Joel H. Garner’s research while affiliated with Portland State University and other places

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 deterrence processes and to the deterrent impacts of intermediate sanctions, such as prosecution or conviction; none of these reviews incorporate any of the research on criminal sanctions for intimate partner violence. To address these limitations, this research uses meta-analytic methods to assess the specific deterrent effects of three post-arrest criminal sanctions—prosecution, conviction, and incarceration—for one offense type—intimate partner violence. Based upon 57 studies that reported 237 tests of specific deterrence theory, the effects of sanctions varied: there is a marginal deterrent effect for prosecution, no effect for conviction, and a large escalation effect among incarcerated offenders. In addition, deterrent effects in the available research are stronger in tests that use more rigorous research designs, that measure repeat offending using victim interviews instead of official records, and that use new offenses against the same victim—not new arrests or new convictions against any victim—as the criteria for repeat offending.

This study describes changes in the use of sworn volunteers among the nation’s local law enforcement agencies and identifies those state-level certification, community, and agency characteristics associated with agencies using such volunteers in 2013. Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics data from 1999 through 2013 were analyzed to document trends in both the number of sworn volunteers and the prevalence of agencies using sworn volunteers. While there has been a modest decline in the use of sworn volunteers since 1999, in 2013, about 36% of all local law enforcement agencies used sworn volunteers; furthermore, these volunteers comprised 7% of all local sworn personnel having arrest authority nationwide in 2013. A survey of peace officer standards and training agencies found that approximately two thirds of states required state-level certification of sworn volunteers. Multivariate analyses of state-level certification standards, census data, and agency characteristics found that agencies were more likely to use sworn volunteers if they (a) are a sheriff's office, (b) serve jurisdictions with larger populations, (c) have greater levels of social disadvantage, (d) do not require recruits to have more than a high school education, or (e) are located within states offering graduated levels of sworn volunteer certifications. Agencies were less likely to use volunteer officers if they (a) hire part-time sworn officers, (b) have a greater entry-level salary, or (c) are accredited.

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, and official homicide reports from Chicago, Sampson et al. found that neighborhood collective efficacy directly affects perceived neighborhood violence, household victimization, and homicide rates. In addition, they reported that the relationship between residential stability and concentrated disadvantage with each measure of violence is mediated after adding their collective efficacy measure to the regression models. This article uses Earls, Brooks-Gunn, Raudenbush, and Sampson’s archived data collection and other archived data collections to assess the extent to which Sampson et al.’s core substantive findings are independently reproducible. While the reanalysis identified some differences between the archived data and the information provided in Sampson et al., the reanalysis produced findings in the same reported direction and statistical significance for virtually all of Sampson et al.’s core substantive outcomes. This confirmation of their key conclusions provides added confidence in their collective efficacy thesis and enhances the prospects for extending it by assessing the degree to which it also affects other crime types and whether these effects persist over time.

Standard errors for Table 6. (DOCX)

Types of force used in organizational studies of force. (DOCX)

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, and disparate reporting of rates of force. The present study employs data from a nationally representative survey of state and local law enforcement agencies that has a high survey response rate as well as a relatively high rate of reporting uses of force. Using data on arrests for violent offenses and the number of sworn officers to impute missing data on uses of force, we estimate a total of 337,590 use of physical force incidents among State and local law enforcement agencies during 2012 with a 95 percent confidence interval of +/- 10,470 incidents or +/- 3.1 percent. This article reports the extent to which the number and rate of force incidents vary by the type and size of law enforcement agencies. Our findings demonstrate the willingness of a large proportion of law enforcement agencies to voluntarily report the amount of force used by their officers and the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) program to produce nationally representative information about police behavior.

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 crime control effect or not. This research seeks to contribute to this discussion by providing a systematic review of 31 published studies that provide evidence regarding the crime control benefits from prosecution, conviction, and sentencing of intimate partner violence offenders. This review describes the characteristics of each of these studies, summarizes the substantive findings reported, and evaluates the research designs, measures, and methods used. Across these studies, we array 143 reported tests into three crime prevention hypotheses: the prosecution hypothesis, the conviction hypothesis, and the sanction severity hypothesis. Based on the analyses and conclusions produced by these studies, we find that the most frequent outcome is that sanctions that follow an arrest for intimate partner violence have no effect on the prevalence of subsequent offending. However, among the minority of reported analyses that do report a statistically significant effect, two thirds of the published findings show sanctions to be associated with reductions in repeat offending and one third show sanctions to be associated with increased repeat offending. Our examination of the methods used by these studies identified seven common issues that suggest that the research designs used are inadequate to assess the relevant public policies and criminological theories. Based on our systematic assessment of the published studies, we conclude that the preponderance of the reported findings show no effect for criminal sanctions; moreover, the quality of the research methods used in this research provide an insufficient basis to support a conclusion about the use of criminal prosecution and sentencing for intimate partner violence.

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 crime control effect or not. This research seeks to contribute to this discussion by providing a systematic review of 31 published studies that provide evidence regarding the crime control benefits from prosecution, conviction, and sentencing of intimate partner violence offenders. This review describes the characteristics of each of these studies, summarizes the substantive findings reported, and evaluates the research designs, measures, and methods used. Across these studies, we array 143 reported tests into three crime prevention hypotheses: the prosecution hypothesis, the conviction hypothesis, and the sanction severity hypothesis. Based on the analyses and conclusions produced by these studies, we find that the most frequent outcome is that sanctions that follow an arrest for intimate partner violence have no effect on the prevalence of subsequent offending. However, among the minority of reported analyses that do report a statistically significant effect, two thirds of the published findings show sanctions to be associated with reductions in repeat offending and one third show sanctions to be associated with increased repeat offending. Our examination of the methods used by these studies identified seven common issues that suggest that the research designs used are inadequate to assess the relevant public policies and criminological theories. Based on our systematic assessment of the published studies, we conclude that the preponderance of the reported findings show no effect for criminal sanctions; moreover, the quality of the research methods used in this research provide an insufficient basis to support a conclusion about the use of criminal prosecution and sentencing for intimate partner violence.

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 residents in 343 neighborhood clusters conducted as part of the NIJ-sponsored Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, it was reported that collective efficacy directly affects perceived neighborhood violence, household victimization, and official homicide rates (Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls, 1997). Also reported was that collective efficacy moderates the relationship of residential stability and disadvantage with each measure of violence. This study uses Earls, Brooks-Gunn, Raudenbush, and Sampson’s (Earls et al., 1997) archived community survey database, archived U.S. Census summary data (United States Department of Commerce, 1993) and Block and Block’s (2005) archived Homicides in Chicago, 1965-1995 study to assess the extent to which Sampson, et al.’s (1997) reported results can be reproduced by using measures and statistical methods specified by Sampson, et al. (1997) and Morenoff, et al. (2001). The authors then extend the analyses conducted by Sampson, et al. (1997) by adding ten additional years of more detailed crime data in statistical models that address temporal and spatial correlation and multicollinearity. Findings reproduce the direction and statistical significance of all the key theoretical results reported by Sampson, et al. (1997). In addition, an extension of their analyses finds a direct connection between collective efficacy and rates of homicide and rape from 1995 through 2004. However, the authors did not find that collective efficacy is negatively related to officially recorded measures of robbery and assaults in 1995, nor is collective efficacy related to most property crimes during any period covered by the study. These latter findings suggest some of the limits to the influence of collective efficacy on crime. Future research should seek to determine the extent to which these limits are valid or due to issues of measurement or to methodological considerations. https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=257130

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 women, and another reason to question the criminal justice system's ability to successfully address violence between intimate partners. Our review of 135 English language studies leads us to challenge the widely accepted notion that prosecution and conviction for this offense are infrequent. There is great variability in the reported rates of prosecution and conviction for intimate partner violence. These studies report that, on average, about one third of the reported offenses and more than three fifths of arrests result in the filing of charges; more than half of all prosecutions result in a criminal conviction.