School of Criminology and Criminal Justice

This study examined the results of the National Prison Wardens’ Survey to ascertain the levels of job satisfaction, occupational sentiments, and work-related stress among prison wardens and to establish whether these variables differed between male and female respondents. The findings indicated that wardens generally experience high levels of job satisfaction, reflect positive occupational sentiments, and report low levels of work-related stress. Additionally, results from the Chi-square tests and Lambda measures of association indicated that little to no relationship existed between gender and any of the explored variables.

With the increasing rate of violent criminal victimization, concerns about safety
and prevention have begun to resonate across college campuses throughout the nation.
Despite the efforts put forth by institutions of higher education to reduce fear of crime
and criminal victimization, college students are subjected to coexist with the probability
of crime victimization on campus. The main objective of this thesis was to explore new
measures of crime prevention on college campuses. Specifically, the efforts put forth in
this study were to focus on understanding the problem of property theft of personal
belongings on college campuses. The findings based on Pearson correlations and
multiple regression analyses indicate that students’ crime prevention awareness and
behavior are highest amongst female and non- victimized students. Crime prevention
behavior was best explained by awareness. Furthermore, expanded evaluation of
contributing factors may lead to future crime preventive measures such as participation in
crime prevention seminars.

Following the events of September 11th, 2001, national attention has been
captivated by terrorism and terrorism prevention. Parallel to this time of increased focus
on terrorism prevention, adequate funding to support new departments or increased
terrorism prevention efforts in existing departments was unattainable. Consequently, a
strong need for prevention strategies that are affordable and highly applicable at the local
level has resulted. Thus, it is the purpose of this study to examine methods of risk
assessment and test the accuracy of such methodologies in order to assist local
organizations in effectively applying limited resources for opportunity reduction at
vulnerable locations based on calculated risks. The primary goal of this thesis is to test
the validity of the EVIL DONE vulnerability assessment and evaluate its ability to
predict the number of fatalities and injured persons resulting from a terrorist attack.

Recently, empirical attention has been directed toward understanding public opinion about gun control laws. Despite this focus, three gaps are evident in extant scholarship. First, few current examinations have relied on recently collected, national data to explore predictors of public attitudes. Second, relatively little work systematically investigates whether type of weapon bans (e.g. handgun versus semi-automatic weapon) affects public support for a given gun control initiative. Third, and importantly, the general focus in prediction support for gun control measures has been on social and demographic factors. Little is known from a theoretical perspective about how other variables - such as knowledge of Constitutinal issues or perceptions of the U.S. Supreme Court - affect public attitudes toward gun control. Using national poll data collected in 2011 by Time magazine, this study addresses these research gaps by estimating several logistic regression analyses. Research and policy implications are discussed.

The current study is a content analysis and comparison of news articles from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The objective of this study is to explore media coverage of terrorism over the last five decades to determine the impact of religion and to compare coverage between two respected news sources that are known for their liberal (New York Times) and conservative (Wall Street Journal) view points. Using a stratified random sample, 1,832 news articles were selected between 1960 and 2006 from the two news sources of interest. The articles were read, analyzed, and categorized. Then, a qualitative analysis examined a random selection of articles pertaining to religious terrorist events. Results suggest an increase in coverage of religiously perpetrated terrorism in recent decades. Interestingly, coverage from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal showed similar patterns despite being representative of opposite ideologies. Implications are discussed.

The cruelty of Military Police guards at Abu Ghraib prison contributed to American shame and questions regarding how such cruelty emerges. The accepted approach of "situational attribution theory" - based upon Zimbardo's (1973, 2007) social psychological perceptions and results of the Stanford Prison Experiment - proposed that personality or "disposition" has little role in the emergence of such cruelty. Termed "institutional cruelty," this manuscript presents the possibility that understandings and preventive measures afforded by situational attribution theory can be extended via acknowledgement of a greater role played by disposition. Psychoanalytic and object relations approaches are presented to this end. The manuscript addresses the most puzzling characteristics of institutional cruelty: 1) rapidity of onset, taking days or, at most, weeks for initial expression, 2) emergence in ordinary, normal individuals, and 3) emergence in the "mock" situation of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Criminological, organizational culture, and social psychological theories are explored for their application to institutional cruelty.