The question has been posed whether current developments in American penal policy toward reducing prison populations and sentences for low level, nonviolent offenses might reflect the end of the mass ...incarceration era. Yet articulation of precisely what defines the present in American penal policy remains unclear. This paper identifies three distinctive features: a national-level program of comprehensive criminal justice reevaluation and reform in response to the excesses of recent policy; the distinguishing of groups for distinct treatments as a central principle and product of the reform program; and the fusion of previously distinct political and administrative logics that undergird the reform process. Rather than a full turn away from mass incarceration or an ambivalent mix of old and new, contemporary penal policy is better characterized as a bifurcation, responding uniquely, with new answers and new omissions, to the dilemmas and constraints of “late mass incarceration.”
This book is about the convergence of trends in two American institutions - the economy and the criminal justice system. The American economy has radically transformed in the past half-century, led ...by advances in automation technology that have permanently altered labor market dynamics. Over the same period, the U.S. criminal justice system experienced an unprecedented expansion at great cost. These costs include not only the $80 billion annually in direct expenditures on criminal justice, but also the devastating impacts experienced by justice-involved individuals, families, and communities. Recently, a widespread consensus has emerged that the era of "mass incarceration" is at an end, reflected in a declining prison population. Criminal justice reforms such as diversion and problem-solving courts, a renewed focus on reentry, and drug policy reform have as their goal keeping more individuals with justice system involvement out of prisons, in the community and subsequently in the labor force, which lacks the capacity to accommodate these additional would-be workers. This poses significant problems for criminal justice practice, which relies heavily on employment as a signal of offenders' intentions to live a law-abiding lifestyle. The diminished capacity of the economy to utilize the labor of all who have historically been expected to work presents significant challenges for American society. Work, in the American ethos is the marker of success, masculinity and how one "contributes to society." What are the consequences of ignoring these converging structural trends? This book examines these potential consequences, the meaning of work in American society, and suggests alternative redistributive and policy solutions to avert the collision course of these economic and criminal justice policy trends.
This article is a review of European Judicial Systems – Edition 2014 (2012 Data): Efficiency and Quality of Justice, European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice, available online in full and ...summary versions at www.coe.int/cepej .
California has fundamentally reformed its criminal justice system. Since 2011, the state passed several reforms which reduced its massive prison population. Importantly, this decarceration has not ...harmed public safety as research finds these measures had no impact on violent crime and only marginal impacts on property crime statewide. The COVID-19 pandemic furthered the state’s trend in decarceration, as California reduced prison and jail populations to slow the spread of the virus. In fact, in terms of month-to-month proportionate changes in the state correctional population, California’s efforts to reduce overcrowding as a means to limit the spread of COVID-19 reduced the correctional population more severely and abruptly than any of the state’s decarceration reforms. Although research suggests the criminal justice reforms did not threaten public safety, there is reason to suspect COVID-mitigation releases did. How are COVID-19 jail downsizing measures and crime trends related in California, if at all? We address this question in the current study. We employ a synthetic control group design to estimate the impact of jail decarceration intended to mitigate COVID-19 spread on crime in California’s 58 counties. Adapting the traditional method to account for the “fuzzy-ness” of the intervention, we utilize natural variation among counties to isolate decarceration’s impact on crime from various other shocks affecting California as a whole. Findings do not suggest a consistent relationship between COVID-19 jail decarceration and violent or property crime at the county level.
This is an exploratory study of "non-traditional" criminal punishments, particularly focusing on the attitudes toward these sentences among prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges. Through ...interviews with practitioners, this study explores among other things, if they had used, or advocated for, these types of sentences and why or why not. There was a broad openness to doing something different from the status quo of fine or jail, however it was tempered by concerns of bias and fairness. With considerations of mass incarceration dominating the reform conversation, we find that openness to individualizing sentences, albeit with "guardrails," is reentering the reform conversation.
Objectives:
We investigate path dependence and barriers to the acceptance and implementation of reform-minded prosecution, which focuses on reducing unnecessary incarceration, promoting fairness, ...engaging with the community, and improving accountability in the criminal justice system.
Method:
Using semistructured interviews with 47 prosecutors in two Florida jurisdictions, both with newly elected state attorneys, we explore reform-minded prosecution priorities and barriers to their effective implementation.
Results:
Findings suggest that though reform-minded priorities are present in the study prosecutor’s offices, existing prosecutorial norms, case-focused decision-making, policy ambiguities, and communication challenges serve as barriers to their effective implementation.
Conclusions:
The study highlights the role that line agents play in determining the success of reform-minded prosecution. It also identifies key barriers to reform that reform-minded prosecutors must overcome if they are to achieve meaningful changes toward greater effectiveness, transparency, and impartiality in prosecution.
The past 40 years have been a time of great change in life sentencing, during which the use of life sentences has dramatically grown and the quality of life sentences has markedly hardened. The rise ...of life without parole in the United States is a particularly recognizable development, but life sentencing has increased worldwide, and the use of other forms of punishment that hold people in prison until death has also intensified. This article focuses on these transformations by examining several important areas in which thinking and scholarship on life sentencing have been altered and spurred by recent developments. The review concludes by pointing to gaps in the field of research and highlighting issues on which social scientific research on life sentencing has more to contribute going forward.
The implementation of child justice reforms often lingers or fails because it has not been systematically planned, properly communicated or adequately resourced. There are also many social, cultural ...and systemic barriers to child justice reforms, but these barriers are often poorly understood and meekly addressed. Progress in implementing rights-based comprehensive child justice systems has been slow, and there is a growing interest in understanding why, in many countries, child justice reforms have made relatively little progress over the past 30 years. This article reviews the experience of child justice reforms in Vietnam and discusses the broader question of policy transfer, specifically the translation of international children’s rights standards and norms into national child justice laws and policies.
This article furthers the discussion on bail through an analysis of the conditions under which this measure is used in Mexico, a country which has recently reformed its penal system (2008-2016) by ...introducing new procedural rules, which seek to reduce the use of pretrial detention. The study is based on a statistical-descriptive examination of 1,537 judicial cases in which judges chose to impose either pretrial detention or bail. Our findings indicate that, obtaining bail, rather than pretrial detention, is related to both the specific nature of the crime as well as the circumstances of the criminal investigation. Furthermore, our data confirm that pretrial decisions can affect the entire course of a case. In our sample, defendants who were granted bail were more likely to receive non-condemnatory sentences than those who awaited trial in prison.
This article explores the consequences of unenthusiastic criminal justice reform through the case study of special measures provision in England and Wales. These measures provide assistance to ...vulnerable people giving evidence in criminal trials. For witnesses other than the accused, the law’s development followed a standard process: public concern; governmental inquiries; legislation; and a period of inception to prepare for its implementation. The development of special measures for the accused did not follow this same pattern. Instead, it was gradual, ad hoc and somewhat reluctant. This article argues that the way and the context in which special measures developed for the accused has had a negative impact on the extent to which they are embedded within the criminal justice system. This, in turn, has negatively affected their uptake in practice. It is concluded that the way in which the law is reformed is important to its success in practice.
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