Criminologist Joan Petersilia of Stanford Law School will give the keynote address next week at the National Institute of Justice’s conference on crime research and related issues in Crystal City, Va., near Washington, D.C., Petersilia will discuss the future of prison downsizing in the U.S., contending that current prison downsizing policies “may well backfire if we fail to heed the lessons learned from the intermediate sanctions movement of the 1990s.” Petersilia will speak Tuesday morning; the conference runs Monday through mid-day Wednesday. There is no charge for attending.
In a plenary session next Monday, Jeff Rojek of the University of South Carolina, Tami Sullivan of Yale University, and Vivian Tseng of the William T. Grant Foundation will discuss researcher-practitioner partnerships. On Wednesday, a plenary session will consider NIJ research to reduce police officer shooting and traffic-related fatalities — consistently the leading causes of officer line-of-duty deaths — and improve officer wellness. Panelists will be Bryan Vila of Washington State University, Carrick Williams of Mississippi State University, Karen Amendola of the Police Foundation, and John Violanti of SUNY Buffalo. NIJ has said that it will not hold the annual conference next year because of budgetary concerns but will resume in 2014.