The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/viewpoints/)
Ordinary disciplinary measures for violating prison policy apparently aren’t enough when an inmate develops a relationship with a staff member or volunteer. The women must feel the full weight of the system’s retribution, deterrence, disgust, and racial animus, charges an inmate from Washington State.
Attorney General William Barr’s criticism of reform prosecutors this week was not only “ill-informed”—it would lead us back to the failed tough-on-crime era, warns one of the nation’s leading criminologists.
The increasing number of exonerations around the country underlines the need for defense lawyers to double down on strategies of challenging faulty evidence, racial bias, and poor witnesses.
All too often our justice system isn’t equally fair to youth of all races, writes an R Street Fellow. Here are some ways to change that.
Inmates sometimes believe that striking up friendly relationships with corrections officers is a useful strategy. Our TCR columnist calls it a prison-based version of the Stockholm Syndrome—and is just as manipulative.
A vision of top-down criminal justice change is emerging that threatens to take on a life of its own, even though no individual participant would completely endorse it, and many participants would repudiate it, warns a TCR columnist.
The focus on misconduct of individual officers has shifted attention from the harder task of addressing the systemic flaws of U.S. policing, argue two researchers. They propose a way to get reform efforts back on track.
The troubling revelations of racist Facebook comments by law enforcement agents make clear that bigotry and its more insidious version of “implicit bias” need to be recognized—and promptly addressed—by prosecutors and police on the front lines of justice, writes the Miami-Dade State Attorney.
Insufficient support for crime survivors undermines the ability of prosecutors to uphold the law and do their part in helping communities thrive, writes the executive director of John Jay’s Institute for Innovation in Prosecution.
As we rethink the assumptions that have guided justice policymaking for decades, a leading criminologist proposes a research agenda that uses innovative ways of analyzing and organizing the terabytes of information collected by the nation’s justice agencies to underpin reform.