The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/research-analysis/)
While a small but influential group of big-city “progressive” prosecutors are actively promoting restorative justice, mainstream DAs remain skeptical. The way to win more converts is to show how the concept fits within traditional justice goals — and also hope for a less hostile political environment, argues a Fordham Law Review paper.
Homicide rates fell in April and May in most large cities as part of a general decline in street crime caused by restrictions imposed to contain COVID-19, but a report from Arnold Ventures adds “there’s reason to think 2020 will be more violent than 2019.”
“Proportionally, Native Americans are the most likely racial group to be killed by the police,” says a report by the Lakota People’s Law Project. Native American men are also imprisoned at four times the rate of white men, and Native American women at six times the rate of white women.
Responses to the spread of coronavirus in prisons and jails ranged from “disorganized or ineffective…to callously nonexistent,” the Prison Policy Initiative said in a report released Thursday, adding the ”systemic” failure continues to put the general public at risk.
A report published Thursday by the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance (CJJA) calls on state and city leaders to invest in eliminating racial inequalities. Giving the report extra weight is the fact that recommendations come from impacted young people themselves.
Typically, the criminal justice system is most concerned with an offender’s behavior before and during the crime committed. However, according to a forthcoming paper in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, analyzing an offender’s potentially redeeming behavior after the crime is just as important.
Federal prosecutors filed just 27 cases against police for excessive use of force in the first seven months of FY 2020, and 49 in FY 2019, according to a new TRAC report. In FY 2019, federal prosecutors filed nearly 70,000 cases for illegal entry into the country.
Criminal justice reforms have so far largely been limited to large cities, while racial inequities in incarceration and policing in rural areas go ignored, says former Utah prosecutor Maybell Romero.
Taxpayers usually end up footing the bill for lawsuits involving officer-involved shootings. But these settlements rarely achieve the goals of making police more accountable and deterring future misbehavior, argues a UCLA law professor.
Nearly 50 percent of former inmates experienced a traumatic event in the eight months after they were released, according to a recent Florida State University study. Citing ex-inmates’ trauma and lack of support systems, the authors believe change is long overdue.