July 2, 2011

Steffan's Alerts #6: Tattoos, bias, homicides and death penalty attitudes


In a new issue of Child Abuse and Neglect, Mark Everson and Jose Miguel Sandoval surveyed 1,106 child maltreatment professionals in order to explore personal biases and attitudes that might account for how professional judgments of child sexual abuse differ based on the same evidence.


In a new issue of Crime and Delinquency, Scott Camp and colleagues report data suggesting that the answer is "yes" but the extent of the effects depends on personal characteristics.


Alicia Rozycki Lozano and colleagues examine the connection between prison tattoos and criminality in their new article in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology. As a group, offenders with prison tattoos are at higher risk for recidivism and incur more institutional infractions than do offenders with non-prison tattoos or no tattoos, the authors report.


Several articles in the new issue of Homicide Studies might pique your interest: 
  • Amy Nivette reports on the limitations of using cross-national research to identify predictors of homicide.
  • Sharon Smith and colleagues of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used qualitative analyses to derive four categories that they hope will improve understanding of sexually motivated homicides.
  • Melanie-Angela Neuilly and colleagues present a classification tree analysis, based on  320 homicide offenders in New Jersey, that they contend is useful in predicting recidivism.
  • Jeff Gruenewald compared homicides committed by extremists with those perpetrated by other types of persons in the United States. He found both similarities and differences.
    Click on a title to read the article abstract;   
    click on a highlighted author's name to request the full article.   

Steffan's alerts are brought to you by Jarrod Steffan, Ph.D., a forensic and clinical psychologist based in Wichita, Kansas. For more information about Dr. Steffan, please visit his website.

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