Citation
Dhingra, K. (2016), "Editorial", Journal of Criminal Psychology, Vol. 6 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCP-02-2016-0003
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Editorial
Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Criminal Psychology, Volume 6, Issue 1.
Katie Dhingra
The Journal of Criminal Psychology (JCP), although only founded in 2011, is a widely recognised scientific journal that occupies a specific niche in the field of psychology. As a team, we are honoured and humbled by the opportunity to take the editorial leadership of JCP from the very capable of hands of Dr Daniel Boduszek, Professor Gary Adamson, and Professor Mark Shevlin. We are very enthusiastic about JCP’s current position and future prospects and hope to see the journal become a leading publication in the field of criminal psychology. Our readership’s active involvement and input will be instrumental in accomplishing this ambitious goal.
In the past few months, we have implemented a few modifications.
First, we revised the aims and scope of the journal to make it more encompassing; this has been updated on the website http://emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/journals.htm?id=jcp and now reads as follows.
The JCP is multi-agency and multidisciplinary in its outlook and encourages submissions of papers from academics, researchers, and practitioners. The journal publishes papers based on quantitative and/or qualitative research design. Original conceptual papers and brief research reports will also be considered for publication.
Coverage includes: predictors of delinquent and criminal behaviour; classification of offenders; risk assessment and risk management; prevention, intervention, and treatment programmes; offender and offense characteristics; policing; interrogation and witness testimony; criminal thinking style and criminal identity; process of prisonization; recidivism.
Second, we have expanded our editorial board further increasing the scope of expertise represented, as well as diversity in regards to geographic areas. We are very proud to work with such a distinguished editorial board, who have been active in reviewing the submitted manuscripts, along with many other reviewers who actively support JCP’s effort worldwide.
Finally, two special issues are planned for this year, one on self-harm and suicidal behaviour in forensic settings (guest editor: Karen Slade) and one on technology and the criminal justice system (guest editor: Jeff Pfeifer). We believe these are two timely issues which will be well received by the readers of JCP and the scientific community.
We are excited to be moving forward with the new initiatives described above, and continue to explore opportunities to improve the overall quality and impact of the work published in JCP. Your continued support and involvement will be greatly appreciated!
With warmest regards,
Katie Dhingra, Philip Hyland, and Marc Swogger
Welcome to our first issue of 2016. We are delighted to present papers that address a wide range of issues and bring together contributions from researchers from around the world.
The first paper, by Delisi and colleagues, examines the dark figure of crime among a sample of 119 US federal sex offenders to quantify crime victims and sex crime events among those with no official criminal record. Results indicate that federal sex offenders are usually contact sex offenders with many victims, that the correlates of self-reported vs official sexual abuse significantly vary, and that total number of paraphilias are a pronounced risk factor for the most chronic sexual abusers. The authors conclude that the containment approach to supervising sex offenders is imperative as the preponderance of ostensibly non-contact sexual offenders are in fact dangerous contact sexual abusers.
The second paper by Knowles is a literature review that examines the major components of hostage negotiations. The authors’ findings highlight the difficulties present within the hostage negotiation process and the changing dynamics of the hostage taker depending upon his or her mental state or the specific situation.
Using smallest space analysis by Trojan and Salfati, examines the thematic patterns present in the prior offenses of 122 US homicide offenders and whether homicide offenders specialise in themes of offending prior to the commission of their homicide. The results indicate that it is possible to differentiate homicide offenders’ previous criminal offenses according to a violent (expressive) and instrumental thematic distinction. Moreover, the clustering of smaller groups of variables within the overall framework suggests that further refinement of the model may be possible. Additionally, the authors found that 84 per cent of offenders could be allocated into a single dominant offending style, suggesting that the framework can differentiate the majority of offenders’ criminal backgrounds.
The final paper in this issue (Levi) considers whether ROC analysis is a tool that could replace probative analysis in studying lineups. The author concludes that eyewitness ROC curves are similar to probative analysis, but provide less useful information. More specifically, ROC is noted to provide a less precise measure of the relative diagnostic value of each lineup method, and fails to produce a discriminability measure due to the structure of lineup experiments.
We hope you find the papers in this issue interesting. If you would like to contribute to the coming issues of JCP, you can find instructions on how to do so in our author guidelines at http://emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/author_guidelines.htm?id=jcp