Racial innocence is the practice of securing blamelessness for the death-dealing realities of racial capitalism. This article reviews the legal, social scientific, and reformist mechanisms that ...maintain the racial innocence of one particular site: the US carceral state. With its routine dehumanization, violence, and stunning levels of racial disparity, the carceral state should be a hard test case for the willful unknowing of obvious devastation. Nonetheless, the law presumes "no racism," condones racial profiling, and interprets racial disparity in policing and imprisonment as evidence of true racial difference in criminality, not discrimination. Prominent social science research too often mimics these practices, producing research that aids in the collective erasure of racism.
Research summary
In recent years, there has been a rise in so‐called “progressive prosecutors” focused on criminal justice reforms. Although there has been considerable debate about the relationship ...between progressive prosecution policies and crime rates, there has been surprisingly little empirical research on the topic. Building on the limited extant research, we examined whether the inauguration of progressive prosecutors in the nation's 100 most populous counties impacted crime rates during a 21‐year period (2000 to 2020). After developing an original database of progressive prosecutors in the 100 largest counties, we used heterogeneous difference‐in‐differences regressions to examine the influence of progressive prosecutors on crime rates. Results show that the inauguration of progressive prosecutors led to statistically higher index property (∼7%) and total crime rates (driven by rising property crimes), and these effects were strongest since 2013—a period with an increasing number of progressive prosecutors. However, violent crime rates generally were not higher after a progressive prosecutor assumed control.
Policy implications
Despite concerns that the election of progressive prosecutors leads to “surging” levels of violence, these findings suggest that progressive‐oriented prosecutorial reforms led to relatively higher rates of property crime but had limited impact on rates of violent crime. In fact, in absolute terms, crime rates fell in jurisdictions with traditional and progressive prosecutors. Yet, relative property crime rates were greater after the inauguration of progressive prosecutors. Given that prior research shows progressive prosecutors reduce mass incarceration and racial inequalities, our findings indicate that higher property crime rates may be the price for these advancements.
The American criminal justice system was built upon the premise of holding its citizens accountable for violations of law and upon being adjudicated and after having paid their prescribed punishment ...by a Court of Law, such citizens would be recognized as having “paid their debt” to society. However historical precedent has shown that very little of that premise has been practised. Instead citizens deemed felons of the law are perpetually punished by a series of lifetime collateral consequences, translating into an almost bar on access to employment and housing and other public rights. Expungement, or setting aside those convictions for people who’ve “paid their debt to society” is a clear pathway to increased access to employment for persons with a criminal record.
Today there is a growing chorus to end mass incarceration ranging from leftists and liberals to some on the right. For abolitionists, decarceration-or the reduction of the prison population-is an ...important first step in a vision that seeks to do away with the social ills the present criminal justice system simply manages. While some attention has been paid to the growing bi-partisan consensus that acknowledges, at least rhetorically, the need to end mass incarceration, we know very little about one of its key players: criminal justice non-profits. In what follows, we devise a conceptual schema that we term carceral non-profits to interrogate the complex class position of certain non-profit organizations surrounding decarceration and criminal justice reform. We argue that the defining feature of carceral non-profits is their role in steering radical change towards piecemeal liberal reform, and the promotion of carceral expansion under the guise of decarceration. This paper is an attempt to engage with an audience of abolitionist activists and scholars trying to make sense of the shifting terrain of the non-profit industrial complex at the grassroots level.
This paper examines ethical considerations relating to the current role of financial incentives in policing and punishment in the USA, focusing on the two methods of punishment most popular in the ...USA: (1) fines and forfeitures and (2) incarceration. It examines how financial incentives motivate much of our penal system, including how and when laws are enforced; discusses relevant ethical considerations and concerns connected with our current practices; proposes a theoretical solution for addressing these problems that involves realigning existing incentives to better serve the interests of justice; and considers how that theoretical solution can be applied in practice. While there are no easy solutions to resolving many of the current ethical problems related to policing and punishment, this paper will argue that some of our current practices, practices that many people believe are morally problematic (e.g., our current approach to prison labor), not only are not problematic, but also can point us toward more effective and efficient policy solutions in other areas.
We are sometimes forced to use the Interrupted Time Series (ITS) design as an identification strategy for potential policy change, such as when we only have a single treated unit and cannot obtain ...comparable controls. For example, with recent county- and state-wide criminal justice reform efforts, where judicial bodies have changed bail setting practices for everyone in their jurisdiction in order to reduce rates of pre-trial detention while maintaining court order and public safety, we have no natural and available comparison group other than the past. In these contexts, it is imperative to model pre-policy trends with a light touch, allowing for structures such as autoregressive departures from any pre-existing trend, in order to accurately and realistically assess the uncertainty of our projections. We aim to provide a methodological approach rooted in commonly understood and used modeling tools to achieve this. We quantify uncertainty with simulation, generating a distribution of plausible counterfactual trajectories to compare to the observed; this approach naturally allows for incorporating seasonality and other time-varying covariates, and provides confidence intervals along with point estimates for the potential impacts of policy change. We find simulation provides a natural framework to capture and show uncertainty in the ITS designs. It also allows for easy extensions such as nonparametric smoothing in order to handle multiple post-policy time points.
The US criminal justice system is built on the notion of the liberal, autonomous subject who chooses to engage in criminal activity, rather than one that addresses the underlying factors that lead to ...crime. I argue that by combining Vulnerability Theory, a feminist legal theory focused on universal human vulnerability, and Universal Design, a disability approach aimed at creating access for the widest range of bodies and minds, we can create a system that necessitates an analysis of how social institutions are related to risk for criminal justice involvement to reduce the harms perpetuated by criminal justice involvement. Applied to criminal justice reform together, I develop a Vulnerability Inspired Universal Design of Justice that identifies important areas of reform throughout our social institutions in order to reduce the harms of the criminal justice system.
Reforma justiției reprezintă una dintre prioritățile politice promovate de Republica Moldova. Realizarea cu succes a acesteia depinde de o serie de factori, în primul rând, de implicarea deplină a ...reprezentanților instituțiilor din sectorul justiției, de voința fermă a factorilor de decizie, precum și de implicarea reprezentanților societății civile. Cooperarea dintre societatea civilă și instituțiile de drept duce la edificarea unui sector al justiției accesibil, eficient, independent, transparent, profesionist și responsabil față de societate, care corespunde standardelor europene, asigură supremația legii și respectarea drepturilor omului. Ținând cont de contextul social, politic și juridic actual, în prezentul articol evidențiem rolul societății civile în procesul de valorificare a reformei justiției. THE ROLE OF CIVIL SOCIETY IN THE REFORM PROCESSThe process of justice reform represents one of the priorities among politics and projects that are promoted in Republic of Moldova as a state of law. It consists of a complex of actions and common efforts made by political and juridical implicated actors, with specific prerogatives. Near the state power, the civil society is another very important actor that manifests itself more and more active in the process of justice reform. The role of the civil society in promoting the process of justice reform is unchallenged:it appropriates justice to the people`׳s necessities, accustoms the society with the most problematic difficulties that justice actually confronts with and at the same time proposes real, theoretical and practical inspired solutions to guarantee progress to justice reform. The main idea of this paper is that the civil society is a compulsory condition for guaranteeing justice a steady and predictable progress and for being sure of the quality and efficiency of the final act of justice.
This paper describes the rather neglected role played by committees of the Church of England in rewording and promoting a set of arguments that facilitated the reform of a number of repressive laws ...in mid-twentieth century England and Wales. It is in part a comment on the manner in which the Church provided a clear-eyed understanding of some of the major moral upheavals of the time, drawing on classic utilitarian principles. It is also a comment on our propensity to lose sight of interesting and influential passages in the history of criminal justice.
Since 1995, significant investments have been made in justice reform initiatives in Haiti. The results, however, have been meager. Drawing upon data from a longitudinal study conducted in Cité Soleil ...between 2008 and 2011, this article illuminates the short‐sightedness of top‐down reforms that fail to meet the demands of the population, leaving them to fend for themselves. In the absence of a viable justice system Cité Soleil residents have resorted to alternative, and at times pathological, measures to exact some level of “justice”. In this article, we contend that an empirically grounded base of knowledge of the demand side of justice and the promotion of trust‐building strategies that engage the active participation of citizens in the country are necessary to enact and sustain justice and rule of law reform. Such an approach will create a venue to channel civil society's demands, build political will and facilitate coordination between stakeholders and Haitian society for self‐sustained rule of law institutions and long‐term peace building in Haiti.
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