the crime report

One of the more troubling issues I have encountered in my 15 years of the practice of psychiatry is the frequency with which agencies work to evade responsibility and accountability for the clients they are supposed to serve.  No agency is immune to this problem, but in my experience, one of the most egregious situations goes something like this:

Joe is a 33 year old man seen on the grounds of a local elementary school. He is not recognized by school staff, and the police are called.  Upon approach by police officers, he appears not to understand their direction to leave the grounds.

(more…)

I recently heard a hopeful story about a distressing subject—child sex trafficking. A teenage girl, a recent immigrant, had suddenly disappeared from the community center she used to visit, and a social worker set out to find out what had happened to her. The social worker found out the girl had been kidnapped and forced into sex trafficking, and was being raped as many as 25 times a day. The community center worked with the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) to have the traffickers (who included the girl’s mother) arrested and prosecuted and the girl placed in foster care.

(more…)

Read more of Mark Pryor’s work at his blog D.A. Confidential.

Several news sources, including our local paper, have reported that the Austin City Council has approved 15.5 million for new digital cameras to be installed in APD’s cars. And several people have asked me what I think about this.

Woohoo.

Seriously, I think this is a great plan and the cameras will serve the community well, in the sense that they will hopefully reduce some of the anti-police sentiment and skepticism I see (too often, frankly) and make the criminal justice system more transparent.

(more…)

Last week, Congress corrected what most criminal justice analysts believe was a 24-year-old error, reducing the large disparity between mandatory federal prison sentences for crack and powder cocaine offenses.  Advocates hailed the long-overdue action. Alison Shames of the Vera Institute of Justice called it “monumental on many fronts.”

But why did it take a quarter century for Congress to act, and what does that long time lapse say about the prospects of reform on other criminal justice issues?

(more…)

In my last post, I raised the following question: How do we address the growing population of incarcerated individuals with mental illness?

One approach gaining popularity around the country is the idea of “specialized caseloads” for parole officers. Practically, what this means is that parolees with mental illness are assigned to parole officers who have received training on how to best manage this population and carry a reduced caseload.

(more…)

New Report Builds the Case for Action to Better Serve LGBT Youth in Louisiana

Louisiana is notorious for housing some of the most brutal youth prisons in the country. In recent years, it’s made great strides toward reform, as leaders introduced more therapeutic, rehabilitative models.

Even still, youth who identify as LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) experience physical, sexual and psychological abuse, excessive use of lockdown and isolation, confidentiality breaches and privacy violations in Louisiana’s juvenile justice system, according to the report “Locked Up & Out.”

(more…)

After a half-century of high crime rates in the United States, what do we really know about crime and justice? We’d know a lot more if a succession of congressional and Justice Department leaders had paid more attention to the National Institute of Justice, the Justice Department’s research agency, says a new report from an expert panel assembled by the National Research Council, part of the National Academy of Sciences. (http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12929) (more…)

Joan is a 62-year-old woman who was transferred from jail to the hospital for an assessment as to her competency to stand trial.  She was arrested in a subway station and charged with disorderly conduct, trespassing and resisting arrest, because she would not leave the pay phone when asked to do so by other patrons.  When approached by the police, she began yelling at them and refused to leave the premises.

(more…)

In a time of turmoil for American journalism, investigative reporting on criminal justice is alive and well, but it appears unevenly across the nation That was a central message  last week from the annual convention of the largest group of news reporters in the U.S., Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE).

Meeting in the unlikely location of a Las Vegas casino, IRE staged at least half a dozen panel discussions on hot criminal justice topics, four of which were organized by Criminal Justice Journalists, the co-operator of this website. The subjects included police fudging crime statistics, a new way of “justice mapping,” bail reform, and covering prisons during a budget crunch.

(more…)

Read more of Mark’s work at his blog D.A. Confidential.

This falls under the heading of “storm in a teacup” — or I hope it does.

On June 1 the New York Post reported that a bill has been proposed in the New York State Assembly requiring cops to shoot to stop, not shoot to kill, and police officers and their backers have said stuff like. . . . Well, they can say it better than me:

“It’s moronic and would create two sets of rules in the streets if there is a gunfight. This legislation would require officers to literally shoot the gun out of someone’s hand or shoot to wound them in the leg or arm. I don’t know of any criminal who doesn’t shoot to kill. They are not bound by any restrictions.”

(more…)