"The stay-at-home restrictions to control the spread of COVID-19 led to unparalleled sudden change in daily life, but it is unclear how they affected urban crime globally. We collected data on daily counts of crime in 27 cities across 23 countries in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. We conducted interrupted time series analyses to assess the impact of stay-at-home restrictions on different types of crime in each city. Our findings show that the stay-at-home policies were associated with a considerable drop in urban crime, but with substantial variation across cities and types of crime. Meta-regression results showed that more stringent restrictions over movement in public space were predictive of larger declines in crime."
Your resource for news, research, opinion and comment in the world of Criminology and Criminal Justice, brought to you by the Criminology Library, Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto
Sexual Assault of Sexual Minorities in the U.S. Military
"Much of the focus of research on sexual assault in the military has been on the risk faced by women. However, in civilian populations, individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) are known to be at especially high risk for sexual assault.
In this report, RAND researchers examine evidence from the 2016 and 2018 Workplace and Gender Relations Survey of Active Duty Members (WGRA) survey to estimate the proportion of military sexual assaults that are against LGB service members and others who do not describe themselves as identifying as heterosexual. They find that assaults on the minority of service members who do not describe themselves as heterosexual constitute almost half of the military's sexual assault numbers. The authors discuss sexual assault risks for these individuals and recommend modifying prevention programs to better address a large and previously unquantified proportion of all military sexual assaults."
A Second Look at Injustice
"Over 200,000 people in U.S. prisons were serving life sentences in 2020—more people than were in prison with any sentence in 1970. Nearly half of the life- sentenced population is African American. Nearly one- third is age 55 or older....
Legislatorxs in 25 states, including Minnesota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Florida, have recently introduced second look bills. A federal bill allowing resentencing for youth crimes has bipartisan support. And, over 60 elected prosecutors and law enforcement leaders have called for second look legislation, with several prosecutors' offices having launched sentence review units....
[This] report presents in-depth accounts of three reform efforts that can be models for the nation."
Multiagency Programs with Police as a Partner for Reducing Radicalisation to Violence
"Multiagency partnerships involving police are often implemented to foster collaboration and reduce radicalisation to violence. There is no clear evidence to support this approach, although a small number of studies provide mixed evidence about the effectiveness of multiagency partnerships for improving collaboration. Some studies offer insights about the costs and ways to best implement multiagency programmes."
Effectiveness of School-Based Programs to Reduce Bullying Perpetration and Victimization
"Bullying is a ubiquitous form of aggression in schools worldwide. Intervention and prevention programs targeting school bullying perpetration and victimization are effective, yet more research is needed to understand variability in effectiveness.
The main findings of our review are that anti-bullying programs were effective in reducing bullying perpetration outcomes by roughly 18-19% and bullying victimization by roughly 15-16%. There are substantial variations in effects, and the reasons for these variations require further research."
"Systemic Discrimination" Contributed to Failings in Toronto Police Missing-Persons Cases, Report Finds
"An independent review of the Toronto police force's handling of missing-person cases, including the victims of serial killer Bruce McArthur, has found that 'systemic discrimination' contributed to failings in a number of investigations.
That's one of the many takeaways from a massive report led by former judge Gloria Epstein that was released Tuesday morning. You can read the full report here.
Epstein found there were 'serious flaws' in how missing-person cases have been handled in Toronto, and notes that "the police could have done better."
Can Blockchain Safeguard the Rights of At-Risk LGBT People?
"LGBT people have always found themselves at the cutting edge of technological innovation - often out of necessity. They pioneered navigating dial-up chat rooms in the 1990s and looking for hook-ups in the early days of Grindr; now, members of Iran's LGBT community are using locally created private messaging apps using Telegram's source code to evade danger....
Yet online surveillance and censorship have cast a shadow over this marginalized community. The deployment of new technologies has emboldened anti-gay governments and non-state actors to crack down on the most vulnerable LGBT people across the world....
In a bid to safeguard hard-won civil liberties, activists, NGOs, and technology companies are increasingly looking to blockchain technologies as an effective way to provide tools for sexual minorities to defend themselves against repressive governments and gain equal rights."
Can Artificial Intelligence Give Us Equal Justice?
"It’s 'misleading and counterproductive' to block the use of machine-learning algorithms in the justice system on the grounds that some of them may be subject to racial bias, according to a forthcoming study in the American Criminal Law Review.
The use of artificial intelligence by judges, prosecutors, police and other justice authorities remains 'the best means to overcome the pervasive bias and discrimination that exists in all parts of the deeply flawed criminal justice system,' said the study.
Algorithmic systems are used in a variety of ways in the U.S. justice system in practices ranging from identifying and predicting crime “hot spots” to real-time surveillance....
The study authors concede that many of the algorithms are far from perfect, but they argue that dropping them altogether would remove an important counterweight to human fallibility."
Research Shows How Safety Concerns Impact Women's Travel Patterns
"New research from Ramboll finds that personal safety concerns about walking, cycling and using public transport have a big influence on how women move around cities.
The Gender and (Smart) Mobility report calls on cities and transport planners to adopt a safety by design approach and apply a gender lens to all projects without casting women as victims. This, it says, is the key to making all citizens feel safer.
The analysis brings together existing local and national gender-segregated transport behaviour data with a survey of 3,525 people and focus groups across seven capital cities – Helsinki, Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Berlin, New Delhi, and Singapore."
COVID-19 Hit Federal Prisons Twice as Hard in 2nd Wave of Pandemic, Report Says
Link to Correctional Investigator Report
"COVID-19 has hit federal prisons twice as hard in the second wave of the pandemic compared to the first, according to a new report from Canada's Correctional Investigator that recommends an inmate vaccination strategy to prevent more outbreaks behind bars....
In all, about 10 per cent of the federal prison population has been infected with COVID-19, compared to just two per cent of Canada's general population....
Among his key recommendations, Zinger [Correctional Investigator] alls on Public Safety Minister Bill Blair to explore alternatives to incarceration and to 'address the failings of Canada's aging, antiquated and costly federal prisons.'
Throughout the pandemic, prisoners advocates have called for the early release of offenders to limit the spread of COVID-19 in the confined and often crowded institutions. Zinger's report noted that there have been 1,053 fewer admissions than releases during the pandemic, but said that is due to reductions in sentencing and admissions during the pandemic rather than a planned increase in the release of inmates.
Zinger recommends that CSC collaborate with the Parole Board of Canada on the early, prioritized release of elderly and medically compromised inmates who don't pose a risk to society."
No End in Sight: America's Enduring Reliance on Life Imprisonment
Link to Summary and Key Findings
"Before America's era of mass incarceration took hold in the early 1970s, the number of individuals in prison was less than 200,000. Today, it's 1.4 million, and more than 200,000 people are serving life sentences - one out of every seven in prison. More people are sentenced to life in prison in America than there people in prison serving any sentence in 1970."
Council on Criminal Justice. Task Force on Policing: Policy Assessments
"In partnership with the Crime Lab at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy, the Task Force is conducting more than two dozen assessments of proposed policing reforms. Each policy assessment provides an overview of the state and extent of the evidence on each topic and the expected impact of each reform on public safety, misuse of force, police-community relations, racial disparities, and officer safety.
Task Force members are examining measures focused on preventing excessive use of force, reducing racial biases, increasing accountability, and improving the relationship between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve."
The Economic Costs of Pretrial Detention
"We measure the economic costs of the U.S. pretrial system using several complementary approaches and datasets. The pretrial system operates as one of the earliest points in the crim- inal justice system and typically represents an individual’s first opportunity to be incarcerated. We find that individuals lose almost $30,000 in present value terms when detained in jail while awaiting the resolution of their criminal cases. These adverse consequences are also present in aggregate data, with a 10 percentage point increase in county pretrial detention rates leading to an 1.05–1.41 percentage point increase in county poverty rates and a 1.15–2.06 percentage point decrease in county employment rates. Counties with high levels of pretrial detention also exhibit significantly lower levels of intergenerational mobility in later years, consistent with pretrial detention adversely impacting young children."
Court-Mandated Interventions for Individuals Convicted of Domestic Violence
"The objective of this review was to determine if court-mandated group-based batterer intervention programs are effective at reducing intimate partner violence among male batterers."
"This update of a Campbell systematic review examines the effects of court-mandated batterer intervention programs for adult males who have perpetrated intimate-partner violence."
"The review summarizes the evidence from 11 high-quality studies, including four randomized controlled trials and eight quasi-experimental comparison group studies.
Eight studies were conducted in the USA, two in Canada and one in Australia."
"The studies we included do not support the effectiveness of court-mandated batterer intervention programs. There are two important caveats.
First, there is not enough evidence to draw a strong conclusion that these programs do not work. The evidence is insufficient to conclude that they do work.
Second, there is a new generation of these programs that have incorporated new elements, such as motivational interviewing. Meta-analyses have established that motivational interviewing improves in-program outcomes, such as attendance and other indicators of compliance, but there is insufficient evidence to establish whether these newer generation programs reduce post-program intimate partner violence."
"The classic batterer intervention program that relied solely on a feminist framework, a cognitive-behavioral model, or a mix of the two, is unlikely to provide a meaningful solution to the problem of intimate partner violence. New programs and/or entirely new approaches to this important social problem should be explored."
Unequal Justice: Experiences and Outcomes of Young People in Ontario's Youth Bail System
"...This report begins with an overview of the legal framework for youth bail in Ontario followed by a literature review on the youth bail system. The findings section outlines the results of the data analysis, and key trends identified in the data and through the consultations. The report concludes with a section focusing on solutions, complete with a set of recommendations."
The Radical Idea to Reduce Crime by Policing Less, not More
"Evidence-based policing aims to make policing more fair, by treating it like medicine – running controlled trials to see which interventions work, and which don't."
Domestic Violence during COVID-19: Evidence from a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
"In March and April of 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic was wreaking havoc on the lives and economies of nations worldwide, government leaders began to institute stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders.
These orders, while intented to help stop the spread of the virus, could be associated with certain adverse outcomes, including child abuse and domestic violence, in particular. Stay- at-home orders and the pandemic’s economic impacts exacerbated factors that tend to be associated with such violence: increased male unemployment, stress associated with childcare and homeschooling, increased financial insecurity, and poor coping strategies, including the increased use of alcohol and other substances. In addition, COVID-19 left parents and children confined to their homes, cut off from friends, neighbors, colleagues, and others capable of reporting signs of abuse and violence and intervening to help potential victims escape violent situations. These and other pandemic-related dynamics increased the risk of abuse, and potentially its severity."
Undemocratic Crimes
"One might assume that in a working democracy the criminal law rules would reflect the community’s shared judgments regarding justice and punishment....
It may then come as a surprise, and a disappointment, that a wide range of common rules in modern criminal law seriously conflict with community justice judgments, including three strikes and other habitual offender statutes, abolition or narrowing of the insanity defense, adult prosecution of juveniles, felony murder, strict liability offenses, and a variety of other common doctrines.
In short, democratically elected legislatures have regularly chosen to adopt criminal law rules that conflict with the deep and abiding intuitions of their constituents."
Canada is Torturing Inmates with Solitary Confinement, Report Finds
Link to Report by Anthony Doob and Jane Sprott
"Nearly one-in-ten federal inmates who are placed in the 'structured intervention units' designed by the Trudeau government to replace solitary confinement cells are actually being tortured, a new report says.
The new research confirms what inmates and prisoner advocates have been saying for years: Canada isn't following its own laws, various court rulings, or international standards around the treatment of inmates. It is even violating a UN convention on torture that it helped write.
The new report, authored by criminologists Anthony Doob and Jane Sprott, called the findings 'very disturbing,'
The study looked at how often inmates were placed in those cells, how long they spent there, and whether they received any meaningful human contact during their stay."
Race and Criminal Injustice: An Examination of Public Perceptions of, and Experiences with, the Criminal Justice System among Residents of the Greater Toronto Area
"...Race and Criminal Injustice is an important examination of perceptions of the criminal justice system in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and follows earlier research by the same authors that found that perceptions of the police and the courts differed significantly by racial group. Using many of the same survey questions from their 1994 and 2007 studies, the authors found that Black and Asian people are still more likely than Whites to perceive racial bias in law enforcement, and also more likely to have negative perceptions of the police. And yet a majority of all respondents perceive that police treat Black citizens worse than Whites. In addition, public perceptions that the police and courts are racially biased have increased over the past twenty-five years. These findings are especially stark considering the number and scope of anti-racism initiatives and programs that major police services have undertaken to improve community relations during those years...."
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