Registration and the Closure of Stranger-Perpetrated Sex Crimes Reported to Police.

A key goal of sex offender registration is to assist law enforcement in sexual assault investigations; to identify potential suspects when the perpetrator's identity is unknown. To date, however, no research has assessed the utility of sex offender registries in closing cases of sexual assault when the incident involved stranger perpetrators. Addressing this gap, the study drew on the National Incident-Based Reporting System (1992-2001) to test the effect of registry implementation on closure of stranger-involved sex crimes across six states.

Parks, Playgrounds, and Incidents of Sexual Assault.

In the United States, certain laws restrict those convicted of sexually offending from accessing social spaces where youth congregate such as parks and playgrounds. However, empirical work to date has rarely described sexual assaults in these locations or tested the assumptions of these laws explicitly. To address these gaps in the literature, we drew on the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) to analyze offender, victim, and crime characteristics of sexual assaults that occurred at parks and playgrounds over a 5-year period (2010-2015).

Injury Matters: On Female-Perpetrated Sex Crimes.

Despite the importance of studying sexual assaults perpetrated by women, the field knows very little about female sexual offenders' (FSOs) use of violence or physical injury resulting from these assaults. This study draws more than 20 years of National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) data reported to police (1992-2014) to identify factors that distinguish between female perpetrated incidents of sexual assault that result in severe, minor, or no physical victim injuries above and beyond the sexual assault itself. Using a multinomial logistic regression model (MNLM), 15,928 incidents of FSO-perpetrated sexual assault were analyzed from the NIBRS.

Deconstructing Incidents of Campus Sexual Assault: Comparing Male and Female Victimizations.

Research on campus sexual assault (CSA) has almost exclusively drawn on self-report data, examined undergraduates (i.e., students aged 18-24), and focused on female victimization.

Romeo, Juliet, and Statutory Rape.

Statutory rape is an important yet understudied topic. There is broad public support for the prosecution of older adults who engage in sexual relationships with minors regardless of perceptions of consent by either party. However, some scholars worry that expansive definitions within these laws have led to the widespread involvement of the justice system in the lives of similarly aged teenagers engaging in relatively normal sexual behavior, so called "Romeo and Juliet" liaisons.

Deconstructing Incidents of Female Perpetrated Sex Crimes.

Very little is known about co-offending by female sexual offenders (FSOs), especially in terms of diverse forms of offender groupings. To address this gap in the literature, this study uses 21 years (1992-2012) of National Incident-Based Reporting System data to analyze incidents of sexual offending committed by four female groupings: solo FSOs ( n = 29,238), coed pairs consisting of one male and one FSO ( n = 11,112), all-female groups ( n = 2,669), and multiple perpetrator groups that consist of a combination of three or more FSOs and male sexual offenders (MSOs; n = 4,268). Using a multinomial logistic regression model, the data show significant differences in offender, victim, and crime context incident characteristics.

An incident-based comparison of female and male sexual offenders.

Identifying the ways in which male and female sex offenders differ is an important but understudied topic. Studies that do exist have been challenged by a reliance on small and select samples. Improving on these limitations, we use the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) to compare male and female sex offenders among all 802,150 incidents of sexual assault reported to police across 37 states between 1991 and 2011.

Enhancing the National Incident-Based Reporting System: A Policy Proposal.

The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) is an important data set serving social scientists, policy makers, the business community, and the press. However, it is hampered by low participation rates among the nation's police agencies. This article outlines a strategy for enhancing NIBRS by (a) providing police agencies free and supported software to extract and transmit an agency's Record Management System (RMS) data in NIBRS format (or a data-entry system if an RMS does not exist), (b) including personal identifiers of arrestees, and (c) allowing police agencies to access the national data for routine police work.

Measurement Matters: Comparing Old and New Definitions of Rape in Federal Statistical Reporting.

National statistics on the incidence of rape play an important role in the work of policymakers and academics. The Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) have provided some of the most widely used and influential statistics on the incidence of rape across the United States over the past 80 years. The definition of rape used by UCR changed in 2012 to include substantially more types of sexual assault.

Endogeneity in prison risk classification.

Security designation tools are a key feature of all prisons in the United States, intended as objective measures of risk that funnel inmates into security levels-to prison environments varying in degree of intrusiveness, restriction, dangerousness, and cost. These tools are mostly (if not all) validated by measuring inmates on a set of characteristics, using scores from summations of that information to assign inmates to prisons of varying security level, and then observing whether inmates assumed more risky did in fact offend more. That approach leaves open the possibility of endogeneity--that the harsher prisons are themselves bringing about higher misconduct and thus biasing coefficients assessing individual risk.

Is tougher better? The impact of physical prison conditions on inmate violence.

Physical conditions of prisons have been at the center of long-standing debates in correctional policy and research. Many argue prisons should be unpleasant to deter future offending and motivate prosocial change among inmates. Others believe harsh conditions inhibit effective treatment and, perhaps, make offenders worse.

The impact of prison conditions on staff well-being.

Prison conditions have been at the center of long-standing debates among corrections scholars. Interestingly, this debate has focused on inmates alone while paying little attention to the potential impact of prison conditions on staff. Addressing this limitation, the study draws on survey data collected from a stratified random sample of prison staff working at all federal prisons in 2007 to examine the impact of prison conditions on staff well-being (substance use, psychological symptomatology, physical duress, and sick leave use).

Social bonds and change during incarceration: testing a missing link in the reentry research.

Research examining prisoner reentry has demonstrated negative impacts of incarceration on social bonds. However, this research is limited in two ways. First, it generally examines outcomes after release, paying less attention to processes occurring in prison.