Laurie A. Gould

Georgia Southern University | GSU · Criminal Justice and Criminology

Failed and fragile states often govern through the criminalization of otherwise inconsequential or tolerated acts. These weak states also frequently use kidnapping, murder, and other violent or oppressive tactics to maintain order and stay in power. State Fragility Around the World: Fractured Justice and Fierce Reprisal analyzes the path to state f...

According to the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, approximately 1 in 5 women and 1 in 7 men will experience stalking, physical violence, and/or rape by an intimate partner in their lifetimes, and almost half of U.S. men and women have been the victim of psychological abuse by an intimate during their lives (Black et al. 20...

Culture has been implicated in a wide range of individual behaviors. However, empirical investigation of how culture impacts violent behavior is limited. In particular, the well-established finding that there is an overlap between offenders and victims has not been examined in a culturally comparative context - limiting the ability to generalize cu...

An increasing problem of great concern for academic institutions around the world is the pervasiveness of academic cheating among students. However, there is a dearth of prior research on cheating in cross-national contexts. The present study examines the relationships between structural measures of strain and principals’ reports of problematic che...

Gender inequalities in legal protection, education, health, employment, and political empowerment have been of special interest to researchers for many years. Hausmann, Tyson, and Zahidi (201020. Hausmann , R. , Tyson , L. , & Zahidi , S. ( 2010 ). Gender gap index . Geneva , Switzerland : World Economic Forum . View all references, p. 3) noted,...

The concept of state failure has only recently emerged in the political science and legal literature. Although state failure has been used to predict violent conflicts, and all citizens are affected by violence in failed/fragile states, women are especially at risk. Using data from the WomanStats project, this study’s findings reveal that the physi...

The minority threat hypothesis contends that growth in the size of a given minority population along with the ensuing competition for social and political resources will threaten existing social power arrangements. Regarding punishment specifically, the hypothesis states that dominant groups will support coercive measures to keep minority populatio...

To many, spanking a child or paddling a student is as outmoded as flogging a prisoner. Yet in many places worldwide, including the United States, corporal punishment is still practiced in the home, at school, in religious institutions, and in prisons, and is either permitted in specific circumstances or fully accepted in all venues.

Worldwide, the punishment of law violators takes many forms, with some countries relying heavily on incarceration and others favoring a mix of punishments including incarceration, corporal punishment, and the death penalty. Determining why a nation chooses to implement one sanction over another requires an examination of political factors. While so...

Actuarial risk assessment instruments have become integral to the functioning of the correctional systems in North America, the United Kingdom, and many other parts of the world. While research on the classification of female offenders has been ongoing since the 1980s, there is still more work to be done. Adding to the growing body of literature, t...

The academic job search process is perhaps one of the most important and stressful events for scholars hoping to gain full‐time employment in academia. The stress that this process induces is due, at least in part, to the fact that candidates are forced to make important, life‐changing decisions with very little information. The goal of the present...

Risk is a defining feature of punishment in the United States. This is evidenced by the profusion of actuarial risk assessment instruments, now entering their 4th generation. Although the literature on risk assessment specific to female offenders is growing, certain questions remain unresolved. In particular, it is still largely unknown how gender...

Corporal punishment as a sanction for criminal offenders has a long global history. While most North American and European countries have abandoned such methods, corporal punishment is still a mainstay of criminal justice in many parts of the world. Employing a Foucauldian framework, we posit that the distribution of social power plays a determinat...

In the past few decades, shifts in client population and criticisms of ineffectiveness-tion systems. Most correctional agencies utilize the same risk assessment instrument for both male and female offenders, and the assumption is that these tools perform an adequate job of assessing risks for both populations. However, research indicates that femal...

Risk has emerged as a defining feature of punishment in the United States. Feeley and Simon (1992) note that contemporary punishment is increasingly moving away from rehabilitation (the old penology) and moving toward the management and control of offenders (the new penology), often though actuarial techniques. While the profusion of risk assessmen...