Outside the interrogation room: the context of confession in sexual crimes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this study is to identify factors in sex offenders that act to facilitate or inhibit confession to police. Moreover, it aims to assess possible interactions and differences among factors related to confession specifically for child molesters and those who attack adult victims (rapists). Design/methodology/approach The authors use a combination of CHAID and conjunctive analysis to analyze interactions and factors significantly associated with confession to police in a sample of 624 sex offenders. Findings The study identifies several factors, as well as interactions among those factors, related to confession to the police. Moreover, rapists and child molesters present different factors related to confession, the former being more related to the criminal event as to the latter being more related to the offender characteristics. Practical implications The findings point to the conclusion that investigators need to pay careful attention to the type of victim when preparing the interrogation. Moreover, these crime event characteristics are readily observable factors that can improve the estimation of the likelihood of obtaining a confession. Finally, the several interactions identified confirm the complexity of the decision making leading to confession to police as well as the need to look at the factors in combination as opposed to individually. Originality/value This paper is the first attempt to apply a combination of innovative multivariate statistics (CHAID) and a qualitative technique (conjunctive analysis) to investigate factors leading to confession for two specific types of sex offenders.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".