The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/tcr-special-report/)
Stories by The Crime Report staff and nationwide network of contributors.
“If we didn’t exist, no one would invent us,” says former New York Commissioner of Probation Vincent Schiraldi. Speaking this week at the Smart on Crime conference at John Jay College, he said the punitive approach taken by probation and parole agencies made them major drivers of mass incarceration.
Some of the most embattled elements of the U.S. justice system, ranging from prisons to prosecutors, are emerging as targets of a rejuvenated bipartisan reform movement in the Trump-era. The broad outlines of that movement emerged this week during a conference at John Jay College in New York.
The terror group appears poised to turn its attention back to Western targets. But counter-terrorism expert Ali Soufan says Washington has been too slow to understand the threat.
Some of the urban neighborhoods singled out as the most violent places in the country are mislabeled. In most of them homicides are confined to identifiable “hot spots” which require more focused intervention, according to experts at the New York “Smart on Crime” conference Wednesday.
The Trump administration should ground its anti-crime strategy on evidence-based research and discard “ideologically-driven” approaches if it wants to keep Americans safe, former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Tuesday. He was joined by Georgia GOP Gov. Nathan Deal at the start of a two-day Smart on Crime forum at John Jay College in New York.
Many states are making it possible for individuals released from prison to find decent jobs, but more work needs to be done to give them a “fair chance” at turning the skills they learned behind bars into employment opportunities, the Smart on Crime forum was told Tuesday.
Efforts to close facilities like the Rikers Island jail complex in New York won’t work unless authorities find alternative ways to deal with seriously mentally ill individuals who run afoul of the justice system, says New York’s former chief judge.
A New York pilot program launched by students at John Jay College aims to help college-bound high schoolers and first-year college students deal with the forms of sexual aggression they might encounter on and off campus. The program is an outgrowth of a college course called “Seeing Rape”—the first of its kind in the U.S.
Prisoner rights advocates say the safety of inmates in areas threatened by climate change is dangerously low on the priorities of disaster planners. Exhibit A, they argue, are the thousands of prisoners in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico who were among the victims of this fall’s devastating hurricanes.
The FBI says overall reports of violent crime increased by 8.6 percent in 2016, and homicides were up 4.1 percent. One analyst called the increases “ominous,” following similar upticks in 2015. Others point out that crime in the U.S. is still at modern historical lows. “What’s going on?” asked another expert. “No one really knows.”