Federal Criminal Justice System Research Articles

Recidivism in Alternatives to Incarceration Programs across Thirteen Federal Districts

The current study evaluates the effectiveness of Alternatives to Incarceration (ATI) programs in the federal criminal justice system across thirteen federal districts, particularly their impact on post-program recidivism. It explores the development and expansion of ATI programs, which offer defendants charged in federal court the opportunity to participate in a formal judge-led multi-disciplinary team program that emphasizes community-based rehabilitative approaches that target root causes of criminal behavior. These programs emphasize treatment over punishment while holding defendants accountable using proscribed protocols of sanctions and incentives. Depending on the rules of the individual program, defendants who successfully complete the program receive a reduced or non-incarcerate sentence, or have their charges dismissed. The study utilizes data from the participating districts to compare the outcomes of ATI participants with those of matched counterparts who did not participate in the programs. In addition to examining outcomes of defendants while on pretrial supervision, the study examines re-arrests for new criminal behavior one, two, and three years after defendants’ exit from the program. The results highlight the potential effectiveness of ATI programs in reducing both pretrial detention and post-sentence incarceration without expense to community safety. We emphasize the need for further research to validate and generalize the findings and suggest that ATI programs, given sufficient resources and policy support, could play a significant role in transforming the criminal justice system by prioritizing rehabilitation over incarceration.

Characteristics, institutional behaviour, and post-release outcomes of federal Veteran and non-Veteran men offenders

LAY SUMMARY Incarcerated Veterans represent 2.5% of the federal offender population and are a unique subset of the general Canadian Veteran population. This study provides the first in-depth examination of Veteran offenders in federal custody. During the study period, 374 federal offenders self-reported as Veterans. Federal Veteran offenders were older and more likely to have committed a violent offence and to have mental health concerns. Although they were more likely to report mental health concerns, Veteran offenders have more stable institutional behaviour and greater post-release success than non-Veterans. Understanding the unique characteristics and correctional experiences of federal Veteran offenders aids in identifying needs related to intervention and support to promote successful community reintegration after release. Future qualitative research should enhance knowledge of the lived experiences of Veterans involved in the federal criminal justice system in Canada.

One Nation Under Supervision

This special issue of the Federal Sentencing Reporter is dedicated to community supervision in the federal criminal justice system. Federal law recognizes two justifications for community supervision: public safety and rehabilitation. Yet these justifications are in tension, if not in conflict. Judges impose terms of supervision to protect the public and promote the defendant’s rehabilitation, but the government enforces the conditions of supervision through the threat of imprisonment, which officially serves only for retribution and public safety, not rehabilitation. In other words, federal law justifies supervision to ease the defendant’s return to the community, while the revocation mechanism subordinates the defendant’s interests to the safety of the public. One way to resolve this contradiction would be to return to Congress’s original plan for supervised release as a period of supervision without the possibility of revocation. Lawmakers should authorize sentencing judges to decide whether the supervision they impose will be “revocable,” in other words, whether violations will be punishable by imprisonment. Under this approach, judges could sentence particularly dangerous defendants to revocable terms of supervision if necessary to protect the public, but also would have the option of impose “irrevocable” terms on less-serious offenders. This sentence of truly non-coercive supervision would use the judge’s position at a nexus of the criminal justice system to coordinate the provision of reentry services to former prisoners, while also ensuring that the supervision itself never became a driver of imprisonment.

The Burden of Criminal Justice Debt in Federal Community Supervision

The federal criminal justice system routinely requires convicted individuals to pay fines, restitution, and special assessments as part of their sentence. These criminal justice payments are an obligatory condition of federal community supervision, which a vast majority of convicted individuals are compelled to undergo. Although some of these legal financial obligations are intended to hold people accountable for criminal behavior and address crime victims’ financial losses, they also create a significant barrier to supervision success by imposing heavy economic burdens on those least able to afford them. The financial obligations imposed on the majority of federal criminal defendants both frustrate the practice of community supervision as well as create onerous and long-lasting criminal debt. The government’s inability to recover most financial legal obligations demonstrates the futility of continuing our current supervisory debt practices. Permitting courts to determine a financial assessment of a defendant’s ability to pay, allowing partial debt waiver, and creating an income-based fines and fees system would help ameliorate some of the crushing debt obligations resulting from community supervision. Unpayable criminal justice debt serves no one.

A VIEW OF CRIMINAL PROCEEDINGS IN THE USA

According to the federal system of government, the federal (i.e. national) government and the government of each one of the 50 US states has independent authority to enact criminal laws applicable within the territory of its jurisdiction. Also, each state has the authority to enforce criminal laws through its own criminal procedure laws, through its own criminal law agencies. Thus, in many respects, there are 51 different criminal proceedings, one for each state and one for the federal jurisdiction. Fifty second jurisdiction is secured by the decision of the US Congress (Amendment XXIII to the US Constitution) to treat the District of Columbia separately, which has a separate criminal code and criminal procedure code that are separated from those applicable in federal criminal laws across the country. In many areas where both federal and state governments have the authority to regulate an area, the federal system dominates. Federal law is the basic source of law and the vast majority of all enforcement proceedings are introduced into the federal structure (administrative or judicial). Similar dominance is not found in the sphere of criminal law. Using any of the traditional standards to measure its share of the national criminal justice system, the federal criminal justice system is nothing more but one of many. The presence of 52 different criminal proceedings would be less significant if these proceedings were the subject of a single act prescribing one exclusive, comprehensive regulation for all 52 jurisdictions. Contrary to the impression sometimes conveyed by constitutional experts, the US Constitution is not such an act. This does not challenge the characterization of federal constitutional law, as interpreted by the US Supreme Court, as “the most important source of criminal procedure law”. It is the only source of criminal justice provisions applicable in all 52 jurisdictions. It “closes” 52 jurisdictions into a basic procedural structure that guarantees uniformity in majority of comprehensive principles in different procedures. The U.S. Constitution, for many aspects of criminal procedure, also requires the application of special standards (sometimes quite detailed) that implement those standards. Nevertheless, the obligations imposed by the US Constitution are not extensive or exclusive enough to place the law of individual jurisdictions on a relatively insignificant role in regulating criminal proceedings. For many aspects of criminal procedure, the laws of individual states provide much more than the standards from the US Constitution. Even where the US Constitution is dominant, the “local” law of one jurisdiction often still plays a significant role. Of course, wherever the law of one jurisdiction has control, there is always the potential for variations in the content of the law from one jurisdiction to another.

Sentencing Federal Drug Offenders

The Drug War ushered in harsh sentencing practices in the United States. The severity in penalties has been particularly salient in the federal criminal justice system. Increased statutory penalties and U.S. Sentencing Commission guidelines led to drug users and traffickers serving longer periods of incarceration. As a result, the federal correctional system is overburdened. A noticeable change in attitude is evident. Congress has offered leniency for certain first-time drug offenders in the form of a statutory safety valve. While a progressive step, the safety valve applies to relatively few individuals. Importantly, federal judges have some discretion to reject what they might consider to be overly lengthy sentencing mandates. This Article provides an empirical study of sentencing statistics for drug offences. The sample derives from the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s fiscal year 2019 dataset of over 20,000 cases sentenced for drug crimes. Results show that judges employed various mechanisms to reduce statutory- and guidelines-based penalties. Strategies by judges include avoiding mandatory minimums (using the safety valve and otherwise), giving greater point reductions than permitted, and rejecting Commission policies. Over 60% of sentences were below the guidelines’ minimum recommendations. The consequences are beneficial in alleviating strain on the federal prison population, but create inconsistency in sentencing practices. A qualitative component supplements the quantitative. Judges, when issuing their statement of reasons for the sentence, may include textual comments. These comments provide valuable contextual information in how judges articulate their concerns with sanctions for drug offenders. Overall results present important policy considerations.

Contagious Animosity in the Field: Evidence from the Federal Criminal Justice System

We investigate whether increased animosity toward Muslims after 9/11 had spillover effects on Black and Hispanic individuals in the federal criminal justice system. Using linked administrative data tracking defendants from arrest through sentencing, we find that after 9/11, sentence and presentence outcomes for Hispanic defendants significantly worsened. Outcomes for Black defendants were unchanged. The findings are consistent with judges and prosecutors displaying social preferences characterized by contagious animosity from Muslims to Hispanics. Our findings provide among the first field evidence of contagious animosity, indicating that social preferences across out-groups are interlinked and malleable.

Sentencing Abstention

A primary role of the Supreme Court is to resolve conflicts among the federal courts of appeal. When the split concerns the federal sentencing guidelines, however, the Supreme Court has ceded this role to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, effectively allowing the Commission to act as the court of last resort in this context. As then-Judge Alito recognized, “no other federal agency—in any branch—has ever performed a role anything like it.” This anomaly has largely escaped academic attention because the Court’s abdication comes in the form of certiorari denials, which are buried in the Court’s long order lists. But the consequences of the Court’s refusal to review splits involving federal sentencing policy—referred to here as “sentencing guidelines abstention”—cannot be ignored. Sentencing guidelines abstention perpetuates uncertainty and wide-ranging sentencing disparities, meaning the length of a federal defendant’s sentence will depend on the happenstance of where the defendant is sentenced. The principled and fair administration of justice cannot tolerate such ambiguity and randomness. This Article argues that there is no sound basis for sentencing guidelines abstention. It outlines reasons—grounded in precedent, congressional intent, administrative law principles, and practical considerations—why the Court should reassume its traditional role of resolving federal sentencing guideline splits, provide uniformity and consistency to the federal judiciary, and contribute thereby to the development of a reasoned and coherent federal criminal justice system.

Race, Ethnicity, and Punishment for Federal Sex Offenses: Changing Composition in Child Pornography and Sex Abuse Cases and Temporal Disparity in Sentencing Over Time.

In response to several high-profile violent offenses against children over the past two decades, Congress has enacted several pieces of legislation aimed at increasing punishment for those convicted of federal sex offenses. Coinciding with these enhanced penalties was a demographic shift in the composition of those prosecuted for these offenses. In the federal criminal justice system, sex offenses fall into two main categories: child pornography and sexual abuse. The racial and ethnic makeup of individuals charged for federal sex offenses has significantly changed over the past 15 years. The current study utilizes federal sentencing data from the United States Sentencing Commission for the years 2006 to 2017 to explore the nature of punishment for these offenses over time. We also employ multivariate analyses to examine differences in punishment for the two types of offenses and employ disaggregated analyses by offense type to examine temporal change in racial/ethnic disparities in sentence length and departures from the federal sentencing guidelines. Findings demonstrate that convicted individuals who are Black and Hispanic are receiving harsher sentences over time net of controls for other key predictors such as age, sex, criminal history, and presumptive sentence length. Implications for how legislatively enhanced penalties and changing demographic makeup of those convicted for these offenses may have introduced extra-legal disparity into federal sentencing are further discussed.

Expanding Therapeutic Jurisprudence Across the Federal Judiciary.

A patchwork of drug courts and other problem-solving courts currently exists to divert individuals with mental illness and substance use disorders away from the criminal justice system. We call for a broader implementation of problem-solving courts, particularly at the federal level, that would operate according to the principles of therapeutic jurisprudence (i.e., a framework that aims to maximize the health benefits of judicial and legislative policies and practices). Expanding federal problem-solving courts will better serve individuals with mental illness and substance use disorders in the federal criminal justice system and allow them to benefit from rehabilitation and diversion programs. This effort will also signal that the federal judiciary has recognized the criminal justice system's failure to address inmate mental health care, and that it is willing to institute changes to provide appropriate, evidence-based interventions.

NATURE AND BASIC PROBLEMS OF NON-CONVICTION-BASED CONFISCATION IN THE UNITED STATES

This report discusses the goals that asset forfeiture is intended to serve in the federal criminal justice system, the types of property that are subject to forfeiture, and the procedures that are used to initiate, litigate, and conclude asset forfeiture cases. With respect to procedure, its focus is on non-conviction-based (NCB) forfeiture, and especially on the safeguards that protect the property interests and due process rights of property owners.

The 2018 Debate over Statutory Reforms to the Federal Criminal Justice System

The 2018 Debate over Statutory Reforms to the Federal Criminal Justice System

In Search of the Missing Link: Examining Contextual Variation in Federal Charge Bargains across U.S. District Courts

Punishment scholars acknowledge the fundamental importance of both prosecutorial discretion and jurisdictional variation in punishment; yet, little is known about the extent to which charging practices vary across court contexts. This is especially true in the federal criminal justice system. This research investigates this issue by linking four years of charging data from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AOUSC) to corresponding data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC). It incorporates unique information on district court contexts from a variety of sources to investigate jurisdictional variation in charge reductions. Findings provide evidence that federal charging practices vary across district courts. In particular, several structural court characteristics are significantly related to the likelihood of charge reduction for similarly-situated defendants. Results from this study are interpreted through the lens of contemporary legal perspectives on court communities and suggest several fruitful directions for additional research on the social contexts of criminal prosecution.

Inverting Risk Assessment: Considering the Lowest Risk Clients in the Federal Criminal Justice System

More than 30% of federal defendants have no prior official criminal history other than their present offense, and despite the low-risk nature of a large group of federal defendants, more than nine out of every 10 serve time in prison. Because of the overincarceration of low-risk defendants, the high cost of incarceration, and other developing evidence, there is growing interest in federal jurisdictions to develop alternatives to incarceration for defendants who pose little risk to public safety. Using pilot data from 1,046 federal pretrial defendants in a federal jurisdiction in the Midwestern United States, the current study developed a low-risk actuarial tool, validated the low-risk actuarial tool on a sample of pretrial candidates from the same federal jurisdiction, and examined recidivism outcomes at 1, 2, and 5 years after their entry into the pretrial phase of their federal prosecution. The assessment tool identified 65 clients as posing minimal risk, and these offenders accumulated just four arrests across 5 years. If all 65 defendants were sentenced to prison followed by supervised release, the total cost would be US$2.34 million, yet this blanket approach would have prevented just four arrests. The findings suggest two static criminal history factors coupled with age at onset of first offense and substance abuse predict excellent candidates for sentences of diversion and probation. Research implications and description of the development of the alternatives to incarceration screening work group in this jurisdiction are provided.

Racial and Ethnic Sentencing Differentials in the Federal Criminal Justice System

A large body of multidisciplinary research has documented how sentencing outcomes vary tremendously across racial and ethnic groups. The research challenge lies in establishing whether these sentencing differentials are driven by unobserved heterogeneity correlated to defendant race/ethnicity, or whether they reflect discrimination. We add to the debate by examining the robustness of racial/ethnic sentencing gaps, by gender, when allowing for selection on unobservables. We do so in the context of federal criminal cases, considering 250,000 cases, and using a dataset containing a rich set of covariates relating to defendant and legal characteristics of cases.

The Desired Outcome of the Federal Criminal Justice System

The Desired Outcome of the Federal Criminal Justice System

An Overview of Mandatory Minimum Penalties in the Federal Criminal Justice System (Sections 4 and 5)

Review Article| October 01 2017 An Overview of Mandatory Minimum Penalties in the Federal Criminal Justice System (Sections 4 and 5) United States Sentencing Commission United States Sentencing Commission Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Federal Sentencing Reporter (2017) 30 (1): 34–57. https://doi.org/10.1525/fsr.2017.30.1.34 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation United States Sentencing Commission; An Overview of Mandatory Minimum Penalties in the Federal Criminal Justice System (Sections 4 and 5). Federal Sentencing Reporter 1 October 2017; 30 (1): 34–57. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fsr.2017.30.1.34 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFederal Sentencing Reporter Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2017 Vera Institute of Justice2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Two Targeted, Back-End Reforms for the Federal Criminal Justice System

Two Targeted, Back-End Reforms for the Federal Criminal Justice System

Alternative Visions for the Federal Criminal Justice and Corrections System

Alternative Visions for the Federal Criminal Justice and Corrections System

Sex Offenders in the Federal Correctional System

Driven largely by changes in federal legislation, which increased resources for law enforcement and enhanced mandatory minimum sentences, the number of sex offenders handled by the federal criminal justice system has increased over the last 5 years at rates second only to illegal immigration offenses. The heightened attention to sex offending by federal law enforcement coupled with a greater certainty of punishment imposed has resulted in a record number of sex offenders in federal prison and on supervision in the community. Child pornography offenders, for example, share a similar likelihood of receiving a prison sentence (given being charged and convicted) as drug, weapon, and violent offenders. Sex offenders are also serving longer terms in federal prison and on supervision—terms that are expected to increase further in the next decade. This article considers changes in the federal response to sex offenders and growth in prison and supervision populations. Implications for the management of sex offenders in prison—including prison-based residential and nonresidential treatment programs and civil commitment for individuals adjudicated as sexually dangerous—and offenders under supervision in the community are discussed.