of criminal prosecution and conviction is more commonplace than traditionally thought. The substantial use of criminal sanctions beyond arrest heightens the salience
of whether criminal sanctions for intimate partner violence have a...
A prior review of published research established that once an intimate violence offense results in an arrest, the use of criminal prosecution and conviction is more commonplace than traditionally thought. The substantial use of criminal sanctions beyond arrest heightens the salience of whether criminal sanctions for intimate partner violence have a...
This study reproduces and extends the analyses about the neighborhood-level effects of collective efficacy on criminal behavior originally reported by Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls in a 1997 Science article entitled Neighborhood and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy. Based on a 1995 citywide community survey of 8,782 residen...
Randomized clinical trials (RCTs) have been used for several decades in criminal justice research to assess the benefits of
interventions. RCTs have been employed with some frequency in evaluating batterer intervention programs (BIPs); between 1990
and 2005, there were five RCTs of BIPs. While most of these studies failed to find positive findings,...
This article examines the aggregate effects of neoclassical sentencing reforms on three often contested outcomes of these reforms. The rate of new court commitments, the average length of time inmates serve, and prison population rates across the fifty U.S. states and the District of Columbia are examined. Data from 1973 to 1998 across these jurisd...
This study tests the impact of coordinated community response (CCR) on reducing intimate partner violence (IPV) and on modifying knowledge and attitudes. The authors conduct hierarchical linear modeling of data from a stratified random-digit dial telephone survey (n = 12,039) in 10 test and 10 control sites, which include 23 counties from different...
The prosecution of intimate partner violence is thought to be infrequent, as is the rate at which those prosecutions result in a criminal conviction. The paucity of prosecutorial and court response to intimate partner violence is considered one of the inadequacies of the justice system, an indicator of society's inattentiveness to violence against...
The author(s) shown below used Federal funds provided by the U.S. Department of Justice and prepared the following final report:
Collective efficacy is a major contemporary concept explaining the influence of neighborhood dynamics on the rate of various crimes within and between neighborhoods or among other socially cohesive units. The collective efficacy concept ascended from earlier theorizing regarding the way in which a neighborhood's static dynamics (e.g., concentrated...
Preventing repeat victimization is an area of criminology that has shown particular promise in recent years. Based on the premise that persons once victimized are at higher risk than others for future victimization, British officials developed successful programs that focus crime prevention efforts on victims. Of all crimes, family violence may hav...
This study examines how patrol officers respond to citizens' requests that officers control another citizen—by advising or persuading them, warning or threatening them, making them leave someone alone or leave the scene, or arresting them. Data are drawn from field observations conducted in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1996 and St. Petersburg, Florida...
This paper examines the co-occurrence of prostitution, drug use, drug selling, and involvement in non-drug crimes among women who have used serious drugs (e.g., crack, heroin). Existing perspectives on the drug use-prostitution nexus are re-examined using three dimensions of the criminal career paradigm: prevalence, lambda, and age of onset. Result...
Research Summary: This research addresses the limitations of prior analyses and reviews of five experiments testing for the specific deterrent effect of arrest on intimate partner violence by applying to individual level data consistent eligibility criteria, common independent and outcome measures, and appropriate statistical tests. Based on 4,032...
The relationships among women's experiences of domestic violence, community violence, and their mental health functioning were explored (N = 94). Social contagion theory was used to argue for the link between community violence and family violence. Results revealed that women's experiences of domestic violence were not related to community violence...
The widespread belief that illicit drugs are closely associated with crime has contributed to America's "War on Drugs" and attendant increases in arrests, convictions, and prison populations. However, the links between alcohol and crime have received less attention from policy makers and the public despite consistent evidence that alcohol is more l...
The effects of family violence on children's aggressive behaviors have been the focus of much research. However, results have been equivocal in at least the following three areas: (a) the specific effects on aggression of child-directed violence versus child-witnessed violence, (b) the salience of family violence as an explanation of aggression whe...
This study describes the risk factors associated with experiencing and committing sexual aggression among a sample of male and female adolescents. High school students completed a questionnaire containing a revised form of the Sexual Experiences Survey to assess sexual victimization and offending experiences. Ordinal regression equations were estim...
This study assessed whether sexual assault offenders were differently adjudicated from other violent felons and to what extent any differences in adjudication decisions were explained by the defendant's race. Five court decisions were analyzed using a weighted sample of 41,151 cases adjudicated between 1990 and 1996 that were representative of case...
Statements in italics represent the views of the reader, Rus Funk, MSW, and are not found within the content of the article.) This report provides an overview of two recent studies that examined the efficacy of batterer intervention programs in 2 communities (Broward Co., Fl. and Brooklyn, NY). The Broward Co. project compared men who went through...
Using a diversity of samples, sources of data, measures of force, analytical methods, and theoretical frameworks, prior research reported that the prevalence of police use of force ranges from 0.8% to 58.1% of police-suspect encounters. In addition, few characteristics of officers, suspects, police departments, or neighborhoods are associated consi...
This study examines the relationship between age, physical violence and non-physical abuse within the context of intimate partner violence (IPV). It tests the hypothesis that while the prevalence of physical violence is lower among older women, other forms of intimate partner violence are not related to age. The study uses data from the Michigan Vi...
This study examines the justice system's decision that sexual violence, particularly rape, is not an economic crime. The authors estimate the tangible and intangible financial costs of sexual violence in Michigan. In 1996, rape and sexual assault cost Michigan more than $6.5 billion, most of which came in the form of intangible costs. Sex-offense h...
Prior research has examined the relationship between variations in police behavior and variations in possible explanatory factors, such as demographic characteristics of police officers and citizens, situational factors of police-citizen encounters, and community characteristics. The research on the use of force has, in many instances, been limited...
Despite numerous evaluations of batterer treatment programs, most lack sufficient methodological rigor to yield valid answers about the programs' effectiveness. This paper presents results from an experimental evaluation in which 376 adult males convicted of domestic violence were randomly assigned to either a 40-hour batterer treatment program or...
The six domestic violence police arrest experiments and several precursor studies stand unique in their research contribution to criminology and public policy. Together, these studies have significantly informed the debate about the deterrent effects of criminal justice sanctions and about the importance of how police can respond effectively to dom...
Abstract This report describes the design and implementation,of a series of studies that measures the continuum,of force ordinarily used by police officers and suspects and assesses the extent to which characteristics of the arrest situation and the characteristics of the officer and the suspect are associated with increased use of force. This stud...
The Metropolitan Area Child Study (MACS) is a multifaceted school- and family-based intervention and evaluation study designed to prevent and understand the development of aggressive behavior. The multifaceted interventions are grounded in combined social-cognitive and ecologic theories. Social-cognitive theories contend that cognitive scripts, att...
Published reports from seven jointly developed experiments have addressed whether or not arrest is an effective deterrent to misdemeanor spouse assault. Findings supporting a deterrent effect, no effect, and an escalation effect have been reported by the original authors and in interpretations of the published findings by other authors. This review...
"[Graduate School of Criminal Justice]" Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 1998. Includes abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 208-249).
Projects
Projects (6)
Over 47% of family members who care for a relative with Alzheimer’s disease or a related dementia (ADRD) engage in physical or psychological abuse or neglect. Cross-sectional studies report caregiver stress and behavioral symptoms of dementia are correlated with elder abuse and neglect (EAN), making the caregiver burden theory the leading explanation for EAN. Our pilot work found that the causal pathway between caregiver burden and EAN may only hold true under certain situations with evidence that the subtypes of EAN (physical abuse, psychological abuse, neglect) are enacted through different mechanisms. This suggests that the caregiver burden theory may not wholly explain EAN by ADRD family caregivers, and that other explanations offered for family violence (power and control, social learning, ecological frameworks) may explain EAN in situations when the caregiver burden theory does not. Accordingly, our project will develop a more nuanced understanding of how, when and for whom the caregiver burden theory does apply and identify alternative explanations for when the burden theory does not fit our data. To achieve our goal of understanding the contextual-dependency of modifiable risk and protective factors in predicting EAN events within ADRD family caregiving, our prospective observational cohort study will employ an innovative multi-time series design with three measurement periods over the course of a year. English and Spanish speaking family caregivers of those with ADRD or mild cognitive impairment (N=760) will complete surveys to capture long-term patterns in health and wellbeing at intake, month 6 and 12. Immediately following each time point, participants will complete 21daily diary surveys to capture varying daily dynamics of caregivers’ experiences. We will use multi-level models (HLM) to account for the daily observations in three follow up periods nested in people. In aim 1, we will evaluate the direct and interaction effects of various daily dynamics (care and non-care related stressors, contextual moderators) in predicting EAN events, testing hypotheses offered by the caregiver burden theory. In aim 2, using the 6-month measures we will evaluate the effects of various long-term patterns in health and wellness, testing hypotheses offered by the caregiver burden theory. We will also test for cross-level interactions consistent with the ecological framework. In aim 3, using data collected at intake we will examine the extent to which person-level attributes predict EAN events, testing hypotheses offered by the caregiver burden, social learning and power and control theories. Finally, because the ecological framework suggests that these theories are not mutually exclusive, we will test for cross-level interactions in this 3-level HLM to predict EAN events. The study findings will significantly impact the field, by laying the groundwork for further intervention development to support ADRD caregivers and care recipients, and serving as a methodological model for understanding EAN in other contexts. The framework will inform intervention strategies on multiple levels, spanning from individualized person-centered approaches to public health programming and policy.
The US Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) and National Institute of Justice (NIJ) funded the National Domestic Violence Homicide Prevention Demonstration Initiative (DVHPDI) to assess the implementation process and outcomes of two domestic violence homicide reduction models: the Lethality Assessment Program (LAP) and the Domestic Violence High Risk Team (DVHRT) program. The Demonstration Initiative includes four sites implementing the Lethality Assessment Program and one site implementing the High Risk Team model. The evaluation also includes two comparison sites that are implementing the Lethality Assessment Program without the additional supports provided by the demonstration initiative.