scholarly journals Role of recovery residences in criminal justice reform

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 32-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas L. Polcin
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice Reform

scholarly journals Conflicted conservatives, punitive views, and anti-Black racial bias 1974–2014

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth K Brown ◽  
Kelly M Socia ◽  
Jasmine R Silver
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Violent Crime ◽  
Racial Bias ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Penal Policy ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
Criminal Justice Reform ◽  
Swing Voters

Research suggests that the views of “conflicted conservatives,” Americans who self-identify as conservative but express support for liberal governmental policies and spending, are particularly important in policymaking and politics because they are politically engaged and often act as swing voters. We examine punitive views among conflicted conservatives and other political subgroups in three distinct periods in the politics of punishment in America between 1974 and 2014. In particular, we consider the punitive views of conflicted conservatives relative to consistent conservatives, moderates, and liberals. Given the barrier that racialized typifications of violent crime may pose to current criminal justice reform efforts, we also explore the role of anti-Black bias in predicting punitive views among White Americans across political subgroups. Our overall findings indicate that conflicted conservatives are like moderates in their support for the death penalty and like consistent conservatives on beliefs about court harshness. These findings, and supplemental analyses on punitive views and voting behaviors across political subgroups, call into question whether conflicted conservatives have acted as critical scorekeepers on penal policy issues. We also find that anti-Black racism was significantly related to punitive views across political subgroups and among liberals in particular.

scholarly journals The Consensus Myth in Criminal Justice Reform

2018 ◽  
pp. 259
Author(s):  
Benjamin Levin
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Criminal Justice Reform ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Mass Frame ◽  
Pragmatic Turn ◽  
Policy Proposals ◽  
Policy Solutions

It has become popular to identify a “consensus” on criminal justice reform, but how deep is that consensus, actually? This Article argues that the purported consensus is much more limited than it initially appears. Despite shared reformist vocabulary, the consensus rests on distinct critiques that identify different flaws and justify distinct policy solutions. The underlying disagreements transcend traditional left/right political divides and speak to deeper disputes about the state and the role of criminal law in society. The Article maps two prevailing, but fundamentally distinct, critiques of criminal law: (1) the quantitative approach (what I call the “over” frame); and (2) the qualitative approach (what I call the “mass” frame). The “over” frame grows from a belief that criminal law has an important and legitimate function, but that the law’s operations have exceeded that function. This critique assumes that there are optimal rates of incarceration and criminalization, but the current criminal system is suboptimal in that it has criminalized too much and incarcerated too many. In contrast, the “mass” frame focuses on criminal law as a sociocultural phenomenon. This reformist frame indicates that the issue is not a mere miscalculation; rather, reforms should address how the system marginalizes populations and exacerbates both power imbalances and distributional inequities. To show how these frames differ, this Article applies the “over” and the “mass” critique, in turn, to the maligned phenomena of mass incarceration and overcriminalization. The existing literature on mass incarceration and overcriminalization displays an elision between these two frames. Some scholars and reformers have adopted one frame exclusively, while others use the two interchangeably. No matter how much scholars and critics bemoan the troubles of mass incarceration and overcriminalization, it is hard to believe that they can achieve meaningful reform if they are talking about fundamentally different problems. While many scholars may adopt an “over” frame in an effort to attract a broader range of support or appeal to politicians, “over” policy proposals do not necessarily reach deeper “mass” concerns. Ultimately, this Article argues that a pragmatic turn to the “over” frame may have significant costs in legitimating deeper structural flaws and failing to address distributional issues of race, class, and power at the heart of the “mass” critique.

Gender and Racial Gaps in Support for Policing and Correctional Reforms: Are the Gaps a Consequence of Political Partisanship?

2021 ◽  
pp. 001112872110647
Author(s):  
Michael A. Hansen ◽  
John C. Navarro
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Congressional Election ◽  
Election Study ◽  
Multivariate Models ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
Criminal Justice Reform ◽  
Political Partisanship ◽  
Racial Gaps

Divisive criminal justice issues are typically framed through gender and racial lenses, with little empirical work considering the increasing role of political partisanship. Using the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study ( N = 55,000), we estimate multivariate models of support for four policing and correctional reforms. The models initially point to gender gaps and racial gaps. However, as with many public policy issues, support for criminal justice reforms are largely a product of political partisanship—the gender and racial gaps are largely a consequence of gender and racial gaps in partisanship and appear to be driven by white Republican men. As legislative bodies continue to be overrepresented with individuals with the same demographic profile, criminal justice reform prospects are limited.

What were “They” Thinking, and Does it Matter? Structural Inequality and Individual Intent in Criminal Justice Reform

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-263
Author(s):  
Hadar Aviram
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Structural Inequality ◽  
Criminal Justice Reform ◽  
Clear Preference ◽  
The Third

In Visions of Social Control (1985) Stanley Cohen provided a typology of scholarly works on the punitive turn: “uneven progress,” “good intentions-disastrous consequences,” and “discipline and mystification.” This Essay applies these categories to recent punishment and society scholarship, finding a clear preference for the third category, arguing that current works do not merely point to systemic evils—they impute bad intent to individuals in the system. Against this current, I identify two works—James Forman’s Locking Up Our Own (2017) and Heather Schoenfeld’s Building the Prison State (2016)—and show the strengths of analyses that take individual actors on their own terms. Finally, relying on the recent example of the Ban the Box initiative—a well-intended but failed policy—I argue that flexibility in viewing actors’ motivations, rather than relegating them to the role of cogs in a system fraught by inherent flaws, is important not only for scholarly accuracy but for policy and strategic reasons.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document