Good Intentions Gone Awry—A Proposal for Fundamental Change in Criminal Sentencing

This article will discuss the individual treatment model and analyze the fallacies of current sentencing practices and philosophies. Concluding that the treatment model is inappropriate because it fails to consider fundamental principles of justice and the purposes of the criminal law, it will offer an alternative proposal for sentencing that is not dependent on the theory of rehabilitation

Civil asset forfeiture, equitable sharing, and policing for profit in the United States

Purpose: Critics of asset forfeiture claim that forfeiture laws create financial incentives that inappropriately influence police behavior. The present study examines the relationship between measures of the financial incentive and legal burdens for civil asset forfeiture on federal equitable sharing payments to local law enforcement to determine whether police behavior is affected by different statutory incentives for forfeiture activity.Methods: Using LEMAS and DOJ forfeiture data, this study addresses some of the limitations of previous research by using a multi-year average for forfeiture activity, an improved measure of financial incentives for law enforcement, and multiple measures of statutory burdens to law enforcement to determine the impact of forfeiture laws on forfeiture activity.Results: Consistent with anecdotal reports and limited prior research, findings indicate that agencies in jurisdictions with more restrictive state forfeiture laws receive more proceeds through federal equitable sharing.Conclusions: Results suggest that state and local law enforcement agencies use federal equitable sharing to circumvent their own state forfeiture laws when state laws are more burdensome or less financially rewarding to these agencies, providing additional evidence that police operations are influenced by financial incentives

Young, Black, and Wrongfully Charged: A Cumulative Disadvantage Framework

The term wrongful conviction typically refers to the conviction or adjudication of individuals who are factually innocent. Decades of research has rightfully focused on uncovering contributing factors of convictions of factually innocent people to inform policy and practice. However, in this paper we expand our conceptualization of wrongful conviction. Specifically, we propose a redefinition that includes other miscarriages of justice: A wrongful conviction is a conviction or adjudication for someone who never should have been involved in the juvenile or criminal legal system in the first place. Although there are various miscarriages of justice that might appropriately be categorized under this reconceptualization, in this paper we focus specifically on those whose system involvement was the result of engaging in no wrongdoing beyond normative adolescent behavior. With this reconceptualization in mind, we highlight how the intersection of youthfulness and race puts youth of color at risk of both wrongful conviction based on factual innocence and wrongful conviction based on criminalization of normative youthful behavior. We rely on a cumulative disadvantage framework to demonstrate how system responses to both youthfulness and race drive youth of color deeper into the legal system and further contribute to their wrongful conviction. In doing so, we describe how the disadvantage created by youthfulness and racial bias compound within and across each stage of system processing. We also illustrate that it is the behavior of youth of color, not white youth, that is disproportionately criminalized. Youth of color are currently and have historically been overrepresented within the juvenile and criminal legal systems; this disparity can be seen even amongst the youngest system-involved youth. We conclude by presenting recommendations for future research efforts to account for multiple system time points, race, and youthfulness. Finally, we describe what we believe to be important considerations for changes to policy and practice that might begin to correct the unnecessary and disproportionate wrongful charging and conviction of youth of color

Exploring the Impacts of Predictor Variables on Success in a Mental Health Diversion Program

Since the first Mental Health Court (MHC) in 1997, there has been a steady increase of MHCs all over the country. With the introduction of these new specialty courts have also come to introduction of diversion programs. Diversion programs work to connect offenders who have mental illnesses to community-based mental health treatment services as an alternative to incarceration. Typically, with the completion of the program comes with the benefit of having their charges dropped. Diversion programs aim to reduce recidivism in offenders with mental illness and improve their access to treatment

Model(ing) Privacy: Empirical Approaches to Privacy Law and Governance

Model(ing) Privacy: Empirical Approaches to Privacy Law and Governanc

BEING PROFILED:COGITAS ERGO SUM

Profiling the European citizen: why today's democracy needs to look harder at the negative potential of new technology than at its positive potential