How a community responds to behavioral health emergencies is both a public health issue and social justice issue. Individuals experiencing a behavioral health crisis often receive inadequate care in ...emergency departments (EDs), boarding for hours or days while waiting for treatment. Such crises also account for a quarter of police shootings and >2 million jail bookings per year. Racism and implicit bias magnify these problems for people of color. Growing support for reform provides an unprecedented opportunity for meaningful change, but solutions to this complex issue will require comprehensive systemic approaches. As communities grapple with behavioral health emergencies, the question is not just
law enforcement should respond to behavioral health emergencies but
to reduce unnecessary law enforcement contact and, if law enforcement is responding,
,
, and
. This policy article reviews best practices for law enforcement crisis responses, outlines the components of a comprehensive continuum-of-crisis care model that provides alternatives to law enforcement involvement and ED use, and offers strategies for collaboration and alignment between law enforcement and clinicians toward common goals. Finally, policy considerations regarding stakeholder engagement, financing, data management, legal statutes, and health equity are presented to assist communities interested in taking steps to build these needed solutions.
Restorative justice is gaining relevance in Indonesia as an alternative approach to resolving legal cases, focusing on restoring relationships among perpetrators, victims, and society. It aims to ...address the needs, rights, and welfare of children, allowing child offenders to take responsibility for their actions and repair the harm caused. The successful implementation of restorative justice in Indonesia includes facilitating dialogue between victims and perpetrators, aiding victims' emotional recovery, and engaging children in behavior improvement activities. However, challenges persist in raising awareness and garnering support from the community and justice system, necessitating proper training for an equitable and effective process. While restorative justice serves as a valuable means of providing justice for children, it may not be suitable for all cases, occasionally undermining justice for child victims. This paper analyzes how restorative justice can offer justice to children in Indonesia and delves into legal reform, particularly in juvenile delinquency, concerning the application of this approach. Nonetheless, it acknowledges that in specific instances, restorative justice might prove inappropriate, potentially compromising a sense of justice, especially for child victims.
Research Summary
Our study represents the first effort to evaluate systematically Proposition 47's (Prop 47's) impact on California's crime rates. With a state‐level panel containing violent and ...property offenses from 1970 through 2015, we employ a synthetic control group design to approximate California's crime rates had Prop 47 not been enacted. Our findings suggest that Prop 47 had no effect on homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, or burglary. Larceny and motor vehicle thefts, however, seem to have increased moderately after Prop 47, but these results were both sensitive to alternative specifications of our synthetic control group and small enough that placebo testing cannot rule out spuriousness.
Policy Implications
As the United States engages in renewed debates regarding the scale and cost of its incarcerated population, California stands at the forefront of criminal justice reform. Although California reduced its prison population by 13,000 through Prop 47, critics argue anecdotally that the measure is responsible for recent crime upticks across the state. We find little empirical support for these claims. Thus, our findings suggest that California can downsize its prisons and jails without compromising public safety.
Mass incarceration is an unprecedented development, one with myriad adverse consequences. Although the expansion of US penal institutions is largely a function of changes in practice and policy ...rather than rising crime rates, reversing this trend will nonetheless be challenging. The need for comprehensive sentencing reform is clear, but political limits on legislative remedies and the failure of the courts to notably reduce the scale, or improve conditions, of confinement render these approaches highly uncertain. In the short term, unconventional methods that do not require legislative authorization, such as electing, pressuring, and incentivizing prosecutors to reduce penal severity, may be a promising way of addressing mass incarceration. The return and revitalization of parole or other systems of post-sentence review are also crucial and may be legitimated in terms of the need to incentivize rehabilitation and prevent the unnecessary and costly incarceration of the elderly. The recent mobilization of grass-roots movements for penal change that include those directly affected by both violence and mass incarceration is also auspicious, as their work may help to humanize the justice-involved and undermine the erroneous assumption that crime survivors are well-served by mass incarceration.
Recently, in the wake of high-profile incidents, public and policy attention has been directed toward addressing mental health as an avenue to prevent crime. Given the link between public opinion and ...policy, it is important to understand how the public views such efforts. Specifically, do Americans favor measures (e.g., diversion/mental health partnerships, 988 hotline) that require a mental health, rather than police response, for incidents involving mentally distressed people? What factors—concerning beliefs about crime and mental health and personal characteristics (e.g., prior mental health history)—are associated with these policy preferences? Drawing on a 2022 national poll, this study examines these research questions. Results suggest majority approval for changes in mental health responses to crime among the public. However, divides in public attitudes are evident.
Several states have adopted recreational marijuana legislation (RML). While the public favors RML, open questions remain concerning the specific implementation of legalization. Specifically, how do ...Americans feel the revenue from such sales should be spent? Relatedly, what justice reforms should be considered? Not least, what proportion of the public remains uncertain about these facets of regulation and how does this uncertainty impact policy preferences for investment and reform? These are important questions to examine given the public’s influence in the emergence of RML. Drawing on a 2022 national poll (N = 1,003), this study examines public attitudes toward investment strategies (e.g., public schools) and justice system responses due to legalization (e.g., expungement). Results suggest that most of the public approves of these measures. However, divides in favoring specific initiatives are evident. Implications are discussed.
Can the impact of justice processes be enhanced with the inclusion of a heterogeneous component into an existing cost-benefit analysis (CBA) APP that demonstrates how benefactors and beneficiaries ...are affected? Such a component requires: (i) moving beyond the traditional cost benefit conceptual framework of utilising averages; (ii) identification of social group or population-specific variation; (iii) identification of how justice processes differ across groups/populations; (iv) distribution of costs and benefits according to the identified variations; and (v) utilisation of empirically informed statistical techniques to gain new insights from data and maximise impact to beneficiaries. In this paper, we outline a method for capturing heterogeneity. We test our method and the CBA online APP we developed using primary data collected from a developmental crime prevention intervention in Australia. We identify how subgroups in the intervention display different behavioural adjustments across the reference period revealing the heterogeneous distribution of costs and benefits. Finally, we discuss the next version of the CBA APP, which incorporates an AI-driven component that reintegrates individual CBA projects using machine learning and other modern data science techniques. We argue that the APP, enhances CBA, development outcomes, and policy making efficiency for optimal prioritization of criminal justice resources. Further, the APP advances policy accessibility of enhanced, social group-specific data illuminating policy orientation for more inclusive, just, and resilient societal outcomes.
In this article, attention is paid to understanding how the principle of restorative justice is operationalised and works within a context such as the Norwegian youth justice reform. The study ...reveals a distinct gap between ideals and practical realities. This gap is elaborated on and discussed within various perspectives on restorative justice. By this, the article adds both to international literature on the subject and to debates on limitations of this principle within youth justice. The article also adds important experiences from restorative justice used as part of a penal regime for youth offenders.
An early examination of the impact of COVID-19 on juvenile delinquency and juvenile justice in America, this review provides initial scholarship to rapidly evolving areas of research. Our appraisals ...of these topics are made after nearly 2 months of national COVID-19 mitigation measures, like social distancing and limited “non-essential” movement outside the home but also as states are gradually lifting stricter directives and reopening economic sectors. We consider the impact of these pandemic-related changes on twenty-first century youths, their behaviors, and their separate justice system. To forecast the immediate future, we draw from decades of research on juvenile delinquency and the justice system, as well as from reported patterns of reactions and responses to an unprecedented and ongoing situation. As post-pandemic studies on juvenile delinquency and juvenile justice proliferate, we urge careful consideration as to how they might influence societal and the system responses to youths’ delinquency. Additional practical implications are discussed.
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