Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/research/)
Research revealed that about 30% of the 116 state and local officers who responded in a May 2022 survey did not get active shooter training after graduating from police academies. Of those who had been trained, many received such instruction only once in their careers.
Black men who were incarcerated between the ages of 15 and 22, and tracked for roughly 40 years ending in 2018, had a significantly lower life expectancy after their release from prison than non-Blacks, according to a recently released Boston Medical Center-based study.
Few crimes stimulate such visceral reactions and deep-seated fears as sexual offenses. Accordingly, societal responses to sexual offending such as registration and notification laws tend to be quite punitive and highly stigmatizing for the offender. Yet these social control practices are widely considered by the public to be essential for community safety.
However, given lessons learned about the linkages between moral panic and legislation in other justice contexts (e.g., juvenile “superpredators” and waiver/transfer laws), we question the degree to which public perceptions about the characteristics of persons who commit sexual offenses are accurate — particularly of juveniles who commit these types of offenses. Specifically, we ask: If public sentiment drives public policy in a democracy, how accurate is the information they are basing their perceptions/attitudes on that ultimately frame legal responses to these juveniles? We propose here that the larger societal understanding of and reaction to youth who have committed a sexual offense has been disproportionately severe in comparison to the risk posed by these youth and what we understand about youth development and resiliency.
Our findings from a pilot study exploring public perceptions of these youth suggest practice and policy reform efforts should continue to incorporate a substantial public education and prevention component.
I began my research program on gun violence prevention in the early 1970s, when my children were just starting school. Now I am the proud grandfather of...
Across the country, child welfare and juvenile justice systems now recognize that youth involved in both systems (i.e., dual system youth) are a vulnerable population who go unrecognized...
Juvenile justice studies could be weakened by the transfer of the five research managers in the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) into the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), said Jeffrey Butts, director of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice Research and Evaluation Center.
Over the past several weeks, I have attended a number of meetings and conferences in which both juvenile justice practitioners and researchers were present. Over and over, I was reminded that these two groups really do speak in different languages and often have very different philosophies.
Athens, Ga., is a funny town. It’s the home of the University of Georgia, meaning some 35,000 students make their home here for nine months out of the year.
The Centers for Disease Control’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) has published numerous studies analyzing firearms-related deaths and injuries data, but over the last 16 years, the NCIPC hasn’t conducted a single study exploring why such acts of violence take place. The reason, several former CDC directors say, is because pro-gun lobbyists made the topic of gun violence research forbidden through several measures adopted in the mid 1990s. In 1996, several legislators co-sponsored an amendment that would cut the CDC’s budget, with a House Appropriations Committee adopting an additional amendment that prohibited CDC funding “to advocate or promote gun control.” Eventually, $2.6 million was removed from the CDC’s budget -- the exact amount that the NCIPC spent on firearms injuries studies a year prior. The National Rifle Association (NRA) has long been critical of the CDC, with NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre recently telling the Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC) that he believed the agency was promoting a political agenda through the NCIPC in 1995. Other gun proponents agreed.
When a young person is sent to a detention facility away from his or her family, it is a drastic intervention and most would agree that our system of justice should approach it with great care. Even if the child is not removed from the community and sent to live in juvenile detention, a delinquency case can now follow the child throughout her life in an increasing number of ways, such as DNA registration, housing access, and sentencing enhancements, and sex offender registration. As a result, on paper, our system of justice purports to provide this child with most of the same procedural checks that we provide to adults and sometimes, in theory, even more. But in reality, our system falls short. Too often, this entire process is left to one overburdened judge with no jury, little public access, sometimes no defender, and, as it turns out, little appellate oversight.