When individuals are released from prison, they typically enter a period of post confinement community supervision. While under community supervision, their behaviors are subject to special conditions requiring them to report to supervisors and prohibiting certain behaviors such as drug and alcohol use. Many supervisees are returned to prison…

Warrantless arrest laws for domestic violence (DV) are generally classified as discretionary, preferred, or mandatory, based on the level of power accorded to police in deciding whether to arrest. However, there is a lack of consensus in the literature regarding how each state's law should be categorized. Using three classification schemes, this…

Nonlethal strangulation of intimate partners has substantial direct health effects and is associated with an increased risk of later lethal violence by a partner or ex-intimate partner but can be difficult to prosecute under felony assault statutes. After review of state laws regarding assault, the authors identified 10 states with specific…

Using data that, to our knowledge, have not been used before for this purpose, we examined 9,231 opposite-sex intimate partner violence (IPV) calls for law enforcement assistance recorded in the Compstat system of a large U.S. city. Although women were the predominant victims, injuries were documented more often for men. Only about 1% of incidents…

Background: A small but growing body of research evidence suggests that place-based police interventions generate significant crime control gains. While place-based policing strategies have been adopted by a majority of U.S. police departments, very few agencies make a priori commitments to rigorous evaluations. Objective: Recent methodological…

In assessing criminality, researchers have used counts of crimes, arrests, and so on, because interval measures were not available. Additionally, crime seriousness varies depending on demographic factors. This study examined the Crime and Violence Scale (CVS) regarding psychometric quality using item response theory (IRT) and invariance of the…

Objectives: Establish metric properties of the Neighborhood Inventory for Environmental Typology (NIfETy). Method: A total of 919 residential block faces were assessed by paired raters using the NIfETy. Reliability was evaluated via interrater and internal consistency reliability; validity by comparing NIfETy data with youth self-reported…

Portal survey techniques involve multimodal assessments (e.g., self-report, biologic, and observational) in high-risk drinking and drug-use settings. Our investigation expanded the portal survey methodology to include follow-up assessments of emerging adult women recruited at the border as they cross to and from Mexico south of San Diego,…

Domestic violence imposes a large cost on society. The authors exploit state variation in timing to examine the impact of three types of law on intimate partner homicides. These laws restrict access to firearms by individuals who are subject to a restraining order or have been convicted of a domestic violence misdemeanor or allow law enforcement…

Firearms play an important role in lethal domestic violence incidents. The authors review state laws regarding two policies to separate batterers from firearms: laws authorizing police to remove firearms when responding to a domestic violence complaint ("police gun removal laws") and laws authorizing courts to order guns removed from batterers…

Restraining orders, an important legal intervention for victims of domestic violence, have broad potential for injury prevention. Using data from one of the busiest restraining order clinics in the nation, the authors examined 1,354 applicants' descriptions of abuse. Most (89.2%) applicants were issued a restraining order. A total of 16.0% of…

Laws that prohibit persons under a domestic violence restraining order from purchasing or possessing a firearm are a primary way to keep guns out of the hands of batterers. In July 2005, the California Attorney General's Task Force on the Local Criminal Justice Response to Domestic Violence issued a report called Keeping the Promise: Victim Safety…

Federal law prohibits the purchase or possession of a firearm by persons convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence and those under certain domestic violence restraining orders. The purpose of this investigation is to examine public sentiment about the removal of firearms in the absence of a restraining order or misdemeanor conviction following…

Batterers with access to firearms present a serious lethal threat to their partners. The purpose of this exploratory study is to estimate the prevalence of and risk markers for gun possession among Massachusetts men enrolled in batterer intervention programs. The authors found that 1.8% of the men reported having a gun in or around their home.…

The Maryland Gun Violence Act, enacted into law in 1996, explicitly authorized courts to order batterers to surrender their firearms through civil protective orders. It also vested law enforcement with the explicit authority to remove guns when responding to a domestic violence complaint. In order to assess how these laws were implemented, we…