Real-Time Crime Centers in Chicago

Link to Full Report

"Strategic Decision Support Centers (SDSCs) are the Chicago Police Department’s
(CPD’s) district-level real-time crime centers (RTCCs), launched in January 2017 and expanded
in 2018. They serve as command and control centers for staff to gain awareness of what is happening
in their districts and decide on responses. Their objectives are to improve districts’
abilities to reduce crime, hold offenders accountable, improve officer safety, and reduce service
times."

Global Expression Report 2019

Link to Online Report

"The data and analysis revealed in this report points to ingrained and corrosive challenges to freedom of expression around the world....

The report uses data for 2018, and combines it with analysis up to and including events in 2019."

Trends in Correctional Control by Race and Sex

Link to Full Report

"American prison populations have long been characterized by racial and ethnic disparities. U.S. Census Bureau data on incarcerated persons from 1870 through 1980 show that black incarceration rates ranged from three to nine times those of whites, depending upon the decade and region of the country.1 According to Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reports over the past 40 years, black imprisonment rates ranged from about six to about eight times those of whites. 

In recent years, racial disparities in imprisonment have decreased. BJS reports have drawn attention to the trend, showing that since the mid-2000s, black and Hispanic incarceration rates have fallen faster than those for whites.3 These changes also have been noted by media,4by advocacy organizations such as The Sentencing Project, and by the National Research Council. 

This report updates and advances earlier presentations of data on disparities."

Defending Progressive Prosecution

Link to Full Text

“'Progressive prosecutors' are taking over District Attorney’s Offices in cities across the nation, with a mandate to reform the criminal justice system from the inside. Emily Bazelon’s new book, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration, chronicles this potentially transformative moment in American criminal justice." 

Novel Policing Techniques Reduce Gun-Violence and the Cost to the Healthcare System

Link to Full Text

"The objective was to investigate the effects of novel policing techniques on hospital-observed incidence, healthcare utilization, mortality and costs associated with gun violence, from the perspective of a level-1 trauma center."

Lone Offender: A Study of Lone Offender Terrorism in the United States (1972-2015)

Link to Full Report

"...This study of lone offender terrorism attacks included offenders who carried out violent attacks in furtherance of any claimed ideology or cause, as long as the offender was primarily radicalized within the United States and carries out the attack against targets within the United States."


Association of Punitive and State Reporting Policies Related to Substance Use in Pregnancy with Rates of Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome

"Are state punitive or reporting policies related to substance use during pregnancy associated with rates of neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS)?

... Policy makers seeking to reduce NAS rates may wish to consider approaches favored by public health experts that focus on primary prevention."
 

The Crisis of Social Media

Link to Complete Report

"Internet freedom is increasingly imperiled by the tools and tactics of digital authoritarianism, which have spread rapidly around the globe. Repressive regimes, elected incumbents with authoritarian ambitions, and unscrupulous partisan operatives have exploited the unregulated spaces of social media platforms, converting them into instruments for political distortion and societal control." 

Crime and Consequence: What Should Happen to People Who Commit Criminal Offences?

Link to Full Text

"This collection is a call to action from a cross section of well-informed people from all corners of society. Although they vary in views and answers, they are united in their lack of support for the status quo."

Income Inequality and Mass Shootings in the United States

Link to Compete Article

"Mass shootings are an increasingly common phenomenon in the United States. However, there islittle research on whether the recent growth of income inequality is associated with this rise of mass shootings. Wethus build on our prior research to explore the connection between income inequality and mass shootings acrosscounties in the United States."


Association of Restrictive Housing During Incarceration with Mortality after Release

Link to Full Text 

"Question:   Is restrictive housing, otherwise known as solitary confinement, during incarceration associated with an increased risk of mortality after release into the community?

Findings:   This cohort study included 229 274 people who were released from incarceration in North Carolina from 2000 to 2015. Compared with individuals who were incarcerated and not placed in restrictive housing, individuals who spent any time in restrictive housing were 24% more likely to die in the first year after release, especially from suicide (78% more likely) and homicide (54% more likely); they were also 127% more likely to die of an opioid overdose in the first 2 weeks after release.

Meaning:   The results of this study suggest that exposure to restrictive housing as a condition of confinement is associated with an increased risk of death during community reentry."



Towards a Health-Informed Approach to Penal Reform? Evidence from Ten Countries

Link to Complete Report

"This report examines the effects of failed penal policies through the lens of health.... [It] makes a compellingcase for re-shaping our justice and health policies to ensure that society's most vulnerable citizens are better protected."



School Resource Officers Lack Training, Effectiveness Questioned: Study

Link to Full Report

"Since 1999, the federal government has spent close to $1 billion to deploy police in our nation's public schools.  Commonly referred to as School Resource Officers (SROs), these mostly armed law enforcement officers can now be found in an estimated 71% of all public high schools in the country, as well as in middle and elementary schools.

It remains unclear how effective SROs are in preventing the types of school tragedies that have rocked the country for 20 years and that are frequently used as a major justification for SROs' deployment."



Philadelphia's Probation Trap Ensnares African Americans: Report

Link to Complete Series

"Pennsylvania has one of the nation's highest rates of supervision, driven by unusual laws that leave judges unchecked. But many people fail, ending up in jail or in a cycle of ever more probation."

Does "Stop and Frisk" Include the Right to Remain Silent?

Link to Complete Article

"This article answers a question that has confounded the lower federal courts: whether a suspect briefly detained under the doctrine of Terry v. Ohio is obligated to answer police questions posed to her. Although the Supreme Court has never explicitly found a right to remain silent during a Terry stop, it has, through dicta, concurrences, and elsewhere, consistently assumed the existence of such a right. Nonetheless, more than fifty years after Terry was decided, lower federal courts consistently deny recovery to those who allege they were wrongfully arrested for refusing to answer police questions. Interestingly, these courts rarely reject outright the existence of a right to silence in the Terry context. Rather, they simply find that because such a right is not clearly established, officers who arrest suspects for refusing to answer their questions are entitled to qualified immunity."

How America's Health-Care System Makes Mass Incarceration Worse

Link to Full Report 

"Inmates suffering heart attacks , on the verge of diabetic comas and brutalized in jail beatings have been released so sheriffs wouldn't have to pay for their medical care. Some were rearrested once they had recovered."




Richard Rosenfeld Revisits Legacy of 1994 Crime Bill in New Report for Council on Criminal Justice

"...Rosenfeld’s report, titled 'Overviews and Reflections,' was intended to lead off of a series of academic papers planned on 'The 1994 Crime Bill: Legacy and Lessons.' It was published last week just ahead of the 25th anniversary of President Bill Clinton signing it into law.

A companion paper by criminologists William J. Sabol and Thaddeus L. Johnson looks more closely at the bill’s impact on prison populations.

'A selective reading of the legislation has resulted in... claims that the bill contributed to mass incarceration when, in fact, there is little evidence that it did,' Rosenfeld said.

He notes that the law only directly applied to the federal prison system, while much of the explosion in prison populations occurred at the state level. What’s more, much of that growth occurred before the bill was signed, and the rate of growth actually decreased after the bill had been enacted.


Research Reveals Link between High Pollen Counts and Low Crime Rates

Link to Full Text


"A large literature points out that exposure to criminal victimization has far-reaching effects on public health. What remains surprisingly unexplored is [the] role that health shocks play in explaining aggregate fluctuations in offending. This research finds novel evidence that crime is sensitive to health shocks. We consider the responsiveness of crime to a pervasive and common health shock which we argue shifts costs and benefits for offenders and victims: seasonal allergies. Leveraging daily variation in city-specific pollen counts, we present evidence that violent crime declines in U.S. cities on days in which the local pollen count is unusually high and that these effects are driven by residential violence. While past literature suggests that property crimes have more instrumental motives, require planning, and hence are particularly sensitive to permanent changes in the cost and benefits of crime, we find that violence may be especially sensitive to health shocks."




The Tragedy of Wasted Funds and Broken Dreams: An Economic Analysis of Childhood Exposure to Crime and Violence

Link to Complete Study

"In 2012, Attorney General Eric E. Holder's Task Force declared childhood exposure to crime and violence a 'natioinal crisis.'  The problem of childhood crime exposure, which we previously coined the Triple-C Impact, is estimated to be one of the most damaging and costly public health and public safety problems in our society today.  Yet, thus far no one knows how much it actually costs us.


this artilce aims to answer this daunting question and provide an empirical economic analysis of the cost of the Triple-C Impact problem to the state and to society."




Beyond Cannabis: Psychedelic Decriminalization and Social Justice

Link to Full Text Article

"Psychedelics are powerful psychoactive substances which alter consciousness and brain function. Like cannabis, psychedelics have long been considered prohibited Schedule I substances under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. However, via the powerful psychological experiences they induce, psychedelics are now being shown to be viable therapeutic alternatives in treating depression, substance use disorders, and other mental illnesses, and even to enhance the well-being of healthy individuals...."



Survey: Police Forces Face Hiring and Retention Crisis

"Police agencies across America are having difficulty keeping and hiring police officers,  according to a new survey produced by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF).

'The policing profession is facing a workforce crisis,' according to the survey, titled The Workforce Crisis, and What Police Agencies Are Doing About It.  Fewer people are applying to become police officers, and more people are leaving the profession, often after only a few years on the job. These trends are occurring even as many police and sheriffs’ offices are already short-staffed and facing
ABC News reported, 'The surveys shows a ‘triple threat’ for police departments: there is a decrease in applications, early exits and higher rates of retirement.'

Agencies participating in the survey reported that there has been a 63 percent decrease in applying to become a police officer. Departments are also having trouble hiring non-white/minority applicants the most, followed by female officers, according to the survey."

Link to Full Report
 

Predictive Policing Poses Discrimination Risk Think Tank Warns, but AI shouldn't be Dismissed

"The use of data analytics and machine learning in policing has plenty of potential benefits, but it also presents a significant risk of unfair discrimination, security think tank Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI) has warned.
 
A new report, Data Analytics and Algorithmic Bias in Policing, outlines the various ways that analytics and algorithms are used by police forces across the United Kingdom. 

This includes the use of facial recognition technology, mobile data extraction, social media analysis, predictive crime mapping, and individual risk assessment. The report focuses on the latter two and the risks they pose, given the predictive nature of these uses.

The study notes that if bias finds is way into these technologies, it could lead to discrimination against protected characteristics such as race, sexuality or age. This is a result of human bias in the data used to train these systems." 

Prosecutors, Democracy, and Justice: Holding Prosecutors Responsible

"As the nation grapples with fundamental questions about the nature of our democracy, advocates for criminal justice reform see hope in the nascent focus on one of the most powerful stakeholders in the legal system: the prosecutor.i1Across the country, prosecutor campaigns have shifted from debates over conviction rates and sentence lengths to candidates vying to show their commitment to ending mass incarceration and ameliorating other harms associated with the criminal justice system. While 85 percent of incumbent prosecutors ran unopposed between 1996 and 2006, and 95 percent of elected prosecutors were white in 2015, recent elections saw unprecedented electoral competition and diversity in prosecutor races across the country. As reform-minded prosecutors3 are elected in growing numbers, communities are holding them to account on their campaign promises to bring about deep criminal justice reforms. At the core of this new era of prosecutorial accountability is a more fundamental question: are reformers justified in betting on our democracy, specifically the election of a new generation of prosecutors, as an avenue to justice reform?

The electoral wins of reform-minded prosecutors are certainly cause for optimism, but they also necessitate public discourse about what it means for prosecutors to play a role as agents of change. Certainly the reform agenda is daunting. Even a campaign pledge to end mass incarceration by reducing the number of people in jails and prisons does not explicitly recognize the broader ways in which the state criminalizes and supervises large swaths of the US population, disproportionately low-income individuals and people of color, while affronting common standards of human dignity. With over six million people under correctional supervision,5 excessive use of the arrest powers, and stubbornly high levels of distrust of the criminal justice system in the communities most directly impacted, the need to temper the justice system’s excessive reach remains urgent. By promising to unwind the machinery that created this state of affairs, reform-minded prosecutors are tackling an enormous challenge."

Link to Full Text 

Spike in California Handgun Sales Linked to Increase in Firearms Injuries

"In the weeks following President Barack Obama’s re-election and the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012, Californians rushed to stock up on handguns.

Over the next year, firearm injuries in the state increased, according to a study released by the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program.

The study, the first to track the correlation between handgun purchases and firearm-related harm, showed that  gun injuries rose by 4 percent following a 55 percent increase in handgun sales.

The authors of the report, published in Injury Epidemiology, carefully hedged their findings to avoid drawing a direct cause-and-effect relationship. But they point out that, the number of guns purchased—36,142—above the normal pattern was associated with a greater risk of harm."

Read on...

Link to Full Text article
 

A Community-Based Report on Alberta's Supervised Consumption Service Effectiveness

"Alberta has six approved community-based SCS facilities operational in Calgary, Edmonton (three sites), Grande Prairie, and Lethbridge.1 The model used in each SCS organization is a supervised consumption and treatment-based approach....

Since 2016, 2,183 people have died in Alberta from opioids, with the vast majority (86%) now due to accidental fentanyl poisonings. The cost and burden of the opioid crisis on Alberta’s health care system is extensive, with huge impacts on Emergency Medical Service (EMS) responses and Emergency Department (ED) visits and hospitalizations. SCS provides a cost-effective way for people who use drugs to improve their quality of life and reduce the burden on EMS and ED. 

The recent 24% decline in fentanyl deaths in Alberta suggests that the harm reduction strategies are working, and their continued expansion into communities of need is a priority." 

Read on... 

10 Most Censored Countries

"Repressive governments use sophisticated digital censorship and surveillance alongside more traditional methods to silence independent media.

Eritrea is the world's most censored country, according to a list compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The list is based on CPJ's research into the use of tactics ranging from imprisonment and repressive laws to surveillance of journalists and restrictions on internet and social media access.

Under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, everyone has the right to seek and receive news and express opinions. These 10 countries flout the international standard by banning or severely restricting independent media and intimidating journalists into silence with imprisonment, digital and physical surveillance, and other forms of harassment. Self-censorship is pervasive."

Read on...

DOJ Survey: Violent Crime Now on the Rise

"The general trend of violent crimes committed in the U.S. has been steadily declining since the 1990s, but that crime rate appears to have reversed in recent years, based on findings released Tuesday from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS)....

This Bureau of Justice Statistics’ report differs from the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report (UCR), considering the fact that the NCVS looks at non-fatal reported crimes and self-reported surveys, whereas the FBI’s UCR collects data solely from police databases....

NCVS argues that this stark increase in the rate of violent victimizations, 'was largely due to crimes that were not reported to police....'

Researchers found that 'From 2015 to 2018, the rate of violent victimizations that went unreported to police rose from 9.5 to 12.9 per 1,000 persons age 12 or older, while the rate of violent victimizations that were reported to police showed no statistically significant change.'"

Read on...

Link to Full Report

The Future of Fentanyl and other Synthetic Opioids

"Deaths involving synthetic opioids in the United States increased from roughly 3,000 in 2013 to more than 30,000 in 2018. In fact, synthetic opioids like fentanyl are now involved in twice as many deaths as heroin. This book offers a systematic assessment of the past, present, and possible futures of synthetic opioids in the United States. It is rooted in secondary data analysis, literature reviews, international case studies, and key informant interviews. The goal is to provide decisionmakers, researchers, media outlets, and the public with insights intended to improve their understanding of the synthetic opioid problem and how to respond to it.

The authors conclude that (1) fentanyl and other synthetic opioids are becoming dominant in some parts of the United States and Canada, but remain less common in other parts of these countries; (2) a confluence of factors, including the dissemination of simplified and novel synthesis methods and increasing e-commerce, helps explain the surge in synthetic opioids; (3) much can be learned from other countries' experiences with synthetic opioids; (4) supplier decisions, not user demand, drive the transition to fentanyl; (5) fentanyl's spread is episodically fast and has ratchet-like persistence; (6) synthetic opioids drive up deaths rather than the number of users; (7) problems with synthetic opioids are likely to worsen before they improve, and states west of the Mississippi River must remain vigilant; (8) improving surveillance and monitoring is crucial; and (9) limiting policy responses to existing approaches seems unlikely to reverse this tide."

Read on...

Link to Full Report
 

The First Alleged Crime Committed in Space Raises Questions about Jurisdiction in Orbit

"NASA is currently investigating what could be considered the first crime perpetrated in space, after one of the agency’s astronauts was accused of illegally accessing her wife’s bank account during her stay on the International Space Station. Investigators have yet to decide if the event actually constitutes a crime, but this case does raise questions about how we should handle criminal activity in space in the future."

Read on...
 

Arrest, Release, Repeat: How Police and Jails are Misused to Respond to Social Problems

"Police and jails are supposed to promote public safety. Increasingly, however, law enforcement is called upon to respond punitively to medical and economic problems unrelated to public safety issues. As a result, local jails are filled with people who need medical care and social services, many of whom cycle in and out of jail without ever receiving the help they need. Conversations about this problem are becoming more frequent, but until now, these conversations have been missing three fundamental data points: how many people go to jail each year, how many return, and which underlying problems fuel this cycle.

In this report, we fill this troubling data gap with a new analysis of a federal survey, finding that at least 4.9 million people are arrested and jailed each year, and at least one in 4 of those individuals are booked into jail more than once during the same year. Our analysis shows that repeated arrests are related to race and poverty, as well as high rates of mental illness and substance use disorders. Ultimately, we find that people who are jailed have much higher rates of social, economic, and health problems that cannot and should not be addressed through incarceration."

Read on...
 

Algorithmic Equity: A Framework for Social Applications

"Social institutions — such as markets, social media platforms, criminal justice systems, and employment processes — increasingly leverage algorithms for decisionmaking purposes. This report examines potential pathologies in institutional use of algorithmic decisionmaking tools. The primary focus of this report is to understand how to evaluate the equitable use of algorithms across a range of specific applications. The report outlines concepts of equity from philosophical, legal, and technical traditions to draw insights that apply across algorithmic decisionmaking contexts. The researchers develop a framework for examining algorithmic decisionmaking and work through three domain explorations (auto insurance, job recruitment, and criminal justice). In addition, the work contains a deep dive into an algorithm audit of a part of the North Carolina criminal justice system. The work ends with overall insights and recommendations of practical mechanisms for algorithmic governance. The subject of the report is important because unaddressed equity challenges can undermine the stability and legitimacy of social institutions and lead to severe adverse impacts on affected people."

Read on...

Link to Full Report
 

How Norway Turns Criminals Into Good Neighbours

"What is the point of sending someone to prison - retribution or rehabilitation? Twenty years ago, Norway moved away from a punitive 'lock-up' approach and sharply cut reoffending rates. The BBC's Emma Jane Kirby went to see the system in action, and to meet prison officers trained to serve as mentors and role models for prisoners."

Read on...

Metro Vancouver's Top Doctor Calls for Safe Drug Supply as Fentanyl Overdoses Rise


"Vancouver Coastal Health’s top doctor is joining the calls for a safe and regulated drug supply in the region to help combat the overdose crisis.

In a report released Friday, chief medical health officer Dr. Patricia Daly says the safe supply would help fill the gap left by people who haven’t connected with the health care system, arguing expanding treatment for people battling addiction isn’t enough to eliminate further deaths.

'Replacing the unregulated, illegal supply of opioids with legal alternatives must rise to the top of our priority list, and requires our urgent attention,' Daly writes at the top of the report.


The report found fentanyl was detected in 87 per cent of overdose deaths across the Vancouver Coastal Health area in 2018 — a six per cent rise from the previous year.

In 2015, only 25 per cent of fatal overdoses involved fentanyl, an opioid 50 times stronger than heroin.

Daly makes 21 recommendations to improve services throughout the Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) region, which covers more than a million people on the South Coast.

Chief among those recommendations is to integrate the various services provided to care for people with substance abuse disorders."

Read on...

Link to Full Report

Related Article: How Opioid Courts Can Help Addicts Begin the "Long Road to Recovery"
 

 




Gatekeepers: The Role of Police in Ending Mass Incarceration

"Police in America arrest millions of people each year, and the likelihood that arrest will lead to jail incarceration has increased steadily: for every 100 arrests police officers made in 2016, there were 99 jail admissions, up from 70 jail admissions for every 100 arrests in 1994. Ending mass incarceration and repairing its extensive collateral consequences thus must begin by focusing on the front end of the system: police work. Recognizing the roughly 18,000 police agencies around the country as gatekeepers of the system, this report explores the factors driving mass enforcement, particularly of low-level offenses; what police agencies could do instead with the right community investment, national and local leadership, and officer training, incentives, and support; and policies that could shift the policing paradigm away from the reflexive use of enforcement, which unnecessarily criminalizes people and leads directly to the jailhouse door."

Read on...

Link to Full Report
 

Mental Illness Plays Only "Limited" Role in Mass Violence: Paper

"Mental illness plays an 'important but limited role' in mass violence, according to a paper prepared for the National Council for Behavioral Health by the Medical Director Institute (MDI).

'While there is a modest link between mental illness and violence, there is no basis for the public’s generalized fear of people with mental illness,' said the paper, which summed up a recent panel of experts on mass violence convened by the MDI.

'Having a psychiatric diagnosis is neither necessary nor sufficient as a risk factor for committing an act of mass violence.'

The paper noted that mass violence is 'rare,' and has accounted for less than two-tenths of one percent of homicides in the U.S. between 2000 and 2016, even though the U.S. stands out among other advanced countries because of the frequent use of guns by violence perpetrators.

Efforts to tie such incidents to mental illness are understandable but misleading, the paper said."

Read on...

Link to Full Report 

Related article: Violence and the Mentally Trouble: Reaching Them Before They "Explode"
 

Model Practices for Parents in Prisons and Jails

"This report offers a comprehensive guide to inform correctional administrators in their efforts to reduce barriers to incarcerated parents’ contact and communication with their children. Informed by leading experts in the field and individuals directly affected by parental incarceration, the guide describes many low-cost, high-impact practices and provides administrators with evidence on the effectiveness of recommended practices and helpful tips and resources for successful implementation. Examples of family-friendly practices include designing welcoming visitor lobbies, providing parenting and parent-child relationship programming, allowing for contact visiting, coaching parents on telephone calls with their kids, hosting family activity days, and conducting family-inclusive reentry planning."

Read on...

Link to Full Report

James Alan Fox: There is no Evidence of an Epidemic of Mass Shootings

"The horrific mass killings in El Paso and Dayton have understandably inspired terror in America and calls for expanded gun control, predictive policing, and mental health interventions designed to reduce violence.

But Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, the leading researcher on the topic for the past 35 years, tells Reason, 'There is no evidence that we are in the midst of an epidemic of mass shootings.' The number of incidents and casualties are simply too small to make such claims and, he stresses, the media coverage of shootings often ends up creating a false sense that gun violence—which is at or near historic lows—is ubiquitous and growing.

In a wide-ranging interview with Nick Gillespie, Fox explains the common characteristics of mass killers, why violent crime involving guns has declined over the past several decades, and how cable TV and social media contribute to a false sense of panic."

Read on...

"Red Flags" and Guns

"Issuing extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs), commonly referred to as 'red flag' orders, could reduce mass shootings, according to recent case studies.

Almost 80 percent of perpetrators of mass shootings had made threats in advance or somehow indicated in advance their plans for violent actions, according to a study published in the latest issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.

In three of the most notorious mass shooting incidents—Parkland, Fl., Aurora, Co., and Tucson, Az.—all of the shooters were recognized by friends, relatives, law enforcement or health care professionals members to be at a 'high risk' for committing violence, the study authors said.

The case studies were prepared by researchers from the Violence Protection Research Program at the University of California-Davis School of Medicine. They evaluated California’s 2016 statute establishing Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs), the first of its kind in the United States."

Read on...

Link to Full Test
 

How the Justice System Can Reward "Going Straight"

"After punishment, is there room for society to acknowledge an offender’s efforts to turn his or her life around?

Two researchers at the University of Pennsylvania Law School argue that the criminal justice system should publicly celebrate cases where those who have been convicted of a crime show remorse and atone for their behavior.

'The criminal justice system traditionally performed its public functions – condemning criminal conduct, shaming and stigmatizing violators, promoting societal norms – through the use of negative examples: convicting and punishing criminal offenders,' wrote Paul H. Robinson and Muhammad Sarahne in a research paper entitled The Opposite of Punishment: Imagining a Path to Public Redemption.

'One could imagine, however, that the same public functions could also be performed through the use of positive examples.'

Creating a path to redemption and offering uplifting examples of those who have taken this path would encourage others to do the same, the authors maintained. It would allow those who have been convicted to think of their future instead of dwelling on the past."

Read on...

Link to Full Text
 

The Physics of Dissent and the Effects of Human Momentum

"How do ‘people power’ movements succeed when modest proportions of the population participate? Here we propose that the effects of social movements increase as they gain momentum. We approximate a simple law drawn from physics: momentum equals mass times velocity (p = mv). We propose that the momentum of dissent is a product of participation (mass) and the number of protest events in a week (velocity). We test this simple physical proposition against panel data on the potential effects of movement momentum on irregular leader exit in African countries between 1990 and 2014, using a variety of estimation techniques. Our findings show that social movements potentially compensate for relatively modest popular support by concentrating their activities in time, thus increasing their disruptive capacity. Notably, these findings also provide a straightforward way for dissidents to easily quantify their coercive potential by assessing their participation rates and increased concentration of their activities over time."

Read on...
 

Does Stop and Search Reduce Crime?

"Despite recent declines in its use, stop and search continues to be one of the most controversial powers vested in police in England and Wales. Yet until recently there has been surprisingly little research assessing its effectiveness in reducing crime. In this briefing we attempt to redress this imbalance. Starting with an overview of recent trends in the use of stop and search, we then draw on our own research, as well as a number of other recently published studies, to suggest that its overall effect on crime is likely to be at best marginal. Existing research evidence seems to converge on this conclusion. This, we suggest, means that questions of the effectiveness of stop and search cannot be considered independently of the wider issues that surround the power: social and cultural understandings of what police are for; and a clear-eyed view of the impact policing has for those individuals and communities subject to it."

Read on...
 

State of the Criminal Justice System

"The Department of Justice Canada has created the first performance monitoring framework for Canada’s criminal justice system. It comprises broad expected outcomes, measured by selected national indicators. The Framework is based on extensive research and feedback from multi-phased consultations with criminal justice system partners, stakeholders, experts and other Canadians. The Department took on this work as part of its commitment to review the criminal justice system and as part of its broader efforts to identify and address data gaps that hinder evidence-based decision making. The Framework is presented through a State of the Criminal Justice System Report..."

Read on...

Access the Full Report
  

Reconsider "Violent Offender" Label, Panel Told

"Our criminal justice system’s treatment of those who have committed violent acts needs to change, said panelists Thursday at a presentation of two new papers by the Square One Project and the Emerging Adult Justice Learning Community.

The papers “Reconsidering the Violent Offender,” by the Square One Project and “Thinking About Emerging Adults and Violent Crime,” by the Emerging Adult Justice Learning Community provide research and recommendations about combatting violence and treating those with violent charges.

“The number one factor propping these systems up now is how we detain and sentence people we call violent offenders,” said Jim Austin, one of the authors of the Square One Project’s Paper. “We have to do something about the way we do this if we want to have any hope of lowering mass incarceration.”

Many individuals are labeled as violent offenders who are not actually violent, such as Sandra Bland, who was charged for with assault for kicking an officer, Austin pointed out.

“Once you get that label applied to you, there are severe consequences,” Austin said, noting that these individuals are less likely to be released pretrial, have longer sentences, less opportunities to appeal to a parole board, and higher supervision upon release.

Read on...

Link to Full Text:

Square One Project: Reconsidering the "Violent Offender"

Thinking About Emerging Adults and Violent Crime

Sex Offender Recidivism Lower than for other Released Prisoners: BJS Study

"Released sex-offenders are less likely to be rearrested than other released prisoners, according to new data released by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS).

But sex offenders who do return to prison are more likely to be guilty of another rape or sex-related crime than others who recidivate, the data show.

The study, titled “Recidivism of Sex Offenders Released from State Prison: A 9-Year Follow-Up (2005-14),” followed prisoners throughout the nine years after their release in 2005, comparing prisoners whose most serious offense was rape or sexual assault to other prisoners....

The BJS found that released sex offenders were over three times as likely to be re-arrested for rape and sexual assault than other released prisoners....

However, sex offenders were less likely to be arrested in general....

The study said the statistics are consistent with findings from a 2003 BJS analysis, which examined another sample of sex offenders following their release from prison in 1994."

Read on...

Access the Full Report

Big Data and Criminal Justice - What Canadians Should Know

"On its surface, the term ‘big data’ refers both to very large data sets, as well as the tools used to manipulate and analyze them. This concept, however, does not just refer to the harvested information – it also refers to the motivations behind what harvesting that information is supposed to achieve. When data is collected en masse, and algorithms (a series of instructions that tell a computer what to do) cross reference data both within and between datasets, the computational software processing the data identifies patterns within them. It is this notion of “identifying patterns” that serves
as the backbone of predictive justice.

Predictive justice uses data on past occurrences or behaviours to make decisions about the future, such as who and where will be policed, how an individual should be sentenced given the risk they pose to others, and when someone should be released from prison....

Unfortunately, there has been a lack of both awareness and scholarship regarding how this technology is being employed across Canadian police departments, justice agencies, and courts....

These predictive technologies are appealing because they claim to make justice a speedier, more egalitarian affair; they take complicated and potentially-biased discretionary decisions – such as who to police and who to assess as “higher-risk offenders” - and reduce these decisions to scores, numbers, or dots on a map. In so doing, these technologies can incur greater costs than benefits."

Read on...

Crime Up, Homicide Down: Five Things to Know about the 2018 Crime Statistics

"New national crime data for 2018 was released Monday, courtesy of Statistics Canada, with big changes to some key indicators. Here are five things that stood out:
  • Crime Up, but Still Near Decades-Long Law 
  • Less Homicide, but Provinces May Vary
  • Sexual Assault is Up, and More Left Unreported
  • Hate Crimes Down from 2017 Peak
  • More Fraud, More Extortion
Read on...

Link to Complete Juristat Report

What Doesn't Kill Us...

"In the face of a crisis or calamity people 'reconsolidate and rebuild' rather than descend into chaos.

An example of this is the Blitz and the Dresden Bombings of World War 11. In both cases the communities didn't crumble, instead they came together and helped each other survive.

However, as we've learned to better control man made and natural disasters our need to unite has diminished, and as [Centre alumnus] Vincent Harinam and Rob Henderson argue, 'one consequence of this is outrage culture'.

They continue, 'In the absence of legitimate calamities, we create artificial ones. Outrage culture is simply the calamitisation of the mundane. It is a process by which group solidarity can be lazily achieved by combatting non-existent crises. Whether it’s an actor fabricating a hate crime, journalists inflating the menace of a boy in a hat, or academics creating black lists, our outrage satisfies a deep desire to unite in overcoming a common threat'."

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Memo to Prosecutors: Crime Victims Are Your Responsibility, Too

"
Legendary Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, who died this weekend at 99, would often tell his assistant prosecutors: “Every case matters to the victim.” As far back as 1935, the Supreme Court enshrined the same point in a phrase that still resonates today.

The twofold aim of prosecution, the Court said in Berger v United States, was that 'guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer.'

The current criminal justice reform movement has, rightly, focused largely on the unmet needs of people charged with crimes, and on prosecutors’ role in addressing these challenges. However, this should not distract attention from the other fundamental work of prosecutors’ offices, as both Morgenthau and the Court made clear: to care for community members who have been victimized....

As a recent paper from the Institute of Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College of Criminal Justice argues, greater justice for crime victims requires reimagining the role of a prosecutor and reallocating resources."

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Want to Cut Back on the Prison Population? Start by Tackling Probation Reform

"President Trump recently noted the 3,000 individuals who will be released from prison next month thanks to the landmark First Step Act. Yet each day, we are sending 95,000 more people to prison in their place. We are sending them there not because they have committed new crimes, but because they have violated conditions of parole and probation. Adam Gelb, director of the Council on Criminal Justice, rightly calls this the “dirty little secret” of the criminal justice system in the United States.

Indeed, new research by the Council of State Governments shows that a quarter of all state prison admissions are due to minor technical violations of conditions of probation, an alternative to prison time, and parole, the release of an individual from prison before their sentence is complete. While on probation or parole, individuals are placed under community supervision and presented with a list of conditions to follow. Technical violations of these conditions can include things like missing a meeting with an agent, breaking curfew, or failing to pay fines and fees, none of which are crimes in and of themselves. Yet in some states, more people wind up behind bars for these types of violations than for actual crimes."

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How Confirmation Bias Sends Innocent People to Prison

"A new study of wrongful convictions shows the problem goes beyond misconduct by police and prosecutors.

Last week an Oklahoma judge freed Corey Atchison, who had spent 28 years in prison for a murder he has always said he did not commit, after concluding that he had been convicted based on the false testimony of 'purported eyewitnesses' who had been 'coerced' by prosecutors. The next day, an Idaho judge exonerated Christopher Tapp, who had served more than two decades for rape and murder, after DNA evidence implicated another man, who confessed to the crimes.

While cases like these often feature wrongdoing by individual prosecutors and police officers, a new study suggests the problem is deeper. After analyzing 50 wrongful convictions and other investigative failures, Texas State criminologists Kim Rossmo and Joycelyn Pollock found that confirmation bias, reinforced by groupthink and strong incentives to quickly identify the perpetrators of highly publicized crimes, figures prominently in the mistakes that send innocent people to prison."

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Prosecution and Public Defense: The Prosecutor's Role in Securing a Meaningful Right to an Attorney

Prosecution and Public Defense: The Prosecutor's Role in Securing a Meaningful Right to an Attorney
"Public defenders have faced mounting caseloads and declining budgets for years. While well documented in court cases and research reports, this crisis has yet to be remedied through adequate funding or policy and practice change. The insufficient time and resources that public defenders have undermines representation for, and the life and liberty of, their clients.

All legal stakeholders should be concerned with the state of indigent defense and its implications for constitutional protections, equality under the law, and justice. In our adversarial system, prosecutors, in particular, have a role to play in securing a meaningful right to an attorney.

Today there is unprecedented focus on the power of the prosecutor. With discretion to charge, recommend bail, and condition pleas, prosecutors are amongst the most powerful stakeholders in the
criminal justice system. As communities demand, and prosecutors strive towards, a more equitable and effective justice system, prosecutors should be prepared to answer: How are you going to ensure
a robust defense for all?"

Report on Algorithmic Risk Assessment Tools in the U.S. Criminal Justice System

Report on Algorithmic Risk Assessment Tools in the U.S. Criminal Justice System
"This report documents the serious shortcomings of risk assessment tools in the U.S. criminal justice system, most particularly in the context of pretrial detentions, though many of our observations also apply to their uses for other purposes such as probation and sentencing. Several jurisdictions have already passed legislation mandating the use of these tools, despite numerous deeply concerning problems and limitations. Gathering the views of the artificial intelligence and machine learning research community, PAI has outlined ten largely unfulfilled requirements that jurisdictions should weigh heavily and address before further use of risk assessment tools in the criminal justice system."

Do Minimum Wage Increases Raise Crime Rates?

Do Minimum Wage Increases Raise Crime Rates?
"They do for younger workers and property crimes, finds a new paper by Zachary S. Fone, Joseph J. Sabia and Resul Cesur.

Back in 2016, President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) claimed raising the minimum wage to $12 per hour could prevent up to half a million crimes annually. The basic idea was simple: there is good evidence criminal behavior is negatively related to wages. The CEA thought raising the minimum wage would raise the opportunity cost of low-paid workers engaging in crime.

Implicitly they were saying this crime-reduction effect would dominate any impact of job losses or hour reductions leading to more property crime, for economic reasons, or violent crime, for despair-related reasons. But this new paper suggests the CEA’s intuition on the balance of the effects was wrong, for younger workers especially."

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Income-Based Fines Could Reduce Justice Debts for the Poor: Study

Income-Based Fines Could Reduce Justice Debts for the Poor: Study
"Some 300,000 Americans owed nearly $136 billion in criminal debt in 2017, the last year for which data is available, according to a study sponsored by the Brookings Institute.

An astonishing 90 percent of that debt is categorized as unrecoverable by the federal government, said the study authored by Prof. Beth A. Colgan of the UCLA School of Law.

But in the process, the escalating court fees and fines often end up locking low-income individuals behind bars in the modern equivalent of “debtors’ prisons” when they can’t pay, Colgan wrote.

In her study, sponsored by the Hamilton Project of Brookings, Colgan proposed a system of “graduated sanctions” that would be levied according to a person’s ability to pay."

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New Report: Postsecondary Education In Prison Increases Employment Among Formerly Incarcerated, Cuts Costs & Benefits Businesses

New Report: Postsecondary Education In Prison Increases Employment Among Formerly Incarcerated, Cuts Costs & Benefits Businesses
"The Vera Institute of Justice and the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality today released a new report, “Investing in Futures: Economic and Fiscal Benefits of Postsecondary Education in Prison.” The first of its kind report found that removing the federal ban on Pell Grants for people in prison would:

  • Increase employment rates among formerly incarcerated students by 10 percent, on average; combined earnings among all formerly incarcerated people would increase by $45.3 million during the first year of release alone;
  • Provide employers with a larger pool of skilled workers to hire; and
  • Reduce recidivism rates among participating students, saving states a combined $365.8 million in decreased prison costs per year.
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The Criminogenic and Psychological Effects of Police Stops on Black and Latino Boys
"Four waves of longitudinal survey data demonstrate that contact with law enforcement predicts increases in black and Latino adolescents’ self-reported criminal behaviors 6, 12, and 18 months later. These results are partially mediated by psychological distress. The younger boys are when stopped for the first time, the stronger these relationships. Boys’ race and prior engagement in delinquent behaviors did not moderate the effect. These findings fill a gap in the research literature on labeling, life course, general strain, and deterrence theories.... [and] raise policy questions about the influence of proactive policing on the trajectory of children."
 
The Case for Expunging Criminal Records
"The consequences of a run-in with the law can persist for decades after the formal sentence has been served. People with records face major barriers to employment, housing and education, effectively condemning them to second-class citizenship.

In recent years, criminal justice reform efforts have increasingly focused on finding policy tools that can lower these barriers. The most powerful potential lever is the expungement of criminal convictions, which seals them from public view, removes them from databases, and neutralizes most of their legal effects....

For many years, debates about expungement laws have been missing something critical: hard data about their effects. But this week, we released the results of the first major empirical study of expungement laws. Michigan, where our data came from, has an expungement law that exemplifies the traditional nonautomatic approach."

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From Courtesy, to Discretion... to Heightened Police Power
"In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court legitimized pretextual policing. The case of Whren v. United States began when a vice squad officer noticed a Pathfinder SUV with temporary license plates waiting at a stop sign for more than 20 seconds—an unusually long time to pause at an empty intersection—in what the officer considered a 'high drug area' of Washington, D.C. Inside were two young black men. Suspicious, but without any specific reasons that the car’s occupants might be committing a crime, the officer stopped the car for making a right turn without signaling and driving at an 'unreasonable' speed. When the officer stepped up to the driver-side window, he saw two plastic bags of crack cocaine in Michael Whren’s hands.

Whren and his friend in the passenger seat appealed their federal drug convictions to the Supreme Court. They argued that pretextual traffic stops violated the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits 'unreasonable searches and seizures' and generally requires an articulable suspicion to stop—that is, to make a “seizure” of—an individual. Because the officer did not have legal cause to act on his mere hunch that criminal activity was afoot, he relied on minor traffic violations to investigate....

The social and legal developments that have led to the systematic policing of minorities, however, did not begin with an intent to do so. The history of discretionary policing, which today enables racialized policing, actually begins with the mass production of the automobile and the practical need to regulate upstanding citizens."

The Next Frontier for Juvenile Justice: Reinvest in At-Risk Youth
"There is no scarcity of research concluding that locking kids up for juvenile delinquency does little to teach correct behavior or prepare youth for successful adulthood. It’s not just  counterproductive; national and state-level findings reveal that it is also broadly racially discriminatory and a leech on the public purse.

In a new report, the Urban Institute argues that by repurposing public funds previously used on different elements of youth incarceration, jurisdictions will see decreases in youth delinquency and recidivism while building stronger communities and saving taxpayer dollars."

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Predictive Policing is Tainted by "Dirty Data," Study Finds
"A new study from New York University School of Law and NYU's AI Now Institute concludes that predictive policing systems run the risk of exacerbating discrimination in the criminal justice system if they rely on 'dirty data.'




Law enforcement has come under scrutiny in recent years for practices resulting in disproportionate aggression toward minority suspects, causing some to ask whether technology – specifically, predictive policing software – might diminish discriminatory actions.

However, a new study from New York University School of Law and NYU's AI Now Institute concludes that predictive policing systems, in fact, run the risk of exacerbating discrimination in the if they rely on 'dirty data' – data created from flawed, racially biased, and sometimes unlawful practices.

The researchers illustrate this phenomenon with case study data from Chicago, New Orleans, and Arizona's Maricopa County. Their paper, 'Dirty Data, Bad Predictions: How Civil Rights Violations Impact Police Data, Predictive Policing Systems, and Justice,' is available on SSRN."

Justice Denied: The Harmful and Lasting Effects of Pretrial Detention
"The pretrial population—the number of people who are detained while awaiting trial—increased 433 percent between 1970 and 2015. This growth is in large part due to the increased use of monetary bail. But pretrial detention has far-reaching negative consequences. This evidence brief presents information on the way that pretrial detention is currently used and summarizes research on its impacts. These studies call into question whether pretrial detention improves court appearance rates, suggests that people who are detained are more likely to be convicted and to receive harsher sentences, and indicate that even short periods of detention may make people more likely to become involved with the criminal justice system again in the future. The brief concludes by highlighting strategies that some jurisdictions have employed to reduce the use of monetary bail and increase pretrial release."

Link to Full Report

Inspector General: Chicago PD Gang Database Disorganized, Inaccurate
"The Chicago Police Department’s database of suspected gang members is disorganized, inaccurate and raises questions about fairness, the city’s inspector general said in a highly critical report released Thursday.

The 159-page study offered a number of recommendations to the city on how best to correct the database’s inaccuracies, which the Office of the Inspector General said undermines 'public trust and confidence in the police.'

In addition to containing incomplete and at-times contradictory information, the 'patchwork' of databases involves more than 500 agencies without cohesive oversight and accountability mechanisms, the report said.

'The lack of oversight and transparency for the ‘gang database’ contributes to a variety of negative consequences for both individuals and communities,' Chicago Inspector General Joseph Ferguson wrote.

Among the report’s 30 recommendations, Ferguson calls for requiring evidence before assigning gang designations to individuals, notifying those individuals if they have been designated a gang member, establishing a process by which those individuals can appeal the designation, regularly reviewing the database for inaccuracies and creating a method for purging old or inaccurate information."

Police in Canada are Tracking People's "Negative" Behavior in a "Risk" Database
"Police, social services, and health workers in Canada are using shared databases to track the behaviour of vulnerable people—including minors and people experiencing homelessness—with little oversight and often without consent.

Documents obtained by Motherboard from Ontario’s Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services (MCSCS) through an access to information request show that at least two provinces—Ontario and Saskatchewan—maintain a 'Risk-driven Tracking Database' that is used to amass highly sensitive information about people’s lives. Information in the database includes whether a person uses drugs, has been the victim of an assault, or lives in a 'negative neighborhood.'

The Risk-driven Tracking Database (RTD) is part of a collaborative approach to policing called the Hub model that partners cops, school staff, social workers, health care workers, and the provincial government."

2018 Called "High Point" in Restoring Rights to Individuals with Criminal Records
"Some 30 states and the District of Columbia passed laws or enacted statutes aimed at helping returning incarcerees adjust to life in civilian society, representing a “high point” in national efforts to restore rights and status to people with a criminal record, according to the Collateral Consequences Resource Center (CCRC)....

During 2018, some 52 separate statutes (some addressing multiple restoration mechanisms),  three executive orders, and one ballot initiative aimed at enhancing the prospects for successful reentry and reintegration were enacted. In comparison, 23 states enacted 42 new restoration laws in 2017.

The CRCC said the 'most consequential single new law' was the ballot initiative approved by Florida voters last fall to restore the franchise to 1.5 million people with a felony conviction."

Vie the Full Report
 
The War-Torn Web: A Once-Unified Online World has Broken into New Warring States
The global internet continues to fragment. Governments, in particular, are using their influence to shape the ways that digital companies, markets, and rights connect us online. This new form of realpolitik, which we call “digitalpolitik,” is an emerging tactical playbook for how governments use their political, regulatory, military, and commercial powers to project influence in global, digital markets.

Last month, at the Internet Governance Forum, French President Emmanuel Macron announced the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace, a multi-stakeholder effort to define internet principles around human rights law, with calls for protections against cybercrimes, intellectual property theft, hate speech, and hacking from nonstate actors.

The Untapped Promise of Cannabis Legalization
"Cannabis legalization is spreading across the globe. In this visionary talk, criminologist Akwasi Owusu-Bempah shares his insights on the people who have been most impacted by drug prohibition and explains how the economic benefits of legalization can be used to promote positive social change. Akwasi Owusu-Bempah is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. His work focuses on the intersections of race, crime and criminal justice, with a particular interest in the area of policing. Akwasi is now studying various aspects of cannabis legalization in Canada. His current projects include a study of Black males’ perceptions of and experiences with the police in Greater Toronto Area."

Reimagining Prison Report
"Prison in America causes individual, community, and generational pain and deprivation. Built on a system of racist policies and practices that has disproportionately impacted people of color, mass incarceration has decimated communities and families. But the harsh conditions within prisons neither ensure safety behind the walls nor prevent crime and victimization in the community.

In this report, the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) reimagines the how, what, and why of incarceration and asserts a new governing principle on which to ground prison policy and practice: human dignity. Basing American corrections practice on human dignity acknowledges and responds to the role formal state punishment systems have played in creating and perpetuating inequality. Vera proposes three practice principles to give life to this tenet: (1) respect the intrinsic worth of each human being; (2) elevate and support personal relationships; and (3) respect a person’s capacity to grow and change."

Link to Full Report
 
Related Report: What Incentives Work in Prison? A Prisoner Policy Network Consultation
 
Police Across the US are Training Crime-Predicting AIs on Falsified Data
"In May of 2010, prompted by a series of high-profile scandals, the mayor of New Orleans asked the US Department of Justice to investigate the city police department (NOPD). Ten months later, the DOJ offered its blistering analysis: during the period of its review from 2005 onwards, the NOPD had repeatedly violated constitutional and federal law.

It used excessive force, and disproportionately against black residents; targeted racial minorities, non-native English speakers, and LGBTQ individuals; and failed to address violence against women....

Despite the disturbing findings, the city entered a secret partnership only a year later with data-mining firm Palantir to deploy a predictive policing system. The system used historical data, including arrest records and electronic police reports, to forecast crime and help shape public safety strategies, according to company and city government materials. At no point did those materials suggest any effort to clean or amend the data to address the violations revealed by the DOJ. In all likelihood, the corrupted data was fed directly into the system, reinforcing the department’s discriminatory practices....

 But new research suggests it’s not just New Orleans that has trained these systems with 'dirty data.' In a paper released today, to be published in the NYU Law Review, researchers at the AI Now Institute, a research center that studies the social impact of artificial intelligence, found the problem to be pervasive among the jurisdictions it studied."

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