Rebuilding the Infrastructure for At-risk Youth

The term "at-risk youth" generally refers to those ages 10 to 17, vulnerable to delinquency, violence, substance abuse, or involvement with the justice system. Though definitions vary, the risk factors remain fairly constant: prior history of violence, poor family functioning, severe substance abuse, poverty, negative peer influences such as gangs, and school failure.Despite, or maybe due to, the inherent limitations of the juvenile justice system to positively impact families and communities, many services for at-risk youth have emerged in the form of neighborhood collaboratives, before- and after-school programs, family support systems, and diversion programs designed to keep youth out of the juvenile justice system. Unfortunately, in the past eight years, these programs have received little attention, and many cuts in the federal budget have had devastating consequences for our nation's children and future. The Bush Administration radically reduced funding for a wide range of services and programs. NCCD strongly recommends reinstating an infrastructure that we know helps youth stay out of trouble while improving the conditions of juvenile detention facilities so that they are safe and rehabilitative

Evaluating Federal Gang Bills

The Gang Abatement and Prevention Act of 2007 and the Gang Prevention, Intervention, and Suppression Act. expand the current penal code regarding criminal street gangs, resulting in an over-reaching defi nition of both gangs and gang-related crimes. Additionally, they create an entirely new section of penalties pertaining to gang crimes, increasing the enhanced sentences that are already in place. The bills' provisions call for suppression-heavy strategies, increasing punishments for gang crimes, and expanding the types of crimes that can be categorized as such. Years of research and evaluation have shown that these types of suppression strategies are not the solution to the gang problem. Yet, these bills propose more than $1 billion in duplicative suppression, prosecution, and incarceration of "gangs" and "gang members," leaving little money for community-based prevention and intervention programs that have been proven to work

A New Era in California Juvenile Justice

Behind the media and political attention focused on California prisons, which are plagued with severe levels of crowding, and a federal court order to reduce the inmate population by over 40,000, lies one of California's best-kept secrets: the state's youth correctional custodial population has declined over 80% in just over the past decade. Just since 2004 the California Youth Authority (CYA) population declined by over 5,000 inmates. The state has already closed five major juvenile facilities and four forestry camps for juvenile offenders.A number of factors have contributed significantly to the drop in the population of the CYA. The most frequently cited is the very negative media publicity in the early 2000s about the conditions inside facilities, the case of Farrell v. Harper in 2003, and realignment legislation passed in 2007 that required that more youthful offenders be managed at the county level. However, the CYA population began declining as early as 1997. The trend towards increased costs for counties to send youth to the CYA, and doubt that the CYA was an appropriate setting for many of the youth being sent there, had already begun in the late 1990s.While no single factor accounts for the drastic change in the CYA population, the research presented here points to multiple forces that came together in the mid- to late-1990s and early 2000s to change public perception, judicial behaviors, probation programs, sentencing policies, and state funding streams.We also find that this population reduction is particularly notable because it did not result in an increase in juvenile crime, as some had erroneously predicted

Created Equal: Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the US Criminal Justice System

NCCD uses federal and state data to catalog racial and ethnic disparities at each stage of the justice system, including arrest, court processing, jails and prisons, probation and parole, and the death penalty. Primarily using relative rate indices, the report finds that people of color, especially African Americans and Hispanics, are overrepresented throughout the system. The report also gives similar data for youth in the juvenile justice system, and discusses racial and ethnic differences in recidivism in select states

The Extravagance of Imprisonment Revisited

This report analyzes prison and jail populations in the US as a whole and in four key states -- California, Florida, New York, and Texas -- to determine 1) how many prisoners are nonserious offenders and what it costs to lock them up, 2) what proven effective alternatives are in use and what they cost, and 3) what savings could be realized if a portion of the nonserious offenders were sentenced to alternatives instead of prison and jail

Children Exposed to Violence (Focus)

A review of the types of violence to which children are exposed, the effects of that violence on their development, and promising approaches for improving outcome

Special Report: Crime and Economic Hard Times

As concerns over the current economic situation continue to grow, the question of the correlation between increased crime and a depressed economy has resurfaced. Do economic instability and its discontents, such as unemployment, reduced wages, and reduced social services lead to a general increase in criminal activity? News stories about a supposed rise in crime caused by the economic crisis are appearing regularly around the country. Recent reports by Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today seem to start from the assumption of a distinct and causal relationship. In addition, articles often focus on one city's problems. For example, the Times headline reads "Crime continues to fall in Los Angeles despite bad economy," while USA Today cites residents of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, who are convinced that "Desperate people do desperate things" because their city has seen an increase in property crimes. Both the causes of crime and the workings of the economy are immensely complex questions, and a clear, direct relationship is nearly impossible to prove.Crime stems from a multitude of variables including economic measures, demographic dynamics, health indicators, and social safety nets.There is very little conclusive research on the relationship between crime and the economy. This report examines the question using state and national data. A review of the literature discusses how this topic has been studied to date and is followed by an NCCD analysis that examines criminal justice data in conjunction with economic recessions and expansions

A vehicle classification algorithm based on telematics data

Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2018.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 45-46).In the thesis, I develop an algorithm to identify the vehicle model from telematics data. By extracting the features from the accelerometer and GPS data, we obtain the classification features, which then goes through a multiclass random forest classifier. We apply this results into problems of driver and vehicle identification. The result shows that, while the algorithm could identify the vehicle models to some extent, the dominating signal comes from driving style, and an approach running purely unsupervised learning is harder to achieve good classification results compared to supervised methods.by Linh Vuong Nguyen.M. Eng

Scrambling for higher metrics in the Journal Impact Factor bubble period: a real-world problem in science management and its implications

Universities and funders in many countries have been using Journal Impact Factor (JIF) as an indicator for research and grant assessment despite its controversial nature as a statistical representation of scientific quality. This study investigates how the changes of JIF over the years can affect its role in research evaluation and science management by using JIF data from annual Journal Citation Reports (JCR) to illustrate the changes. The descriptive statistics find out an increase in the median JIF for the top 50 journals in the JCR, from 29.300 in 2017 to 33.162 in 2019. Moreover, on average, elite journal families have up to 27 journals in the top 50. In the group of journals with a JIF of lower than 1, the proportion has shrunk by 14.53% in the 2015–2019 period. The findings suggest a potential ‘JIF bubble period’ that science policymaker, university, public fund managers, and other stakeholders should pay more attention to JIF as a criterion for quality assessment to ensure more efficient science management

The California Cities Gang Prevention Network: Bulletin 18

This bulletin will address Senate Bill X3 18, which was passed by the legislature in September, 2009, signed into law by Governor Schwarzenegger in October, 2009, and came into effect on January 25, 2010. The express purpose of this measure is to close budget gaps by reducing the inmate population and creating more manageable caseloads of parole officers (from 70 to 48). Because this legislation has been implemented so quickly, there has been some confusion regarding the details