Tag: Statistics

Youth in Adult Courts, Jails, and Prisons – The Sentencing Project

Overview

At the turn of the 21st century, it was estimated that 250,000 children every year were charged as adults in the United States. By 2019, that number had dropped 80% to 53,000. This drop is to be celebrated and is the result of legislative changes in 44 states and the District of Columbia, as well as federal funding incentives. However, there is still much work to be done.

The children that remain exposed to the adult criminal legal system are overwhelmingly youth of color. The vast majority serve short sentences in adult jail or prison and return home by their 21st birthdays, the age at which services can be extended to in the youth justice system in the vast majority of states; indicating that many youth could be served, more appropriately, by the youth justice system.
— Read on www.sentencingproject.org/reports/youth-in-adult-courts-jails-and-prisons/

New data fill long-standing gaps in the study of policing | Science

Data limitations have long stymied research on racial bias in policing. To persuasively demonstrate bias, scholars have sought to compare officer behavior toward minority versus white civilians while holding constant all other factors in the police-civilian encounter that might provide alternative explanations for enforcement disparities. These comparisons in “similar circumstances” are also critical in litigation concerning discriminatory policing, which can often lead to court-ordered remedies (1). Such “all-else-equal” scenarios are elusive in many realms of social science, but two challenges have made them particularly difficult to find in the study of policing. On page 1397 of this issue, Aggarwal et al. (2) report using data from the ridesharing service Lyft—having obtained vehicle location on more than 200,000 drivers using highfrequency GPS pings from their smartphones—to analyze speeding enforcement by the Florida Highway Patrol (FHP) and to show how such data offer a path forward for addressing both challenges.
— Read on www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adw3618

UK: Police forces ‘supercharging racism’ with crime predicting tech – new report

Amnesty’s new report ‘Automated Racism’ reveals dangerous discrimination in police prediction tools Almost three-quarters of police forces attempt to predict crime by racially profiling communities across the UK
— Read on www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/uk-police-forces-supercharging-racism-crime-predicting-tech-new-report