Criminal Justice Reform Research Articles

Policies, procedures and risk aversity: police decision-making in domestic violence matters in an Australian jurisdiction

ABSTRACT Domestic violence (DV) is an issue of global concern, which has been subject to public health and criminal justice reforms for decades. Much attention has been paid to legal responses to DV, specifically the policing of this social issue. Police responses have frequently been scrutinised for not taking DV seriously, not placing sufficient emphasis on perpetrator accountability and not recognising and acknowledging victim survivor preferences sufficiently. The current study examines police responses to DV in an Australian jurisdiction that has been subject to substantial DV-focused policy and law reforms in recent years. Drawing on focus group data from 19 police officers and prosecutors, this article examines the factors that shape police decision making when responding to DV. Findings identify a shift towards more proactive and protective policing of DV, guided by a strong emphasis on operational policies and procedures, risk perceptions and aversity. Findings further reveal limited room for victim preferences in police responses to DV, highlighting the need for specialist DV units to provide holistic and nuanced responses to families affected by DV.

Ensuring Marijuana Reform Is Effective Criminal Justice Reform

In less than a decade, marijuana legalization has gone from unthinkable to seemingly unstoppable. This essay — written for a special issue on improving Arizona’s criminal justice system — discusses how Arizona should best advance marijuana legalization so that it can significantly improve Arizona’s criminal justice system. Now that Arizona has legalized marijuana via ballot initiative, we do not wade too deeply into the arguments for and against legalization or the criminal justice impact inherent in the repeal of prohibition (such as reductions in marijuana arrests and sentences). Instead, we focus on steps that Arizona policymakers and advocates who are interested in improving the criminal justice system can take to ensure that legalization best advances this goal. First, we set the stage in Part I with a brief history of marijuana prohibition, its role in criminal enforcement today, and the movement to enact state legalization laws. In Part II, we turn our attention to Arizona, beginning with a description of marijuana reform efforts in Arizona and key facets of the Smart and Safe Arizona Act. We then provide recommendations for policymakers and other concerned parties about how to ensure modern marijuana reforms in Arizona (and elsewhere) can and should help build a reform infrastructure that could not only ensure record relief to redress past marijuana convictions but also address broader criminal justice issues that historically intersect with marijuana prohibition.

Attitudes toward the Punishment of Juvenile and Adult Sexual Offenders in Canada: The Roles of Sentencing Goals and Criminal Justice Motivations

ABSTRACT There has long been concern among academics and those in criminal justice professions regarding the public’s seemingly enthusiastic support for punitive responses to sexual offenders, such as long sentences, residency restrictions, registration, and community notification. Yet there has been little research to date on what motives may be driving the endorsement of these policies, particularly registration. Our understanding is further muddled by conflicting research on punitive attitudes in general, with some suggesting that retributive motives are behind such attitudes while others report the efficacy of utilitarian motives. Using a sample of 376 university students, the current study sought to determine whether retributive, utilitarian, or other motives drove support for longer sentences and registration for juvenile and adult sexual offenders. Results indicated that motives largely differed between the two sanctions as well as the two age groups of offenders. Both retributive and utilitarian motives contributed to support for policies, suggesting that these motives work in congruence with one another. This has clear implications for policy discussions, as advocates for criminal justice reform should be appealing to both motives to change societal attitudes.

Documentary Ethics and Criminal Justice Reform in "The Jinx"

Documentary Ethics and Criminal Justice Reform in "The Jinx"

Perceptions of Justice in Multidistrict Litigation: Voices from the Crowd

With all eyes on criminal justice reform, multidistrict litigation (MDL) has quietly reshaped civil justice, undermining fundamental tenets of due process, procedural justice, attorney ethics, and tort law along the way. In 2020, the MDL caseload tripled that of the federal criminal caseload, one out of every two cases filed in federal civil court was an MDL case, and 97% of those were products liability like opioids, talc, and Roundup. Ordinarily, civil procedure puts tort plaintiffs in the driver’s seat, allowing them to choose who and where to sue, and what claims to bring. Procedural justice tells courts to ensure plaintiffs can present evidence, participate, and tell their story—or risk inaccurate outcomes and judicial illegitimacy. But MDL’s efficiency mantra trumps all, transferring plaintiffs with related facts away from their preferred venue, centralizing their cases with hundreds of others before a judge in a faraway forum, replacing their chosen attorneys with a judicially selected roster of lead lawyers, depersonalizing plaintiffs’ narratives, and settling their cases en masse. Though MDL makes them feel like “just another number,” one-shot plaintiffs can say little in response: many are sick, bankrupt, and silenced by private settlements’ confidentiality provisions. No longer. In conducting the first ever MDL procedural justice study, we spoke with plaintiffs from 42 different states with diverse backgrounds, educations, and races. Their cases originated in 32 different state and federal courts, and 295 lawyers from 145 law firms represented them. Although 54% of their attorneys (or someone from their firm) led the MDLs, lawyers did little for the clients they stockpiled. When it came to their attorney experience, 64% of participants were somewhat or deeply dissatisfied, 50% did not feel that they could trust their attorney, 59% received few or no status updates, and 67% did not understand what was happening with their lawsuit. Nor did MDLs feel efficient or accessible. They lasted almost four times as long as the average civil case, with 73% of respondents finding the delay unreasonable and only 1.3% ever attending a hearing. And yet, nearly 60% would have been willing to wait longer to tell their story—some up to five years more. Without those opportunities for input, only 25% thought claims administrators possessed or relied on accurate information, which raises questions about accuracy, substantive outcomes, and the system’s ability to fulfill tort-law objectives. And though plaintiffs had many goals, from compensation to protecting others to holding corporations accountable, a mere 1.8% of all participants felt their lawsuit accomplished what they hoped. One put it simply, “Our judicial process is very broken.” MDL needs reform. We ignite the discussion with proposals to increase transparency through mandatory public closing statements that reveal attorneys’ fees, costs, and settlement amounts; voice, access, and accuracy through the public’s newfound familiarity with technology; and due process by appointing separate lead lawyers to represent plaintiffs with conflicting interests.

Mass Deliberative Democracy and Criminal Justice Reform

The American criminal justice system falls far short of democratic ideals. In response, democratic communitarian localism proposes a more decentralized system with a greater emphasis on local control. This approach aims to deconcentrate power and remove bureaucracy, arguing local control would reflect informal cultural life better than our current system. This view fails to adequately address localized domination, however, including in the background culture of society. As a result, it underplays the need for transformative, democratizing change. Rejecting communitarian localism, I defend a mass deliberative democratic approach to criminal justice reform that relies on institutions outside localities to democratize local institutions and background cultural patterns. Nonetheless, local institutions must be empowered to exert democratic control, as well as to influence institutions outside the locality. This process of democratic co-development offers greater hope for political equality, non-domination, and inclusive democratic deliberation about criminal law than democratic communitarian localism.

Criminal justice reforms in India

India is the World’s largest democracy. But unfortunately, over the period of the time its shine is diminishing because of defective criminal justice system. Therefore, we are in a critical juncture of time, there is need to again rethought and reformulate the justice system to address the challenges of the present day. Because of strong spur in demand of justice. There are some lacunae which necessitate the development of various techniques & strategies that can be effectively incorporate into the policy framework. Therefore, in order to better understanding of criminal justice system it is worth examine the object of the criminal justice system.

“For the Public Utility”: the Ideological and Conceptual Foundations of the British Police

The author addresses the problem of power relations in the era of criminal justice reform, presented in historical narratives, taking into account the socio-cultural context and realities of Great Britain in the 18th century. In the 18th century, the British system of crime control consisted of a large number of actors financed extremely unevenly from private and public sources. This fact, coupled with the British society critical attitude regarding the use of militarized forces to maintain civil law and order, reduced the effectiveness of law enforcement mechanisms and led to an unprecedented increase in crime, being a popular area of public discourse.

Evaluating Criminal Justice Reform During COVID-19: The Need for a Novel Sentiment Analysis Package

Existing natural language processing lexicons that underlie current sentiment analysis (SA) algorithms may not perform adequately in certain academic disciplines depending on contextual complexities. The health and safety of incarcerated persons and correctional personnel have been prominent in news media discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic, potentially highlighting the need for a novel SA lexicon and algorithm that is tailored for the examination of public health policy in the context of the criminal justice system. We utilized a text corpus consisting of news articles at the intersection of COVID-19 and criminal justice to analyze the performance of existing lexicons collected across state-level outlets between January and May 2020. Our results demonstrated that sentence sentiment scores provided by three popular SA packages 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.

American Criminal Justice in Disarray

This was one of SCSS president Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer. At a time when there is increased discussion about the need for criminal justice reform, he points to several areas that must be addressed: overcriminalization (making illegal too many kinds of actions), vagueness of laws, the decline of mens rea, too much readiness on the part of American police to arrest, excessive incarceration, and prosecutorial abuse.

On the Law of Self-Defense (And Why Transparency About our Value-Judgments is the Missing Piece in Today's Justice Reform Debate)

A quick review of the mainstream media and recent scholarly output confirms that the exercise of self-preferential force to fend off a threat (and protect property) is squarely at the center of today’s simmering criminal justice reform debates. Real-world examples – largely tragic ones – triggering this discussion abound. Did Louisville police officers acted within their rights when their bullets hit medical worker Breonna Taylor? Was Travis McMichael acting outside of the legal (and moral) bounds when he, in the course of allegedly effecting a “citizen’s arrest” after a claimed trespass on a Georgia construction site, took unarmed Ahmaud Arbery’s life? Did Neighborhood Watch captain George Zimmerman have the legal right to shoot unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin? Was Atlanta Police Officer Garrett Rolfe justified when he shot at the apparently fleeing Rayshard Brooks in an Atlanta parking lot? Should Markus Kaarma have been sentenced to 70 years’ imprisonment for shooting a German high school exchange student who engaging in a local tradition of “garage hopping”? And did retiree Joe Horn act lawfully when he used his shotgun to kill two men he suspected of burglarizing his neighbor’s home? At the risk of noting the obvious, every one of these cases requires the criminal justice system to resolve challenging questions of law, fact, and morality. But it doesn’t’ require years of legal studies to develop very deeply held views on what the right outcome should be in these cases. Rather, we as humans ultimately look at what we think the fact pattern was and then decide for ourselves what the “right” and “just” answers; and to do so we rely on deeply held, complex belief patterns that are all our own. Even thought this unexceptional observation is little more than common sense, a review of the caselaw, legislative history, and scholarship on self-defense in the U.S. reveals that we, as a rule, fail to take a closer look at nuanced value-judgments we all make when we think about such “just results” in these cases. This lack of a value-centric focus or dialogue is particularly concerning because this is among the most important times in recent history for our justice system to shore up its moral credibility. By having an open and honest dialogue about values that do – and should – ground self-defense, rather than remaining fixated simply on rules and outcomes, we position ourselves to significantly reduce the corrosive role played by hidden normativity and buried baselines. This, in turn, will advance the type of transparent and democratic decision-making necessary if we are to succeed in finally making thoughtful choices among available self-defense options. Stepping back a bit, the right to exercise self-preferential force is really foundational. The scholarly literature regularly refers to it as “the ancient right” or “the first civil right,” and Cicero famously described self-defense, which he and his contemporaries prized as the ultimate pre-legal civil right, as a “universal natural moral law.” As such, it was thought to be timeless, lack a history, and, consequently, is incapable of being abrogated or otherwise altered. But despite the right’s bedrock status in criminal law, legislators, academics, and every-day citizens alike all have strongly held — and, in fact, often strongly divergent — opinions about when it is legally (and morally) appropriate to exercise self-preferential force. Some (like Robert Schopp and the late Don Kates) favor “tough-on-crime” approaches, according broader leeway to those defending themselves against attacks. Others (like Fiona Leverick and Andrew Ashworth) advocate for a more “humanitarian” construction of the law, providing greater protections even to culpable attackers who threaten their victims with serious injury. What has been lacking, and what this article will provide, however, is a common analytical language and framework from which to discuss cases involving the use of purportedly justified defensive force. The goal here is to materially advance the patinaed and important self-defense debate. And essential to the objective of achieving a better understanding of self-defense law is the development of a comprehensive, value-based dialogue that applies to self-defense. to self-defense.

Addressing Contemporary Criminal Justice Issues as Interpretive Outcomes at a Prison Museum

Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site (ESP) is a venue for public education and dialogue on contemporary as well as historical criminal justice issues. Since visitors to prison museums typically have had limited involvement with prisons, the experience they have onsite may impact their perceptions of contemporary criminal justice issues. Therefore, this study examined the influence of the onsite experiences, as well as policy narratives, policy beliefs, and underlying values on interpretive outcomes. Visitors were surveyed at the end of their visit to Eastern State Penitentiary. Multiple regression was conducted to identify which factors predicted interpretive outcomes. Results showed an increased awareness of criminal justice issues, increased empathy and appreciation for those involved in the system, and support for criminal justice reform across ideological boundaries.

The Role of Prisoner Voice in Criminal Justice Reform

This paper examines the role of prisoner voice in criminal justice reform in the US. Previous research has attributed reform of criminal justice institutions to either political elites or the public. This research has not considered the role of prisoner voice in influencing reform. This paper fills that gap. I argue that prisoner voice—through the avenues of prison journalism and prisoner litigation—serves as an information channel in state criminal justice bureaucracies, holding bureaucrats accountable to their superiors. I conclude that prison journalism is the only avenue for prisoner voice that influences reform in ways that aligns with voters’ interests. Prisoner litigation and prison riots result in reform that drives the growth of state prison systems and loss of prisoner privileges.

Criminal policy forming as a scince of criminal legal cycle

The article is devoted to the consideration of the problems of the formation of criminal policy as «a science of the criminal legal cycle». Because of this, the author analyzed various approaches in the context of the historical development of the category of "criminal policy". The article demonstrates certain changes in the understanding of criminal policy, as well as identifies its types, which are already considered as separate categories, institutions or sections in «the sciences of the criminal legal cycle». It can be argued that such approaches allowed them to develop sufficiently. The author emphasizes that their development was not carried out simultaneously and with different goals, which leads to a certain imbalance and the need for changes in approaches in defining criminal policy.Criminal policy as a science formed within «the sciences of the criminal law cycle», allows to explore a separate area of scientific knowledge about the causes and consequences of crime, which are aimed at strategic counteraction to crime by means of state and public influence through systematic reform of criminal justice in the distant perspective. The influence of criminal policy is already so significant that it allows to point out the already formed policies and strategies within the framework of criminal law, criminal executive law, criminal procedural law, criminology, criminalistics and forensic sciences. Moreover, these policies and strategies can be referred to as its types and, in their unity, significantly influence the lawmaking and law enforcement processes both in Ukraine and in other states

Transforming the Progressive Prosecutor Movement

It is a near universally accepted principle that prosecutors are the most powerful actors in the criminal system. In response, a new movement has emerged: its proponents argue that, by electing progressive district attorneys, we can use the power of prosecutors to end mass incarceration and bring fairness to the criminal system without changing a single law. They propose to accomplish these goals primarily by declining to prosecute certain low-level crimes, expanding diversion programs, and replacing hardline assistants with reform-minded outsiders. Academics, activists, presidential candidates, and even a Supreme Court Justice have endorsed this movement as the key to change. With little sustained scrutiny of this development, this Article takes the progressive prosecutor movement’s objectives as they are and asks whether, as currently framed, it is likely to achieve them. The conclusion is simple: no. This movement acknowledges the “breathtaking” power that prosecutors yield, then asks its candidates to use that power for good and trusts them to do so. This Article offers a more efficacious prescription: if you are a prosecutor truly committed to transforming the criminal system, relinquish your power. Do not trade the rhetorical appeal of being tough on violent crime for political capital to spend on lenience for those who commit low-level offenses. Advocate for the reallocation of funds from prosecutors’ offices—rather than the expansion of diversion programs—to social services to keep the mentally ill, substance-addicted, and poor out of the criminal system. Rather than hoping to prevent wrongful convictions and over-punitiveness by changing who works in your office, lobby for a stronger indigent defense system and more external limits on prosecutorial power. To combat racial inequities in the criminal system, support efforts to strengthen defendants’ equal protection rights, instead of simply publishing statistics. Through these shifts, we can harness this moment where criminal justice reform tops the national agenda and implement truly transformative change.

The Impact of a Reentry and Aftercare Program on Recidivism

In this article, we explore the impact of a reentry and aftercare service program on the likelihood of returning to prison by ex-offenders. Using administrative data within a difference-in-differences design, we find that this social program is associated with a reduction in recidivism rates. Benchmark estimates show that the program was associated with estimated reductions in the probability of recidivating of 6.0 to 8.7 percentage points. The estimate appears to be economically significant as it implies an estimated treated effect in the 15.8% to 19.2% range. We consider the heterogeneous effects of the program on reducing recidivism according to race, age group, and program type. The program helped to reduce recidivism among Whites but not Blacks; older participants were the main beneficiaries while the effectiveness of the program was observed among older participants. Back-of-the-envelope cost-savings analysis is incorporated to estimate the potential savings to the state arising from the reduction in recidivism rates likely attributable to the program. The findings are robust to sample selection bias, alternative specifications, and estimation techniques. Our results offer some implications for the role of faith-based social programs within the context of criminal justice reform to combat reentry of former inmates. They also provide a cautionary tale about the need to evaluate programs not just based on their overall effect.

Policy Learning and Criminal Justice Reform in the U.S. States

This article investigates criminal justice reform in the U.S. states through a policy learning framework. A comparative case study of reform in Texas and California reveals a policy learning process conditioned by each state’s political environment. Republicans in Texas embraced reform after conservative policy entrepreneurs framed the issue in a manner that matched lawmakers’ core ideological beliefs. Republicans received no such messages in California. With few electoral incentives to support reform, Republicans in California demonstrated little interest in learning from the policy experiences of co-partisans in earlier adopting states. Overall, the analysis shows how policy learning shapes Republicans’ relative support for criminal justice reform and the dynamic ways Republican leadership on the issue helps facilitate state policy adoption.

Legitimacy and public opinion: a five-step model

AbstractTo date, in Western jurisdictions, many criminal justice reforms are devised and implemented with a close eye on public opinion. These are typically intended to regain or foster legitimacy. However, within this context, there is no common understanding of this concept. This essay aims to provide such a conceptualisation of legitimacy, to enable a consistent and systematic evaluation of attempts to accommodate public opinion. To this end, five levels of legitimacy research are discussed that could structure evaluations of public-opinion-targeted reforms: (1) the normative dimension, (2) the ‘audiences’ addressed, (3) the purpose of the reforms, (4) trust and distrust, and (5) dialogic, or longitudinal effects. Furthermore, since research departing from these five levels of analysis is likely to result in observations that are, by nature, incommensurable, it is argued that an overall assessment of legitimacy always requires ajudgment, rather than mere measurement.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission’s Recidivism Studies

Recidivism is now the guiding principle of punishment and has become the new hallmark of criminal justice reform, as reflected in the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s recidivism project. So far, the Commission has issued three reports in 2020 alone, which outline the parameters within which “safe” criminal justice reform can proceed. Yet the overly broad definition of “recidivism” and the focus on easily measurable and static risk factors, such as prior criminal record, create a feedback loop. The Commission’s work should come with a warning label. Its recidivism studies should not be consumed on their own. Instead, they must be read in conjunction with U.S. Probation and Pretrial Services recidivism research, which includes data on the impact of programming, treatment, and services on reentry success. Yet, concerns about undercounting recidivism events drive the entire U.S. approach. Western European studies reflect different philosophies and values that explain some of the underlying reasons for the dramatically different imprisonment rates on the two sides of the Atlantic. These recidivism studies raise also questions about the Commission’s role. Its ongoing preference for imprisonment indicates that it continues to consider itself the guardian of incarceration-driven guidelines. The studies reenforce the status quo and the Commission’s role in it. They threaten to propel us into data-driven selective incapacitation and continuously long prison terms for those with prior criminal records, all in the name of public safety.

Examining the Effects of Race/Ethnicity and Race Relations on Public Opinion about the Overrepresentation of Black People in U.S. Prisons

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to determine whether persons of different racial/ethnic backgrounds differ in their perceptions of the role racial discrimination plays in the overrepresentation of Black people in the U.S. prison system. The paper also tested the gradient hypothesis of comparative conflict theory, which predicts Black people perceive the greatest amount of racial discrimination, followed by Latinx and white people, respectively. This study also tested whether perceptions of race relations between Black, Latinx, and white people influenced the role participants thought racial discrimination played in Black people’s overrepresentation. Nationally representative Gallup Poll data were used. Results partially supported the gradient hypothesis. Black people were more likely than Latinx and white people to perceive racial discrimination to explain Black people’s overrepresentation in prison, but Latinxs’ views did not differ from whites’. Participants who perceived poorer relations between Black, Latinx, and white people were more likely to consider racial discrimination to explain Black people’s overrepresentation. Findings suggest Black people and those who perceive poorer race relations are most likely to support criminal justice reform efforts aimed at reducing racial disparities in the criminal justice system.