Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion

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The growth of incarceration in the United States: exploring causes and consequences

The upshot of these needs for change is both dismaying and exciting, both disturbing in the destruction of long-familiar patterns of dealing with human suffering, and paradoxically hopeful in raising the possibility that significant failures in our health care systems of the past — limited access to medical care and grossly inadequate public sector “non-systems”, for example — may now be addressed more successfully.

Administration and policy in mental health

Child abuse and neglect.

Introducing Focus Groups

After conducting a comprehensive literature search, the authors undertook a meta-analysis to examine the association between correctional education and reductions in recidivism, improvements in employment after release from prison, and learning in math and in reading. Their findings support the premise that receiving correctional education while incarcerated reduces an individual's risk of recidivating. They also found that those receiving correctional education had improved odds of obtaining employment after release. The authors also examined the benefits of computer-assisted learning and compared the costs of prison education programs with the costs of reincarceration.

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Evaluating the Effectiveness of Correctional Education: A Meta-Analysis of Programs That Provide Education to Incarcerated Adults

Motivations for becoming a police officer: Re-assessing officer attitudes and job satisfaction after six years on the street☆

In 2013, the Chicago Police Department conducted a pilot of a predictive policing program designed to reduce gun violence. The program included development of a Strategic Subjects List (SSL) of people estimated to be at highest risk of gun violence who were then referred to local police commanders for a preventive intervention. The purpose of this study is to identify the impact of the pilot on individual- and city-level gun violence, and to test possible drivers of results. The SSL consisted of 426 people estimated to be at highest risk of gun violence. We used ARIMA models to estimate impacts on city-level homicide trends, and propensity score matching to estimate the effects of being placed on the list on five measures related to gun violence. A mediation analysis and interviews with police leadership and COMPSTAT meeting observations help understand what is driving results. Individuals on the SSL are not more or less likely to become a victim of a homicide or shooting than the comparison group, and this is further supported by city-level analysis. The treated group is more likely to be arrested for a shooting. It is not clear how the predictions should be used in the field. One potential reason why being placed on the list resulted in an increased chance of being arrested for a shooting is that some officers may have used the list as leads to closing shooting cases. The results provide for a discussion about the future of individual-based predictive policing programs.

Predictions put into practice: a quasi-experimental evaluation of Chicago’s predictive policing pilot

Objective To examine potential differences in psychiatric symptoms between parent-bereaved youth (N = 172), youth who experienced the death of another relative (N = 815), and nonbereaved youth (N = 235), aged 11 to 21 years, above and beyond antecedent environmental and individual risk factors. Method Sociodemographics, family composition, and family functioning were assessed one interview wave before the death. Child psychiatric symptoms were assessed during the wave in which the death was reported and one wave before and after the death. A year was selected randomly for the nonbereaved group. Results The early loss of a parent was associated with poverty, previous substance abuse problems, and greater functional impairment before the loss. Both bereaved groups of children were more likely than nonbereaved children to show symptoms of separation anxiety and depression during the wave of the death, controlling for sociodemographic factors and prior psychiatric symptoms. One wave following the loss, bereaved children were more likely than nonbereaved children to exhibit symptoms of conduct disorder and substance abuse and to show greater functional impairment. Conclusions The impact of parental death on children must be considered in the context of pre-existing risk factors. Even after controlling for antecedent risk factors, both parent-bereaved children as well as those who lost other relatives were at increased risk for psychological and behavioral health problems.

Psychiatric symptoms in bereaved versus nonbereaved youth and young adults: a longitudinal epidemiological study.

The synthetic control method is an increasingly popular tool for analysis of program efficacy. Here, it is applied to a neighborhood-specific crime intervention in Roanoke, VA, and several novel contributions are made to the synthetic control toolkit. We examine high-dimensional data at a granular level (the treated area has several cases, a large number of untreated comparison cases, and multiple outcome measures). Calibration is used to develop weights that exactly match the synthetic control to the treated region across several outcomes and time periods. Further, we illustrate the importance of adjusting the estimated effect of treatment for the design effect implicit within the weights. A permutation procedure is proposed wherein countless placebo areas can be constructed, enabling estimation of p-values under a robust set of assumptions. An omnibus statistic is introduced that is used to jointly test for the presence of an intervention effect across multiple outcomes and post-intervention tim...

Jessica Saunders

Papers

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Correctional Education: A Meta-Analysis of Programs That Provide Education to Incarcerated Adults

Motivations for becoming a police officer: Re-assessing officer attitudes and job satisfaction after six years on the street☆

Predictions put into practice: a quasi-experimental evaluation of Chicago’s predictive policing pilot

Psychiatric symptoms in bereaved versus nonbereaved youth and young adults: a longitudinal epidemiological study.

A Framework for Synthetic Control Methods With High-Dimensional, Micro-Level Data: Evaluating a Neighborhood-Specific Crime Intervention