O. Hayden Griffin

• University of Florida, Ph.D; University of Richmond, J.D.
• Professor (Full) at University of Alabama at Birmingham

Malaysia has retained the death penalty for violent crimes and some nonviolent drug offenses. Major news dailies, controlled by political parties in the ruling coalition, have helped justify this stance in the past. This situation changed over 22 months when a new coalition, which campaigned on abolishing capital punishment, took office and sparked...

Many researchers have noted that media coverage of drugs can be sensationalized and/or have questionable accuracy. Additionally, it has been alleged that the media often treats all drugs as harmful and can fail to differentiate between different types of drugs. Within this context, the researchers sought to deconstruct how media coverage was simila...

Since the 1960s, inmate litigation has continually evolved by challenging conditions of confinement, lack of due process, and treatment by correctional administrators. One such condition of confinement that has received judicial scrutiny is solitary confinement, but there is sparse research examining solitary confinement practices and conditions th...

Methaqualone, a sedative-hypnotic drug, was legally available in the United States for less than twenty years. During that time, millions of doses were prescribed to patients and an untold number of pills were taken by recreational users. In what has become a common theme among many pharmaceutical products, methaqualone sales and use were heavily i...

Content analysis is the process of examining some form of communication materials. Content analysis is used for purposes of description and inference. It involves extracting implicit and/or explicit information from content through the process of coding and classification. The variance in procedures can leave a study susceptible to threats of valid...

It has been well-established that, in the USA, the news media contributes to the construction of moral panics regarding the use and users of various types of drugs. In this study, we utilize the moral-panic framework to understand how the media depicts drug use in Malaysia. We used content analysis of two widely read English-language Malaysian news...

Edwin Sutherland’s concept of white-collar crime remains incredibly influential in contemporary criminological research and thought. Sutherland’s work was critical of several of the most influential industries in the United States, highlighting both their criminal and unethical conduct. Today, the video game industry has garnered tremendous influen...

Theranos rose to prominence by selling a dream that a company could make blood testing less painful and more effective. The company strove to bring new technology to the laboratory industry that would make Americans healthier. After securing more than $700 million from investors, Theranos would eventually receive, at its height, a $9 billion compan...

Background People caught using amphetamine-type-stimulants (ATS) in Malaysia can either be incarcerated and subsequently be placed in a community supervision programme or if they can afford the fine, be directly sent for community supervision. We sought to determine if treatment compliance in the community supervision varied between the two groups....

Vaping has gained incredible popularity in the United States and in the United Kingdom over the last decade. Likely, this is due to the confluence of certain conditions that, together, bolstered an environment conducive for explosive growth. These conditions include the long existence of vaporizer technology, the growth of the legal cannabis indust...

Despite considerable change in inmate rights over the past several decades, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers know little about the current state of prisoner litigation. The purpose of this study is to examine the conditions of confinement within Texas prisons that inmates allege violated their constitutional rights by examining federal...

Background: Drug policies aimed at youth often adopt “scare tactics” approaches, which highlight harms of substances to dissuade youth from using them. However, the success of deterrent approaches remains widely debated, and some scholars have cautioned that these approaches may do more harm than good. Methods: Drawing on a sample of adolescents fr...

Kratom (Mitragyna speciosa), an indigenous medicinal plant of Southeast Asia, is believed to be harmful. We compared the perceptions toward kratom use among kratom users and non-users in Malaysia. 356 respondents (137 kratom users and 219 non-users) were recruited for this cross-sectional study. The majority of respondents were male (60%, n = 212/3...

Historically, the news media has been a primary participant in the construction of moral panics surrounding various drugs and their users. The current study utilizes the moral panic framework to depict how the media represents a drug new to the Western world: kratom. Kratom, a traditional plant-based substance from South Asia, came in to the public...

Background: Online pharmacies have a growing presence. While some pharmacies are legitimate, others are not and may either be a scam or provide drugs of uncertain origin, uncertain drug type, or inconsistent dosing. Some researchers have referred to these types of pharmacies as “rogue pharmacies.” The purpose of this study was to order three brand-...

One method that has been touted to help end mass incarceration is using intermediate sanctions. While intermediate sanctions often present as attractive options, there is evidence that as practiced, these sanctions often result in net widening. One of the most common forms of intermediate sanctions are drug courts, which are often viewed as progres...

Kratom is a plant native to Southeast Asia. It has been used for hundreds, if not thousands, of years in traditional medicine within that region. Kratom is a rare substance, due to it having both stimulant and narcotic properties. Kratom use has spread to regions outside of its native geographic range, and these countries are simultaneously conside...

Opioid use has long been a problem in the United States and heroin has shown to be particularly dangerous. Whereas the profile of heroin users changed throughout the 1900s, prior to the 1990s, most users were city-dwellers living on the fringes of the law. However, as the push began to make prescription opioids more available, this shift in policy...

Kratom is a traditional drug from Southeast Asia that has been an emerging new substance in the United States. On August 30, 2016, the DEA announced the intention to emergency schedule kratom into Schedule I. To support this decision, the DEA cited an increase in drug seizures of kratom and an increase in calls to poison control concerning kratom....

While the phrase “war on drugs” seems ubiquitous in the United States, many people do not appreciate the historical scope of the conflict. While a war is most often regarded as a battle between two countries, the war on drug targets individuals, predominantly American citizens. Although most people associate the war on drugs with President Richard...

After the rehabilitative era of the 1960s and 1970s there was a demand for a more punitive criminal justice system. As a result, tougher laws, greater enforcement, and longer sentences led to a vast increase in the American prison population. In an effort to combat prison violence and riots, super‐maximum (supermax) facilities were constructed. The...

Attitudes towards drug use and abuse have evolved considerably in the United States. These perceptions have ranged anywhere from drug use being a relatively minor medical condition, or even socially acceptable, to drug use being a significant social problem that is only stopped through harsh punishments and lengthy prison sentences. However, over t...

The state-corporate crime paradigm, which has evolved from the foundational work of Edwin Sutherland and subsequent generations of corporate crime research, has contributed to a more satisfying structural account of the manner in which combinations of corporate malfeasance and government/regulatory policy can result in social harm. While this parad...

Although some novel psychoactive substances (NPS) are newly discovered chemicals, others are traditional or indigenous substances that are introduced to new markets. One of these latter substances is a plant many people refer to as kratom. Indigenous to Southeast Asia and used for a variety of instrumental and recreational purposes, kratom has rece...

The purpose of this study is to examine colleges’ and universities’ compliance with the criteria presented by the Sexual Assault and Violence Education Act (SaVE). Using a stratified random sample of postsecondary institutions (n = 435), we examined university websites in spring 2015 to determine whether schools were meeting each criterion of the S...

Purpose – One of the greatest challenges for drug regulation is valid, comprehensive surveillance of drugs after they reach the pharmaceutical market. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new method of individual and aggregate-level postmarket surveillance using data previously (and continuously) collected by drug courts, which are in operati...

Crime on college campuses has increasingly become an area of public concern. While the Clery Act requires universities to disclose crime statistics and provide some methods of prevention, crimes on university campuses still appear to be a common problem. The purpose of this study was to examine how institutions were using the Internet to provide st...

A recurring concern within criminology and criminal justice (CCJ) is how to best investigate criminological theory and criminal justice policy. To assess the current state of research, we conducted a content analysis of articles that appeared in seven CCJ journals over a two-year period (2013–2014). We then examined types and frequencies of data so...

As drug control policy reform trends toward marijuana decriminalization, focus will shift to opiate enforcement which, in turn, accentuates substance abuse treatment. While the national offender reentry movement has effected widespread implementation of programming for co-occurring substance abuse and mental health disorders, the practice of Medica...

The criminal justice system is framed predominantly by notions of justice, as well as the creation of policies that will most effectively prevent and/or punish crime. The pedagogy of criminal justice often overlooks the expenditures that are necessary to enact these policies or how people actually benefit from the creation of these policies. While...

Plea bargaining is the practice of a criminal defendant pleading guilty to criminal charge(s) in exchange for several potential forms of leniency. The frequency of plea bargaining has increased significantly and is now far more common than jury trials. Many different historical developments have led to this increase. The United States Supreme Court...

Among policymakers and media in the United States, there is growing concern over increasing rates of illicit prescription drug use among college students. Using semi-structured interviews with 22 college students who misused prescription stimulants, we find that they draw on conventional middle-class beliefs (e.g., success and moderation) to make s...

Past research has demonstrated the utility of on-line support groups for individuals to form relationships and make connections. Additionally, some on-line communities have expanded to provide various types of support, particularly for deviant behavior. These virtual communities may be particularly indispensable to individuals who, out of fear of c...

As a criminal justice policy, researchers have encountered numerous problems attempting to evaluate whether supermax confinement achieves its desired goals. Among the many goals of supermax confinement is the incapacitation of the “worst of the worst” inmates. This type of custody, however, has been widely criticized for worsening inmate mental hea...

Since the United States began using incarceration as its cornerstone of punishment for those who transgress the law, this method of discipline has been fraught with problems. One of the most ubiquitous problems found within correctional institutions are the conditions inmates are forced to live in particularly, when penal facilities are overcrowded...

The contemporary media has often portrayed marijuana as a “slacker drug”; however, this portrayal is somewhat novel. Several scholars have argued in the early 1900s, especially in the 1930s, the media often associated marijuana with violence and mental illness. Another common argument was that marijuana was associated with Mexican immigrants. Conve...

Through judicial review, the United States Supreme Court has played a pivotal role in deciding and/or interpreting the constitutionality of legislation. Since the passage of the Pure, Food and Drug Act in 1906, the Supreme Court’s role has been integral in formulating drug policy. In some instances, the Court’s decisions have limited the authority...

In 1970, The United States government enacted the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). The CSA usurped all existing federal laws regulating controlled substances and established three primary criteria for evaluating all drugs: medical utility, potential for abuse, and safety of the substance. Since the passage of the CSA, the federal government has gen...

As a response to an increasing prison population and as a counteractive measure to problematic inmates, many states within the United States have established supermaximum (supermax) prisons or supermax units within existing prison facilities. Many criminal justice researchers have questioned the efficacy of these specialized units. Although the Nat...

Objectives The authors examine perceptions of a peer’s substance use to determine whether and to what degree individuals project their own behavior onto their perceptions of peer’s delinquency, and to determine whether the constructs of self-control and peer attachment are related to perceptions. Methods Using a sample of 2,154 young adult respond...

Various concerns and rationales have been the driving force for drug regulation in the United States. The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 (CSA) set up a comprehensive list of schedules and criteria that were intended to guide how all drugs were to be regulated, based on abuse liability and medical utility. This law was also supposed to eliminate...

In recent years there has been a vigorous debate in the discipline of criminology and criminal justice, concerning the role of faculty members in Criminology and Criminal Justice departments who hold a Juris Doctorate (JD), but lack a PhD. Some argue that faculty members with a JD possess sufficient credentials to be tenure-track faculty members wi...

Background: A plant with dissociative and psychoactive properties began to attract the attention of the media and United States policymakers following a well-publicized suicide in 2006 and reports that the plant served as a 'legal high' and substitute for cannabis. As a result, Salvia divinorum and its active ingredient, salvinorin A, were classif...

OxyContin, a controlled-release opioid developed and produced by Purdue Pharma, was given Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval in December 1995. By 1999, to the apparent surprise of Purdue Pharma, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the FDA, extensive reports of OxyContin abuse and diversion began to circulate. The drug abuse asse...

On May 10, 2007, three executives of the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma pled guilty in federal court to misleading doctors and patients about the risk of addiction and potential for abuse of OxyContin. Additionally, Purdue Pharma paid over $600 million in fines and other payments to the United States government and the Commonwealth of Virgini...

As new drugs are introduced into the market, it becomes the role of policy makers to assess the dangers associated with each drug and its potential to be misused by the populace. The focus of this research is to better understand how young adults learn about a new drug and subsequently engage in its use. Salvia divinorum is a plant species whose le...

Salvia divinorum is a new recreational drug where few studies have been conducted on its prevalence and predictors of use. Using a sample of undergraduate students, this study investigated these issues. While a small number reported experimenting with salvia, logistic regression models showed that demographics, marijuana use, and self-control are s...

The legal status of the hallucinogenic plant Salvia divinorum has been rapidly changing. Legal prohibitions on this plant native to Oaxaca, Mexico have emerged at the state level, a phenomenon that has not occurred since the passage of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). Included will be a brief description of the plant that has only recently crep...

The recreational use of Salvia divinorum has received increased attention by media outlets and policy-makers in recent years. The vast absence of research to guide the dissemination of information has prompted this research note describing the use of this substance in a large public institution of higher education. The prevalence of Salvia divinoru...