Congrats to the 2014 DWC Student Paper Award Winners
Please join me in congratulating the winners and attend the DWC breakfast meeting on Thursday morning where they will be able to receive their awards.
The winner of the graduate student competition for 2014 is Jaclyn Cwick (University of Missouri-St. Louis) for her paper “Revisiting Coercive Mobility: Women’s Social Capital and Neighborhood Social Control.”
Abstract
Women’s social capital is investigated as a mechanism to more fully explain the process by which concentrated incarceration unfolds and results in reductions in neighborhood informal social control. Previous work has shown that coercive mobility, referring to involuntary mobility due to prison admissions and returns, impedes informal control by disrupting network ties, but this work has focused almost entirely on the collateral consequences of the incarcerated. The present work moves forward by proposing a gendered theory of coercive mobility, which synthesizes the collateral consequences of incarceration to women who remain in the community, along with coercive mobility theory and social capital.
The winner of the undergraduate competition is Erin Hoffman (Southern Connecticut State University) for her paper “Predicting Rates of Sexual Violence using State-Level Risk Factors.”
Abstract
This study analyzed the ability of societal factors to predict rates of rape and other sexual offenses among the 50 states (N=50). Predictors of state-level sexual violence were organized into five different models based on conceptual similarities and prior research. Two simultaneous linear regression equations were calculated with rates of sexual violence (i.e., arrests for rape and other sexual offenses) as the two criterion variables. Results suggest the need for states to (a) consider implementing sentencing guidelines for rape, and (b) recruit more female law enforcement officers, as both factors may help states lessen the incidence of sexual violence.