Criminal Justice and Behavior

Does requiring the presence of parents at pretrial interrogations of juveniles ensure adequate protection of juveniles' rights to silence and to retain legal counsel? The study assessed the attitudes of parents regarding nurturance and self-determination rights for juveniles—including rights which are relevant to interrogation—for juveniles of two age groups and of both delinquent and nondelinquent status. Nurturance rights for juveniles in legal-judicial contexts were strongly endorsed, but most parents did not believe that juvenile suspects should be allowed to withhold information from police. Parents were negatively disposed to allowing juveniles to decide regarding waiver or assertion of rights to silence and to retain legal counsel. The procedure also included a hypothetical situation examining parents' advice to juveniles and their rationale regarding waiver of rights. The results question parents' abilities to provide meaningful protections for juveniles in interrogation.

Multiple discriminant analyses were performed to examine the sentencing recommendations of clinicians versus caseworkers for white, Mexican-American, and black male offenders, both before and after controlling for selected criminological characteristics of these ethnic groups. Though generally of small magnitude, discrimination effects favoring whites for relatively lenient case dispositions were larger for caseworkers than for clinicians and remained statistically significant only for caseworkers after holding constant criminological variables. The results are discussed in terms of the need for decreasing the discretion of decision makers through the use of guidelines that contain expected decision outcomes.

The psychological impact of sexual abuse on children is not a well-understood phenomenon. It has been suggested, however, that such an experience renders the child more aggressive and antisocial. Juvenile delinquency crime data represent a strong test of that assumption. This study reports a continuation of prior research testing a theoretical model which predicts that juveniles subjected to abuse will not become aggressive but will engage in escape and social avoidance behaviors. Analysis of the juvenile delinquency patterns of sexually abused children later arrested for juvenile crimes supported the hypothesis derived from the theoretical model. Abuse did not lead to aggression significantly more than in a control sample of nonabused juveniles, but did significantly increase the frequency of escape infractions.

Felons in a maximum security institution were administered the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire to test the validity of Eysenck's theory of criminality on an American population. Comparison with a noncriminal control group found a significant difference in the L-scale, but none for P and N scores. E scores were significantly lower for the criminal group. When the criminal sample was divided according to offense type, differences in P-scale and in neuroticism were also uncovered. When high L-scorers were eliminated from the sample, the criminal group scored higher on the P and N scale, but E scores remained similar to those of the control group. The results raise questions about the Eysenckian theory when applied to American Black and Hispanic prisoners.

A new multi-method, computerized screening system for classifying and assigning all felons entering Kentucky's correctional institutions was developed and implemented. This system—consisting of psychological tests, self-report inventories, rating scales, and detailed observations—requires approximately two hours for administration. A detailed, case-history summary covering nine major classification categories and supplying information about the felon's background, interests, abilities, strengths, and weaknesses in 27 criminological, demographical, sociological, and psychological areas of correctional concern is provided. This new system appears both reliable and valid and should prove useful both for initial classification and assignment, and for reclassification and parole review.

The present study is an investigation of the impact of moving to a new institution upon inmate and staff attributions of causality. Consistent with the attribution literature, instruments were designed to measure the degree to which attributions were made to the environment, others, and oneself. These instruments were in turn administered to samples of inmates and members of the correctional staff during three phases of the facility's construction and occupation. As indicated by the results, with the move to the new institution, attributions to the environment became more positive while attributions to others became more negative. Such an effect was exhibited by both inmates and staff.