Emily Haney-Caron

John Jay College of Criminal Justice | John Jay CUNY · Department of Psychology

Judges often use parental presence to support the validity of youth Miranda waivers, despite a lack of supporting research. Research on factors that influence parents’ behavior during youth interrogation is limited and does not account for the impact of race. The current study involved presenting 763 parents with vignettes in which their child was...

Although many jurisdictions assume that the presence of a parent during youth interrogation protects the child’s rights, research on factors that influence parents’ behavior and advice is limited. The current study examined factors that influence parental advice to their children regarding Miranda waiver, including the severity of the crime and per...

In this book, eminent scholars from varied disciplines detail how developmental science and the law shape one another across the lifespan. The chapters address fundamental questions about how human development influences laws and practices in the legal system and how the law and its practices influence development. The chapters also reveal how the...

Courts often assume that youth and adult suspects are equally capable of making decisions about whether to talk to police officers—decisions that carry serious long-term consequences. In Miranda v. Arizona, the Supreme Court ruled that prior to custodial interrogation, police officers must remind suspects of their rights to silence and legal counse...

This study examined parent acquiescence to attorney recommendations in plea bargain decisions, and the effect of racial similarity between an attorney and their juvenile client’s parent. Scholarship indicates that youth are vulnerable to the influence of authority figures in plea-bargaining, leading to a reliance on parental and attorney input for...

Juvenile Justice Anger Management (JJAM) Treatment for Girls: Facilitator Guide and Participant Materials presents a manualized anger management and aggression reduction treatment designed for adolescent girls and young women placed in residential juvenile justice facilities. The treatment program lasts for eight weeks with 16 90-minute sessions of...

Juvenile Justice Anger Management (JJAM) Treatment for Girls: Facilitator Guide and Participant Materials presents a manualized anger management and aggression reduction treatment designed for adolescent girls and young women placed in residential juvenile justice facilities. The treatment program lasts for eight weeks with 16 90-minute sessions of...

This study introduced a novel laboratory false confession paradigm to research on true and false confession. Participants were 91 undergraduates who were given the opportunity to cheat on a research task. All were ultimately accused of cheating. Of participants innocent of cheating, 17.9% confessed. Results suggest that the current paradigm complem...

Colorism is a social construct privileging lighter-skinned people of color with proximity to European features over their darker-skinned counterparts. Despite the significant role in the lives of Black women and girls, colorism is an overlooked and understudied phenomenon, particularly regarding how it shapes their punishment and criminalization in...

The term wrongful conviction typically refers to the conviction or adjudication of individuals who are factually innocent. Decades of research has rightfully focused on uncovering contributing factors of convictions of factually innocent people to inform policy and practice. However, in this paper we expand our conceptualization of wrongful convict...

Justice-involved youth have a number of risk factors for HIV infection, including high rates of substance use, psychiatric comorbidities, and risky sexual behaviors. Although detained youth are likely to receive health care—which may include HIV testing—court-involved, non-incarcerated (CINI) youth may be unlikely to receive HIV testing services ei...

Substance abuse is a widespread mental health concern in the United States. As of 2015, more than 20 million Americans over the age of 12 years met diagnostic criteria for substance abuse or dependence, and rates of substance abuse have risen since the 1990s. Furthermore, the prevalence rates of substance abuse are much higher among correctional po...

In a recent meta-analysis, Papalia, Spivak, Daffern, and Ogloff (2019) examined whether psychological treatments with adult violent offenders in correctional and forensic mental health settings are effective in preventing community recidivism and institutional misconduct. The meta-analysis, which involved 27 independent studies and over 7,000 offen...

Youth involved in the justice system meet criteria for psychiatric disorders at much higher rates than youth in the general population and a large body of research has established a relationship between mental health problems and delinquency or recidivism. However, only limited research has examined the relationship between specific types of psycho...

Exclusionary discipline practices have made schools among the primary referral sources to the juvenile justice system, helping create and perpetuate the school-to-prison pipeline. To dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in Philadelphia, the City's police department initiated the Philadelphia Police School Diversion Program and collaborated with...

This study examined the efficacy of the Juvenile Justice Anger Management (JJAM) Treatment for Girls, an anger management and aggression reduction treatment designed to meet the unique needs of adolescent girls in residential juvenile justice facilities. This randomized controlled trial of JJAM compared changes in levels of anger and aggression amo...

False confessions represent a significant problem for the criminal and juvenile justice systems and juveniles may be at particular risk for falsely confessing. In part, this risk may be due to juveniles’ greater likelihood of waiving Miranda rights and, consequently, undergoing interrogation, as well as their heightened suggestibility and greater s...

After a finding of guilt, mental health factors may influence criminal sentencing in state or federal courts, for misdemeanors or felonies, by determining the length or type of sentence imposed or whether the court chooses to suspend all or part of the sentence. This entry first discusses the factors considered at sentencing and then outlines the u...

Legal decision-makers have discretion at every stage of processing in the juvenile justice system, and individual youth characteristics (e.g., a particular psychiatric diagnosis) influence how a youth progresses through the system. As a result, changes in diagnostic criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Editio...

Developmental immaturity (DI) may help explain some of the variability in aspects of academic achievement among girls in the juvenile justice system, a population with high rates of truancy, dropout, and school failure. This study examined the relationships among the decision making and independent functioning components of DI, verbal intelligence,...

Application of the Risk-Needs-Responsivity (RNR) model in adult correctional research and practice is well developed, but remains underway in the juvenile justice system. The RNR model may facilitate a shift from punitive practices in the juvenile justice system toward individualized assessment and treatment of youth fostering rehabilitation and re...

Child custody assessments are among the most complex kinds of psychological evaluations conducted for the courts. There are standards for best practice associated with such evaluations, but relatively little has been written about how such standards apply to custody evaluations involving lesbian and gay parents. This article describes the current l...

Emerging research suggests that antisocial behavior in youth is linked to abnormal brain white matter microstructure, but the extent of such anatomical connectivity abnormalities remain largely untested because previous Conduct Disorder (CD) studies typically have selectively focused on specific frontotemporal tracts. This study aimed to replicate...

Background: Previous studies of brain structure abnormalities in conduct disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) samples have been limited owing to cross-comorbidity, preventing clear understanding of which structural brain abnormalities might be specific to or shared by each disorder. To our knowledge, this study was the firs...

Studies of pediatric conduct disorder (CD) have described frontal and temporal lobe structural abnormalities that parallel findings in antisocial adults. The purpose of this study was to examine previously unexplored cortical thickness and folding as markers for brain abnormalities in "pure CD"-diagnosed adolescents. On the basis of current frontot...