By the Justice Policy Institute

Over the last 20 years, elected officials and juvenile justice system stakeholders have changed policies and practices to create a more developmentally appropriate youth justice system, resulting in a reduction of the number of confined youth by 60 percent since the 1990s and reducing the number of youth automatically prosecuted as adults by 56 percent since 2007. This change in course is largely the result of policies that restrict the use of secure detention facilities and limit prosecution of youth in the adult court system. These trends in declining youth incarceration rates, while positive, have primarily focused on youth involved in nonviolent offenses. Moreover, despite a significant decline in the overall use of confinement, racial disparity in the juvenile justice system has worsened in many jurisdictions. This is due, in large part, to the fact that too many jurisdictions still rely on confinement and transfer to the adult system for youth who engage in violence. The research clearly shows that youth are best served in the least restrictive setting, regardless of underlying offense type. However, state practices frequently do not follow these lessons, turning to secure settings and transfer to the adult criminal justice system when other interventions would be more effective at addressing the underlying cause of the behavior and delivering a better public safety return on investment. Instead, these punitive practices worsen racial disparities, saddle youth with the collateral consequences of a criminal record if they are
prosecuted in the adult criminal justice system, and contribute to recidivism.

Washington, DC: Justice Policy Institute, 2020. 24p.

By Jim Quinn  

Since New York State’s 2019 bail reform went into effect, controversy has swirled around the question of its impact on public safety—as well as its broader success in creating a more just and equitable system. The COVID-19 pandemic (which hit three months after the bail reform’s effective date), the upheaval following the killing of George Floyd, and the subsequent enactment of various police and criminal justice reforms are confounding factors that make assessing the specific effects of the 2019 bail reform particularly complex. This paper attempts to give the public a better sense of the risks of this policy shift and the detrimental effect that the changes have had on public safety. First, I will lay out the content of the bail reform and will measure pertinent impacts on crime and re-offending rates. Then I will review changes made in the 2020 and 2022 amendments. I will look at the push for supervised release and closing Rikers Island and how those initiatives fed into the momentum behind these laws. Finally, I will propose recommendations to improve bail reform’s impact on public safety, which include: 1. Allow judges to set bail, remand, release on recognizance (ROR), or conditions of release for any crime and any defendant. There should be a presumption of release for misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, which could be rebutted by the defendant’s prior record or other factors that indicate that the defendant is a flight risk. There should be a presumption of bail, remand, or nonmonetary conditions for defendants charged with violent felonies or weapons offenses. This presumption could also be rebutted by evidence of the defendant’s roots in the community, lack of criminal record, and similar factors

New York: The Manhattan Institute, 2022. 29p.

By: Oded Oren, Chad M. Topaz, and Courtney Machi Oliva.

Key Findings:

1. An analysis of public pretrial data from 2020 - 2022 reveals that some New York City judges are disproportionately carceral, i.e., these judges are substantially more likely to order pretrial detention than their peers, even when accounting for factors such as the severity of the case and the defendant’s prior criminal history.

2. The fourteen judges who exhibited the most carceral discretion compared to their peers are Felicia Mennin, Gerald Lebovits, Quynda Santacroce, Josh Hanshaft, Kerry Ward, Bruna DiBiase, Gerianne Abriano, Beth Beller, Phyllis Chu, Alan Schiff, Tara Collins, Derefim Neckles, Joseph McCormack, and Lumarie Maldonado-Cruz.

3. These fourteen judges’ disproportionately carceral decisions over 2.5 years resulted in an estimated 580 additional people detained, 154 additional years of pretrial detention, and over $77 million of additional costs borne by New York City taxpayers

Key Recommendations:

1. Closer scrutiny of judges’ bail decisions is crucial because of the link between pretrial detention and increased recidivism rates, exacerbated racial disparities, and influence over case outcomes.

2. New York (and other jurisdictions) must evaluate whether judicial discretion should be constrained given that legislative efforts to reform bail have not prevented some judges from exercising discretion in disproportionately carceral ways.

3. New York lawmakers should consider the following approaches to constraining disproportionately carceral judges:

• Making additional judge-level data publicly available to all New Yorkers.

• Removing disproportionately carceral judges from overseeing criminal cases.

• Limiting judges’ discretion to detain, including by mandating release from detention upon the preparation of a release plan by holistic teams of experts.

Scrutinize, Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Zimroth Center on the Administration of Criminal Law at NYU School of Law, 2023. 29p.

MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

By Bruce Smith

PREFACE: “This volume is a study of American state police forces —of the police bodies maintained by Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Texas, West Virginia; Michigan, New Jersey, Colorado, Maryland, Delaware, and also the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It is concerned primarily with the organization, administrative methods, and statutory powers of those forces. It deals with the position of the police in state administration, their jurisdiction, the powers delegated to the administrative head, the direction, control, compensation and welfare of the rank and file, the distribution of patrol units and the patrol methods which are employed, eriminal investigation, identification and crime prevention.

THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF PUBLIO ADMINISTRATION. .1 925, 295p.

By Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, Amy Gallagher, Deborah Azrael , and Matthew Miller 

Little is known about the frequency and features of firearm carrying among adult handgun owners in the United States. In fact, over the past 30 years, only a few peer-reviewed national surveys, conducted in 1994, 1995, 1996, and 2015, have provided even the most basic information about firearm carrying frequency.1–4 Since the first of these surveys, reasons offered by firearm owners for why they own firearms have shifted from hunting and sports shooting toward personal protection. In 1994, for example, 46% of firearm owners reported owning firearms for protection2; by 2015, that number had reached 65%,5 and, by 2019, it had reached 73%.6 As personal protection became the predominant motivation for owning firearms, handgun ownership increased disproportionately from 64% in 1994 to 83% in 2021.2,7

These trends have been accompanied by a loosening of state laws governing who can carry handguns in public places. State laws regulating concealed handgun carrying are typically divided into the following types: (1) permitless: no permit is required; (2) shall issue: the issuing authority is required to grant a permit to anyone who meets certain minimal statutory requirements with no or limited discretion; (3) may issue: the issuing authority has substantial discretion to approve or deny a concealed carry permit to an applicant.8 In 1990, only 1 state allowed permitless handgun carry; at the time of this writing, that number had risen to 21.8

To our knowledge, the only contemporary national estimates of handgun carrying among US adults come from the National Firearms Survey in 2015 (NFS-2015). NFS-2015 found that 23.5% of adult handgun owners (9 million adults) had carried a loaded handgun on their person in the month before the survey; of those, 34.5% (3 million) had done so every day.4 Of handgun owners who carried, 4 in 5 carried primarily for protection, 4 in 5 had a concealed carry permit, 2 in 3 always carried concealed, and 1 in 10 always carried openly.4 The prevalence of handgun carrying was similar in states with permitless carry laws and states with shall issue carry laws. By contrast, the prevalence of carrying was notably lower in states with may issue carry laws.4

In the current study (NFS-2019), we used nationally representative survey data collected from July 30, 2019, to August 11, 2019, to update information pertaining to the proportion of handgun owners who carried a handgun over the previous month (and, of those, the fraction who carried daily), the characteristics of those who carried, and the prevalence of handgun carrying by handgun owners in states that did versus did not require a permit for concealed carrying at the time of the survey.

United States, American Journal of Public Health. 2022, 8pg