The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/focus/)
This section features the best criminal justice reporting around the nation, produced by our media partners and collaborators, and journalists who have participated in the Criminal Justice Reporting Fellowship programs sponsored by the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, TCR’s parent organization. For a more comprehensive list of Fellows’ work, please check out the “programs” section—and monitor this site for information on upcoming programs and how to apply!
For justice-involved members of the Chippewa nation in northern Minnesota, the judicial system has failed to tackle the “historical traumas” that have mired them in substance abuse and other ills. But tribal and state authorities are collaborating on a plan to apply traditional tribal notions of restorative justice to their needs.
Raise the Age laws bar judges from sending youth defendants to adult detention facilities. But the New York State law passed in 2018 has had some unintended consequences for young people.
As police around the country struggle to recruit women, some states are doing worse than others. In New Jersey, a tough new fitness standard has almost tripled the rate of women failing police academy physical tests, according to a newspaper investigation.
For the last 18 months, Middlesex, which is Massachusetts’ most populous county, has sought to abolish the use of cash bail for low-level defendants, who otherwise languish in detention before trial if they cannot pay their way out of lockup.
Mental health courts offer troubled individuals a treatment alternative to jail. They’ve begun to take hold in rural Minnesota’s “Iron Range,” where the fourth such court in the state recently began hearing its first cases.
“We see the transformation in front of our eyes,” says a member of the team operating out of the rural courtroom where Judge Michelle Anderson offers substance abusers the chance to drop charges if they participate in a rigorous 13-month treatment program.
With the death toll from opioid overdoses growing in northern Minnesota, officials have concluded they can’t arrest their way out of the problem. Jess McCarthy of Duluth’s police department is among those who have launched promising alternatives.
In Wisconsin’s Washburn County, local authorities are developing diversion and counseling programs to cope with a 60 percent increase in jail inmates in the past eight years. But they admit it’s an uphill struggle.
Two-thirds of all license suspensions in New York are just for traffic debt. In the upstate city of Rochester, the poor have been hit the hardest.
In rural New York, youth advocates and authorities have found a more age-appropriate way to house older justice-involved youths who are no longer subject to the adult justice system.