Recently in Statistics Category

I personally have never been a child of divorce or separation. My parents were never together as I grew up and that was normal to me. I do however have a nephew who is two going through a separation and a brutal custody battle between his mom and dad. Since the start of this battle I have been paying close attention to his attitudes, his behaviors, and his actions since things have started. Although he is only two and does not know what is really going on, I can tell that he has a sense of some kind of tension between his parents.

With that said I decided to make this blog on children of divorce and how it affects them as well as both the mom and dad. It has always been said that a child who goes through a divorce they will suffer from depression, failing grades and acting out. This is not ALL true now today. Research has shown that if both parents separate their divorce from the well being of their child that the child will most likely still feel loved and do well in life as oppose to those parents who are putting their divorce first and the well being of their child second. This is a website all on the psychological and Emotional aspects of divorce of children and the families. It has some recent and good statistics on many different aspects. It also breaks down the emotional stages of divorce the child is most likely to go through as well as the parents.

I found this website to be very beneficial and it brought new knowledge to me that I did not know or understand before. I hope this blog brings about good discussion and other people's points of view.

http://www.mediate.com/articles/Psych.cfm 

After watchin the movie Gridiron Gang the other night I found myself fearing things like the chance of a gun man in the mall. When a person starts thinking about these kinds of things they sometimes start to consume my thoughts. I started thinking about our campus and the safety of it. I'm very thankful to go to a college the gives me a great sense of safety. I started to think about small towns. I grew up in one and found myself not worrying if I walked across town and not witnessing or ever hearing about crime in my small town hardly ever growing up. It makes me wonder if because of the fear of crime people in bigger cities would be more psychologically unstable when it came to fearing crime and what kind of impact this would have on depression rates in small towns and big cities. I also thought this article was neat because of the correlation between fearing crime and people's mental health.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070927164455.htm

I also wanted to look deeper into researching the presence of depression in the law system. I found shocking information relating to depression and lawyers. According to a study at Johns Hopkins, that when 28 occupations were studied, the one most likely to experience depression was the occupation of lawyer. Why is this? For one, it appears that the legal profession attracts people who are perfectionists. There also seems to be a large amount of pessimistic personality traits in people who are lawyers. Of another study at Johns Hopkins it showed that optimism out performed pessimism. However, there was one exception and that was people working in law school.

I am taking the class Psych of Personality. I wouldn't say that Psych of Law and that class are very compatible. However, personality does have a large effect on what professions people choose. This is something that affects the types of people who do indeed become lawyers. Psychology reaches so many different aspects of life, and this is clearly an example of that.

http://www.legalunderground.com/2005/03/lawyer_depressi.html

Did you know that a majority of imprisoned murderers only spend 8 years, on average, in jail? Rediculous right? What is the worth of a human life, or 5, or 100? Where do we draw the line? September 18, 2004 the LA Times put out an article concerning MORE killers getting out on parole. The article discusses Governer Schwarzenagger letting out 48 murderers in only one years time! The most common release for murderers in prison is due to "good behavior" and a "clean prison record." How can someone who murdered a person, or numerous people, get out of prison for "good behavior" when what they are in there for deserves death itself? This cite leads to the LA Times cite housing the article about Schwarzennager: http://articles.latimes.com/2004/sep/18/local/me-parole18 

The following website delivers a few statistics based on granted paroles: http://www.citizensinc.org/parolestatistics.html 

I understand second chances-- and wrongful charges. But how does the victims family feel about all the goings on? The person who took the life of their loved ones being set free? I side with the victims in this one. The website: http://www.murdervictims.com/Parole.htm gives a little information regarding the victims rights and ways they can get a parole overturned.

The Parole process is a long one that does take victim's family and suspect into consideration. The process has to look at all sides because if they release a criminal and the criminal repeats the offense- or worse- it goes back to the board that chose to grant parole. So the board has to have put some heavy thought into their decision. The following website is a cite that describes the governing process of parole in the state of Connecticut: http://www.cga.ct.gov/2009/rpt/2009-R-0345.htm 

As you can see, parole sentences are governed by state and each state has its own set rules of who they are willing and not willing to let rome the streets among us. Each state has a public record of their procedures,etc. that determine parole sentences, some more strict than others. All sites are easily accessed through search for parole sentences in said states.

I'm doing my book report on "Psychic Criminology" a book about the use of psychics in law enforcement.  My research brought me across the following article regarding the use of Remote Viewing by the CIA.

http://www.mceagle.com/remote-viewing/refs/science/air/hyman.html

First a little background information.  Parapsychology is the branch of psychology studying various kinds of psychic phenomena, known to the scientific community at large as anomalous mental phenomena.  Parapsychology research encompasses various abilities including telepathy (communication between minds), clairvoyance (acquiring information without the use of the 5 known senses), Precognition (predicting something in the future), Dowsing (locating something, generally water or minerals with a dowsing rod or a pendulum), Psychometry (acquiring information about the history of an object by touching the object), and Remote viewing (the ability to describe very distant objects, really this is a form of clairvoyance).

This article discusses the interaction between genes, the environment and the impact they have on criminal behavior. In the article the researchers discusses three different ways in which psychologists have researched whether or not humans can be predisposed to commit a crime. Researchers looked at Twin Studies, Adoption Studies, and Family Studies. Researchers also looked at the different neurochemicals that interact with the environment which can cause the predisposition. A  lot of the information in this article was more biologically based once I got into the reading but overall it was very interesting. 

This article is about the misconceptions of eyewitness testimony and some cases exemplifying its inaccuracy.  False eyewitness testimonies have put innocent people behind bars, but with the growth of DNA testing and its use as evidence in criminal cases, eyewitness testimony has been found to be highly inaccurate.  This article also describes a few cases and studies researching the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.  According to a study published earlier this year in the journal Law and Human Behavior, false eyewitness testimony contributed to 77 percent of the 230 wrongful convictions exposed by DNA evidence over the last decade (the number of exonerations has grown since the study was conducted). These of course are only those cases for which DNA testing was available, which are usually murder and rape cases. In crimes where investigators are more likely to rely only on eyewitnesses, robberies or muggings, for example, it's likely that the problem is even more pronounced. Studies have also found that subtle, unintentional feedback from police or prosecutors can lead to false identifications.

Psychologists suggest some ways of improving the validity of eyewitness testimony, which include making witness and photo lineups double-blind, where neither the officer conducting the lineup nor the witness knows which person is the suspect. Lineups should also include people that the police know are innocent. If a witness selects a known innocent, police and prosecutors will then know that particular witness's memory isn't reliable enough to be used as evidence.  However, it seems as though the police and prosecutors have yet to change their procedures.   

http://reason.com/archives/2009/04/08/eyewitness-testimony-on-trial 

I think this article is beneficial in increasing awareness about the inaccuracy of eyewitness testimonies.  The suggestions that were offered should be implicated to see their effect as opposed to traditional methods.  I think we have come a long way by discovering techniques to obtain DNA and use them to exonerate wrongfully convicted prisoners, however, I still feel that we have a long way to go in increasing awareness about the epidemic of putting innocent people behind bars and how to curb that trend.  

Bureau of Justice Statistics provides comprehensive data on criminal justice systems.

http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/tost_1.html#1_aa