searchfortruth.info > Blog > 2017 > October > Page 21

Month: October 2017

Sadism and Masochism: The Psychology of Hatred and Cruelty

by

Abstract

These are among the most recent volumes in a series now being issued in English by Horace Liveright. Stekel is generally recognized as a disciple of Freud who has gone far beyond Freud himself, as well as other followers of the great psychologist, in his methods and in the extent of his practice. He is recognized as perhaps more romantic than scientific. In these two volumes he is largely concerned with the relationships of hatred and cruelty to psychologic reactions. It has been known since these subjects were popularized by Havelock Ellis that there is a clear relationship between the sex element and both the infliction and the enjoyment of cruelty. Dr. Stekel makes this clear by the recital of numerous cases from his practice and from psychosexual literature. His manner of presentation is such as to make almost anything he writes most interesting....

Read More!

The Seven-Stage Hate Model: The Psychopathology of Hate

by

Hate masks personal insecurities. Not all insecure people are haters, but all haters are insecure people. Hate elevates the hater above the hated. Haters cannot stop hating without exposing their personal insecurities. Haters can only stop hating when they face their insecurities.

Stage 1: The Haters Gather

Haters rarely hate alone. They feel compelled, almost driven, to entreat others to hate as they do. Peer validation bolsters a sense of self-worth and, at the same time, prevents introspection, which reveals personal insecurities. Individuals who are otherwise ineffective become empowered when they join groups, which also provide anonymity and diminished accountability.

Stage 2: The Hate Group Defines Itself

Hate groups form identities through symbols, rituals, and mythologies, which enhance the members' status and, at the same time, degrade the object of their hate. For example, skinhead groups may adopt the swastika, the iron cross, the Confederate flag, and other supremacist symbols...

Read More!

Effects of Defense Counsel on Homicide Case Outcomes in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1995-2004 [United States] (ICPSR 32541)

by

Summary:

This study measured the difference that defense counsel made to the outcome of homicide and death penalty cases. One in five indigent murder defendants in Philadelphia were randomly assigned representation by the Defender Association of Philadelphia while the remainder received court-appointed private attorneys. This study's research design utilized this random assignment to measure how defense counsel affected murder case outcomes. The research team collected data on 3,157 defendants charged with murder in Philadelphia Municipal Court between 1995-2004, using records provided by the Philadelphia Courts (First Judicial District of Pennsylvania). Data were also obtained from the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, the Pennsylvania Unified Judicial System web portal, the National Corrections Reporting Program, and the 2000 Census. This study contains a total of 47 variables including public defender representation, defendant demographics, ZIP code characteristics, prior criminal history, case characteristics, case outcomes, and case handling procedures...

Read More!

Motive and Criminal Liability

by

According to Jerome Hall, “Hardly any part of penal law is more definitely settled than that motive is irrelevant." This thesis is endorsed, sometimes with minor qualifications, by almost all leading criminal theorists. Hall and these commentators must be understood to mean that motive is and ought to be immaterial to liability. Roughly, criminal justice is dispensed in two stages: first it is decided whether the defendant is liable; if so, it is next determined to what extent he is to be punished. it is beyond dispute that motive is relevant to the latter inquiry. Thus a bad motive might aggravate,or a good motive might mitigate, the severity of the defendant’s punishment but the goodness or badness of his motive does not bear on the prior issue of his liability.

Commentators should have been more critical of the thesis that motives are and ought to be material to sentencing, but not to liability. A defense of this thesis requires a theory about why a...

Read More!

Extreme Hatred: Revisiting the Hate Crime and Terrorism Relationship to Determine Whether They Are “Close Cousins” or “Distant Relatives”

by

Abstract

Existing literature demonstrates disagreement over the relationship between hate crime and terrorism with some calling them “close cousins,” whereas others declare them “distant relatives.” We extend previous research by capturing a middle ground between hate crime and terrorism: extremist hate crime. We conduct negative binomial regressions to examine hate crime by non-extremists, fatal hate crime by far-rightists, and terrorism in U.S. counties (1992-2012). Results show that counties experiencing increases in general hate crime, far-right hate crime, and non-right-wing terrorism see associated increases in far-right hate crime, far-right terrorism, and far-right hate crime, . We conclude that hate crime and terrorism may be more akin to close cousins than distant relatives.

Read More!

Crime Scene Behaviors Of Crime Scene Stagers

by

Abstract

In an article entitled, "Crime Scene Staging and its Detection," Hazelwood and Napier (2004) defined crime scene staging as “the purposeful alteration of a crime or crime scene in an attempt to mislead investigators and frustrate the criminal justice process” (p. 745). While it is true that crime scene staging can frustrate the criminal justice process specifically, generally speaking, crime scene staging is quite a complex societal problem. Staged crime scenes can potentially threaten public safety, the effective use of public resources, and the adjudication of homicide cases on the very broadest level. Unfortunately, there is very little published empirical research on crime scene behaviors in staged homicide cases that can be applied by scholar-practitioners and law enforcement professionals in the field. Therefore, the identification and analysis of crime scene behaviors of crime scene stagers is necessary in order to build an...

Read More!

Murder as a Sociological Phenomenon

by

Historically among most peoples the murderer has been looked upon as perhaps the most dangerous member of society, certainly not rivaled by any other offender unless it be the traitor. As discussed by most criminologists, the murderer is one who kills a fellow member of his society not by accident or negligence but with purpose or to defend himself in connection with an attempt to commit another. crime, such as robbery, or to shield himself from accusation by a person whom he has offended or abused. Therefore the term “murder” is more restricted than the term “homicide.” That is the sense in which the term is used in this paper. Did the limits of this paper permit, it would be worth while to trace in some detail the attempts of the various schools of criminology to explain the murderer. That survey, however, will have to be forgone.’

My own study of murderers was part of a larger project—a study of a sample of 486 ?

Read More!

Stalking and Serious Violence

by

Stalking, sometimes known as “obsessional following,” describes behavior characterized by the repeated unwanted intrusion of one person into the life of another, by either direct contact or communication. A characteristic of the behavior is that it occasions fear or apprehension in the victim. Dramatic incidents of stalker violence brought stalking to public prominence and were the impetus to the introduction of antistalking legislation that, in most jurisdictions, is framed in terms of a behavior that places a person in fear of physical harm., However, most stalkers are not violent; rates for violent behavior range between 30 and 40 percent in most reported series.2 Violence infrequently results in serious physical injury, with most victims being grabbed, punched, slapped, or fondled by the stalker. Serious violence is rare. It has been suggested that the homicide rate in stalking is probably less than two percent,4–6 but an analysis of prevalence rates of...

Read More!

A Brief History Of Restorative Arts

by

As early as 1200 BCE, the ancient Egyptians were practicing a range of restorative techniques on the emaciated features of the dead from filling the inside of the mouths with sawdust to improve hollowed cheeks to stuffing linen under the eyelids or replacing eyes with stones. They would continue this procedure, tending to any disability, injury or disfigurement until the face and the body were contoured to approximate the original features and shape of the person they were preparing for their death ceremony.

Since then, modern restorative techniques, renamed restorative arts in 1930, became an important sub-discipline of the aftercare services; mending the body when it exhibited obvious signs of trauma, disease or wounds from war to provide comfort to the bereaved by presenting a loved one who appears familiar in death as they did in life.

It was in 1912, when well-known embalmer, Joel E. Crandall introduced demisurgery, a practice he described as...

Read More!

Why And How Normal People Go Mad

by

Just about any ordinary person can slip into madness, believes APA President Philip G. Zimbardo, PhD. In fact, all it may take to trigger the process is a special kind of blow to one's self-image to push someone over the edge of sanity.

"My colleagues and I have demonstrated that situational forces...can generate surprisingly powerful contributions to make good people behave in bad ways," he said to a standing-room-only crowd in his presentation, "Why and how normal people go mad," at APA's 2002 Annual Convention in Chicago.

The basis for his ideas is his discontinuity theory, which posits that when people perceive a violation in some domain of functioning vital to their sense of self-esteem, they will search for ways to explain or rationalize the experience. An A-student who suddenly gets poor grades, for example, may develop sexual or eating problems, or exhibit violent fantasies--symptoms that could...

Read More!

Effective  Responses:  High Crime  and  Disorder  Areas  

by

Overview

There are a variety of ways to define high crime and disorder areas. For the purposes of this paper (as in the previous IACA Identifying High Crime Areas [2013] white paper), we will rely on three primary characteristics to define high crime and disorder areas. These include:

1. a relatively high volume of crime and disorder, 2. evidence of spatial clustering, and 3. an observable pattern of time occurrence and/or duration.

We recognize that this characterization of high crime and disorder areas shares many similarities with the definition of hot spots. Due to the large number of similarities between the two, in this paper high crime and disorder areas and hot spot areas will be treated as the same concept. Our goal is to help the reader identify these areas, understand contributing factors, develop interventions, and then evaluate their effectiveness in reducing crime and disorder. Police agencies and their communities...

Read More!

Diffusion in Homicide: Exploring a General Method for Detecting Spatial Diffusion Processes

by

Abstract

This article proposes a new method for examining dynamic changes in the spatial distribution of a phenomenon. Recently introduced exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) techniques provide social scientists with anew set of tools for distinguishing between random and nonrandom spatial patterns of events (Anselin, 1998). Existing ESDA measures, however, are static and do not permit comparisons of distributions of events in the same space but across different time periods. One ESDA method—the Moran scatter plot—has special heuristic value because it visually displays local spatial relationships between each spatial unit and its neighbors. Weextend this static cross-sectional view of the spatial distribution of events to consider dynamic features of changes over time in spatial dependencies. The method distinguishes between contagious diffusion between adjoining units and hierarchical diffusion that spreads broadly through commonly shared influences. We apply the method to homicide data, looking for evidence of spatial diffusion of youth-gang homicides...

Read More!

Barriocide: Investigating the Temporal and Spatial Influence of Neighborhood Structural Characteristics on Gang and Non-Gang Homicides in East Los Angeles

by

Abstract

This study explored how changes in neighborhood structural characteristics predicted variation in gang versus non-gang homicides in a policing division of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Longitudinal negative binomial models were examined to test the relationship between-neighborhood structural covariates with gang and non-gang homicides over a 35-year period. This study highlights the potential to estimate temporal effects not captured by cross-sectional analyses alone. The results underscore a unique feature that distinguishes gang homicides from other forms of non-gang violence, its tenacious clustering, and spatial dependence over time...

Read More!

Modus Operandi Of Insane Offenders In Multiple Homicides

by

Abstract

Homicides committed by insane offenders have been rarely investigated from the forensic point of view in a comprehensive and detailed manner. The objective of the study was to describe and characterize the modus operandi and personal characteristics in cases when more than one victim was killed and the perpetrator was deemed insane in judicial proceedings. Differences between single and multiple-vitim homicides in the population of insane murderers were also examined. Complete dossiers and forensic examination reports of 21 homicide victims killed by 9 individuals were retrospectively analyzed. The comparative control group consisted of 41 cases with only one victim killed by a single insane perpetrator. The offence and offender variables were subjected to a comparative statistical analysis. The results indicated some specific factors that can be regardetvd as distinctive features more commonly observed in multiple vs. single victim killings perpetrated by insane individuals. There was a significant correlation between, psychosis with...

Read More!

The Conditional Effects Of Victim And Offender Ethnicity And Victim Gender On Sentences For Non-capital Cases

by

Abstract

An extensive body of research shows that capital sentences tend to be more likely for Blacks who kill Whites, while more recent studies point to a higher likelihood of capital sentences for killers of White females. The present research broadens these areas of scholarship by including Hispanics and considering sentences for other types of violent crimes. Supporting theory are findings that longer sentences are meted out to offenders who victimize White females, and to Hispanic and African American offenders who victimize Whites. These findings, however, are confined to homicide cases and absent from sexual assault and robbery cases. Contradicting predictions are longer sentences for offenders who victimized Hispanic females, which is observed for robbery as well as homicide. Implications for theory and future research are discussed...

Read More!

Race, Gender, And The Newsworthiness Of Homicide Incidents

by

Introduction

It is nearly impossible to escape crime imagery in the news media. Scholars have found that crime is generally a staple of news programming, comprising from 10 to 50 percent of all news stories (Chermak, 1995; Ericson, Baranek, & Chan, 1991; Graber, 1980; Klite, Bardwell, & Salzman, 1997; Maguire, Sandage, & Weatherby, 1999; Yanich, 2005). In addition, not all crime is presented similarly by the news media. In particular, research has consistently shown that crime is distorted in favor of uncommon events (Chermak, 1995; Ericson et al., 1991; Fishman, 1980; Gans, 1979; Tuchman, 1973). This same research has generally found that violent crimes such as homicides, for instance, are overrepresented while minor, more common crimes are ignored or de-emphasized. Consequently, research examining media coverage of crime, particularly homicide, has increased in recent years (Buckler & Travis, 2005; Johnstone, Hawkins, & Michener, 1995; Lundman, 2003; Paulsen, 2003; Peelo, Francis,...

Read More!