Browsing by Subject "Punishment"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Impulsivity and Risky Decision-Making
    (2016-05) Young, Nathaniel A
    The relationships between emotion, trait impulsivity, sensitivity to reward and punishment and risky decision-making were explored. Twenty-Seven undergraduate psychology students (14 males and 13 females) completed the (negative) Urgency, (lack of) Premeditation, (lack of) Perseverance, Sensation Seeking, and Positive Urgency scale (UPPS+P); the Sensitivity to Punishment and Sensitivity to Reward Questionnaire (SPSRQ), and the Positive Affect and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). Afterward the participants performed the Iowa gambling task (IGT). Results showed that dimensions related to negative emotion and rash impulsivity significant factors within the model to predict risky decision-making during the IGT
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    Police Misconduct, Monetary Sanctions, and Insurance Models in the Modern Police Accountability Era
    (2024-05) Wulff, Stephen
    Despite many police accountability efforts underway in the contemporary United States, financial immunization of officers continues to enable police impunity. Legal scholars have examined these issues from the vantage points of law and how governments pay for misconduct (Schwartz 2014, 2016); they have also mapped the police liability insurance terrain (Rappaport 2016, 2017). Yet little is known about how police accountability activists and municipal actors—e.g., public officials, police leaders, risk managers—approach and perceive the overlapping issues of insurance, risk management, police accountability, and police misconduct settlements. Furthermore, despite pioneering research in this area by legal scholars, few in-depth municipal case studies currently exist, especially from a sociological and sociolegal perspective. My qualitative case study of municipalities in Minnesota operating with and without market-based insurance elucidates how activists and key municipal representatives approach and perceive these issues and examines a potential insurance alternative. My dissertation grapples with a fundamental paradox: policing as an institution is charged with social control of the general public; however, police violence reflects a breakdown in the social control of what sociologist Howard Becker (1963) refers to as “rule enforcers.” To understand contemporary efforts to stem police violence, my project examines the role that insurance and risk management strategies play—or could potentially play—in regulating police departments and individual officers. I extend the sociology of punishment literature by reinterpreting Feeley and Simon’s (1992) classic “new penology” paradigm through a social movement lens. They argue that a late-twentieth-century penal shift occurred away from rehabilitation toward managing aggregates of dangerous criminal categories (e.g., violent offenders) using risk management approaches. I extend their thesis by examining how police accountability groups are implicitly inverting the new penology onto police in an effort to manage aggregates of dangerous police categories (e.g., violent officers) using risk management approaches. My study also extends the sociology of punishment literature on “monetary sanctions.” Existing research focuses on all the costs imposed by the criminal legal system on denizens accused and/or convicted of a crime (Harris 2016). Instead of focusing on how cities (like Ferguson, Missouri) budget for revenue generated from monetary sanctions and the micro-level predatory effects these sanctions have on traditional offenders, my project illuminates: 1) how police misconduct payouts contribute to tax revenue shortfalls, which can trap cities in long-term debt cycles; and 2) how financially immunizing officers and departments has meso-level predatory effects on cities by diverting tax revenue from the public sector to cover payouts. Since the 2014 killing by police of unarmed African American Michael Brown in Ferguson, policing has faced a public legitimacy crisis. To address core issues raised by Black Lives Matter and other racial justice movements in response to such killings—namely, racial injustice and police impunity—public debate has centered on adopting existing accountability mechanisms and reforms (e.g., body cameras, police de-militarization) (Weitzer 2015). Following the 2020 murder by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis, some activists and community members have also called for defunding and/or abolishing police (Coleman 2020). Meanwhile, policing scholars have identified new accountability mechanisms (e.g., critical incident reporting) to address the weaknesses of past policing reforms (Walker and Archbold 2019). However, insurance as an accountability mechanism has received scant attention in both scholarly and national debates. My study seeks to add to the existing sociological and related interdisciplinary literatures, while shedding light on the salience of this accountability mechanism, by: 1) Elucidating key stakeholders’ approaches to and perceptions of existing and potential insurance models and risk management strategies for regulating police behavior. 2) Uncovering and/or further elucidating municipal, non-profit, and/or private sector insurance and risk management practices that either perpetuate or reduce police impunity and police violence. 3) Informing scholarly and policy discussions on reforming police via insurance. 4) Examining the implications of a potential insurance alternative.
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    Two-sided uncertainty in persuasion games.
    (2009-05) Pillai, Evsen Turkay
    I study a communication game between a listener and a speaker in which the speaker sends costless but verifiable messages in order to persuade the listener to take an action that is favorable for the speaker. Because of its practical relevance for many economic, legal, and political matters, this problem has been well studied in economics literature, usually under the assumption that the speaker knows the preferences of the listener. This assumption is restrictive, as in many persuasion problems the speaker might not know the preferences of the listener, possibly because either the listener is not able to communicate her preferences or wants to deliberately keep the speaker uncertain about her preferences. I explore two possible tools that can be used for information extraction in such a game. The first tool is the uncertainty about the listener's preferences (type) that may be maintained or removed. Another tool is to change the ``scale of actions"-for example, increasing or decreasing legal punishment. First, in a persuasion game in which the listener has two possible types and two actions to choose from, I show that when one of the listener's types is more likely, the equilibrium speaker strategies are a subset of those that arise when the speaker knows the listener's type. Further, I show that among the equilibria that deliver the highest expected utility to the more likely type when there is certainty, there is always one that remains in the set of equilibria under uncertainty. These results imply that maintaining uncertainty can be a useful tool only for the less likely type. To analyze the effect of the second tool, I study a legal application of persuasion games with two-sided uncertainty. A defendant (speaker) is trying to persuade a judge by presenting evidence to take a favorable legal action rather than less favorable ones on his case. I show that the equilibrium disclosure of the defendant is not affected by a change in the scale of legal actions when there is no uncertainty on how the judge evaluates evidence. With uncertainty, however, the defendant can be induced to disclose more information by decreasing the severity of the most unfavorable legal action relative to the favorable one.