Community-based treatment as an alternative to incarceration has substantial benefits to the criminal justice system and society. The Kentucky Alternative Sentencing Worker (ASW) program connects individuals with substance use disorder and/or mental health needs to incarceration alternatives. A secondary analysis of 9 years (2016–2024) of de-identified data ( N = 15,168) was conducted to assess client outcomes. Less than half (48%) of clients reported having been arrested and 57% reported having reductions in drug use during the 12-month follow-up. Being employed at the initial assessment was associated with lower odds of being arrested, while prior stimulant use was associated with higher odds of being arrested. Taken together, the results suggest the Kentucky ASW program had positive outcomes for program clients.
Restrictive housing reforms have spread across U.S. prisons, but evidence evaluating their effectiveness remains limited. The studies that do exist have focused largely on institutional outcomes, rather than investigating whether reforms change the experience of confinement. Using data from a randomized controlled trial of Oregon’s restrictive housing step-down program (SUP) that randomly assigned incarcerated men to either transfer to the SUP or remain in the business-as-usual Intensive Management Unit, we integrate intent-to-treat, local average treatment effects, and qualitative analyses to compare daily life in restrictive housing, perceptions of correctional officers, and participants’ recommendations for restrictive housing reform. Those assigned to the SUP reported more time out-of-cell and greater interaction with other prisoners, both of which were described as meaningful improvements to their daily life. Perceptions of correctional officers depended more on interpersonal interactions than housing assignment. Participants also identified greater opportunities for movement, social interaction, and meaningful programming as priorities for reform. The findings suggest that step-down programs can improve the experience of confinement without fundamentally changing the function of restrictive housing, while also underscoring the importance of evaluating reforms through a combination of institutional outcomes and prisoner lived experiences.
Although prior research has identified factors associated with bystander willingness to intervene in intimate partner violence (IPV), whether responses differ across heterosexual and same-sex relationships remains underexplored. Using a vignette design with 182 college students, this study examined whether perpetrator gender and relationship sexual orientation influenced awareness of violence, post-situation informal intervention, and willingness to report the incident to police. A significant perpetrator gender & times; relationship sexual orientation interaction emerged for police reporting. The interaction showed a crossover pattern: descriptively, reporting willingness was greater for male than female perpetrators in heterosexual vignettes, whereas the pattern reversed in same-sex vignettes. However, neither within-context perpetrator-gender comparison reached statistical significance in follow-up simple-effects analyses, indicating that the interaction should be interpreted cautiously.
This study contributes to the criminological literature by being the first to assess Saudi males’ and females’ discrepant perceptions of the police via the prisms of trust, procedural justice, and satisfaction. The salience of this study further lies in researchers’ and practitioners’ ability to understand how men and women view the police in non-Western contexts. We employed both t -tests and ordinary least-squares regression to analyze data from 235 Saudi citizens to assess their perceptions of the police. We found that, compared to men, women had higher levels of trust in the Saudi police. For procedural justice, there was no significant difference between the perceptions of men and women. Saudi women were also more satisfied with the police than were Saudi men. Participants willing to provide information on suspects and to solve crimes had higher levels of trust in the police than those who did not. Finally, older participants had less favorable views of police procedural justice and were also less satisfied with the police. Saudi men and women significantly differ in their attitudes toward the police, which points to the need to enact public policy to address the specific needs of both men and women.
Reliable estimates of human trafficking remain elusive because most victimization is never identified by formal systems. To address this challenge, researchers have increasingly turned to behaviorally specific measures that assess experiences of exploitation directly. Using a statewide survey of adults in Florida, this study examined convergence across the Quick Youth Indicators for Trafficking (QYIT), the Rapid Appraisal for Trafficking (RAFT), and independent indicators of sex and labor trafficking. Findings revealed strong associations across human trafficking measures and limited reporting to law enforcement among respondents endorsing multiple human trafficking indicators. The results provide evidence of convergence across independently developed trafficking measures and contribute to ongoing efforts to evaluate behaviorally specific indicators in population-based studies of hidden victimization.
