SAGE Journal Articles

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Article 1: Alpert, Geoffrey P. and Jeffrey J. Noble (June 2009). Lies, True Lies, and Conscious Deception: Police Officers and the Truth. Police Quarterly, 12(2): 237-254.

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Police officers often tell lies; they act in ways that are deceptive, they manipulative people and situations, they coerce citizens, and are dishonest. They are taught, encouraged, and often rewarded for their deceptive practices. Officers often lie to suspects about witnesses and evidence, and they are deceitful when attempting to learn about criminal activity. Most of these actions are sanctioned, legal, and expected. Although they are allowed to be dishonest in certain circumstances, they are also required to be trustworthy, honest, and maintain the highest level of integrity. The purpose of this article is to explore situations when officers can be dishonest, some reasons that help us understand the dishonesty, and circumstances where lies may lead to unintended consequences such as false confessions. The authors conclude with a discussion of how police agencies can manage the lies that officers tell and the consequences for the officers, organizations, and the criminal justice system.

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Article 2: Lucas, Jeffrey W., Corina Graif & Michael J. Lovaglia (March 2006). Misconduct in the Prosecution of Severe Crimes: Theory and Experimental Test. Social Psychology Quarterly, 69(1): 97-107.

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Prosecutorial misconduct involves the intentional use of illegal or improper methods for attaining convictions against defendants in criminal trials. Previous research documented extensive errors in the prosecution of severe crimes. A theory formulated to explain this phenomenon proposes that in serious cases, increased pressure to convict encourages misconduct; further, serious cases increase perceptions of the suspect's guilt, which facilitate justification of the misconduct. A controlled laboratory experiment allows tests of theoretically derived predictions while controlling for extraneous factors common in naturally occurring settings. University undergraduate participants were assigned randomly to prosecute a contrived case of murder or assault; otherwise the two cases were identical. Results showed that participants improperly withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense more often in the murder case than in the assault case. Further, participants prosecuting the murder case expressed a stronger belief in the defendant's guilt than did participants in the assault case. Implications for future research in naturally occurring settings are discussed.

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Article 3: Lavena, Cecilia Florencia (June 2014). Whistle-Blowing: Individual and Organizational Determinants of the Decision to Report Wrongdoing in the Federal Government. The American Review of Public Administration, 1-24.

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The act of blowing the whistle on wrongdoing poses an ethical dilemma to the individual, the organization, and society. To help identify the key individual and organizational determinants that encourage or prohibit whistle-blowing in the U.S. federal government, this article presents a logistic regression analysis of survey data collected by the Merit Systems Protection Board, covering 36,926 federal employees from 24 agencies. Findings suggest that, although whistle-blowing is a rare event within most federal agencies, its likelihood is positively associated with norm-based and affective work motives, but negatively associated with several key indicators of organizational culture, including perceptions of respect and openness, cooperativeness and flexibility in the work setting, and fair treatment and trust in supervisors. This indicates intrinsic individual motives, together with organizational culture and leadership, should be taken into account when developing and sustaining policies to promote ethical behavior and responsible public service in the federal government.

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Article 4: Ross, Jeffrey Ian (March 2013). Deconstructing Correctional Officer Deviance: Toward Typologies of Actions and Controls. Criminal Justice Review, 38(1): 110-126.

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This article reviews the scholarly research that has been conducted on the problem of correctional officer (CO) deviance. It then outlines the most dominant kinds of CO deviance and the solutions that have been proposed and, in part, implemented. In so doing, the author provides a typology of the categories of deviance and the variety of controls. The researcher concludes with several recommendations on how these findings might be utilized to further the research on this subject.