The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/author/jackatme/)
Photos published on Colombian policewomen’s social media showing 22 female officials aboard a Church of Scientology boat in August 2017 have reignited questions about the national police force’s links to the controversial church.
A new report by the American Bar Association’s Senior Lawyers Division makes nine recommendations and suggests 45 “action items” that it says can advance public health efforts to confront the opioid epidemic. One recommendation calls for promoting policies and laws that support families and caregivers struggling with opioid and substance misuse disorders.
In a report issued Tuesday, the Prison Policy Initiative found that people who have been to prison are 10 times more likely to be homeless than the general public. Recommended policy initiatives include barring housing discrimination against returning citizens.
Commonwealth authorities have been negotiating with CoreCivic, one of the nation’s leading private corrections companies for the transport of prisoners to Arizona, in an effort to reduce the burden on the island’s antiquated prisons and jails—many of which were rendered uninhabitable by last year’s Hurricane Maria.
A study by a home security startup argues they may not. The firm, which advertises its own “artificial intelligence” alternative, says a nationwide survey of law enforcement agencies found that in cities with populations of 50,000 or more, police won’t answer alarm alerts from 40 percent of residents.
Over a dozen Houston judges are appealing a federal judicial order forcing the prompt release of most misdemeanor defendants within 24 hours of arrest. The injunction went into effect last June.
The pronouncements that leading politicians make about crime can have a lasting impact on the crime fears of young adults, according to a study in the British Journal of Criminology.
The Texas Criminal Justice Coalition calls for reforms to community supervision that are ‘developmentally appropriate’ to young people who age out of the juvenile justice system but are still too immature to understand the consequences of their behavior.
Evidence indicating that individuals imprisoned for sexually violent offenses have a low likelihood of recidivating was never made public, according to two California scholars─perhaps because it called into question the constitutional legitimacy of state laws making sex offenders subject to indefinite civil commitment long after they served their sentences.
The number of people housed in private prisons increased five times faster than the total prison population between 2000 and 2016, and detainees in private immigration facilities increased by 442 percent in same period, says the Sentencing Project, predicting that as overall prison populations decline, corrections companies will “seek profit in other areas of criminal justice services and immigration detention.”