Tag: Reform

Reforming the police through procedural justice training: A multicity randomized trial at crime hot spots | PNAS

Our study is a randomized trial in policing confirming that intensive training in procedural justice (PJ) can lead to more procedurally just behavior and less disrespectful treatment of people at high-crime places. The fact that the PJ intervention reduced arrests by police officers, positively influenced residents’ perceptions of police harassment and violence, and also reduced crime provides important guidance for police reform in a period of strong criticism of policing. This randomized trial points to the potential for PJ training not simply to encourage fair and respectful policing but also to improve evaluations of the police and crime prevention effectiveness
— Read on www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2118780119

Desistance From Crime – Implications for Research, Policy, and Practice

A key step in advancing our knowledge in these areas is to examine how we think about and measure the process of individuals ceasing engagement in criminal activities, referred to as “desistance.” How we conceptualize this process can afect how we evaluate the efectiveness of laws and policies intended to provide or increase public safety. How practitioners view this process — and their role in supporting it — can infuence how they engage with clients across all stages of system involvement. Furthermore, programs and initiatives are ofen judged on their ability to reduce reofending and improve other outcomes. Having a clear understanding of what we consider desistance to be, incorporating policies and interventions that support desistance, and identifying best practices to evaluate these eforts is important work.

Recidivism — often defned as criminal acts or interactions with law enforcement that result in re-arrest, reconviction, or return to prison — has been the primary outcome for criminal justice research for decades, and it continues to be. The recidivism data available from federal, state, and local systems over time provide valuable information. For example, the data can help us gauge the performance of correctional programs and whether policies are successfully providing public safety to their communities. Practitioners can also use recidivism data to assess the risk of reofending for the populations they serve. Despite the value of this information, we must expand beyond recidivism in how we understand and examine individual behavior.

This volume takes important steps in describing how a desistance framework can move the feld forward across key decision points in the criminal justice system (e.g., at time of arrest, charging, pretrial release, case processing, disposition and sentencing, and reentry). Although research has focused on desistance for some time, the term and its accompanying knowledge base are far less known than recidivism. Recidivism is a discrete measure — that is, yes or no — and has a limit to the amount of information it can provide. Capturing where an individual is in the desistance process provides more nuanced information, better supports assessment of individual progress toward less criminal behavior, and facilitates a strengths-based perspective focused on building on individual assets to promote positive change. Incorporating desistance principles into the criminal justice feld has great potential to improve outcomes, elevate practices, better support those with system involvement, and more effectively use resources to provide safety to the community.

Get the report HERE:

www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/301497.pdf

Misdemeanor Prosecution | NBER

Communities across the United States are reconsidering the public safety benefits of prosecuting nonviolent misdemeanor offenses. So far there has been little empirical evidence to inform policy in this area. In this paper we report the first estimates of the causal effects of misdemeanor prosecution on defendants’ subsequent criminal justice involvement. We leverage the as-if random assignment of nonviolent misdemeanor cases to Assistant District Attorneys (ADAs) who decide whether a case should move forward with prosecution in the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts. These ADAs vary in the average leniency of their prosecution decisions. We find that, for the marginal defendant, nonprosecution of a nonviolent misdemeanor offense leads to large reductions in the likelihood of a new criminal complaint over the next two years. These local average treatment effects are largest for first-time defendants, suggesting that averting initial entry into the criminal justice system has the greatest benefits. We also present evidence that a recent policy change in Suffolk County imposing a presumption of nonprosecution for a set of nonviolent misdemeanor offenses had similar beneficial effects: the likelihood of future criminal justice involvement fell, with no apparent increase in local crime rates.

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
— Read on www.nber.org/papers/w28600

From the VERA Institute

Misdemeanor cases make up over 80 percent of the cases processed by the U.S. criminal justice system, yet we know little about the causal impacts of misdemeanor prosecution. In this talk, we will report the first estimates of the causal effects of misdemeanor prosecution on defendants’ subsequent criminal justice involvement. To do this, we leverage the quasi-random assignment of nonviolent misdemeanor cases to arraigning assistant district attorneys in the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts between 2004 and 2018. We find that the marginal prosecuted misdemeanor defendant has a substantially higher risk of being charged with a subsequent criminal complaint, of being prosecuted on that complaint, and of acquiring a criminal record of that complaint, within two years of their initial case. These effects appear to work through a longer time to case disposition, an increased likelihood of acquiring a criminal record of a misdemeanor complaint, and an increased likelihood of a misdemeanor conviction in the current case.

See the VIDEO HERE:

https://www.vera.org/events/neil-a-weiner-research-speaker-series/misdemeanor-prosecution

Advancing Racial Equity: Shrinking Misdemeanor Prosecution in New York

Misdemeanors are under attack. Misdemeanors are what drives the criminal justice system at least at the local criminal court level. Misdemeanors are the crimes that directly and most often impact day to day life. This has led to a shift of the criminal justice system from being victim focused to offender focused. This has created drastic changes.

The link below has several reports on its webpage and there are also links to several additional articles.

Findings and policy recommendations from a comprehensive analysis of misdemeanor cases in NYC.
— Read on www.courtinnovation.org/publications/misdemeanor-race-NYC

Thoughts on New York’s Manhattan’s District Attorney’s Day One Memo

Alvin Bragg the Manhattan DA is not the first DA to make a policy manifesto on how their office will run. His is one of the most resent. Bragg is part of a Progressive Prosecutor movement that is moving through some of the most crime ridden cities. Manhattan joins Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles with their progressive movement.

District Attorneys are supposed to be the leading “Law Enforcement Official” in their County. That would put them in the Executive Branch of government. Prosecutors enforce the law they don’t interpret the law and they don’t create the law. If Prosecutors want to change the law there is a process for doing so, it isn’t by improperly charging crimes that are robbery (with a weapon) as simple petit larceny. As a Prosecutor if you don’t like the fact that when someone robs another person by displaying a gun (§ 160.10(2b)) and can get sentenced up to 15 years in jail. It’s not the Prosecutors choice to establish the penalty for the crime, the legislators did that. Again there is a process to change the severity of the penalty through petitioning the legislator, it is not by artificially improperly charging a serious felony robbery to a petit larceny.

For the record petit larceny is a theft of $1 to under $1000 and is a misdemeanor with a penalty of up to 1 year in jail. This compared to a robbery where a the offender brought a gun to aid in the completion of the robbery with a threat of harm if you don’t give up the money. Crazy.

Mare sure to check out DA Bragg’s Police Memo there is much more than what was covered here so far.
See DA Bragg’s Police Memo HERE

Concerns with DA Bragg’s Policy Memo

The Commissioner of NYPD has issue with the policies of the Manhattan DA.
See HERE

The Union for NYPD also see issue with the DA’s policy. See HERE

Here is a link to the New York Constitution and the role and function of District Attorneys in New York – access it HERE

2 Articles from the Manhattan Institute

Looking Beyond Day One

Three steps to minimize the impact of the new Manhattan DA’s soft-on-crime policies.
See HERE

How Much Leniency with Criminals Can We Afford?

Progressive prosecutors claim that a soft-on-crime approach will make us safer, but the evidence tells a different story.
See HERE

Reimagining Judging

My focus in this short essay is only on sentencing. A judge’s role is different at sentencing than her role at other points in a criminal trial, or in other contexts.

The stakes are the highest; it is when state power confronts a person’s liberty. And I write for the most part about what I know best, which is federal sentencing. Federal sentencing has changed over the past forty years and with it the judge’s role. It has seesawed from a period when the purpose of sentencing was rehabilitation, and a judge had virtually unlimited discretion to sentence (Gertner 2010). It then moved to a more recent period when a judge’s power was more strictly cabined by mandatory minimum sentences, and mandatory Federal Sentencing Guidelines. Finally, it has shifted to the present which is—at least on the surface—some combination of both. Today, there is space for more judicial discretion. On the surface, that change—increasing judicial discretion—looks promising.

More judicial discretion might well be an antidote to treating people as Guideline categories or cogs in a three-strikes machine. Reformers sometimes assume that when judges focus on an individual, they will necessarily consider their humanity and the social context of the crime, all factors that have largely been ignored during the past thirty years. But there are reasons to be skeptical.

Access the article at the link below:

squareonejustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/CJLJ9284-Reimagining-Judging-report-211215-WEB.pdf