Books published by LFB Scholarly Publishing

Williams examines TASER use and high-risk group theory, which posits that people with certain physiological attributes, such as heart disease, mental illness, or drug use, are at increased risk of sudden death following application of a TASER electronic control device (ECD). Data derived from autopsy reports indicate few differences in the presence of such attributes between arrest-related sudden deaths following the application of an ECD and arrest-related sudden deaths that did not involve an ECD. The notable exception was deaths involving excited delirium, which appeared statistically more often in ECD-proximate events.

Archibald attempts to find variables that can explain the variation not only in the adoption of the death penalty, but also in the implementation of capital punishment. She combines Kingdon's Garbage Can model and Social Control Theory to explain the differences in the adoption and implementation of the death penalty. Given that there was only one model that showed a correlation between the adoption and implementation of the death penalty and homicide rates, while other variables, such as race and hate crimes, were correlated across multiple models, one could argue that the death penalty is used as a means of social control. Her results also bolster the argument that state policies are not merely reactions to murder rates, but are influenced by other sociological, political, and economic factors.

Battin tests collective efficacy theory by accounting for additional measures of informal social control and social ties. Past social disorganization theory and collective efficacy theory research utilized community members to measure community levels of informal social control and social ties. Battin's work deviates from the previous methodology and incorporates real estate agents as resident proxies to test collective efficacy theory and its relationship with perceptions of crime. The data provide support for collective efficacy theory and the use of resident proxies.

Community policing is in decline, threatened with obsolescence by data-driven practices like COMPSTAT and Intelligence-Led Policing. Efficiency driven and aided by technology, these practices are delivering on the crime reduction promises community policing aspired to. Ray argues that much of community policing's difficulties lie in the lack of a clear theoretical foundation informing its community engagement mandate. The uncritical incorporation of pluralism needlessly highlights the differences between police and community groups. Deliberative democratic theory offers a theoretical foundation that may save community policing. Moreover, Ray uses historical sources to suggest the inevitability of community policing in America.

Weber and Pelfrey examine qualitative and quantitative data collected from middle and high school students in a large urban area regarding the use of social technologies in cyberbullying perpetration and victimization. They further explore the interconnectedness between the online and face-to-face environments created by these advancements in technology which may produce risk taking behaviors and school safety issues. Students reported a carryover between environments (during school and after school via social technology) that create a constant access to peers and a reciprocal relationship between cyberbullying perpetrators and victims who become perpetrators in retaliation. The book also provides insight from school staff regarding policies, protocols, and approaches to combating cyberbullying in school.

Online video can bypass police jurisdictional influence over traditional mass media and may be affecting police-civilian interactions in American public space as the initial cusp of a paradigm shift. Where a camera may have videorecorded police actions, exclusive police custody of that camera or its recording correlates with the video being lost, destroyed, reported as nonexistent, or concealed from the public. Where police destroy, falsify, fail to file, or omit data from required documentation, online video correlates with improved accountability through police disciplinary actions. Online video correlates with significantly higher civil suit settlements for police misconduct.

Cook analyzes the relationship between Supreme Court decisions and public opinion concerning First Amendment religious liberties. Overall, the Court has issued opinions consistent with public opinion in a majority of its decisions dealing with the First Amendment's religion clauses, with a level of congruence of almost seventy percent when a clear public opinion expression is present. She also provides a new perspective for understanding the long and contentious debate about prayer in public school by identifying an area of agreement between the Court and public opinion that has not received much attention.

The mass incarceration policies of recent decades have created the corresponding realization that the vast majority of these individuals will someday be released back into society. Failure to properly prepare these individuals for their return to society will result in a large number of these individuals returning to prison. This research uses propensity score matching to create comparison groups in order to evaluate a cognitive intervention program designed to reduce recidivism. Survival analysis reveals that offenders who completed the program were less likely to recidivate and their survival time was longer when compared to offenders who did not complete the program.

Living on Death Row represents a 13-year ethnographic study of men awaiting their execution while confined on Ohio's Death Row (DR). Lose was granted unprecedented access to conduct confidential interviews in a supermax environment. Slowly he developed a mutual trust with the inmates, and they began to open up about their crimes, lives, hopes, fears and impending executions. Reading Death Row statistics can be a blasé experience to some, upsetting to others. But nothing compares to confronting the rampant injustices, horrendous misconceptions and lies about the culture of Death Row. A few are innocent, most are guilty, but all were found guilty of capital murder - not because of their crimes - but due to poverty, mental illness, or minority status. Equally upsetting were the frank, open discussions of their homicides.

Clark describes the risks and correlates of intimate partner violence (IPV) among adolescents. Using longitudinal data, she finds that the victim-offender overlap that exists in general violence extends to IPV. Also, Michael Johnson's typology of IPV among adults likely exists among adolescents; sometimes IPV is perpetrated by both partners, and sometimes it is perpetrated by only one. Moreover, IPV victimization is not evenly distributed among adolescents, and more targeted interventions are likely needed to prevent abuse. Clark integrates multiple theories of violence and victimization, including lifestyle exposure theory, differential association theory, general strain theory.

After the September 11th attacks the United States government sought a response to terrorism. The ensuing "war on terror" brought sweeping new federal regulations and changes in immigration policy. Consequent changes in society's reaction to immigration and the degree to which immigrants have become criminalized are apparent. Hauptman reveals the effects of a moral panic toward immigration after 9/11, explaining social control initiatives like the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, as a direct result of the concern over immigrants in the United States. Hauptman concludes that the response to the attacks resulted in the criminalization of immigrants in post-September 11th society.

Urbina's consideration of capital punishment seeks to examine racial and ethnic differences, stressing how Latinos' and Latinas' experiences are distinct from those of Caucasians and African Americans. In considering Latinos he focuses on the problem of lack of data and addresses it through several means. His goal is to go beyond traditional approaches of analyzing death penalty information, with the ultimate objective of addressing theoretical and methodological shortcomings empirically, and quantitatively analyzing death sentence outcome data for California, Florida, and Texas between 1975 and 1995.

Vukelich-Selva gives voice to young Latino immigrant students from a school, Prairie Heights, in the upper Midwest. While the students' presence is growing exponentially, they have not been granted full participation in the school's circles of power. Vukelich-Selva takes their stories out of the shadows and places them in the larger historical context of immigrant students and education. She offers insight regarding the importance of the border and related issues of citizenship for Latino immigrant students. She urges educators to listen to and respect the stories of their Latino students and to understand the crucial ways that race, culture, and legal status impact student identity and success.