American Criminal Justice Research Articles

An Examination of Correctional Staff Support and Perceptions of Post-Release Success Among Australian Juvenile Detainees

ABSTRACT Much research exists on the role of correctional staff on the carceral experience, but less work examines how staff influence post-release behavior among those previously incarcerated and how personal characteristics might be related to correctional staff attitudes and actions. This includes, for example, individuals’ perceptions of success upon release. The current study uses a sample of 427 detained juvenile males derived from the Australian Institute of Criminology’s Drug Use Careers of Offenders (DUCO) study to assess the relationship between individuals’ perceptions about the willingness of correctional staff to help them and their perceived likelihood of success upon release. Results indicate that most Australian juvenile detainees felt optimistic about their prospects for success upon release and that staff were interested in trying to help them. However, no relationship was found between the two variables of interest. Instead, time served was most significantly related to one’s perceptions of success upon release. These findings are discussed through the juxtaposition between Australian and American criminal justice systems and offer several implications for carceral policy.

Virtual oral hearings: a comparative analysis in the search for standards for Latin American criminal justice

Virtual oral hearings: a comparative analysis in the search for standards for Latin American criminal justice

Book Review: Everyone against Us: Public Defenders and the Making of American Justice

Everyone against Us is a memoir of a lawyer’s nine year career in the Cook County, Illinois Public Defender’s Office. Readers ought not expect a “wonkish” book, detailing how to improve upon the dysfunction in the American criminal justice system. Rather, it is very personal, with large portions of the book being about the author’s experiences (that can often seem only tangentially related to legal defense). However, this helps the reader delve deeper into the mindset of one called to serve as the sole legal representation of the indigent in one of the largest (and most crime-prone) jurisdictions in the U.S., and it makes for a very readable book.

Review of “Rules of the Road: The Automobile and the Transformation of American Criminal Justice”

Review of “Rules of the Road: The Automobile and the Transformation of American Criminal Justice”

Unfitness to stand trial and the social model of disability: challenges for Latin American criminal justice

ABSTRACT The social model of disability has contributed important legislative modifications to civil law in several Latin American countries. Substitute decision-making regimes are being replaced by supports in the exercise of legal capacity based on the rights, will, and preferences of persons with disabilities. The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has pointed out that the legal concepts of ‘unfitness to stand trial’ and ‘not guilty by reason of insanity' are contrary to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In the field of Latin American criminal law, the social model still bears scant influence in dogmatic and criminal procedures. Mexico and Argentina have recently incorporated procedural accommodations and support in their criminal procedural codes, which is an advance in terms of compliance with the CRPD. The reforms have not led to further discussion on the concepts of unfitness to stand in trial and inimputabilidad or their harmonisation with human rights standards, and thus persons with disabilities who are found not guilty by reason of insanity are sent to prison to receive treatment in Mexico, and in Argentina they are derived to civil judges and placed in psychiatric hospital. Despite changes, most local authors maintain traditional views.

“They Need to Go in There”: Criminalized Subjectivity among Formerly Incarcerated Black Men

Black people are overrepresented in the American criminal justice system, yet policy-based criminal justice research has historically ignored the perspectives of criminalized Black people. Using interviews with 27 formerly incarcerated Black men, the author helps address this issue by exploring how carceral experiences produce “criminalized subjectivities.” In particular, when explicitly asked about what they would say to powerful state officials about their contact with the criminal justice system, the Black men in this study described a range of practices and policies they viewed as unfair and contradictory. Interviewees discussed: unequal judicial processes, inhumane prison conditions, postimprisonment barriers to reintegration, and the rigged nature of racialized mass criminalization. The author argues that, taken together, their responses constitute a critical perspective urging structural (rather than individual-level) change, rooted in experiences with invisibilization and criminalization.

Femininity on trial: decoding female violence in true crime documentary

ABSTRACT This article explores the treatment of criminally accused women and girls in 2000s crime documentaries. I argue that although the HBO documentaries I Love You, Now Die and Beware The Slenderman challenge established tropes associated with criminally accused women and girls, the documentaries do not disrupt patterns within patriarchy that penalize and vilify nontraditional embodiments of femininity. The 2000s brought a new era of representation for criminally accused men. The emergence and popularity of injustice narratives positioned true-crime documentaries as agents of social change. Androcentric films facilitated in-depth exposés that highlighted wrongful convictions and systemic corruption in the American criminal justice system. Beware The Slenderman and I Love You, Now Die challenge portrayals of allegedly violent women and girls as mentally ill, inherently evil, and particularly susceptible to corruption. The documentaries awareness of established tropes signals a potential reevaluation of patriarchal understandings of female crime. However, I Love You, Now Die and Beware The Slenderman reinforce correlations between criminality and gender performance. Unlike the male-centered injustice narratives of the 2000s, crime documentaries featuring accused women and girls normalize patriarchal gender roles rather than examine systemic failings.

What Does it Mean to Say “The Criminal Justice System is Racist”?

Abstract This paper considers three possible ways of understanding the claim that the American criminal justice system is racist: individualist, “patterns”-based, and ideology-based theories of institutional racism. It rejects an individualist explanation of institutional racism because such an explanation fails to explain the widespread prevalence of anti-black racism in this system or indeed in the United States. It considers a “patterns” account of institutional racism, where consistent patterns of disparate racial effect mimic the structure of intentional projects of racial subjugation like slavery or Jim Crow. While a “patterns” account helpfully directs attention to the effects of policies and practices that make up an institution, it does not fully explain the deep roots of anti-blackness in the criminal justice system in the United States. The paper concludes by defending an ideology-based theory of institutional racism for understanding the criminal justice system because the stereotype of the black criminal has a mutually reinforcing relationship with the patterns of disparate outcome for black people in the criminal justice system. This relationship creates a looping effect where the stereotype of the black criminal fuels the disproportionate involvement of black people in the criminal justice system, and the disproportionate representation of black people with felony records, in prisons, brutalized in police encounters, and so on reinforces the idea that black people are especially prone to criminality. Ideological approaches to racism that integrate attention to the patterns of disparate effect best explain what it means to say that the criminal justice system is racist.

How Does Structural Racism Operate (in) the Contemporary US Criminal Justice System?

I describe how cultural and structural racism operate the entire contemporary American criminal justice system via five features: devaluation of certain human lives, ubiquitous adaptation, networked structure, perceived neutrality, and temporal amnesia. I draw from specific historical and contemporary examples in policing, courts, and corrections to further emphasize the foundational nature of racism and its role in shaping racial/ethnic inequities not just in relationship to criminal justice outcomes but also in relationship to health, economic, and social well-being.

Lessons from the American Innocence Projects

This review essay examines recent trends in American wrongful conviction scholarship. Despite calls for a ‘criminology’ of wrongful conviction, narrative about actual cases remains important. The two books reviewed explore the ambiguities and challenges of innocence work by examining cases where the authors represented wrongfully convicted persons without DNA evidence. The books both critique restrictions on post-conviction relief in the American Federal Courts. These restrictions are assessed as examples of American ‘extra-legalism’ where a very complex legal system frequently produces unjust results and fails to provide redress and accountability for injustice. The role of equality and non-discrimination norms in wrongful convictions discourse are also assessed. Valena Beety’s call for a substantive and social justice approach focused on ‘manifest justice’ and fundamental reforms to the American criminal justice system is compared to Daniel Medwed’s more narrow focus on factual innocence. It is argued that Beety’s more ambitious approach is normatively superior and more easily applied outside the distinct context of American mass imprisonment and extra-legalism.

Introduction, Summary, Questions for the Future

Introduction, Summary, Questions for the Future

AI’s Complex Impact on American Criminal Justice: Promise, Peril, and the Imperative for Safeguards (Part I of III)

Incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the criminal justice system has changed how law enforcement and judicial process’s function. This research paper delves into the effects of AI in this particular context, examining its influence on predictive policing, sentencing and parole determinations, surveillance practices, legal representation, and racial and ethnic disparities. By exploring these concerns, this paper aims to shed light on the challenges posed by AI and propose strategies for protecting the rights and well-being of citizens and individuals involved in the criminal justice system. Together, these different aspects create a story that emphasizes the difficulties present in a justice system that, despite progress, is still far from achieving perfection. This story highlights the importance of addressing these challenges to safeguard the well-being and rights of citizens and professionals closely connected to how the system operates.

Modern Approaches to Addressing the Mass Incarceration of America's Mentally Ill Population

Correctional facilities negatively affect individuals with pre-existing mental and behavioral health concerns while also creating an environment that manifests future mental illness. Issues include facility overcrowding, restrictive housing practices, lack of accessible services, and ill-informed practices and procedures when working with individuals with mental illness. Incarcerated individuals with mental illness also face disparities through (1) sentence length, (2) race/ethnicity and gender, and (3) increased risk in victimization. This paper draws attention to a long-standing, yet current critical issue in the American criminal justice system—the use of jails and prisons as modern-day psychiatric hospitals. This literature yields many options for disrupting this practice, including both proactive and reactive reforms that seek to reduce mass incarceration of those with mental illness as well as improve correctional facility conditions for this incarcerated population.

Positive Criminology and Positive Psychology

Welcome to our Special Issue on Positive Criminology and Positive Psychology. It is our hope that this issue will help generate critical reflection about American criminal justice policy and the possibility of moving the system towards a happier and more prosocial perspective. To begin, this editorial introduction briefly frames positive criminology and positive psychology for the readers, and then reviews the content of the special issue.

The Effects of Jurors’ Initial Views of Jury Service on Predeliberation Preferences for Prosecution or Defense

Jury trials are considered a key element of the American criminal justice system, even as many question the continued legitimacy of the jury system and its ability to be fair. Using data from actual jurors collected at both the beginning of jury service and after deliberations, this research examines whether jurors’ views of the fairness of the jury system affect perceptions of evidence presented to them at trial. By surveying jurors at the beginning of jury service, this research uses measurements of jurors’ views which are not affected by the court process itself. We find that jurors who enter jury service with a stronger belief in the fairness of juries are more likely to favor the defense after hearing the evidence. Policy implications are discussed, including using caution with harsher methods to improve juror rate of appearance because of the potential effects on jurors’ views.

The Current Crisis of American Criminal Justice: A Structural Analysis

This review situates the recent, radical challenges to American criminal justice—calls to end mass incarceration, defund the police, and dismantle systemic racism—within the broader social and economic arrangements that make the US system so distinctive and so problematic. It describes the social structures, institutions, and processes that give rise to America's extraordinary penal state—as well as to its extraordinarily high rates of homicide and social disorder—and considers what these portend for the prospect of radical change. It does so by locating American crime and punishment in the structural context of America's (always-already racialized) political economy—a distinctive set of social structures and institutional legacies that render the United States more violent, more disorderly, and more reliant on penal control than any other developed nation. Drawing on a broad range of social science research findings, it argues that this peculiar political economy—a form of capitalism and democratic governance forged on the anvils of slavery and racial segregation and rendered increasingly insecure and exclusionary in the decades following deindustrialization—generates high levels of social disorganization and criminal violence and predisposes state authorities to adopt penal control as the preferred policy response.

The Justice Gap and the Promise of Criminological Research. Russian Journal of Economics and Law

Objective: to summarize and study the law-application errors during preliminary interrogation, court investigation, and conviction in the American criminal justice system.Methods: dialectical approach to cognition of social phenomena, allowing to analyze them in historical development and functioning in the context of the totality of objective and subjective factors, which predetermined the following research methods: formal-logical and sociological.Results: the work describes in detail and considers four main causes of law-application errors occurring during preliminary interrogation, court investigation, and conviction in the American criminal justice system. These include: false confessions, eyewitness misidentification, forensic error, and perjured jailhouse informant testimony. Hence, it is not accidental that the main task of empirical research of criminologists and other researchers in the past two decades has been a call for greater transparency in the evidence-gathering process and the development and implementation of best practices based on social science research. Developing conceptual knowledge is important not only for creating a more systematic, generalizable and respectable criminology of wrongful conviction, but also to better inform policy-makers’ understandings that people’s lives may be at stake, as well as trade-offs of wrongful convictions.Scientific novelty: the work considers the current problems in the American criminal justice system, that occur during preliminary interrogation, court investigation, and conviction. Among them are the problems of police interrogations, false confessions and court errors, leading to wrongful convictions.Practical significance: the main provisions and conclusions of the article can be used in scientific, pedagogical and law enforcement activities when considering the issues related to the minimization of errors occurring at the stages of preliminary interrogation, court investigation, and conviction in the American criminal justice system.The article was first published in English language by Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society and The Western Society of Criminology Hosting by Scholastica. For more information please contact:CCJLS@WesternCriminology.org.For original publication: Leo, R. A. (2014). The Justice Gap and the Promise of Criminological Research, Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society, 15 (3), 1–37.Publication URL: https://ccjls.scholasticahq.com/article/419-the-justice-gap-and-the-promise-of-criminological-research

Book Review: Daniel P. Mears, Out-of-Control Criminal Justice: The Systems Improvement Solution for More Safety, Justice, Accountability, and Efficiency. Cambridge University Press. 2017

In his book, Out-of-Control Criminal Justice, Daniel Mears writes about what he calls the Systems Improvement Solution, also called the Systems Solution. The Systems Solution is his solution for the way criminal justice policy is currently handled. Mears is an influential criminologist who is also the Mark C. Stafford Professor of Criminology at the Florida State University College of Criminology and Criminal Justice (Mears, n.d.). Along with Out-of-Control Criminal Justice, he is the author of Fundamentals of Criminological and Criminal Justice Inquiry, Prisoner Reentry in the Era of Mass Incarceration, and American Criminal Justice Policy (Mears, n.d.). He is well-versed in his field of criminal justice, research, and policy; his research has also been featured in multiple journals and media outlets (Mears, n.d.). In Out-of-Control Criminal Justice, Mears discusses every aspect concerning his Systems Solution- what a system is as a whole, the innerworkings of a system, how the Systems Solution can be used in other fields besides criminal justice, the emphasis on research, the multi-stakeholder policy process, the benefits of a Systems Solution, and many other pieces needed for a Systems Improvement Solution.

Examining Disparities in Case Dispositions and Sentencing Outcomes for Domestic Violent Extremists in the United States

This study examines how strength of ideology, victim status, and other factors shape prosecutorial and sentencing decisions in cases of far-right extremist homicide. We draw from multiple conceptual frameworks to understand how assessments of defendants’ blameworthiness, crime seriousness, and other practical constraints influence the severity of legal outcomes. Our analysis of data from the United States Extremist Crime Database finds that while demographic attributes of homicide participants have little influence on legal outcomes, strong affiliations to domestic extremism and indicators of crime seriousness and risk significantly predict harsher treatment of defendants. We contextualize our findings within the broader criminological sentencing literature and discuss their implications for understanding how the American criminal justice system responds to domestic violent extremism.

The State of Diversity in Criminal Justice Higher Education: An Analysis of Curricula in Criminal Justice Bachelor’s Degree Programs

The study examines diversity-themed course offerings in criminal justice and criminology (CJC) bachelor’s degree programs in the United States in 2020–21. Using a sample of 359 CJC programs, we document the presence of diversity-themed courses and degree requirements using data collected from university websites. We explore patterns of diversity-themed courses by department and institutional characteristics and assess the current state of diversity curricula in the discipline of criminal justice and criminology. Results of our analysis reveal that a substantial majority (75 percent) of CJC programs possessed at least one diversity-themed course while only 12 percent required students to complete a diversity-themed course in the major. We consider what these and related findings mean for the discipline in light of previous research and discuss the importance of developing student competencies in racial, gender, and other dimensions of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the contemporary context of American criminal justice.