Rick Dierenfeldt seems to enjoy putting his academic peers in a state of disbelief.
Earlier this month, Dierenfeldt traveled to New Orleans for an Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences annual meeting with three undergraduate students, who he said continually wowed other conference goers with the quality of their research and abilities as students.
Dierenfeldt is an assistant professor in administration of justice at Penn State Wilkes-Barre. He and Melisa Naylor, lecturer and program coordinator in the rehabilitation and human services program, presented three papers there along with Samantha Bilardi, Matt Caines and Katie George, all undergraduate students within the AOJ department.
“Each presentation was met with positive feedback from session attendees,” Dierenfeldt said, just after arriving home from New Orleans. “In fact, no one we spoke with could believe that Matt, Katie and Samantha were undergraduate students. This was a consistent theme throughout the conference and it is apparent that what we are doing at Penn State Wilkes-Barre is raising the bar in undergraduate education and research.”
From Feb. 13-17, Dierenfeldt said his students had the opportunity to network with their peers and even meet giants in the field of criminal justice research. Those peers were often graduate students and educators.
Caines’ paper focused on perceptions of the death penalty in a practitioner-oriented criminal justice program. Dierenfeldt said they found no statistically significant difference in support for the death penalty between criminal justice and non-criminal justice students.
“We did find, however, positive and statistically significant relationships between support for the death penalty and support for the use of the death penalty in cases involving juvenile defendants, defendants who were people with special needs, defendants who were mentally incompetent, and defendants who were mentally ill. Similarly, increased support for the death penalty was associated with diminished perceptions that the death penalty is used disproportionately against minorities and the poor.”
George’s paper examined the perceptions of false convictions. Again, the study revealed no statistically significant differences between criminal justice students and non-criminal justice students in terms of perceptions of the frequency of false convictions or the degree to which minorities, the poor, the mentally incompetent or the mentally ill are falsely convicted.
“We did find, however, that respondents who believed false convictions are relatively common were more likely to believe that minorities, the poor, the mentally incompetent, and the mentally ill are more likely to be falsely convicted.”
Both Caines and George presented with Dierenfeldt as a co-author.
Dierenfeldt, Naylor and Bilardi presented a multi-level study of sexual victimization, which took data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System in conjunction with contextual-level data from cities where incidents took place to examine the influence of weapon use, victim-offender familiarity and offender intoxication on victim injury.