Criminal Justice Data Quality - Free Essay Example

Research study has been done on prosecution of child sexual abuse cases from the past few decades. In today’s paper, this research has been studied and provided facts, methods and conclusion with the help of five articles. A meta-analysis of rates of Criminal Justice Decisions. Using coplink to analyze Criminal-Justice Data. Risk-appraisal versus self-report in the prediction of Criminal Justice outcomes: A meta-analysis Prosecution rate and quality of the investigative interview in child sexual abuse cases. Factors associated with delays of days to decades to criminal prosecutions of Child Sexual Abuse. Introduction and Observations: From the first article, it is evident that this study meta-analyzed rates of criminal justice decisions in 21 studies of prosecution of child abuse. Rates of referral to prosecution, filing charges, and incarceration varied considerably. Compared to national data, child abuse was less likely to lead to filing charges and incarceration than most other felonies but more likely to be carried forward without dismissal. Thus, prosecuting child abuse is generally neither feckless nor reckless. Rates can be misleading and cannot be the sole measure of prosecution success. From the second article, the Coplink project, which unites the technical expertise of the University of Arizona’s Artificial Intelligence Lab with the Tucson Police Department’s law enforcement domain knowledge. Coplink serves the community by bridging the gap between conducting research in cutting-edge technologies and solving real-world problems such as helping police officers fight crime. The Coplink project attacks several problems existing in many law enforcement agencies by developing a model integrated system that lets law officers’ access and share information with other agencies. Coplink has the additional goal of developing consistent, intuitive, and easy-to-use interfaces and applications that support specific and often complex law enforcement functions and tasks. From the third article, it has been observed that the risk-appraisal and self-report procedures are divergent methods of data collection, with risk-appraisal procedures relying in part or in whole on historical, chart, and non-self-report information and self-report measures relying exclusively on self-report data. The risk-appraisal/self-report differentiation should not be confused with actuarial and clinical methods of prediction, as both risk-appraisal and self-report methods of data collection can be entered into actuarial decision models or treated clinically. The five risk-appraisal procedures which will be used to for a meta-analysis are: Historical-Clinical-Risk Scales (HCR–20), Lifestyle Criminality Screening Form (LCSF), Level of Service-Inventory (LSI), Psychopathy Checklist (PCL), Violence Risk Appraisal Guide (VRAG). more self-report measures will also be included, such as BDHI, etc. From the fourth and fifth article, a brief analysis about the prosecution rate in child sexual abuse cases. From the study, it has been examined that the reason for the low prosecution rate in child sexual abuse cases is the poor quality of the interviews conducted by the interviewers. The relationship between interview quality and prosecution rate has been clearly examined in this research. Interviews with the older children has been of good quality on one hand and when it comes to interviews with young children has been of poor quality on the other hand. There are various reasons behind this poor quality. Analysis: Most of the child sexual abuse cases resulted in many psychological problems especially in younger children. Child sexual abuse can always affect children by causing trauma on the child and resulting in cascading effects in terms of social, sexual, physical and mental problems. This research has been conducted in Sweden and Canada and it has been found that the number of child rape cases have been rapidly increased up to 450% from the year 1987 to 2003. There has been tremendous increase in small abuse cases like sexual harassment about 200% in the same time period. Based on the increasing knowledge of parents and social media effects, people are coming forward and registering cases. These cases have been taken seriously and the convicts who got imprisonment have been increased from 73 to 145 in the same time period. It has been observed that the rate of reporting is higher than the conviction numbers. There are many reasons behind these figures. One of the main reasons for this low-quality prosecution rate is there is no evidence except the child’s statement. There are statements against this saying that due to advanced medical examinations, the convicts can be easily given imprisonment which will be a big evidence to the justice. Justice has been facing problems with the cases of preschoolers than the teenagers. Hence, interviewer has a challenger when interviewing them which results in a bad quality. In Canada, a maximum of 55% CSA cases were filed in the year 2012 and it has been observed that most of the victims are under age 18. These cases have been becoming a challenge to criminal courts not only in Canada but also in most of the American states, Australia, UK, Europe. Below are only the published CSA cases in Canada from 1986 to 2012. There has been increase in the percentage of cases between the years 1991 and 1998. A substantial decrease can be seen in the years 2000 and 2002. Factors associated with delays to Criminal Prosecutions of CSA: There have been a lot of changes in the criminal justice in the past 30 years and there are few factors which are related with the delays in prosecutions of CSA cases. Judicial warnings are no longer mandatory in most jurisdictions. To lessen the trauma of testifying, courtroom modifications are in the form of testimonial supports but they are fully in progress. An attitude that children’s evidence is inherently unreliable. Knowledge of terrifying forensic system is very low in children which always plays an important role in evidence. Methods: In contrast to a traditional literature review, a meta-analysis statistically combines results in an objective manner to summarize and synthesize selected empirical studies (Cooper Hedges, 1994; Lipsey Wilson, 2001). In addition, meta-analysis provides a foundation for future research by identifying what is and what is not known about a particular topic. Rates were calculated for the following decision points in the prosecution of child abuse: referral, filing criminal charges, diversion, carrying cases forward (versus dismissing them), guilty plea, trial, conviction, and incarceration. Comparison data were gathered from 12 national studies of prosecution in urban areas conducted for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) 328 TRAUMA, VIOLENCE, ABUSE / October 2003 from 1977 to 1998. Crime analysts and detectives create knowledge from information daily by analyzing and generalizing current criminal records. In general, building a domain-specific concept space (CS) involves three main steps. First, to locate the sources from which they will derive terms or concepts, developers must identify document collections in a specific subject domain. Second, the terms must be filtered and indexed. At last, a co-occurrence analysis captures the relationships among indexed terms. Data for this meta-analysis were identified in a computerized search of the PsycINFO, National Criminal Justice Reference Service, and Cambridge Scientific Criminal Justice Abstracts databases, followed by several expert opinions. Effect sizes were point-biserial correlations computed between a continuous risk-appraisal or self-report predictor and a dichotomous outcome. Individual Z scores were calculated for each effect size. They carried a research by observing 18 video-taped interviews with children which were provided by the officers. After going through every interview of each child, they finally categorized their analysis in 12 aspects along with the interrater reliabilities which is intraclass correlation with a scale rate of 1 to 5. Table 1. Twelve aspects used to analyze the interviews and the intraclass correlations Aspects of the interview Intraclass correlation The extent to which the interviewer establishes ground rules (i.e. Do you know the difference between telling the truth and a lie? Explaining that it is ok to answer I don’t know; Explaining why the same question may be asked several times) 0.87 The extent to which the interviewer builds rapport with the child 0.65 The extent to which the interviewer use closed-end or open-ended questions (1=only closed end; 5=only open ended) 0.60 The extent to which the interviewer allows the child to tell the story without interrupting 0.73 The extent to which the child seems tormented during the interview 0.92 The extent to which the child verbalizes negative emotions during the abuse 0.92 The extent to which the interview consists of short questions and long answers 0.76 The general quality of the interview (1=very bad; 5=very good) 0.68 The extent to which the interviewer allows the child practice free recall? * 0.00 The extent to which the interviewer encourages the child to tell everything about the abuse†  0.49 The extent to which the interviewer helps the child to report details about one specific event of abuse (when frequent abuse) †  0.45 The extent to which the interviewer uses techniques from the Cognitive Interview* 1.00 The last four aspects were excluded from further analyses. *Aspect was excluded because of no variance. Aspect was excluded because of to low intraclass correlation. Conclusion From the articles, it can be concluded that for the child abuse studies, the Q statistic was statistically significant at p Coplink CS has been successfully deployed at the Tucson Police Department, where crime analysts, officers, detectives, and sergeants from 16 departmental units use the technology voluntarily as part of their daily investigative routine. This cross-section comprises approximately 30 to 40 percent of TPD’s investigative units and includes 90 percent of the crime analysts. Investigative units include adult and child sexual assault, aggravated assault, auto theft, elder abuse, community office, fraud, gangs, homicide, undercover, neighborhood crimes, night detectives, patrol, robbery, and warrants. Although risk-appraisal procedures displayed an advantage over self-report measures in recidivism prediction, the two methods produced comparable results when the meta-analysis was restricted to investigations using content-relevant self-report predictors. Incremental validity analysis of 72 risk-appraisal/self-report contrasts revealed that both sets of measures accounted for criminal justice outcomes beyond the variance attributable to the alternate method.