The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/research-analysis/page/2/)
Lifetime appointments to the nation’s highest court have given the “politicians in robes” too much power and too little accountability, argues a forthcoming essay in the Cardozo Law Review. The writers say a bill currently in Congress proposing fixed 18-year term limits is a step towards “democratizing” the court.
Despite youth justice reforms in many states, the U.S. still has one of the world’s highest rates of youth incarceration. That could change if authorities eliminated detention as a “catch-all” response to behavioral, social and mental problems suffered by at-risk young people, says the Square One Project.
Fewer executions were carried out in states than at any time in the past 37 years, according to the year-end report by the Death Penalty Information Center. But declining public support for capital punishment hasn’t swayed the lame-duck Trump administration, which is continuing to approve federal executions up to the time it leaves office.
An analysis of three months of COVID-19 data found that over half a million coronavirus cases were caused by the transmission of the virus into, through, and out of prisons and jails. The finding should force communities to rethink their incarceration policies, says the Prison Policy Initiative.
A move by outgoing President Donald Trump to pardon his close associates and family could leave him vulnerable to “thorough” investigations of his activities while he occupied the White House, according to a professor at the University of Missouri School of Law.
Two peer-reviewed studies published earlier this month concluded that providing local police departments with military gear — like high-powered rifles and armored trucks — do not reduce crime rates. The researchers also found that federal data supporting the militarization of police departments to reduce crime has long been ‘incomplete and inaccurate.’
At least 36 states will consider incarcerated people a “priority group” when administering the coronavirus vaccine, 12 states have no plans at all so far to put inmates on a priority list, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.
In a first-of-its-kind analysis of Texas arrest and conviction records, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that crime rates among undocumented immigrants “are just a fraction of those of their U.S.-born neighbors.”
Conceding that American counter-narcotics policies have at times caused “considerable harm” in many countries, a bipartisan commission on drug policy in the Western Hemisphere said Washington should address the domestic demand that has driven the illicit narcotics trade, even as it continues the fight against transnational cartels.
An upsurge in admissions to county jails across the U.S. threatens to make them a new source of COVID-19 infections to prisoners, staff and the communities where they are located, warns the Prison Policy Initiative.