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Posts tagged Criminal Justice Reform
Mental Health Courts in an Era of Criminal Justice Reform 

By Stephen Eide

Introduction - Mental health courts place seriously mentally ill defendants in community treatment as an alternative to incarceration. In recent decades, these and other “problem-solving” courts have expanded dramatically nationwide. These programs were long seen as core elements of criminal justice reform and frequently reduce recidivism more effectively than traditional court systems. But recently, problem-solving courts’ place in the criminal justice reform agenda has become more ambiguous. Not only has energy shifted toward more radical ideas (such as jail “abolition”), but some far-reaching reforms threaten court programs’ traditional incentive structure. Mental health courts rely on criminal sanctions as leverage; they lose that leverage when criminal justice reforms reduce or jettison the use of criminal sanctions entirely. This brief assesses mental health courts’ future in an era of criminal justice reform. It considers how sentencing, bail, and discovery reforms threaten the structure of mental health courts. It also evaluates attempts to “co-opt” the model, through New York’s “Treatment Not Jail Act.” Overall, the brief argues that mental health courts will retain their relevance for the foreseeable future, owing mainly to their small scale. Mental health courts serve only a small fraction of the universe of mentally ill offenders. They will therefore never contribute significantly to mass de-carceration, the goal of progressive reformers. But that also means that they are likely to retain their relevance, even if the use of criminal sanctions declines, as long as the population of mentally ill offenders remains substantial. This brief will conclude with suggestions on how to sustain mental health courts in the future 

New York: The Manhattan Institute, 2024. 15p.

Forced Confessions: Tracking Torture and Mistreatment in Mexico’s Accusatorial Criminal Justice System

By Rita E. Kuckertz

This study examines the impact of Mexico’s 2008 criminal justice reform on the practice of utilizing torture and mistreatment to extract criminal confessions. Complaint data submitted to the National Commission on Human Rights (Comisión Nacional de Derecho Humanos, CNDH) and detainee survey data compiled by the National Institute for Statistics and Geography (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, INEGI) were employed to assess if the use of torture and mistreatment by judicial sector operators had decreased (1) in states with advanced levels of reform implementation and (2) in judicial districts that had already implemented the reform. The author also examined the incidence of forced confessions before and after the reform’s implementation at the judicial district level. The author hypothesized that decreases in torture, mistreatment, and forced confessions would be observed in each of these cases. Basic correlation and regression tests were employed to assess the geographic hypothesis, while two chi-square tests for independence were utilized for judicial district data. The results of these analyses demonstrate evidence rejecting the null hypothesis in each instance, suggesting that the reform can indeed be credited for small but meaningful reductions in torture, mistreatment, and forced confessions in Mexico. The author argues that reforms must be accompanied by further action to address the pervasive use of torture and mistreatment in Mexico

San Diego: Justice in Mexico Department of Political Science & International Relations University of San Diego 2020. 51p.

Prosecutor Mercy

By Lee Kovarsky  

The tailwinds might be behind criminal justice reform, but American mercy power remains locked in a sputtering clemency model. Centralized leadership should be braver or the centralized institutions should be streamlined, the arguments go—but what if the more basic mercy problem is centralization itself? In this essay, I explore that question. In so doing, I defend the normative premise that post-conviction mercy is justified, and I address the questions of institutional design and political economy that follow. I ultimately encourage jurisdictions to layer decentralized mercy powers on top of their clemency mechanisms, and for the newer authority to be vested in local prosecutors. I present less a single proposal than a collection of principles for mercy decentralization. Governors and presidents simply cannot deliver the punishment remissions appropriate for an American prison population bloated by a half-century love affair with over-criminalization, mandatory minimums, and recidivism enhancements.  

24 New Criminal L. Rev. 326 (2021)