Matthew Demichele
Biographic Data
| ID | 121958 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew Demichele |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew |
| FAMILY NAME | Demichele |
| SIGNATURE | DEMICHELE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | RTI International |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6534-474X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 107 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Learning to predict violence: Deep learning approaches to violent crime prediction during pretrial release
Satellite‐Derived Environmental Metrics and the Micro-Spatial Ecology of Crime: Extending Routine Activity and Social Disorganization Theory with Big, Complex Data
The proliferation of big, complex, and spatial data presents opportunities to further advance criminological theories by measuring the physical environments in which crime occurs. Drawing on high-resolution Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and administrative crime, demographic, and land-use data for Chicago, this study develops micro-scale indices of physical disorder, environmental instability, and vegetation intensity. We integrate these novel envi…
Smart Decarceration: Is It Possible to Detain Fewer People and Reduce Arrests
This paper provides the results of a thought experiment to see what would have happened if a jurisdiction made release decisions solely based on risk assessment predictions of new arrests. Random forest imputation is used with data from all admissions to a large county jail system ( n = 28,188) to forecast new arrests for individuals detained by the court. After imputing outcome rates for the detained, we rank order everyone by their predicted pr…
Sensible Pretrial Reform: The Importance of Accounting for Risk of Violence in Judicial Release Decisions
This study uses data collected from three diverse counties in the United States between 2017 and 2019 to compare the performance of a pretrial risk instrument—the Public Safety Assessment (or PSA)—to a revised version of the tool that accounts for risk of future violence in predicting three pretrial release outcomes. Results indicate the suggested three tiered release levels produced from the current PSA release conditions matrix (RCM) are better…
Jurisdictional Resource Factors Influencing Adoption and Implementation of the Public Safety Assessment During Pretrial
Criminal legal systems are increasingly adopting actuarial pretrial assessments which use statistical formulas to estimate individuals’ probability of adhering to pretrial requirements and guide the conditions of their supervision. A large gap in the study of pretrial assessments is due to inattention to implementation of these assessments in real-world settings. We conducted qualitative research examining personnel and data resource factors that…
Becoming an Ex-Extremist: Stopping the Hate and Embracing a New Identity
Domestic radicalization to violent extremism has evolved into the most urgent terrorism threat facing the West. We contribute to research on extremism and role exit processes by demonstrating how identity transformations are linked to the pursuit and avoidance of possible future selves motivated by negative emotional states of shame, embarrassment and guilt. The data are drawn from in-depth life history interviews with 47 former members of US dom…
There is a common thread: Shifting court culture through collaborative processes as a core component of pretrial reform
How much does criminal history contribute to racial differences in arraignment outcomes
The Body in Extremist White Supremacism
This article advances the study of racial extremism by analyzing how its practices of violence and sexuality are marked on the bodies of participants in the form of scars, physical stances, abuse, tattoos, pregnancy, injury, strength and size, using an extraordinarily rich and extensive set of narratives collected from lengthy in-person interviews with 47 former members of U.S. extremist white supremacist groups. It asks how embodied practices of…
Analyzing Human Behaviors in the Immediate Aftermath of A Terrorist Bombing: A Multi-Case Analysis
In recent years, terrorists and perpetrators of mass violence have increasingly targeted civilians at soft targets and crowded places, such as concert venues and public transportation hubs. A growing body of research looks at the motivation behind attacks and how to prevent them; still, we know relatively little about how people respond during, and in the immediate aftermath of, an attack. This study seeks to build our understanding of human beha…
How Long is Long Enough: Using Abbreviated Criminal Histories for Pretrial Assessment Instruments
The debate over pretrial assessment instruments focuses largely on the potential for instruments to exacerbate racial disparities. This study examines the effects of using different recall periods for the criminal history items on the New Criminal Arrest (NCA) scale from the Public Safety Assessment. Using jail admission data from a large jurisdiction in the southeast of the US, we varied the recall period from 1 to 10 years for the criminal hist…
Justice involvement prediction as individuals age: An age-graded evaluation of the public safety assessment
OBJECTIVE: Some scholars have criticized pretrial assessments for perpetuating racial bias in the criminal legal system by offering biased predictions of future legal system outcomes. Although these critiques have some empirical support, the scholarship has yet to examine the predictive validity and differential prediction of pretrial assessments across individuals by their age. Following the guidance of the life-course literature, the present st…
Testing Predictive Biases at the Intersection of Race-Ethnicity and Sex: A Multi-Site Evaluation of a Pretrial Risk Assessment Tool
Pretrial assessment instruments provide courtroom actors with information about the likelihood that someone who has been charged with a criminal offense would engage in criminal behavior if released prior to trial. Although prior research supports the ability of pretrial instruments to predict pretrial outcomes, there are concerns that pretrial instruments may inadvertently exacerbate racial-ethnic and sex disparities found in the larger criminal…
Where’s the Bias: No Evidence of Bias by Sex When Testing the Public Safety Assessment
Pretrial assessments are criticized for inherent biases. We conduct research in Kentucky to assess the predictive validity and differential prediction by sex of one pretrial assessment, the Public Safety Assessment (PSA). Our research is unique because we find equal base rates by sex for missing a court date, which allows us to assess for error rate balance by sex. We find the PSA to have predictive validity within acceptable ranges for the crimi…
Locked up and awaiting trial: Testing the criminogenic and punitive effects of spending a week or more in pretrial detention
Research summary This study provides a rigorous assessment of the public safety benefits of pretrial detention by estimating the criminogenic and punitive effects of spending at least 1 week in pretrial detention across three jail systems in two states. We use a doubly robust difference‐in‐differences design to show that pretrial detention increases the odds for someone to miss a court appearance or be arrested by roughly 50% and increases the od…
Does pretrial detention influence time until re-involvement with the criminal legal system
Intuitive pathways into racist beliefs
In this article, we present empirical evidence on the cognitive processes underlying racist beliefs and judgement. We draw on 47 life history interviews with former members of White supremacist groups to better understand how social interactions and stimuli from the wider environment inform cognitive pathways or how people think. While we examine both deliberate and intuitive pathways to racist belief, we focus on the intuitive ways that extreme …
Measuring the Extent and Nature of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) among Former White Supremacists
While progress has been made to understand mid-life correlates associated with extremist participation, much less research focuses on adolescent risk factors. The purpose of the current study is to expand upon the focus on individual-level correlates by assessing the extent and nature of childhood adversity among a sample of former white supremacists. The current study relies on in-depth life-history interviews with ninety-one North America-based…
Reimagining Pretrial & Sentencing
In this article, we discuss the evolution of criminal justice reform efforts focused on pretrial and sentencing policies and practices that resulted in unprecedented rates of incarceration. There is an urgent need to identify a strategy of pretrial justice and sentencing that will reduce crime and victimization, ameliorate unwarranted disparities, and reclaim human capital currently lost to incarceration. A discussion of proposed policy reforms s…
Bias Testing of the Public Safety Assessment: Error Rate Balance Between Whites and Blacks for New Arrests
This study is an evaluation of predictive bias by race when using a pretrial risk assessment. We use data from Kentucky from July 2013 through December 2014 ( n = 164,597) to evaluate differences across five error measures. Pretrial risk assessments were developed to respond to growing awareness about how intuitive processes were leading to disparate impact for people of color and the poor. This study contributes data to the debate about the meri…
Public safety assessment: Predictive utility and differential prediction by race in Kentucky
Research Summary We assess the predictive validity and differential prediction by race of one pretrial risk assessment, the Public Safety Assessment (PSA). The PSA was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF) to reduce the burden placed on vulnerable populations at the front end of the criminal justice system. The growing and disparate use of incarceration is one of the most pressing social issues facing the United …
Do White Supremacist Women Adopt Movement Archetypes of Mother, Whore, and Fighter
The rhetoric of the far-right typically depicts women in tripartite archetypes: as beloved mothers or sex symbols for far-rightist men or, less commonly, as fighters for the cause. But the propaganda and speeches that produced these archetypes of women are largely produced by far-rightist men. Do they reflect the lived experiences of women in the far-right? And how do far-rightist women – and men – react to such rhetorical messages about the fema…
Why White Supremacist Women Become Disillusioned, and Why They Leave
This article examines the relationship between becoming disillusioned with racist ideas and/or groups and the decision to leave organize white supremacism. We explore a classical sociological puzzle about the indeterminate ways that beliefs and actions inform each other. Drawing on a unique dataset from in-depth interviews with former members of U.S. white supremacist groups, we examine disillusionment and exit in a volatile social world in which…
Economic Evaluation of the Hope Demonstration Field Experiment
Research Summary In the program implemented in the Honest Opportunity Probation with Enforcement Demonstration Field Experiment (HOPE DFE), the following approach is taken: close monitoring; frequent drug testing; readily available substance abuse treatment; and swift, certain, and fair sanctioning to deter probationers from violating supervision conditions. We assessed in this study the costs and outcomes of the demonstration program across four…
How Emotional Dynamics Maintain and Destroy White Supremacist Groups
In this article, we explore emotions as a relational mechanism that affects the stability of political movement groups by activating or weakening identities, social ties, and movement boundaries. Our goal is to specify the dynamics by which personal emotional experiences are linked to wider group processes. In this way, emotion serves as an analytic bridge, connecting the micro levels to larger social structures. We draw on data from former viole…
Addicted to Hate: Identity Residual among Former White Supremacists
The process of leaving deeply meaningful and embodied identities can be experienced as a struggle against addiction, with continuing cognitive, emotional, and physiological responses that are involuntary, unwanted, and triggered by environmental factors. Using data derived from a unique set of in-depth life history interviews with 89 former U.S. white supremacists, as well as theories derived from recent advances in cognitive sociology, we examin…
Sociological Explorations in Site-Specific Social Control: The Role of the Strip Club Bouncer
This paper reports the results from a participatory ethnographic investigation into a traditionally perceived deviant setting concentrating on perceptions, communications, and enforcement of site-specific norms and behavioral regulations. Much of the sociological literature covering strip clubs tends to focus on either the strippers or the customers. The current paper moves beyond this discussion to focus on the power arrangements from the perspe…
How Racial Violence Is Provoked and Channeled
This paper seeks to explain the extraordinary violence of modern-day organized white supremacism in the United States. We begin on a conceptual level by distinguishing the racial ideologies and violence associated with modern racist movements from the racism and racial violence expressed in daily life in highly racialized and racially unequal societies. We then move to an empirical level by using our interviews with a broad set of former racist a…
Do White Supremacist Women Adopt Movement Archetypes of Mother, Whore, and Fighter
The rhetoric of the far-right typically depicts women in tripartite archetypes: as beloved mothers or sex symbols for far-rightist men or, less commonly, as fighters for the cause. But the propaganda and speeches that produced these archetypes of women are largely produced by far-rightist men. Do they reflect the lived experiences of women in the far-right? And how do far-rightist women – and men – react to such rhetorical messages about the fema…
Why White Supremacist Women Become Disillusioned, and Why They Leave
This article examines the relationship between becoming disillusioned with racist ideas and/or groups and the decision to leave organize white supremacism. We explore a classical sociological puzzle about the indeterminate ways that beliefs and actions inform each other. Drawing on a unique dataset from in-depth interviews with former members of U.S. white supremacist groups, we examine disillusionment and exit in a volatile social world in which…
How Emotional Dynamics Maintain and Destroy White Supremacist Groups
In this article, we explore emotions as a relational mechanism that affects the stability of political movement groups by activating or weakening identities, social ties, and movement boundaries. Our goal is to specify the dynamics by which personal emotional experiences are linked to wider group processes. In this way, emotion serves as an analytic bridge, connecting the micro levels to larger social structures. We draw on data from former viole…
Public safety assessment: Predictive utility and differential prediction by race in Kentucky
Research Summary We assess the predictive validity and differential prediction by race of one pretrial risk assessment, the Public Safety Assessment (PSA). The PSA was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF) to reduce the burden placed on vulnerable populations at the front end of the criminal justice system. The growing and disparate use of incarceration is one of the most pressing social issues facing the United …
Using Weber’s Rechtssoziologie to Explain Western Punishment: A Typological Framework
An interdisciplinary comparative-historical framework is proposed to map the relationship between legal institutional differences and the use of incarceration. The oft-cited empirical trend that Western countries cluster on an assortment of social, political, and economic outcomes is incorporated with Weberian sociology of law. Incarceration levels vary, in descending order, as a function of the institutional possibilities within the common, Roma…
Measuring the Extent and Nature of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) among Former White Supremacists
While progress has been made to understand mid-life correlates associated with extremist participation, much less research focuses on adolescent risk factors. The purpose of the current study is to expand upon the focus on individual-level correlates by assessing the extent and nature of childhood adversity among a sample of former white supremacists. The current study relies on in-depth life-history interviews with ninety-one North America-based…
Economic Evaluation of the Hope Demonstration Field Experiment
Research Summary In the program implemented in the Honest Opportunity Probation with Enforcement Demonstration Field Experiment (HOPE DFE), the following approach is taken: close monitoring; frequent drug testing; readily available substance abuse treatment; and swift, certain, and fair sanctioning to deter probationers from violating supervision conditions. We assessed in this study the costs and outcomes of the demonstration program across four…
Attitudes about electronic monitoring: Minority and majority racial group differences
The Media and Criminologists: Interactions and Satisfaction
Traditionally, academic criminologists have addressed two audiences—other academics and students—while largely ignoring other segments of society. Frequently neglected is attention to educating the public. This paper uses a random sample of American Society of Criminology (ASC) members to measure the level of interaction with and attitudes toward criminologists working with the media. Findings suggest that most criminologists have participated in…
Becoming an Ex-Extremist: Stopping the Hate and Embracing a New Identity
Domestic radicalization to violent extremism has evolved into the most urgent terrorism threat facing the West. We contribute to research on extremism and role exit processes by demonstrating how identity transformations are linked to the pursuit and avoidance of possible future selves motivated by negative emotional states of shame, embarrassment and guilt. The data are drawn from in-depth life history interviews with 47 former members of US dom…
The Body in Extremist White Supremacism
This article advances the study of racial extremism by analyzing how its practices of violence and sexuality are marked on the bodies of participants in the form of scars, physical stances, abuse, tattoos, pregnancy, injury, strength and size, using an extraordinarily rich and extensive set of narratives collected from lengthy in-person interviews with 47 former members of U.S. extremist white supremacist groups. It asks how embodied practices of…
Does pretrial detention influence time until re-involvement with the criminal legal system
Intuitive pathways into racist beliefs
In this article, we present empirical evidence on the cognitive processes underlying racist beliefs and judgement. We draw on 47 life history interviews with former members of White supremacist groups to better understand how social interactions and stimuli from the wider environment inform cognitive pathways or how people think. While we examine both deliberate and intuitive pathways to racist belief, we focus on the intuitive ways that extreme …
Electronic Monitoring: It Is a Tool, Not a Silver Bullet
If I Had a Hammer, I Would Not Use it to Control Drunk Driving: Using Predictive Tools to Respond to Persistent Drunk Driving
Electronic supervision for sex offenders: Implications for work load, supervision goals, versatility, and policymaking
Sociological Explorations in Site-Specific Social Control: The Role of the Strip Club Bouncer
This paper reports the results from a participatory ethnographic investigation into a traditionally perceived deviant setting concentrating on perceptions, communications, and enforcement of site-specific norms and behavioral regulations. Much of the sociological literature covering strip clubs tends to focus on either the strippers or the customers. The current paper moves beyond this discussion to focus on the power arrangements from the perspe…
Methodological orientations of articles appearing in criminal justice’s top journals: Who publishes what and where
Research methods selection is perhaps the longest‐standing ongoing social science debate. While it is widely acknowledged that quantitative strategies dominate academic fields concerned with crime, this basic assumption has rarely been scrutinized. This paper examines all articles published in five leading criminal justice journals during a five‐year period to determine the frequency which various methods are employed, as well as methodological p…
The Media and Criminologists: Interactions and Satisfaction
Traditionally, academic criminologists have addressed two audiences—other academics and students—while largely ignoring other segments of society. Frequently neglected is attention to educating the public. This paper uses a random sample of American Society of Criminology (ASC) members to measure the level of interaction with and attitudes toward criminologists working with the media. Findings suggest that most criminologists have participated in…
Probation and Parole: Overworked, Misunderstood, and Under‐Appreciated: But Why
Historically, the efficacy of probation and parole policies and practices have been judged by the general public, politicians, and many professional insiders by sensationalised crimes involving individuals sentenced to community supervision. The probation and parole profession has not established mechanisms to clearly articulate its public value; doing so would foster the development of policies and practices that derive more from empirical resea…
Attitudes about electronic monitoring: Minority and majority racial group differences
Electronic supervision for sex offenders: Implications for work load, supervision goals, versatility, and policymaking
If I Had a Hammer, I Would Not Use it to Control Drunk Driving: Using Predictive Tools to Respond to Persistent Drunk Driving
Using Weber’s Rechtssoziologie to Explain Western Punishment: A Typological Framework
An interdisciplinary comparative-historical framework is proposed to map the relationship between legal institutional differences and the use of incarceration. The oft-cited empirical trend that Western countries cluster on an assortment of social, political, and economic outcomes is incorporated with Weberian sociology of law. Incarceration levels vary, in descending order, as a function of the institutional possibilities within the common, Roma…
Electronic Monitoring: It Is a Tool, Not a Silver Bullet
Prisons and Imprisonment
How Racial Violence Is Provoked and Channeled
This paper seeks to explain the extraordinary violence of modern-day organized white supremacism in the United States. We begin on a conceptual level by distinguishing the racial ideologies and violence associated with modern racist movements from the racism and racial violence expressed in daily life in highly racialized and racially unequal societies. We then move to an empirical level by using our interviews with a broad set of former racist a…
Addicted to Hate: Identity Residual among Former White Supremacists
The process of leaving deeply meaningful and embodied identities can be experienced as a struggle against addiction, with continuing cognitive, emotional, and physiological responses that are involuntary, unwanted, and triggered by environmental factors. Using data derived from a unique set of in-depth life history interviews with 89 former U.S. white supremacists, as well as theories derived from recent advances in cognitive sociology, we examin…
Economic Evaluation of the Hope Demonstration Field Experiment
Research Summary In the program implemented in the Honest Opportunity Probation with Enforcement Demonstration Field Experiment (HOPE DFE), the following approach is taken: close monitoring; frequent drug testing; readily available substance abuse treatment; and swift, certain, and fair sanctioning to deter probationers from violating supervision conditions. We assessed in this study the costs and outcomes of the demonstration program across four…
How Emotional Dynamics Maintain and Destroy White Supremacist Groups
In this article, we explore emotions as a relational mechanism that affects the stability of political movement groups by activating or weakening identities, social ties, and movement boundaries. Our goal is to specify the dynamics by which personal emotional experiences are linked to wider group processes. In this way, emotion serves as an analytic bridge, connecting the micro levels to larger social structures. We draw on data from former viole…
Public safety assessment: Predictive utility and differential prediction by race in Kentucky
Research Summary We assess the predictive validity and differential prediction by race of one pretrial risk assessment, the Public Safety Assessment (PSA). The PSA was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF) to reduce the burden placed on vulnerable populations at the front end of the criminal justice system. The growing and disparate use of incarceration is one of the most pressing social issues facing the United …
Do White Supremacist Women Adopt Movement Archetypes of Mother, Whore, and Fighter
The rhetoric of the far-right typically depicts women in tripartite archetypes: as beloved mothers or sex symbols for far-rightist men or, less commonly, as fighters for the cause. But the propaganda and speeches that produced these archetypes of women are largely produced by far-rightist men. Do they reflect the lived experiences of women in the far-right? And how do far-rightist women – and men – react to such rhetorical messages about the fema…
Why White Supremacist Women Become Disillusioned, and Why They Leave
This article examines the relationship between becoming disillusioned with racist ideas and/or groups and the decision to leave organize white supremacism. We explore a classical sociological puzzle about the indeterminate ways that beliefs and actions inform each other. Drawing on a unique dataset from in-depth interviews with former members of U.S. white supremacist groups, we examine disillusionment and exit in a volatile social world in which…
Reimagining Pretrial & Sentencing
In this article, we discuss the evolution of criminal justice reform efforts focused on pretrial and sentencing policies and practices that resulted in unprecedented rates of incarceration. There is an urgent need to identify a strategy of pretrial justice and sentencing that will reduce crime and victimization, ameliorate unwarranted disparities, and reclaim human capital currently lost to incarceration. A discussion of proposed policy reforms s…
Bias Testing of the Public Safety Assessment: Error Rate Balance Between Whites and Blacks for New Arrests
This study is an evaluation of predictive bias by race when using a pretrial risk assessment. We use data from Kentucky from July 2013 through December 2014 ( n = 164,597) to evaluate differences across five error measures. Pretrial risk assessments were developed to respond to growing awareness about how intuitive processes were leading to disparate impact for people of color and the poor. This study contributes data to the debate about the meri…
Measuring the Extent and Nature of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) among Former White Supremacists
While progress has been made to understand mid-life correlates associated with extremist participation, much less research focuses on adolescent risk factors. The purpose of the current study is to expand upon the focus on individual-level correlates by assessing the extent and nature of childhood adversity among a sample of former white supremacists. The current study relies on in-depth life-history interviews with ninety-one North America-based…
Intuitive pathways into racist beliefs
In this article, we present empirical evidence on the cognitive processes underlying racist beliefs and judgement. We draw on 47 life history interviews with former members of White supremacist groups to better understand how social interactions and stimuli from the wider environment inform cognitive pathways or how people think. While we examine both deliberate and intuitive pathways to racist belief, we focus on the intuitive ways that extreme …
How Long is Long Enough: Using Abbreviated Criminal Histories for Pretrial Assessment Instruments
The debate over pretrial assessment instruments focuses largely on the potential for instruments to exacerbate racial disparities. This study examines the effects of using different recall periods for the criminal history items on the New Criminal Arrest (NCA) scale from the Public Safety Assessment. Using jail admission data from a large jurisdiction in the southeast of the US, we varied the recall period from 1 to 10 years for the criminal hist…
Justice involvement prediction as individuals age: An age-graded evaluation of the public safety assessment
OBJECTIVE: Some scholars have criticized pretrial assessments for perpetuating racial bias in the criminal legal system by offering biased predictions of future legal system outcomes. Although these critiques have some empirical support, the scholarship has yet to examine the predictive validity and differential prediction of pretrial assessments across individuals by their age. Following the guidance of the life-course literature, the present st…
Testing Predictive Biases at the Intersection of Race-Ethnicity and Sex: A Multi-Site Evaluation of a Pretrial Risk Assessment Tool
Pretrial assessment instruments provide courtroom actors with information about the likelihood that someone who has been charged with a criminal offense would engage in criminal behavior if released prior to trial. Although prior research supports the ability of pretrial instruments to predict pretrial outcomes, there are concerns that pretrial instruments may inadvertently exacerbate racial-ethnic and sex disparities found in the larger criminal…
Where’s the Bias: No Evidence of Bias by Sex When Testing the Public Safety Assessment
Pretrial assessments are criticized for inherent biases. We conduct research in Kentucky to assess the predictive validity and differential prediction by sex of one pretrial assessment, the Public Safety Assessment (PSA). Our research is unique because we find equal base rates by sex for missing a court date, which allows us to assess for error rate balance by sex. We find the PSA to have predictive validity within acceptable ranges for the crimi…
Psychology (29 works) · Criminology (24 works) · Political science (24 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (22 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (19 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Social Psychology (13 works) · Criminal justice (11 works)