Criminal Justice Actors Research Articles

Adult Restorative Justice and Gendered Violence: Practitioner and Service Provider Viewpoints from Queensland, Australia

This paper presents findings from a study exploring the experiences and viewpoints of conventional criminal justice actors, social and legal service providers, and restorative justice (RJ) conference facilitators/convenors regarding the use of adult RJ conferencing in cases of intimate partner, domestic, family (IPDFV) and sexual violence (SV). Results indicated strong views about what IPDFV/SV victims needed from a system of justice, perceived failings of conventional justice systems in this regard, and the potential of RJ to deliver more efficacious justice. Nevertheless, using RJ in these cases posed concerns and challenges. Research participants identified steps that could be taken to overcome these issues through an RJ best practice framework underpinned by a victim-centred approach committed to victim empowerment, safety, healing, and practitioner training.

Uncertainty, risk and the use of algorithms in policy decisions: a case study on criminal justice in the USA

Algorithms are increasingly used in different domains of public policy. They help humans to profile unemployed, support administrations to detect tax fraud and give recidivism risk scores that judges or criminal justice managers take into account when they make bail decisions. In recent years, critics have increasingly pointed to ethical challenges of these tools and emphasized problems of discrimination, opaqueness or accountability, and computer scientists have proposed technical solutions to these issues. In contrast to these important debates, the literature on how these tools are implemented in the actual everyday decision-making process has remained cursory. This is problematic because the consequences of ADM systems are at least as dependent on the implementation in an actual decision-making context as on their technical features. In this study, we show how the introduction of risk assessment tools in the criminal justice sector on the local level in the USA has deeply transformed the decision-making process. We argue that this is mainly due to the fact that the evidence generated by the algorithm introduces a notion of statistical prediction to a situation which was dominated by fundamental uncertainty about the outcome before. While this expectation is supported by the case study evidence, the possibility to shift blame to the algorithm does seem much less important to the criminal justice actors.

To Serve and Protect Whom? Using Composite Counter-Storytelling to Explore Black and Indigenous Youth Experiences and Perceptions of the Police in Canada

Research based in the US and Britain have established that perceptions of the police are particularly low among youth and racialized communities. However, by contrast, little is known about racialized youth perceptions of the police within Canada. Due to formal and informal bans on the collection of race-based data, Canada maintains its international reputation as a tolerant multicultural society. Using the critical race methodology of composite counter-storytelling, this paper will highlight the perspectives of Black and Indigenous youth and explore their experiences with law enforcement. This aims to counter Canada’s international status as a multicultural utopia and demonstrate how legal criminal justice actors, such as the police, perpetuate the marginalized status of Black and Indigenous youth through the process of criminalization.

Models of Prosecutor-Led Diversion Programs in the United States and Beyond

Diversion programs allow criminal justice actors to send defendants out of the court system, compelling them instead to attend treatment programs, participate in educational opportunities, and/or perform community service. These programs exist for both adult and juvenile offenders. Although some diversion programs are administered within the court system, prosecutors design and operate a substantial number of these programs themselves. Because the prosecutor does not need to obtain input from judges or other actors in these programs, they carry higher risks of performance problems, such as net widening and unequal application of program criteria. Furthermore, because of the local focus of most prosecutors’ offices in the United States, their diversion programs differ from place to place. The published program evaluations are too often site-specific, offering few general insights about this category of programs. The fragmented literature about prosecutor-led diversion programs should expand the metrics of success for these programs and monitor the effects of the prosecutor-dominated governance structure.

Exculpating Injustice: Coroner Constructions of White Innocence in the Postbellum South

Research notes the broad complicity of white public officials in historical racial violence and repression. These discussions emphasize the role of criminal justice actors in perpetrating and enabling this repression. Extending this assessment, the authors examine coroners’ facilitation of white racial dominance through administrative performances constructing white innocence. Using cases from post-Emancipation South Carolina, the authors document race-related patterns of exculpatory effort, through the omission and curation of evidence amid the post-Reconstruction rise of white supremacist redemption. The authors theorize that these exculpatory efforts helped sustain an ideology of white innocence and institutional legitimacy by constructing a white “law-abiding” public. The authors argue that such coroner misconduct not only degrades the rule of law but has broader implications, including its corruption of the corpus of mortality and crime data. Finally, the authors suggest that these administrative performances persist in present-day coroner reporting, including in the exculpation of racist police violence.

We need to talk about dialogue: Accomplishing collaborative sensemaking in homicide investigations

In this paper, we explore the importance of dialogue for collaborative sensemaking during homicide investigation, focusing upon interactions between detectives, forensic scientists and other experts involved in managing and undertaking forensic work. Drawing on data from a 4-year ethnographic study of British homicide investigations, we provide insights from criminal justice actors about both the value of, and barriers to, inter-professional and cross-disciplinary dialogue. We explore how and why organisational arrangements may limit opportunities for forensic scientists and other experts to engage collaboratively with detectives and prosecutors. We conclude by considering ways to enhance collaborative sensemaking during the investigation of homicide.

Tamna i svijetla strana tamne brojke kriminala: o izazovima istraživanja nepoznanica i blagoslovu neznanja

In the paper at hand the authors critically analyse the state of the art in the research into the dark figure of crime, as well as the conceptual and methodological challenges that are inherent to this kind of research. They do so based on current international, foreign and domestic studies, with the goal of highlighting not only the commonly stressed ‘dark side’ of the dark figure of crime, but also in order to raise awareness of its almost completely disregarded ‘bright side’. In this regard the bright side of the dark figure of crime relates to the thesis of the so-called preventive effect of ignorance (germ. Präventivwirkung des Nichtwissens) and presents a phenomenon with a vastly important positive function which has thus far been completely neglected in the domestic criminological and criminal law discourse. This function basically ensures that the criminal justice response to criminal behaviour is perceived as comprehensive and effective. Without such perception the general preventive effect, as envisaged by criminal law, would be unsubstantial. By highlighting the dark figure’s bright side, the authors on the one hand aspire to make a scientific contribution to the comprehensiveness of the discourse about the dark figure of crime in Croatia, while on the other hand they illustrate the unsolvable conceptual and almost unavoidable methodological challenges which are inherent to the attempts of shedding light upon the dark figure of crime. The authors’ intention is neither to devalorize dark figure research in general, nor to bring about resignation with regard to enterprises seeking to reveal the dark figure of certain types of crime by means of victimisation or self-report studies. It is rather the intention of the authors to comprehensively and critically examine the dark figure phenomenon in all its complexity, vividness and mutual interwovenness with the criminal justice actors, and while doing so to neither underestimate the dark figure’s negative cognitive effects, nor to ignore its overly positive function in the service of norm stabilisation and sustaining the repressive system, as well as society as a whole.

Police BWCs as ‘Neutral Observers’: Perceptions of public defenders

Abstract The research on police body-worn cameras (BWCs) has rapidly expanded to evaluate the technology’s impact on a range of police outcomes. Far fewer studies have addressed the various effects on downstream criminal justice actors, and those that do have focused almost entirely on prosecutors. Thus, public defenders have remained on the periphery of the police BWC discussion, despite playing an important role as an end-user of the technology. This study draws on qualitative data from focus groups with public defenders in the Commonwealth of Virginia to discuss the perception of BWCs as neutral observers in a police–citizen encounter. We then provide implications and recommend avenues for future research.

Organizational governance and prosecutorial attitudes: Regulating Chinese prosecutors through the performance evaluation mechanism

Abstracts Performance evaluations shape the behavior of prosecutors in China, yet scholarship on the implementation of such evaluations is scarce. Based on documentary analysis and in-depth interviews with criminal justice officers in China, we show that the Chinese procuratorial evaluation system has been enforced from the top down, incentivizing upper-level prosecutors to pressure their subordinates to be more zealous in carrying out their functions. Highly quantitative parameters are used in the organizational governance of the procuratorial system, drawing different reactions from upper-level prosecutors versus front-line prosecutors and causing reciprocal relationship between prosecutors and other criminal justice actors. This study not only uses the latest empirical data to broaden our understanding of the details and logics of the Chinese procuratorial performance evaluation mechanism, but also stimulates the debate on organizational governance in comparative law and justice studies.

State Prosecutors at the Center of Mass Imprisonment and Criminal Justice Reform

State prosecutors around the country have played a crucial role in mass imprisonment. Little supervision and virtually unsurpassed decision making power have provided them with unrivaled influence over the size, growth, and composition of our criminal justice system. They decide which cases to prosecute, whether to divert a case, whether to offer a plea, and what sentence to recommend. Their impact does not stop at sentencing. They weigh in on alternative dockets, supervision violations, parole release, and even clemency requests. But they are also part of a larger system that constrains them. Funding, judicial limits on their power, and legislative grants of authority to other players in the criminal justice system all serve to limit the freedom of prosecutors. The public health threat COVID-19 presents to those detained in jails and prisons has turned into a case study of prosecutorial authority. It powerfully displays the sway political ideology, divergent purposes of punishment, and public safety considerations hold over release decisions. The prosecutors most successful in decreasing inmate population numbers quickly have been not only proactive but also able to build effective coalitions with other criminal justice actors. Whether COVID-19 will in the long run lead to smaller jail populations and shorter prison terms remains an open question. Yet, it further reinforces and strengthens the role of prosecutors whose expansive reach into our communities—with an eye to incarceration or decarceration—continues to be a powerful feature of the American criminal justice system.

Open risk assessment.

As criminal justice actors increasingly seek to rely on more evidence-informed practices, including risk assessment instruments, they often lack adequate information about the evidence that informed the development of the practice or the tool. Open science practices, including making scientific research and data accessible and public, have not typically been followed in the development of tools designed for law enforcement, judges, probation, and others. This is in contrast to other government agencies, which often open their processes to public notice and comment. Lack of transparency has become pressing in the area of risk assessment, as entire judicial systems have adopted some type of risk assessment scheme. While the types of information used in a risk tool may be made public, often the underlying methods, validation data, and studies are not - nor are the assumptions behind how a level of risk gets categorized as "high" or "low." We discuss why those concerns are relevant and important to the new risk assessment tool now being used in federal prisons, as part of the First Step Act. We conclude that a number of key assumptions and policy choices made in the design of that tool are not verifiable or are inadequately supported, including the choice of risk thresholds and the validation data itself. Unfortunately, as a result, the federal risk assessment effort has not been the hoped-for model for open risk assessment.

If You Build It, Will Vets Come? An Identity Theory Approach to Expanding Veterans’ Treatment Court Participation

Veterans’ treatment courts (VTCs) provide a veteran-centric diversion option to traditional court case processing. These courts have proliferated across the United States without much consideration about whether veterans want, or need, a specialty court. In this article, we investigate the underlying importance of a veteran identity in the decision to enroll in a VTC. Based on in-depth qualitative interviews with veterans, we identify four primary implications for practitioners. First, veterans are ashamed of their criminal justice involvement. Second, they are concerned about increased punitiveness by criminal justice actors, particularly law enforcement, because of their veteran status. Third, veterans perceive the VTC process to bestow upon them stigma and retaliation. Fourth, veterans resist VTC involvement for fear of dishonoring their branch of service. To expand enrollment, results demonstrate that practitioners should consider how veterans reconcile their veteran and offender identities when considering VTC enrollment.

“We’ll Take the Tough Ones”

Expertise in multi-door criminal justice enables new forms of intervention within existing criminal justice systems. Expertise provides criminal justice personnel with the rationale and means to use their authority in order to carry out their existing roles for the purpose of doing (what they see as) good. In the first section, we outline theoretical frameworks derived from Gil Eyal’s sociology of expertise and Thomas Haskell’s evolution of moral sensibility. We use professional stakeholder interview data (N = 45) from our studies of three emerging and existing prostitution diversion programs as a case study to illustrate how criminal justice actors use what we define as primary, secondary, and tertiary expertise in multi-agency working groups. Actors make use of the tools at their disposal—in this case, the concept of trauma—to further personal and professional goals. As our case study demonstrates, professionals in specialized diversion programs recognize the inadequacy of criminal justice systems and believe that women who sell sex do so as a response to past harms and a lack of social, emotional, and material resources to cope with their trauma. Trauma shapes the kinds of interventions and expertise that are marshalled in response. Specialized programs create seepage that may reduce solely punitive responses and pave the way for better services. However empathetic, they do nothing to address the societal forces that are the root causes of harm and resultant trauma. This may have more to do with imagined capacities than with the objectively best approaches.

Will the Supreme Court Rein in “Excessive Fines” and Forfeitures? Don’t Rely on Timbs v. Indiana

The Supreme Court’s decision in Timbs v. Indiana, 139 S. Ct. 682 (2019), last term buoyed the hopes of those who saw it as a powerful signal to states and municipalities to rein in excessive fines, fees, and forfeitures. Yet, the Court seems disinclined to fill the term “proportionality” with robust meaning or wrestle with Eighth Amendment challenges to fines and fees. Those steps would be required for the Excessive Fines Clause to function as an effective backstop against revenue-raising and increasingly abusive local and state practices. In the end, state courts and state legislative changes may more likely address effectively the essential question of what is excessive and restrain criminal justice actors from imposing ever heavier financial burdens on those caught up in the system. This article first sets out the Supreme Court’s decision in Timbs in light of the incorporation debate and prior case law in the area. Next it turns to the underlying but unaddressed contours of “excessive” in the context of fines and forfeitures. The article then provides a broader look at forfeiture, including the interplay between state and federal law enforcement in the area. Finally, the piece addresses state and local fines and fees, which will now be subject to Eighth Amendment analysis. The Court, however, rejected the first opportunity to take up such a challenge. At least for now, litigants may be more successful in reining in abusive fines and forfeitures in state legislatures and state courts.

“Do you understand these charges?”: How procedural communication in youth criminal justice court violates the rights of young offenders in Canada

Abstract This paper considers Canada’s young offenders in the context from which they enter the youth criminal courtroom. To determine how youth criminal justice courts violate the Canadian Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA), this analysis relates said context to several phenomena, including legal linguistics, oral language competency, literacy, communicative competency, non-verbal communication, the physical structure of youth courtrooms, and legal translation (Government of Canada eds. 2018. Youth criminal justice act. Ottawa: Government of Canada.). As a result of the standards of procedural communication upheld by the Canadian criminal justice system, young people’s rights, including the right to be respected regardless of cultural, ethnic, or linguistic differences, the right to be heard and to participate in proceedings, the right to be sentenced meaningfully, the right to privacy, and the right to be tried in a timely manner are abused in the youth criminal courtroom. Although insufficient structures of procedural communication cause these issues and are beyond the control of counsel, defense counsel are often blamed for their effects. Legal professionals must make important adjustments such as altering the formal speech required in youth criminal courtrooms, employing legal professionals with the role of translating legal jargon to young people in the courtroom, and closing youth courtrooms off from the public to reduce the YCJA violations occurring in youth criminal justice court. These adjustments are ultimately the responsibility of the Canadian criminal justice system.

Fair trial standards and legitimacy of criminal justice actors in Kyrgyzstan – a research note

ABSTRACTThe legitimacy of any justice system depends on the belief or perception that it operates fairly and without prejudice against any person whose interests it serves. Previous research has shown that in the Kyrgyz Republic the fair trial rights, for the most part, protected during the trial stage of the criminal justice process. The same cannot be said when it comes to implementing those rights during the pretrial stages of the process. Based on the results of 165 surveys and 10 in-depth post-survey interviews of Kyrgyz judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, members of various law enforcement bodies, NGOs, and of the public, there is a marked lack of trust in the Kyrgyz criminal justice system within the general public and within the system itself. Actual practices differ from the internationally recognized standards reflected in the country’s laws and to a certain degree reflect the legacy of the Soviet criminal justice system.

Social Representations of Homicide Investigations by Judges, Prosecutors and Police: A Case Study from the Metropolitan Area of Brasilia

This article examines homicide in the Metropolitan Area of Brasilia (MAB), analysing social representations from elites in the criminal justice system, including police chiefs, prosecutors and judges. It draws on the theory of social representations (TSR) to explore the imaginaries constructed around the criminal justice system’s inability to adequately investigate the rise in homicides. The representations from focus group participants highlight a lack of resources, infrastructure, equipment and human resources, as well as unsatisfactory working conditions. In seeking to understand and situate themselves in new realities and contexts, these elite criminal justice actors ultimately place themselves within the available reserve of knowledge, in which they claim that ‘nothing works’. Hence, this enables these powerful actors to justify themselves and blame others, while denying their inability to adequately investigate homicides. A hidden rationale emerges that represents the homicide victims of drug crimes and gang feuds as unworthy of investigation.

The Effect of Multiple Types of Intimate Partner Violence on Maternal Criminal Justice Involvement.

Although men make up a large majority of the U.S. incarcerated population, in recent years, incarceration rates have increased faster for women. As a result, scholarship has increasingly sought to hone in on the causes and correlates of women's criminal behavior and criminal justice involvement. One factor that has been consistently found to be associated with criminal behavior and criminal justice involvement is exposure to intimate partner violence. This existing scholarship has largely focused on physical and sexual abuse and has not examined whether exposure to multiple types of abuse places women at a particularly great risk for criminal justice involvement. In this study, we begin to address these gaps by examining two questions: (a) is there an independent association between different types of intimate partner violence (physical, sexual, emotional, and economic) and a mother's risk of experiencing criminal justice involvement; and (b) is the exposure to multiple types of intimate partner violence particularly detrimental to mothers? To address these questions, we use longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and logistic regression models. First, we find evidence that mothers who have experienced any abuse type are at greater risk of criminal justice involvement. Second, once co-occurrence of abuse types is accounted for, only physical and economic abuse are independently associated with a greater risk of criminal justice involvement. Third, we find that being exposed to multiple types of intimate partner violence places women at particularly great risk for criminal justice involvement. These findings point to the need for criminal justice actors to take intimate partner violence into account when they are making decisions that impact women. These results also highlight the importance of legal advocacy for domestic violence counselors in their work with women.

The Impact of Probation and Parole Officers’ Attitudes about Offenders on Professional Practices

ABSTRACT There is a large literature examining public attitudes toward offenders, but fewer studies have examined the perceptions held by criminal justice actors about the clients with whom they work. This study addresses this gap through a survey of probation and parole staff, measuring how their attitudes toward offenders influence supervision strategies, role orientations, job burnout and stress, and the use of case management tools. Results indicate that probation and parole staff who are generally pessimistic about offenders are more compliant with assessment and case management tools, whereas officers who are optimistic about offenders’ ability to change are more likely to be noncompliant with the data entry process in the completion of risk and needs instruments.

America’s Favorite Antidote: Drug-Induced Homicide in the Age of the Overdose Crisis

Nearing the end of its second decade, the overdose crisis in the United States continues to claim tens of thousands of lives. Despite the rhetorical emphasis on a “public health” approach, criminal law and its enforcement continue to play a central role among policy responses to this crisis. A legacy of the 1980s War on Drugs, statutory provisions that implicate drug distributors in overdose fatalities are on the books in many U.S. jurisdictions and federally. This Article articulates an interdisciplinary critique of these “drug-induced homicide” laws at a time of their increased popularity, expanding scope, and aggressive prosecution. That these policy mechanisms are deployed under the banner of overdose prevention invites a critical public health lens to their reexamination. After tracing the trajectory of the overdose crisis, this Article examines the role of drug-induced homicide laws as exemplars of U.S. drug policy’s reliance on criminal law to address problematic substance use. An empirical analysis of publicized drug-induced homicide cases documents a rapid and accelerating diffusion of prosecutions in many hard-hit jurisdictions; pronounced racial disparities in enforcement and sentencing; and broad misclassification of friends, partners, family members, and others as “dealers.” In addition to crowding out evidencebased interventions and investments, these policies and prosecutions run at direct cross-purposes to public health efforts that encourage witnesses to summon lifesaving help during overdose events. At a time of crisis, drug-induced homicide laws and prosecutions represent a false prophecy of retribution, deterrence, and incapacitation. These findings support further efforts to demobilize criminal law and criminal justice actors from responding to drug-related harms in the U.S. as elsewhere.