Criminal Justice Reform Research Articles

검사의 공익 대표자로서 지위와 공익 대표 직무

This essay aims to review the public service duties and roles of the public prosecutors from the viewpoint of criminal justice reform, esp. of the reform of public prosecutors as state power institutions which has had enormous impact on the South Korean politics and people’s life.
 According to the Articel 4 of the Prosecutor’s Office Act, each prosecutor shall have the duties and authority falling under any of the following subparagraphs as a representative of public interests: ➀ Matters necessary for investigating crimes and instituting and maintaining public prosecution: Provided, That the scope of crimes for which a prosecutor may commence an investigation shall be significant crimes prescribed by Presidential Decree, such as corruption crimes and economic crimes, Crimes committed by police officers; ➁ Direction for and supervision of special judicial police officers with respect to the investigation of crimes; ➂ Requests for appropriate application of statutes or regulations to a court; ➃ Direction for and supervision of the execution of judgments; ➄Proceedings with litigation or administrative litigation to which the State is a party or a participant, or direction for or supervision of such proceedings; ➅ Matters which fall under the authority of prosecutors under other statutes or regulations. In performing his or her duties, each prosecutor as a civil servant of all citizens shall protect the human rights of citizens, observe due process, and maintain political neutrality, and shall not abuse any authority vested in him or her, in accordance with the Constitution and statutes.
 For the progress of the criminal justice reform, focused on the reform of public prosecutors should make both status of representative of public interests and civil servant of all citizens in mind. The 2021 case of ‘public interest task force’ at DAEGU District Public prosecutors’ Office can be recommended as one of the best practice of the reform policy.

Seeking Justice for Indonesian Children: The Juvenile Criminal Justice System in Indonesia in the Context of Criminal Justice Reform

Children who are in contact with law in Indonesia have their own characteristics and handling procedures through the Juvenile Criminal Justice System. Through Law Number 11 of 2021 concerning the Juvenile Criminal Justice System, the state tries to be present to protect children's rights, even though children are perpetrators of crimes. Handling criminal cases against children is certainly different from handling cases against adults, the handling of children is special because it is also regulated in separate regulations. Understanding of the process of handling children's cases, of course, there may still be some in the community who do not understand or understand, so that sometimes it gives rise to various assessments, even more fatal if there is a misjudgment that the handling of children, especially children in legal conflicts 5 get special treatment and there are also those who think that children cannot be punished even though it is not that far, it's just that the handling process is specifically regulated. This study aims to analyze the concept of justice for children in the Indonesian Child Criminal Justice System within the framework of Criminal Justice Reform. The method used in this study is a mixed method between empirical and normative studies. This method is used to answer the substance of justice contained in the Juvenile Criminal Justice System within the framework of criminal justice reform. The location of this research was specifically carried out in the city of Semarang, and several other cities as supporting material. Supporting data in this study were also obtained from various studies on the internet.

Prison abolition and reform in Australia: A case for campaigners to take abolition seriously

This article responds to criticisms that the abolition of carceral systems is an impossible ideal which inadvertently undermines criminal justice reform. I discuss the mixed results of criminal justice reform and contend that abolition can shine a light on the dehumanising nature of punishment which may cause some reforms to lead to increased incarceration. Drawing on abolitionist campaigns in the US, I suggest that using the language of abolition is a powerful way to shift public discourse. I then demonstrate that abolition is a practice happening in Australian communities today, not an ideal awaiting government action.

Can Conservative Criminal Justice Reform Survive a Rise in Crime?

Over the past 20 years, conservatives have often been at the forefront of criminal justice reform efforts, including to reduce mandatory minimum sentencing, lengthy prison terms, and excessive criminal fines and fees and to improve conditions in prisons and jails. Rejecting the Nixonian “law and order” impulse, criminal justice reform has increasingly become incorporated into the conservative political self-identity. But this has been an elite-driven phenomenon, and it is open to question whether the roots of that political identity are deep enough to withstand the rising salience of crime as a political issue. This review traces how criminal justice reform came to be incorporated into the conservative political identity, raises questions concerning its staying power in the face of rising crime and increasingly strident progressive demands, and proposes some principles that might ground a more lasting conservative commitment to a just, proportionate system of criminal justice.

The standardisation of transitional justice

This article argues that transitional justice (TJ) has recently been standardised: There is now a two-tiered global standard of TJ which structures policy responses and academic thinking. TJ comprises criminal justice, truth-telling, reparation and institutional reform – four core elements in a ‘comprehensive’ approach. The standard involves specifications for design, procedure and performance and draws on a selection of seemingly unambiguous international legal norms. Paradoxically, it claims to eschew a one-size-fits-all formula, while promoting uniformity in diverse contexts. It is moreover unclear whether its implementation generates beneficial effects in society. Building on existing research on international standardisation as an international political and sociological phenomenon, the article analyses the recently developed TJ standard and presents the first account of the process of TJ standardisation. It demonstrates how processes of ‘generification’ and ‘localisation’ make practices transferable and establish the means to facilitate their replication in and across different contexts and settings. These processes are illustrated drawing on existing scholarship from around the world that highlights the acceptance and contestation of and resistance to the standard. After analysing these processes, the article discusses the implications of TJ standardisation for societies, scholarship and global governance.

How Do Investigation Experiences Shape Views of the Police? Qualitatively Exploring Sexual Assault Survivors’ Interactions With Police Detectives and Subsequent Views of the Police

Little attention has been paid to views of the police among sexual assault survivors. Understanding views of the police among a large population of crime victims who have historically been silenced and mistreated by our criminal-legal system can help inform recent and ongoing conversations about police funding and criminal justice reform. Qualitative interview data from a community sample of sexual assault survivors explored how police-detective interactions during sexual assault investigations shape views of the police. Negative interactions led to negative views of the police and for some were based on a culmination of positive and negative experiences. I share recommendations for responding to sexual assault that consider sexual assault survivors’ experiences with and views of the police.

The Conservative Heartland: A Political History of the Postwar American Midwest ed. by Jon K. Lauck and Catherine McNicol Stock

Reviewed by: The Conservative Heartland: A Political History of the Postwar American Midwest ed. by Jon K. Lauck and Catherine McNicol Stock Linda Van Ingen Jon K. Lauck and Catherine McNicol Stock, eds., The Conservative Heartland: A Political History of the Postwar American Midwest. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020. 390 pp. $29.95 (paper). The Conservative Heartland is an ambitious effort to elevate the political significance of midwestern conservatism and revive the historiography of the region with its complicated political landscape. Seventeen essays range from studies of the anti-statist conservatism that emerged following World War II to the impact of religion on politics, the political fallout of economic and demographic dislocations, and the tumultuous politics of race and gender. The need to define both "Midwest" and "conservatism" complicates this effort, and the editors accordingly allow for a broad definition of each. "Conservatism" is a response to New Deal liberalism, and the Midwest is a region of twelve contiguous states (Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota) from which scholars can further define the parameters of their respective studies. In a comprehensive introduction, Jon Lauck and Catherine McNicol Stock summarize each essay while also offering an overview of midwestern conservatism that challenges the conventional assumption of a so–called liberal "blue wall" that was supposed to hold for Democrats in 2016. Political strategists, blindsided by Donald Trump's wins in Michigan and Wisconsin, failed to recognize the political volatility of the region. This [End Page 101] book addresses that problem, underscoring the Midwest's competitiveness. Although expanding the scholarship on the breadth and depth of the region's conservatism through their individual essays, the featured authors collectively agree that the Midwest is a political battleground that should not be assumed. The first three articles take different approaches to explore the region's competitiveness. Michael Barone's historical analysis identifies three "heritage factors" (the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Kansas-Nebraska Act and founding of the Republican Party in 1854, and labor strikes in the late 1930s) that shape political alignments and cultural attitudes of midwestern voters. Kyle Kondik applies a statistical analysis of presidential deviation in voting from 1976 to 2016 to reveal a political volatility in the region. Daniel Birdsong and Christopher Devine argue that although the Midwest lost much of what made it historically significant in presidential politics (including the size of its electorate, being home to presidential candidates, and hosting national party conventions) it is still a political battleground when measured in terms of media attention, campaign activity, and a "battleground score" calculated to measure electoral competitiveness. All three articles support the book's overall thesis that the Midwest is politically competitive because of significant variations over time and place. Authors of the remaining essays generally agree that midwestern conservatism grew with deep social and fiscal shifts that help explain Trump's appeal in 2016. For example, A. James Fuller explores how Indiana's Mitch Daniels, governor from 2005 to 2013, pursued a fiscally conservative pragmatism emulated by subsequent governors including future vice president Mike Pence. Daniels privatized many government services including toll roads and state prisons. Demands for more prisons were central to Ian Toller-Clark's racial analysis of Wisconsin's working class following decades of liberal criminal justice reform, a development he calls "carceral populism" with wide appeal to conservative voters. Most striking is Catherine McNicol Stock's analysis of how private investment in North Dakota's public sphere influenced public policy. She details the history of how a wealthy benefactor built an ice hockey arena at the University of North Dakota in the 1990s and subsequently wielded control over many university decisions. Stock connects this example to the state's largely unregulated fracking industry and the power of corporate investment over public policy, including environmental concerns and Indigenous rights. Although Stock does not overtly make the claim, it is not hard to connect her work on the "new" [End Page 102] North Dakota with its pro-business agenda to the state's support of Trump in 2016. Several essays address the impact of feminist and gender issues on midwestern conservatism. Ann Marie Wambeke explores...

Tweeting Toward Transformation: Prison Abolition and Criminal Justice Reform in 140 Characters

The United States is the world leader in confining bodies behind bars. As scholars, practitioners, and activists struggle against the problem of mass incarceration, this article makes a distinction between two competing perspectives, both of which seek to change the current criminal legal system: “prison abolition” and “reformism.” Each represents ideological and political differences in how mass incarceration should and could be resolved. Prior research has relied on historical methods and data to examine theoretical departures between prison reform and prison abolition, yet to our knowledge, there have been no explorations of these perspectives on new media. This article fills the gap, drawing on a sample of 2,112,206 tweets between 2011 and 2020 and engaging in an in‐depth qualitative analysis of nearly 5,000 tweets over a 6‐year period in order to investigate the ways Twitter users disclose and define their positions on criminal justice reform on one hand, and prison abolition on the other, and how these discussions have changed over time.

Asymmetric Compassion Collapse, Collateral Consequences, and Reintegration: An Experiment

Public opinion is doubly important for reintegration, as it shapes both the policy and the stigma environments that people with criminal records must face. Nowhere are the policy and stigma environments bleaker than for record holders convicted of sex crimes. Drawing on the theory of compassion collapse (or psychic numbing) and using experimental data from a national survey, we examine the effects of informing members of the public about the hardships faced by record holders convicted of sex crimes, and we compare those effects (or the lack thereof) to the effects of victim discourse. We also randomize the information format: aggregate/statistical versus personal narratives. We find that narratives about crime victims’ suffering matter to the public—increasing aversive emotions, support for collateral consequences, and stigmatization—but narratives about record holders’ suffering do not. We conclude by discussing alternative communication strategies that public criminologists may use to garner public support for progressive criminal justice reforms.

The Role of Victim Advocacy in Criminal Justice Reform in England and Wales

The victims of volume crime in England and Wales are aided by a major institution, Victim Support, but their voices are rarely heard when policy matters are discussed. Many victims of traumatic crimes are organized and purposeful, but they have not come together into a united front. It is the English and Welsh groups supporting abused women, groups amounting to a social movement, that have made the most visible impression on the politics of criminal justice reform at a time when there were widely publicized killings of women and a bill on domestic violence was passing through Parliament at the end of 2021.

Gun Control Policies And The Right To Bear Arms In America: A Utilitarian Perspective

The purpose of this study is to utilize Bentham’s Utilitarianism model to explain gun control policies and the right to bear arms in the United States of America. Meanwhile the literature and available evidence from mass shooting revealed that gun control advocates and gun rights advocate alike appear to be firmly rooted in their respective positions. Perhaps the quintessential question is this – Who’s right and who’s wrong. In an attempt to answer the question above, the researcher utilized the narrative research approach and the application of Utilitarian principles to explain the gun control policies, and gun rights of citizens to inform criminal justice reforms. It is evidenced in this study that in many ways, Bentham and his successors’ writings, discussions and arguments for the application of the principle of utility can be felt in contemporary society, like the USA when it comes to issues like gun control. The United States is a Representative Republic and though not direct but a form of democracy. The study revealed that even though, the structure of the U.S. government is such that certain levels of accountability or checks and balances are in place to hold those in authority of governance accountable, but the system have failed to adequately enact and enforce laws to control the issues of homicides, and gun control to protect the lives of citizens. This finding aligns with Bentham’s proposition in the literature that those who hold the “operative power” in government, administration, and judiciary are, like everyone else, motivated by personal interest but not for the greater good. Therefore, this study recommend that it is imperative to devise mechanisms that will ensure that only by acting in the public interest could they promote their own interests. KEYWORDS: Utilitarian, gun control, gun rights, policy, firearms, assault rifles, Second Amendment. DOI: 10.7176/JLPG/123-09 Publication date: August 31 st 2022

“The Right Kind of Crazy”: How Patrol Officers Police the Boundaries of Mental Illness through Hybridized Strategies

How to better police mental illness is an evergreen component of criminal justice reform agendas. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has, like many departments, adopted specialized strategies designed to improve these encounters by tasking officers with both care and control responsibilities. These hybridized policing strategies are illustrative of a larger trend of managing social marginality through institutions that increasingly destabilize the penal/welfare state binary. This article draws from fieldwork with the LAPD to analyze how patrol officers construct the category of “mental illness” and deploy hybridized strategies. The analysis focuses on the inflection points that shape how a subject is categorized and the call’s disposal to understand how policing from the “murky middle” of state governance unfolds on the ground. Findings show how officers strategically invoke the pressure of time and the power of place to construct this category and deploy specialized resources when resolving trouble case, or “5149 and a half,” calls. Here, hybridized strategies function to manage social marginality through a governance of problem solving that appears uninterested in doing either care or control. The article concludes by reflecting on the project of hybridizing care and control to police mental illness specifically and social marginality more broadly.

Kay Whitlock and Nancy A. Heitzeg, Carceral Con: The Deceptive Terrain of Criminal Justice Reform

Kay Whitlock and Nancy A. Heitzeg, <i>Carceral Con: The Deceptive Terrain of Criminal Justice Reform</i>

Evaluating criminal justice reform during COVID-19: The need for a novel sentiment analysis package.

The health and safety of incarcerated persons and correctional personnel have been prominent in the U.S. news media discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining changing attitudes toward the health of the incarcerated population is imperative to better assess the extent to which the general public favors criminal justice reform. However, existing natural language processing lexicons that underlie current sentiment analysis (SA) algorithms may not perform adequately on news articles related to criminal justice due to contextual complexities. News discourse during the pandemic has highlighted the need for a novel SA lexicon and algorithm (i.e., an SA package) tailored for examining public health policy in the context of the criminal justice system. We analyzed the performance of existing SA packages on a corpus of news articles at the intersection of COVID-19 and criminal justice collected from state-level outlets between January and May 2020. Our results demonstrated that sentence sentiment scores provided by three popular SA packages can differ considerably from manually-curated ratings. This dissimilarity was especially pronounced when the text was more polarized, whether negatively or positively. A randomly selected set of 1,000 manually scored sentences, and the corresponding binary document term matrices, were used to train two new sentiment prediction algorithms (i.e., linear regression and random forest regression) to verify the performance of the manually-curated ratings. By better accounting for the unique context in which incarceration-related terminologies are used in news media, both of our proposed models outperformed all existing SA packages considered for comparison. Our findings suggest that there is a need to develop a novel lexicon, and potentially an accompanying algorithm, for analysis of text related to public health within the criminal justice system, as well as criminal justice more broadly.

C. L. Crouch, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Hebrew Bible and Ethics

C. L. Crouch, ed. <i>The Cambridge Companion to the Hebrew Bible and Ethics</i>

Application and Innovation of Electronic Monitoring in Chinese Criminal Justice

In the field of criminal justice, electronic monitoring technology has experienced the development of four generations of technology: fixed telephone, radio frequency tag, Global Positioning System, and biometrics. Today, Chinese criminal justice practice adopts a monitoring method based on cell phone positioning, supplemented by electronic anklets. The "Non-custodial Code monitoring system " is an innovative achievement of Hangzhou, China's judicial personnel on electronic monitoring, which has achieved good practical results and will be promoted nationwide. As an effective criminal measure, electronic monitoring reduces the number of detainees in prison, eases the supervision pressure on judicial personnel, reduces financial expenditures, and helps criminals rejoin society. Due to the lack of detailed legal provisions, the application of electronic monitoring in practice lacks specificity, and there is the possibility of violating the privacy of citizens. So electronic monitoring in China's criminal justice presents such a situation. On the one hand, the law clearly states that electronic monitoring can be applied only during the community correctional stage and the period of residential confinement. On the other hand, judicial officers actively try to apply electronic monitoring to the bail process. It is foreseeable that electronic monitoring will be widely promoted in the process of China's criminal justice reform. This process should adhere to the principles of legality, necessity, and judicial review.

Seeming incomparability and rational choice

We sometimes have to choose between options that are seemingly incomparable insofar as they seem to be neither better than, worse than, nor equal to each other. This often happens when the available options are quite different from one another. For instance, consider a choice between prioritizing either criminal justice reform or healthcare reform as a public policy goal. Even after the relevant details of the goals and possible reforms are filled in, it is plausible that neither goal is better than, worse than, nor equal to the other. Such seemingly incomparable options present a problem for rational choice since it is unclear how an agent might rationally choose between them. What we need are some principles to help govern rational choice when faced with seemingly incomparable options. I here present three such principles. While each principle is individually compelling, I show that they are jointly incompatible. I then argue that the correct response to this inconsistent triad is to reject the principle that rationally censures performing a sequence of choices one knows will result in a suboptimal outcome. The upshot is that when seeming incomparability is involved, an agent can money pump themselves without being less rational for it.

Using Simulation to Analyze Interrupted Time Series Designs.

We are sometimes forced to use the Interrupted Time Series (ITS) design as an identification strategy for potential policy change, such as when we only have a single treated unit and cannot obtain comparable controls. For example, with recent county- and state-wide criminal justice reform efforts, where judicial bodies have changed bail setting practices for everyone in their jurisdiction in order to reduce rates of pre-trial detention while maintaining court order and public safety, we have no natural and available comparison group other than the past. In these contexts, it is imperative to model pre-policy trends with a light touch, allowing for structures such as autoregressive departures from any pre-existing trend, in order to accurately and realistically assess the uncertainty of our projections. We aim to provide a methodological approach rooted in commonly understood and used modeling tools to achieve this. We quantify uncertainty with simulation, generating a distribution of plausible counterfactual trajectories to compare to the observed; this approach naturally allows for incorporating seasonality and other time-varying covariates, and provides confidence intervals along with point estimates for the potential impacts of policy change. We find simulation provides a natural framework to capture and show uncertainty in the ITS designs. It also allows for easy extensions such as nonparametric smoothing in order to handle multiple post-policy time points.

The interplay between women, opioid use disorder, medication-assisted treatment (MAT), and drug court: A qualitative study

ABSTRACT This qualitative study explores three important and understudied areas of drug court research (e.g., women, opioid use disorder, and medication-assisted treatment [MAT]). The research question for this study is: What are women’s thoughts, opinions, and experiences in drug court, in regard to the quality of treatment they received for their opioid use disorders and to the use of MAT in drug court programming to treat opioid use disorders? To answer the research question, data from female drug court participants (n = 14) were collected through a focus group methodology. Four themes emerged from the analysis: (1) Women had more positive views toward the use of extended-release injectable naltrexone, as compared to methadone and buprenorphine; (2) Women reported fears about using MAT to treat their opioid use disorders because they felt it could negatively impact their housing, where they were able to receive substance use disorder and mental health treatment, and their ability to maintain custody of their children; (3) Women reported histories of oppression, mainly trauma, and shared that, in some situations, they were not comfortable disclosing they were using or considering using MAT because of further oppressions they may experience; and (4) Women reported that the use of a non-adversarial approach by the judge, consistent with key component two of the drug court model, helped minimize their concerns related to the use of MAT and gave them a safe place during status hearings to discuss their opioid use disorder treatment and recovery. Implications for drug court practice and criminal justice reform are discussed, such as promoting access to housing and treatment for women who use MAT to treat their opioid use disorders and creating safe, anti-oppressive environments to promote recovery for female participants.

The Great Oklahoma Swindle: Race, Religion, and Lies in America's Weirdest State by Russell Cobb

Reviewed by: The Great Oklahoma Swindle: Race, Religion, and Lies in America's Weirdest State by Russell Cobb Matthew G. McCoy The Great Oklahoma Swindle: Race, Religion, and Lies in America's Weirdest State. By Russell Cobb. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Pp. xviii, 249. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4962-0998-6.) In this book, Russell Cobb examines the social, political, and cultural underpinnings of what it means to be an Oklahoman in the early twenty-first century. Born and raised in the state, Cobb is now a professor at the University of Alberta. He has also worked as a journalist, with his work appearing in various outlets including the New York Times and NPR. Cobb, a self-described liberal, sees Oklahoma as a state cursed with poor political leadership and a legacy of racism but home to a population that might be more progressive than elections would suggest. In the title, Cobb lays out what he sees as the original sin of Oklahoma's birth. The state was created from lands supposed to be granted in perpetuity to Indians. White land speculators connived to steal desirable land well into the twentieth century, leading to many notorious incidents, some of which Cobb discusses. From that tradition, Cobb argues, the modus operandi of Oklahoma's political and social leadership developed. "We do not like to talk about anything unpleasant," Cobb says of white Oklahomans (p. 102). Cobb writes that [End Page 428] growing up he never heard of the land thefts, the Tulsa Race Massacre, or even the origin of the term Sooner in his history classes. And even as these incidents have become more widely known, Cobb says that the tradition remains, with white Oklahomans preferring to fall back on religious platitudes or political posturing rather than confronting the state's problems. This is the ongoing swindle at the heart of his argument. Cobb spends an entire chapter describing Oklahoma as a "failing state" (p. 27). He points to the collapse of a variety of basic government services to support his claim. And yet, Cobb argues, many Oklahomans like to blame the government for their problems instead of tax cuts that reduce revenues. Cobb's mother refused to seek public assistance when he was growing up. He concludes, "Antigovernment ideology is so rooted into the consciousness [in Oklahoma], it does not even register as ideology" (p. 38). But the author sees hope for the future. He mentions widespread support for teachers in the aftermath of their walkout in the spring of 2018, even among Republicans. Passage of a medical marijuana law and some criminal justice reforms indicate that the pendulum may be swinging back toward the center. Cobb naturally approaches the project as a work of cathartic reportage, meaning that historians of Oklahoma, or the South in general, will find little new in the book. He almost exclusively cites recent journalistic sources, which is understandable given his purpose, but more references to key works of Oklahoma historiography would add greater context. Moreover, Cobb spends much of his time discussing Tulsa specifically, with less attention given to other parts of the state. Oklahoma City, for instance, plays little part in his examination. When the author discusses the history of Jewish communities throughout the state or the all-Black towns that once existed, his work is most impactful. His discussion of the mixed-race complexities of Oklahoma, a "mestizo state," as he calls it, is also valuable (p. 125). Breaking away from Tulsa to explain these other areas strengthens his argument. Ultimately, the book is both critical and confessional. Cobb makes clear in his writing that he is searching for reasons to explain Oklahoma's contradictions, in particular to his liberal acquaintances who seem baffled by the state. But he also wants to come to terms with his own upbringing and experiences. "[D]isavowing the Great Oklahoma Swindle can result in a new way forward," he writes, both for himself personally and for the people of his home state (p. 234). Matthew G. McCoy University of Arkansas–Fort Smith Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association