Crime & Delinquency 57(2)

A Randomized Trial of Probation Case Management for Drug-Involved Women Offenders
Joseph Guydish, Monica Chan, Alan Bostrom, Martha A. Jessup, Thomas B. Davis, and Cheryl Marsh

This article reports findings from a clinical trial of a probation case management (PCM) intervention for drug-involved women offenders. Participants were randomly assigned to PCM (n = 92) or standard probation (n = 91) and followed for 12 months using measures of substance abuse, psychiatric symptoms, social support, and service utilization. Arrest data were collected from administrative data sets. The sample included mostly African American and White women (age M = 34.7, education M = 11.6 years). Cocaine and heroin were the most frequently reported drugs of abuse, 86% reported history of incarceration, and 74% had children. Women assigned to both PCM and standard probation showed clinical improvement change over time on 7 of 10 measured outcomes. However, PCM group changes were no different than those observed for the standard probation group. Higher levels of case management, drug abuse treatment, and probationary supervision may be required to achieve improved outcomes in this population.

Smells Like Teen Spirit: Evaluating a Midwestern Teen Court
Michael Norris, Sarah Twill, and Chigon Kim

Teen courts have grown rapidly in the United States despite little evidence of their effectiveness. A survival analysis of 635 teen court and 186 regular diversion participants showed no significant differences in recidivism, although program completers were half as likely to reoffend as noncompleters. Older offenders survived significantly better than younger ones, and girls better than boys. For the full sample, increasing the number of sanctions resulted in earlier reoffending. This effect disappeared when noncompleters were removed from the analysis, suggesting that increasing sanctions may lead certain teens to drop out and/or reoffend. Implications for policy include screening younger juveniles out of teen courts and reconsidering their panacea status.

Understanding Parole Officers’ Responses to Sanctioning Reform
Benjamin Steiner, Lawrence F. Travis III, and Matthew D. Makarios

There are constant calls for reform in the criminal justice system, but observers have often reported that criminal justice reform is an exceptionally challenging task. As with any organizational change, resistance to new policies, procedures, and practices comes from a variety of sources. The relatively broad discretionary authority vested in line-level personnel often contributes to the difficulty associated with implementing change in criminal justice agencies. There is ample evidence that line staff resistance to organizational reform can undermine the implementation of organizational change. In this study, the authors examine the effects of the state of Ohio’s transition to graduated sanctioning guidelines on parole officers—in particular, how these reforms were perceived by the key actors in the sanctioning process: parole officers. Findings from a statewide survey revealed that officers were generally dissatisfied with the restrictions on their discretion resulting from the reform. Analyses revealed that organizational factors such as officers’ perceptions concerning how the sanctioning policy was implemented and its intended purposes were more influential than individual characteristics in shaping officers’ views concerning the efficacy of the reform.

Juvenile Transfer and Deterrence: Reexamining the Effectiveness of a “Get-Tough” Policy
Kareem L. Jordan and David L. Myers

Although research has examined the effectiveness of juvenile transfer on recidivism, there has been a lack of research done in assessing how well juvenile waiver to adult court meets the criteria necessary for deterrence to occur (i.e., certainty, severity, and swiftness of punishment). The purpose of this study is to assess how well juvenile transfer meets these criteria, using data on 345 youths legislatively waived to adult court in Pennsylvania. The findings indicate that there is greater punishment severity in adult court, but there is no difference in punishment certainty between the two court systems. In addition, court processing occurred more quickly in juvenile court. In other words, only one element of deterrence theory is achieved with juvenile transfer. Implications for subsequent research and policy are discussed.

The Jailing of America’s Homeless: Evaluating the Rabble Management Thesis
Kevin M. Fitzpatrick and Brad Myrstol

The authors of this article test hypotheses derived from Irwin’s rabble management thesis. The analysis uses data from 47,592 interviews conducted with jailed adults in 30 U.S. cities as part of the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring program. Clearly, homeless persons are overrepresented among those arrested and booked into local jails. Bivariate analysis support a fundamental assertion of the rabble management thesis: Homeless are jailed not because of their dangerousness but rather their offensiveness. Homeless arrestees are distinct from their domiciled counterparts in terms of sociodemographic characteristics, previous experiences with alcohol and drug treatment, mental health, criminal justice systems, and alcohol and drug use histories. In addition, homeless are less likely than domiciled arrestees to be jailed for felonies and violent crimes but more likely to be charged with maintenance and property crimes. Logistic regression models confirm these differences, even after other factors are controlled. A discussion of the policy implications of these findings follows.

The Effects of Victim-Related Contextual Factors on the Criminal Justice System
Stacy Hoskins Haynes

Despite numerous reforms designed to integrate the needs and concerns of crime victims into the criminal justice system, which include expanding programs for compensation and restitution, providing counseling and other services to victims, and increasing victims’ involvement in the criminal justice process, critics have argued that these reforms have failed to produce any meaningful change. To investigate this claim, the current study examined how community contextual factors (i.e., characteristics of the economic, political, and social contexts) and victim-related contextual factors (i.e., the availability of victim resources, county-level indicators of justice, and victim participation in the criminal justice system) affected sentencing outcomes across the state of Pennsylvania. Analyses using sentencing information from the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing for the years 1996 to 2006 and contextual information from the U.S. Census, the Uniform Crime Reports, and the Pennsylvania Office of Victims’ Services indicated that the availability of victim resources and county-level indicators of justice increased victim participation and were associated with longer incarcerative sentences.

Crime & Delinquency, March 2011: Volume 57, Issue 2