Racial Justice - some relevant policy and legal guidance
Topical Reports, Articles, and Other Information
- Incorporating Racial Equity into Criminal Justice Reform is an October, 2014 report by the Sentencing Project setting forth recommendations to address racial disparities in criminal justice.
- One Strike and You're Out: How We Can Eliminate Barriers to Economic Security and Mobility for People with Criminal Records is a December, 2014 report by the Center for American Progress discussing ways to eliminate barriers to successful reentry for persons coming out of prison or jail.
- Race and Punishment: Racial Perceptions of Crime and Support for Punitive Policies is an October 2014 report discussing the links between social forces encouraging associations between people of color and crime and greater punitiveness faced by Blacks and Latinos in the criminal justice system.
- Fewer Prisoners, Less Crime: A Tale of Three States is a July, 2014 report on crime rates declining faster than the national average in states that have reduced prison populations.
- Disproportionate Minority Contact in the Juvenile Justice System is a May, 2014 policy brief on persistent racial disparities in juvenile justice in the United States.
- Ending Mass Incarceration: Charting a New Justice Reinvestment is an April, 2013 report discussing the failure of justice reinvestment to impact mass incarceration and setting forth recommendations for improvement.
- The Changing Racial Dynamics of Women's Incarceration is a May, 2013 report discussing the decline in the racial disparities in incarcerated women from a 6:1 to a 3:1 African-American to white ratio.
- To Build a Better Criminal Justice System: 25 Experts Envision the Next 25 Years is a March, 2012 series of essays setting forth the views of criminal justice scholars on the next phase of criminal justice reform.
America Has the Largest Prison Population in the World, But Not for the Reason You Think sets forth arguments suggesting trends in felony charges by assistant district attorneys and other factors are key in understanding growth in prison populations and that the issue extends beyond the war on drugs. "Pfaff's analysis suggests that reforming drug penalties is no silver bullet, and that advocates will need to reckon with deeper patterns in how American society has grown accustomed to dealing so aggressively with crime."
14 Years After Decriminalizing All Drugs, Here's What Portugal Looks Like: Really interesting: here are the caveats: "At the turn of the millennium, Portugal shifted drug control from the Justice Department to the Ministry of Health and instituted a robust public health model for treating hard drug addiction. It also expanded the welfare system in the form of a guaranteed minimum income. Changes in the material and health resources for at-risk populations for the past decade are a major factor in evaluating the evolution of Portugal's drug situation. Alex Stevens, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Kent and co-author of the aforementioned criminology article, thinks the global community should be measured in its takeaways from Portugal. "The main lesson to learn decriminalizing drugs doesn't necessarily lead to disaster, and it does free up resources for more effective responses to drug-related problems,"