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Katherine Beckett and Theodore Sasson

The U.S. crime rate has dropped steadily for more than a decade, yet the rate of incarceration continues to skyrocket. Today, more than 2 million Americans are locked in prisons and jails with devastating consequences for poor families and communities, overcrowded institutions and overburdened taxpayers. How did the U.S. become the world′s leader in incarceration? Why have the numbers of women, juveniles, and people of color increased especially rapidly among the imprisoned?

The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America, Second Edition is the first book to make widely accessible the new research on crime as a political and cultural issue. Katherine Beckett and Theodore Sasson provide readers with a robust analysis of the roles of crime, politics, media imagery and citizen activism in the making of criminal justice policy in the age of mass incarceration.

Features of this text:

• Critical Approach. Debunks myths about crime in the U.S., challenges many current anticrime policies that became harsher in the 1990s, and illuminates the political implications of crime and punishment.

• Contemporary. Updated throughout with particular attention to Chapter 5, "Crime in the Media," including research and analyses of crime in the news, crime as entertainment, and the interplay of news media, entertainment, and crime.

• Comprehensive Research. Draws on a wide range of scholarship, including research on crime′s representation in political discourse and the mass media, public opinion, crime-related activism, and public policy.

• Consistent and Accessible. A great source to communicate new research to both non-specialists and specialists in accessible language with riveting, real-life examples.

Intended as a supplement for use in any criminal justice or criminology course, especially in the punishment, corrections and policy areas, The Politics of Injustice, Second Edition will appeal to those who take a critical approach to crime issues.

Pine Forge Press. Thousand Oakls, Califoria. 2000. 201p.

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By Dionne Barnes-Proby ,Samuel Peterson, Alex Andra Mendoza-Graf, Pierrce Holmes, Danielle Sobol, Nipher Malik A. Malika And Meagan Cahill

Despite widespread recognition that community engagement is important for improving community-police relations, there is little guidance for how to systematically promote and sustain long-term relationship building. This guide was developed to share best practices from the RAND Corporation's work in implementing six community-police dialogues across four sites. This guide provides background on the purpose for the development of the community-police dialogue, guidance for planning and implementing the dialogue, and materials to help carry out the dialogue effectively.

By Rachel E. Barkow and Mark Osler

The federal government and most American states provide for some form of clemency that allows the president or the governor to reduce a sentence or pardon a conviction. Although most US presidents and some governors have made great use of this power in the past, it has long been in decline. Diagnosing the reasons for this decline proves easier than providing solutions to reinvigorate this practice. A great deal of scholarship explores the causes and offers solutions, and this review catalogs the main lines of argument. It also explains why clemency's renewal remains urgent, even in regimes dedicated to the rule of law, to serve the best purposes of punishment and check the excesses of criminal law and punishment that are inevitable given the political process and enforcement practices.

Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 7, Page 311 - 327

By Dianne Beer-Maxwell, Jon Blum, Timothy Bonadies, Jessica Herbert, and Peggy Schaefer

When performing official duties, law enforcement officers rely heavily on knowledge and skills learned during basic academy training. Entry-level law enforcement training is typically delivered in topic-centric classes with little or no connection between concepts, despite significant content overlap. For example, an understanding of search and seizure law is applicable across many contexts, including in lessons about motor vehicle stops, arrests, investigation, use of force, and interview and interrogation. Similarly, communication skills are needed across the board to be effective at interviewing people, de-escalating violent situations, and building relationships with the community. Existing research from other professions recommends integrating or reinforcing foundational and overlapping content consistently to help people retain critical knowledge and skills. The concept of integrating and reinforcing training content consistently has not previously been tested in law enforcement. The Academy Innovations project evaluates the results of reinforcing a critical foundational skill across multiple topics through use of an integrated curriculum in a basic academy setting. In this guide we will 1. introduce and define the concepts of integrated curriculum and retention interval; 2. explain a groundbreaking study that examined the effects of integrated curriculum on retention interval in five law enforcement academies; 3. present eight best practices for integrating curricula in law enforcement academies.   

Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.  2023. 24p.

By Jody van der Heyde, Andrew Faull and Martin Sycholt

Trust in the police is vital to a functioning democracy, but relations between South Africa’s residents and police have long been characterised by mistrust. This report introduces procedural justice as a cost-effective, evidence-informed practice that can increase public trust and confidence in the police, and enhance police legitimacy and social cohesion. The report provides an overview of the theory and presents data on trust, customer satisfaction and police morale in South Africa.

South Africa: Institute for Security Studies, 2023. 16p.

By Emilee Green and Orleana Peneff

Local police are expected to use the least amount of force necessary against citizens, both in self-defense and in defense of others. Although relatively rare, many incidents of excessive, and even lethal, force used by police have been documented, particularly in situations involving people of color. Specifically, Black Americans are more likely to be killed during a police encounter than White Americans. The public has called for further investigation, data collection, and research on police use of force. This literature review provides an overview of theories on why police use of force occurs. Theories are based on officer characteristics, types of situations, organizational norms, and police policies and procedures. The review includes data and research on use of force including disparities in its use.

Chicago: Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, 2022. 18p.

By Council on Criminal Justice, Independent Task Force on Policing

In most cases, police seeking to apprehend suspects and recover evidence inside a private home or business are legally required to knock and announce themselves before entering. But the allowable time between knocking and entering may be short. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the right of officers to forcibly enter 15 to 20 seconds after announcing their presence, so-called “quick-knock” warrants. In some instances, when it is conceivable that unannounced entry will prevent suspects from fleeing, help preserve evidence, and/or protect the safety of innocent parties or officers, law enforcement requests and judges may issue a “no-knock warrant.” No-knock warrants are often executed in the middle of the night to enhance the element of surprise.

Jurisdictions that prohibit or severely restrict no-knock warrants do so to reduce the risk of harm such surprise intrusions may cause to occupants and officers. Even without a warrant, however, officers may lawfully conduct searches and seizures in the case of emergent exigent circumstances.

Council on Criminal Justice, The independent Task Force on Policing , 2021. 5p.

By JohannaSprenhrt and DominikBrodowski

In ever more areas, it becomes evident that the transformative power of information technology – and so-called ‘artificial intelligence’ in particular – affects the administration of criminal justice in Germany. The legal framing of issues relating to the use of ‘AI technology’ in criminal justice lags behind, however, and is of high complexity: In particular, it needs to take the European framework into account, and has to cope with the German peculiarity that the prevention of crimes by the police is a separate branch of law, which is regulated mostly at the ‘Länder’ (federal states) level, while criminal justice is regulated mostly on the federal level. In this report, we shed light on the practice, on legal discussions, and on current initiatives relating to ‘predictive policing’ (1.), ‘predictive justice’ (2.) as well as evidence law and the use of ‘artificial intelligence’ in the administration of criminal justice (3.) in Germany

e-Revue Internationale de Droit Pénal .2023. 57p.

By Desmond Ang and Jonathan Tebes

Roughly a thousand people are killed by American law enforcement officers each year, accounting for more than 5% of all homicides. We estimate the causal impact of these events on civic engagement. Exploiting hyper-local variation in how close residents live to a killing, we find that exposure to police violence leads to signicant increases in registrations and votes. These effects are driven entirely by Blacks and Hispanics and are largest for killings of unarmed individuals. We find corresponding increases in support for criminal justice reforms, suggesting that police violence may cause voters to politically mobilize against perceived injustice.

Working paper, Harvard University, 2022. .30p.

By Magnus Lofstrom, Brandon Martin and Steven Raphael

We analyze the disparate effects of a recent California sentencing reform on the arrest, booking, and incarceration rates experienced by California residents from different racial and ethnic groups. In November 2014 California voters passed state proposition 47 that redefined a series of felony and “wobbler” offenses (offenses that can be charged as either a felony or misdemeanor) as straight misdemeanors, causing an immediate 15 percent decline in total drug arrests, an approximate 20 percent decline in total property crime arrests, and shifts in the composition of arrests away from felonies towards misdemeanors. Using microdata on the universe of arrests in the state in conjunction with demographic data from the American Community Survey, we document a substantial narrowing in inter-racial differences in overall arrest rates and arrest rates by offense type, with very large declines in the inter-racial arrest rate gaps for felony drug offenses. Conditional on being arrested, we see declines in bookings rates for all groups, though we find a larger decrease for white arrestees. This relatively larger decline for white arrests is largely explained by difference in the distribution of arrests across recorded offenses. Despite the widening of racial gaps in the conditional booking rate, we observe substantial declines in overall booked arrests that are larger for African Americans and Hispanics relative to whites. For some offenses (felony drug offenses), inter-racial disparities in jail booking rates narrow by nearly half. Finally, we use data from the American Community Survey to analyze…..

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  change in the proportion incarcerated on any given day and how these changes vary by race and ethnicity. For these results, we present trends for the time period spanning the larger set of policy reforms that have been implemented in the state since 2011. We observe sizable declines in the overall incarceration rate for African Americans, with the largest declines observed for African American males. The one-quarter decline in total correctional populations in the state coincided with sizable narrowing in inter-racial difference in incarceration rates.  

Bonn: Institute of Labor Economics (IZA),  2019. 55p.