Criminology & Public Policy最新文献

In an original article, I analyzed a potential causal link between the policy of de-prosecution in Philadelphia and an increase in homicides. Utilizing the traditional synthetic control method with extensive descriptive data and a donor pool of the other 99 largest cities in the United States, the results demonstrated a statistically significant increase of over 74 homicides per year in Philadelphia during 2015-19 associated with de-prosecution (p<.05). A reaction essay addressing the original article on de-prosecution has been submitted. In this reply, I correct inaccuracies in the reaction essay, explain the validity of methodological choices, discuss the reaction's misunderstanding of certain quantitative issues, and expose the ideological purposes of the reaction. In addition, I have included updated parallel research addressing the issue of de-prosecution and examine the theoretical impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the interaction between de-prosecution and homicides.

Research summary

Restorative justice (RJ) in practice has taken on many different forms. It is argued that RJ does not have definitional boundaries, making it hard to limit its essence to that of a particular program, practice, philosophy, or outcome. Therefore, this study's objective was to systematically review and statistically synthesize all available research on RJ programs and related programs and practices using meta-analytic methods. Our updated systematic search and meta-analysis identified a total of 57 unique studies including 79 evaluations (including 18 random assignment and 61 quasi-experimental designs). We extracted a total of 631 effect sizes related to delinquency, non-delinquency, and victim outcomes. The results of our meta-analysis showed that RJ programs and practices are associated with a small-to-moderate and statistically significant reduction in future delinquent behavior relative to more traditional juvenile justice responses (g = 0.23, 95% CI [0.14, 0.32]). Nevertheless, results were smaller for the more rigorous random assignment studies and nonsignificant, raising concerns about the robustness of this finding. Our most promising findings, however, were for the victim and non-delinquency outcomes.

Policy implications

The bottom line for RJ programs and practices is that the empirical evidence is supportive of these programs in moderately reducing juvenile delinquency. However, the evidence appears more promising in the area of non-delinquency outcomes for victims and youth participants involved in these programs. Taken together, the results indicate that RJ programs and practices may be effective at reducing recidivism, albeit to a small-to-moderate extent, but have the added feature of meaningfully increasing perceptions of satisfaction and fairness for victim and youth participants. These results should be viewed as encouraging for policy makers, RJ practitioners, and proponents that emphasize the centrality of the victim in the process of crime and harm resolution, as well as those interested in alternative solutions to addressing youth crime.

Research Summary

Gun violence was declared a “public health crisis” after shootings increased in many U.S. cities during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. The public health approach to gun violence prevention offers many advantages such as an applied research model, the mobilization of a wider range of stakeholders, and a commitment to harm reduction. Too often, however, the public health community seems unaware of criminological research on gun violence and avoids including criminal justice interventions in their comprehensive plans.

Policy Implications

Communities need immediate relief from the persistent trauma of repeated shootings. Criminal justice interventions represent important responses to outbreaks of gun violence that should be included among recommended public health programs intended to address proximate and upstream causes of gun violence. Gun violence prevention policy and practice would be strengthened by more deliberate attempts to foster complementary public health and criminology research and development collaborations. More applied criminologists need to become engaged in gun violence research to meet this call.

Research summary

In the past, the Canadian government followed in the footsteps of its American counterpart by enacting “sex offender laws.” Since the 1990s, however, the Canadian criminal justice system has taken a different approach to the issue of sex offender recidivism (SOR), focusing on treatment, rehabilitation, and community risk management. This evidence-based approach has been criticized for not doing enough to prevent convicted offenders from sexually reoffending. This criticism has not been addressed empirically, leaving open the question of whether this Canadian policy shift is associated with changes in the rate of sexual recidivism. The present study uses a meta-analytic framework to look at 185 Canadian-based studies involving over 50,000 offenders, making it possible to combine 226 sexual recidivism rates. After controlling for factors such as follow-up length and the independence of samples, weighted pooled recidivism rates have declined since the 1970s by more than 60%. This trend may have gone unnoticed because it is not related to the year of publication but to the period in which the data were collected.

Policy implications

The findings have significant implications for criminal justice practices including the importance of using risk assessment tools that are regularly calibrated to reflect the evolution of sexual recidivism rates over time. Although the current study cannot provide firm conclusions about the factors responsible for this gradual drop, several hypotheses are discussed. Knowledge-based criminal justice practices, better training for professionals, and improvements in treatment programs may have had a subtle and cumulative impact on sexual recidivism rates. The importance of examining period effects on SOR using a comparative and international perspective is discussed.

Research summary

Inspired by studies on crime concentration, scholars have begun examining the spatial patterns of other issues under the police mandate, such as calls for service involving persons with perceived mental illness (PwPMI). While findings show that PwPMI calls for service concentrate in a few number of places, we do not know whether the concentration of these calls fall within a narrow bandwidth of spatial units nor whether these calls are spatially stable. Drawing on 7 years of calls for service data from the Barrie Police Service, this study tests for the temporal stability of PwPMI call for service concentrations at two units of spatial analysis and applies a longitudinal variation of the Spatial Point Pattern Test to assess the spatial stability of these calls at both the global and local levels. The results reveal that concentrations of PwPMI calls for service not only fall within a narrow proportional bandwidth of spatial units, but are spatially stable, even during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Policy implications

Existing police- and community-based efforts that respond to PwPMI in the community are tasked with responding to crises that could have been prevented with timelier intervention. Drawing from crime-focused, place-based policing strategies whose deployment is informed by the spatial concentration of crime, scholars have similarly argued that knowledge on where PwPMI calls for service concentrate can be leveraged to inform and deploy place-based efforts whose focus is to assist PwPMI in a proactive capacity. The findings of the present study further substantiates the deployment of PwPMI-focused police- and community-based resources as proactive, place-based efforts. In doing so, these efforts could not only prevent mental health crises from occurring but could prevent future police-involved calls for service and thus reduce the footprint of the police in the lives of PwPMI in a reactive capacity.

Research summary

We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of studies that examined whether providing people with a postcard, phone call, or text message reminder of their court date reduces their likelihood of failing to appear in court. We included 12 studies (N = 79,255) that compared court appearance rates between groups of people who received a reminder to groups who did not receive a reminder. Results showed that reminders significantly reduce the odds of failure to appear in court. Further, charge type moderated reminder effectiveness; court reminders had a slightly larger effect in studies that did not include people with felony charges. However, the difference in effect size as a function of charge type was small and reminders significantly reduced the odds of failure to appear in both studies that did and did not include people with felony charges. In contrast, there was no evidence that retaining people who could not be contacted in a reminder treatment group (versus excluding them from the study or intentionally assigning them to the nonreminded control group) moderated reminder effectiveness. Finally, a narrative synthesis of studies revealed that studies using more rigorous designs generally produced smaller effects compared to studies with less rigorous designs and that effects did not differ systematically as a function of reminder formats (e.g., postcard, phone call) or frequencies (e.g., one reminder or multiple).

Policy implications

Court date reminders effectively reduce failures to appear across studies, so they are an inexpensive tool for jurisdictions seeking to implement pretrial reform efforts. However, reminders offer only a modest reduction in failures to appear because they only address failures to appear that result from missing or forgetting information. Thus, reminders are not a panacea to court nonappearance. Jurisdictions should consider other programs and interventions as well. Courts could address low-barrier nonappearances with reminders and then efficiently focus more involved resources to help more people get to court.

This article explores the role of cognitive transformations in the process of desistance from crime. Based on our own and others’ subsequent research, clearly, some aspects of our initial theorizing warrant revisiting and adjustment. The discussion describes changes to ideas about the sequencing of various types of cognitive shifts, suggests the importance of emotional processes in tandem with changes in perspective, and highlights the need to move out of the comfort zone of crime itself when thinking about redefinitions that support desistance. Yet, a consistent notion remains that social and broader structural factors are deeply implicated—directly and indirectly—in all aspects of the change process. This includes the important area of “derailments” from a pattern of forward progress, where additional processual research is needed. The discussion concludes with the argument that individualistic policies and programs centered on cognitive deficits requiring correction are likely to be limited in their effectiveness.

Research Summary

The United States is at a turning point in the history of corrections. Suddenly and surprisingly, the era of mass incarceration ended around 2010. Since that time, prison populations, public punitiveness, and get-tough rhetoric have declined. A challenging question remains, however: Now what? Doing more of the same is foolish but likely. Prison reform is inhibited by the twin realities that states have limited budgets and have existing prisons that are rarely shuttered. New thinking is needed to move beyond these restrictions. One guide for a cognitive shift is Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now in which he argues that sustained improvement in human well-being in the United States and across the globe is due to the Enlightenment principles of reason, science, humanism, and progress. In this context, an “enlightened corrections” is possible in which policies and practices are evaluated by the four ideals articulated by Pinker. As one example, mass imprisonment is shown to be irrational, unscientific, inhumane, and bereft of a future. By contrast, more promising policies seek to nourish offenders by offering redemption and by using community supervision to build quality relationships that provide a means for targeting risk factors for intervention.

Policy Implications

The key policy implication is the proposal to place prison reform within the Biden Administration's support for infrastructure improvement. Funded by the federal government, a “Build Back Better Prison Experiment” would be undertaken in which 10 experimental prisons—designed from a clean slate and selected through a competition—would be created and evaluated. The goal is to establish prisons that are rational in their planning, are evidence based, improve offenders’ lives, and foster a new era of progress in American corrections.

Research summary

There is growing evidence that some proactive policing strategies have shown promising results in reducing crime. Most of these strategies are generally applied separately to address specific components of criminal behavior, while the involvement in the crime itself may be caused by different factors. This raises the question of whether an integrative approach that addresses these factors could be an appropriate approach to reduce involvement in the crime. Furthermore, most of these policing strategies have been applied toward regular crime; this leaves us with the question of whether these strategies would show similar results when political offenses are involved as well. Our study focuses on the political offense of stone-throwing in East Jerusalem, usually by Palestinian teenage boys. We applied an integrative approach in one of the Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, which included strategies such as focused deterrence, place-based policing, cognitive behavioral therapy, diversion to nonenforcement tracks, and interventions at the community level. We found a large and significant reduction in the targeted neighborhood compared to similar Palestinian neighborhoods. We have not found evidence of displacement, but rather evidence of significant diffusion of crime-control benefits.

Policy implications

The results of the study suggest that an integrative approach that addresses the risks and needs of minority youth can help reduce their future involvement in political offenses. Furthermore, the implementation of promising strategies in the wider context of policing regular crimes may also be effective in responding to political offenses.