#criminaljustice

Jan 2, 2022
3 min

Increasingly, Cities Use Crisis Response Teams to Improve Police Interactions with the Mentally Ill

Police officers come into contact with millions of individuals with serious mental health problems each year. Many are arrested and end up in the jails and prisons that have become the nation's largest psychiatric care centers. But, unfortunately, many of the interactions between police and the mentally ill have a much more tragic ending. Brookings.edu: The Treatment Advocacy Center estimated in 2015 that people with untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to be kil

Dec 14, 2021
2 min

New Research: College-in-Prison Programs Dramatically Reduce Recidivism

One of the great failings of America's prison system is that it does very little to rehabilitate prisoners. As a result, our recidivism rate is among the highest in the world. Harvard Political Review: "Each year, more than 600,000 individuals are released from state and federal prisons. Another nine million are released from local jails. Within three years of their release, two out of three former prisoners are rearrested and more than 50% are incarcerated again." By way of

Apr 21, 2021
2 min

Chauvin Verdict is Satisfying, But Now We Need to Pass Real Criminal Justice Reform Legislation

The verdicts in the trial of Derek Chauvin are satisfying as the evidence of guilt was overwhelming. However, the nation will face many similar tragedies unless we use the lessons learned to pass criminal justice reform legislation to address the underlying bias in the current system. Former President Obama made that point yesterday in response to the verdict. CNN: "While today's verdict may have been a necessary step on the road to progress, it was far from a sufficient one.

Apr 6, 2021
2 min

Fascinating Research: Not Prosecuting Some Non-Violent Misdemeanors Reduces Future Criminal Activity

For decades most criminal justice experts and district attorneys accepted the theory that vigorously prosecuting defendants for minor first time offenses would reduce the risk that they would engage in future criminal activity. Recently, more progressive prosecutors have questioned the theory and some have stopped prosecuting certain nonviolent low-level offenses like prostitution, disorderly conduct, trespassing, and drug possession, arguing that it caused "significant harm

Feb 12, 2021
2 min

New Research; More Crimes Go Unreported in Cities that Cooperate With ICE

Police officials and researchers have known for some time that many individuals in the Hispanic community are reluctant to contact police about crimes they have witnessed or suffered if the city has a policy of cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE]. That's why many city officials have elected to become "sanctuary cities" which don't automatically detain undocumented individuals so they can be turned over to ICE. They believe that a "sanctuary" policy incr

Feb 6, 2021
2 min

A Momentous Day in Richmond; Virginia to End Capital Punishment

Virginia is poised to be the 23rd state to ban capital punishment, but the first in the South. It's quite a change of heart for the state that holds the national record for most executions - 1,389. The death penalty used to be quite popular in Virginia, but, public opinion has been slowly changing on the issue. The use of DNA evidence to review convictions demonstrated that prosecutors and juries are way more fallible than we imagined, and decades of research showed that capi