Research showing that transgender people experience disproportionately negative police interactions raise a host of questions about the perceptions of police that guide their decisions and attendant actions. One potential driver of these disparities is whether police perceive a person's gender as normative or not. Using data derived from California's Racial and Identity Profiling Act, which requires officers to record their subjective perceptions of every person they stop, we examine how perceived gender relates to policing outcomes. We find that individuals perceived as transgender men and women are significantly more likely to be searched and arrested than those perceived as cisgender men or women, despite being no more likely to be found with contraband during a search. These findings demonstrate that police perceptions of gender are related to interactions and outcomes, and they support arguments that policing can function as a form of queer control, insofar as visibly gender nonconforming individuals are subjected to more invasive forms of policing and punitive outcomes.
]]>In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Clarke and Newman extended environmental criminology ideas with the EVIL DONE framework to better explain terrorist target selection and vulnerability. Though widely cited, the framework has limited empirical validation. This study examines its utility using a unique data set of terrorist incidents in Iran. Using data primarily from the Global Terrorism Database (1979–2020) and supplemented with cases from the Iranian Perspective and News on Terrorism (Habilian) for 2021–2025, a total of 539 incidents were coded for EVIL DONE attributes. Environment categories displayed distinct EVIL DONE profiles across settings, and higher scores were strongly associated with both the likelihood of a fatal attack and the overall number of casualties.
The findings provide empirical support for using EVIL DONE attributes to assess terrorist risk across places and targets and highlight the framework's value for prioritizing prevention efforts. Incorporating EVIL DONE measures into geographic risk assessments may improve the allocation of counterterrorism resources and enhance proactive prevention strategies by identifying locations and targets with elevated risk of terrorist attacks. Although terrorists are systematically shaped by opportunity structures and target vulnerabilities, situational counterterrorism strategies can harden vital infrastructure, increase guardianship around crowded or fragile targets, and reduce ease of access in exposed public settings.
]]>Child sexual abuse (CSA) cases rely on attorneys, judges, and jurors having an accurate understanding of complex abuse dynamics, including sexual grooming. While sexual grooming is widely used in research and legal contexts, little is known about how attorneys understand and use the construct. This study examined attorneys' knowledge, perceptions, and utilization of sexual grooming in CSA cases. Fifty-one attorneys from 23 U.S. states completed an online survey. Attorneys viewed sexual grooming as useful (M = 8.82/10), with 88% having used it in their cases. Around half (55%) used expert testimony on the topic, which they rated as highly helpful (M = 9.08/10). Most attorneys learned about sexual grooming through professional trainings, and many expressed a need for additional expert witnesses and investigative evidence on sexual grooming. Sexual grooming is valued in CSA prosecution and thus, continued education, expert consultation, and use of current research are important.
]]>Malingering—traditionally defined as the intentional production of false or exaggerated symptoms for external gain—has long been treated as a unitary construct. Yet patients who feign illness do so for widely divergent reasons, from seeking material necessities to avoiding legal accountability. This paper critiques the limitations of “malingering” as a clinical category and proposes a motivation-based taxonomy of feigned symptoms: Resource-Driven Symptom Expression (RDSE), Accountability-Avoidant Symptom Expression (AASE), Care Access Symptom Expression (CASE), and Socially Motivated Symptom Expression (SMSE). By reframing feigned presentations through motive rather than symptomatology, clinicians can bring an individualized, ethical and just approach to a significant clinical challenge.
]]>We evaluated a Dallas ordinance mandating that sexually oriented businesses (SOBs) close between 2:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m., with a focus on arrests, calls for service, and offenses within 500 feet of 27 establishments. Using difference-in-differences models comparing restricted hours (2:00–6:00 a.m.) to unrestricted hours (6:00–10:00 p.m.) before and after enforcement, we found arrests increased 0.061 per establishment weekly (p = 0.024), whereas calls decreased by 0.108 weekly (p < 0.05, a 42.7% reduction) and offenses declined by 0.062 weekly (p = 0.054). Effects concentrated at moderate- and high-activity establishments. Heterogeneity analyses further revealed that call reductions were concentrated among cabarets, whereas adult retailers showed no detectable change, and that arrest increases were similarly concentrated among alcohol-serving venues. The arrest increase likely reflected enhanced enforcement rather than increased crime, as calls and offenses both decreased.
Hours-of-operation restrictions can reduce secondary effects around SOBs while preserving First Amendment protections. However, such ordinances impose enforcement costs alongside crime reduction benefits, and effects appear concentrated among cabarets and alcohol-serving establishments, raising questions about whether the compliance burden on lower-risk venues such as adult retailers is proportionate to the public safety return. Our findings suggest targeted regulations focusing on high-activity establishments may prove more efficient than blanket policies affecting all venues uniformly.
]]>Drawing on 576 interviews with incarcerated men and 131 correctional staff across five Western Canadian prisons, we reconceptualize the prison code as subcultural law, documenting the “informal prisoner justice system” as its enforcement arm. Although scholars have treated the code primarily as cultural values prescribing loyalty, silence, and moral boundaries, we show how it operates through systematic enforcement. Through analysis of violence against sex offenders, we identify three core processes that parallel formal legal systems: classification (defining deviant categories), identification (investigating violations through evidence and verification), and punishment (administering sanctions from ostracism to lethal violence). This informal system achieves remarkable procedural consistency across institutions without being coordinated by gangs, leaders, or formal organization, operating instead through shared procedural knowledge that allows even unacquainted prisoners to organize enforcement. Correctional officers sometimes facilitate this system through selective non-intervention and information sharing, producing conditions of dual authority where official rules coexist uneasily with prisoner governance. By foregrounding the informal justice system as governance and showing how it anchors the code as law, we shift attention from prisoners’ beliefs to their governance infrastructure, challenging criminology to reconsider assumptions about how order, control, and legitimacy function behind bars.
]]>This article outlines the early evolution, in the period 1968–1979, of the ancillary role in the Probation Service in England and Wales. It explains why the Probation Service made this ‘very considerable innovation’ and argues that this development was quickly seen to be a success enabling new opportunities for practitioners and for community supervision. The article draws on various sources of data: 13 oral history interviews with former ancillaries, a further six interviews with informants who held other relevant roles in the service, and documents from national and local archives. The article concludes by pointing to the far-reaching consequences of this innovation and, particularly, its prompting of the normative debate about how and where to set the role boundary between ‘professionals’ and ‘paraprofessionals’, a debate that remains salient for the Probation Service as well as other occupations where paraprofessionals deliver frontline practice.
]]>Serious drug crime involves a high level of risk and is often characterised as requiring a network of suitable and trustworthy collaborators. Although prior studies have focused on the importance of economic, social and work-related factors for involvement in such crime, there has been less research into the mental health of the people involved.
To assess the prevalence of mental disorders in a full nationwide cohort of individuals convicted of serious drug crimes in Denmark (2001–2020), who were born after 1984 and had a personal national identification number.
We compared four groups: large-scale serious drug crime offenders sentenced to ≥ 5 years' imprisonment (n = 232); moderate-scale serious drug crime offenders sentenced to under 5 years' imprisonment (n = 2955); offenders convicted only of small-scale drug offences, such as low-level supply, but never of serious drug crime (n = 7630); and sex- and age-matched general population controls who had never been convicted of a serious drug crime (n = 3187). Mental disorders were identified using hospital and pharmacy registers.
The adjusted prevalence of any mental disorder was similar across offender groups (large-scale: 32%, 95% CI [27%–38%]; moderate-scale: 36%, 95% CI [34%–38%]; small-scale: 36%, 95% CI [35%–37%]) and, in all three groups, was substantially higher than among controls (23%, 95% CI [22%–25%]). A similar pattern was observed for specific disorders.
Our results challenge the assumption that engagement in serious drug crime requires skills and behaviours that are incompatible with having a mental disorder. We conclude that people with serious drug crime convictions are as likely as minor drug offenders to need mental health services and that people with mental disorders are vulnerable to recruitment into serious drug crime.
]]>Focus on assessing the likelihood of harms, including the risk of committing criminal offences, has tended to be on negative events or characteristics, but promotive factors—positive events/characteristics—and protective factors—developmental features that may facilitate management of the negative—may be just as important. Stages of moral and cognitive agency development are among the latter.
To determine whether moral and/or cognitive agency helps prevent offending in adulthood among adolescents at risk of becoming offenders after parental maltreatment. The hypothesis was that adolescents at such risk who had stronger moral judgement and cognitive control skills would be less likely to become adult offenders than those with lower moral and cognitive skills.
Data were from the longitudinal, prospective, USA-based Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Data used here were from 2669 participants (1267 males and 1402 females) assessed when 14–19 years old and when 21–26 years old. In the earlier data collection wave, information included one parent's account of parental maltreatment during the previous year and measures of the adolescent's moral judgement and cognitive control skills. Data for the second wave included the young person's reports of any criminal charge between the ages of 18 and 22.
A statistically significant association between parental maltreatment and a later criminal charge was confirmed, even after controlling for fixed variables, including sex and ethnicity. Regression analysis revealed that moral agency moderated the relationship between parental maltreatment and subsequent charges, but cognitive agency did not. Moral agency as an adolescent reduced the likelihood of future adult offending in youth exposed to high parental maltreatment.
Adverse experiences as an adolescent are linked to later offending, but not inevitably so. Recognition that adolescent moral agency is protective may help direct scarce resources into more effective prevention strategies.
]]>When children harm children, the conventional victim–perpetrator framework is ill-equipped to address the developmental, relational, and institutional complexities involved. While juvenile justice scholarship increasingly emphasizes rehabilitation, and victims' rights literature has advanced child-sensitive protection, minor-on-minor offending remains underexplored across legal and social science disciplines. This Review Article draws on legal and criminological literature in juvenile justice, child development, and therapeutic jurisprudence, to examine tensions between the rights and interests of minor defendants and victims, and to identify the absence of an integrated framework within the juvenile justice system. To address this gap, we outline a four-pillar model integrating therapeutic justice, developmental principles, relational procedural justice, and children's rights norms. In this first of a two-parts project, we develop the theoretical framework for such cases and consider its novelty. Part II applies it to two case studies and offers practical implications.
]]>In the United Kingdom, the Offender Personality Disorder (OPD) Pathway provides a psychologically informed pathway of services—from screening to formulation to referral to treatments/interventions—for men and women whose offending is linked to their complex mental health needs. Evidence shows that individuals from most ethnic minority groups in the United Kingdom are over-represented at all stages of the criminal justice system (including arrests, cautions and convictions). Such individuals may, however, be disadvantaged in terms of their access to and engagement with this specialist service.
To examine the extent to which self-reported ethnicity was associated with progression through discrete stages of the OPD Pathway in London.
Linked administrative data from 8816 men who screened into the OPD Pathway from 2011 to 2022 were used to examine the association between self-reported ethnicity (categorised as White, Black, Asian or mixed) and the last known recorded Pathway stage (screened-in and no further work, case consultation/formulation, referral to services, accessing service and completion).
Adjusting for baseline risk, time on the OPD Pathway and London borough, we found that those who self-identified as Black (compared to White) were under-represented at all stages of the Pathway (compared to baseline), suggesting that these individuals tended to get ‘stuck’ at the early Pathway stages.
These findings add weight to suggestions of probably disproportionate disadvantage among men identifying as Black in accessing important dedicated services for offenders with personality disorder. Our data have been used to inform exploration of programme changes, and next steps will include exploration of what has driven this under-representation of non-White ethnic groups across the service and whether more sensitively informed strategies can improve equitable access and benefits.
]]>Although low juror pay is commonly offered as a reason why jurors do not show up to jury service, there is remarkably little empirical information on how juror pay affects summons response. This study examines four large-sized counties in Texas before and after pay increased from as little as $6 a day to $40, analyzing patterns of the percent of available jurors and non-response (“no show”) across time. Although there was, on average, a larger percentage of available jurors in the years following the pay raise compared to those preceding it, there is little evidence that this increase is attributable to the change in pay, particularly given a trend of having more available jurors that pre-existed the raise. Additionally, summons response does not appear sensitive to over-time inflationary pressures. Results suggest that pay may not be the best place to focus attention if the goal is to generate an overall higher summons response rate, although states should ensure that rates are not insultingly low, and we encourage more work on whether targeted increases for low-income persons have an effect on that population.
]]>When children harm children, the conventional victim–perpetrator framework is ill-equipped to address the developmental, relational, and institutional complexities involved. While juvenile justice scholarship increasingly emphasizes rehabilitation, and victims' rights literature has advanced child-sensitive protections, minor-on-minor offending remains underexplored across legal and social science disciplines. Part 1 of this two-parts project developed a four-pillar theoretical framework integrating therapeutic justice, developmental principles, relational procedural justice, and children's rights norms. The present Article considers the implementation of the proposed model through two paradigmatic case studies, concerning victim impact statements and the handling of sensitive disclosures. Through these scenarios, the Article addresses possible critiques against the model and illustrates how it can protect minor victims' rights, foster rehabilitation for juvenile defendants, and mitigate secondary trauma for both parties. Building on the theoretical model and case-study analysis, we offer some guiding principles for promoting a developmentally informed and rights respecting juvenile justice system.
]]>Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a serious and widespread public health concern. Not only has it been the subject of thousands of papers published over the past three decades, but it also appears frequently in legal proceedings across criminal, civil, and family court contexts. To have currency in the field, forensic experts and other individuals working in court systems must identify and synthesize a wide and complex body of literature, from the conceptual underpinnings of IPV to issues of memory and trauma, many of which may affect victim participation, testimony, and credibility. In this review, we provide a comprehensive and concise summary of several foundational IPV studies, as well as some that have built upon these theoretical models and empirically tested the premises, focusing on key findings relevant to legal proceedings. We also spotlight potential avenues of expert testimony, including “counterintuitive” victim behavior, coercive control, persistence in abusive relationships, delayed reporting, technology-facilitated abuse, and factors that may impact the way in which IPV is manifested or reported (e.g., cultural factors, interpersonal context). Finally, we discuss the wider implications of this work for law and policy, focusing on the continuous need for empirically-grounded testimony in the courtroom.
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