Start Here

Start Here PDF Author: Greg Berman
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620972247
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
As heard on NPR's Fresh Air Recommended by The New York Times' Sam Roberts “Start Here is an urgent and timely primer on the approaches that are working and don’t require federal approval or political revolution to end one of the most pressing justice issues the country faces today.” —Brooklyn Daily Eagle A bold agenda for criminal justice reform based on equal parts pragmatism and idealism, from the visionary director of the Center for Court Innovation, a leader of the reform movement Everyone knows that the United States leads the world in incarceration, and that our political process is gridlocked. What can be done right now to reduce the number of people sent to jail and prison? This essential book offers a concrete roadmap for both professionals and general readers who want to move from analysis to action. In this forward-looking, next-generation criminal justice reform book, Greg Berman and Julian Adler of the Center for Court Innovation highlight the key lessons from these programs—engaging the public in preventing crime, treating all defendants with dignity and respect, and linking people to effective community-based interventions rather than locking them up. Along the way, they tell a series of gripping stories, highlighting gang members who have gotten their lives back on track, judges who are transforming their courtrooms, and reformers around the country who are rethinking what justice looks like. While Start Here offers no silver bullets, it does put forth a suite of proven reforms—from alternatives to bail to diversion programs for mentally ill defendants—that will improve the lives of thousands of people right now. Start Here is a must-read for everyone who wants to start dismantling mass incarceration without waiting for a revolution or permission. Proceeds from the book will support the Center for Court Innovation's reform efforts.

Start Here

Start Here PDF Author: Greg Berman
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620972247
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Get Book Here

Book Description
As heard on NPR's Fresh Air Recommended by The New York Times' Sam Roberts “Start Here is an urgent and timely primer on the approaches that are working and don’t require federal approval or political revolution to end one of the most pressing justice issues the country faces today.” —Brooklyn Daily Eagle A bold agenda for criminal justice reform based on equal parts pragmatism and idealism, from the visionary director of the Center for Court Innovation, a leader of the reform movement Everyone knows that the United States leads the world in incarceration, and that our political process is gridlocked. What can be done right now to reduce the number of people sent to jail and prison? This essential book offers a concrete roadmap for both professionals and general readers who want to move from analysis to action. In this forward-looking, next-generation criminal justice reform book, Greg Berman and Julian Adler of the Center for Court Innovation highlight the key lessons from these programs—engaging the public in preventing crime, treating all defendants with dignity and respect, and linking people to effective community-based interventions rather than locking them up. Along the way, they tell a series of gripping stories, highlighting gang members who have gotten their lives back on track, judges who are transforming their courtrooms, and reformers around the country who are rethinking what justice looks like. While Start Here offers no silver bullets, it does put forth a suite of proven reforms—from alternatives to bail to diversion programs for mentally ill defendants—that will improve the lives of thousands of people right now. Start Here is a must-read for everyone who wants to start dismantling mass incarceration without waiting for a revolution or permission. Proceeds from the book will support the Center for Court Innovation's reform efforts.

Handbook of Issues in Criminal Justice Reform in the United States

Handbook of Issues in Criminal Justice Reform in the United States PDF Author: Elizabeth Jeglic
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030775658
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 767

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Book Description
This handbook provides a holistic and comprehensive examination of issues related to criminal justice reform in the United States from a multidisciplinary perspective. Divided into five key domains of reform in the criminal justice system, it analyzes: - Policing - Policy and sentencing - Reentry - Treatment - Alternatives to incarceration Each section provides a history and overview of the domain within the criminal justice system, followed by chapters discussing issues integral to reform. The volume emphasizes decreasing incarceration and minimizing racial, ethnic and economic inequalities. Each section ends with tangible recommendations, based on evidence-based approaches for reform. Of interest to researchers, scholars, activists and policy makers, this unique volume offers a pathway for the future of criminal justice reform in the United States.

Trial and Error in Criminal Justice Reform

Trial and Error in Criminal Justice Reform PDF Author: Greg Berman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442268484
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
In this revised edition of their concise, readable, yet wide-ranging book, Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox tackle a question students and scholars of law, criminology, and political science constantly face: what mistakes have led to the problems that pervade the criminal justice system in the United States? The reluctance of criminal justice policymakers to talk openly about failure, the authors argue, has stunted the public conversation about crime in this country and stifled new ideas. It has also contributed to our inability to address such problems as chronic offending in low-income neighborhoods, an overreliance on incarceration, the misuse of pretrial detention, and the high rates of recidivism among parolees. Berman and Fox offer students and policymakers an escape from this fate by writing about failure in the criminal justice system. Their goal is to encourage a more forthright dialogue about criminal justice, one that acknowledges that many new initiatives fail and that no one knows for certain how to reduce crime. For the authors, this is not a source of pessimism, but a call to action. This revised edition is updated with a new foreword by Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., and afterword by Greg Berman.

Carceral Con

Carceral Con PDF Author: Kay Whitlock
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520974808
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
A critical examination of how contemporary criminal justice reforms expand rather than shrink structurally violent systems of policing, surveillance, and carceral control in the United States. Public opposition to the structural racist, gendered, and economic violence that fuels the criminal legal system is reaching a critical mass. Ignited by popular uprisings, protests, and campaigns against state violence, demands for transformational change have escalated. In response, a now deeply entrenched so-called bipartisan industry has staked its claim to the reform terrain. Representing itself as a sensible bridge across bitterly polarized political divides and party lines, the bipartisan reform industry has sought to control the nature and scope of local, state, and federal reforms. Along the way, it creates an expanding web of neoliberal public-private partnerships, with the promotion and implementation of efforts managed by billionaires, public officials, policy factories, foundations, universities, and mega nonprofit organizations. Yet many bipartisan reforms constitute deceptive sleights of hand that not only fail to produce justice but actively reproduce structural racial and economic inequality. Carceral Con pulls the veil away from the reform public relations machine, providing a riveting overview of the repressive US carceral state and a critical examination of the reform terrain, quagmires, and choices that face us. This book vividly illustrates how contemporary bipartisan reform agendas leave the structural apparatus of mass incarceration intact while widening the net of carceral control and surveillance. Readers are also provided with information and insights useful for examining the likely impacts of reforms today and in the future. What can we learn from reforms of the past? What strategies hold most promise for dismantling structural inequalities, corporate control, and state violence? What approaches will reduce reliance on carceral control and also bring about community safety? Utilizing an abolitionist lens, Carceral Con makes the compelling case for liberatory approaches to envisioning and creating a just society.

Global Justice Reform

Global Justice Reform PDF Author: Hiram Chodosh
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814716350
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
A rare comparative study of judicial systems throughout the world.

Justice and Penal Reform

Justice and Penal Reform PDF Author: Stephen Farrall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317277627
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, Western societies entered a climate of austerity which has limited the penal expansion experienced in the US, UK and elsewhere over recent decades. These altered conditions have led to introspection and new thinking on punishment even among those on the political right who were previously champions of the punitive turn. This volume brings together a group of international leading scholars with a shared interest in using this opportunity to encourage new avenues of reform in the penal sphere. Justice is a famously contested concept and this book takes a deliberately capacious approach to the question of how justice can be mobilised to inform new reform agendas. Some of the contributors revisit an antique question in penal theory and reconsider the question of what fair or just punishment should look like today. Others seek to make gender central to understanding of crime and punishment, or actively reflect on the part that related concepts such as human rights, legitimacy and trust can and should play in thinking about the creation of more just crime control arrangements. Faced with the expansive penal developments of recent decades, much research and commentary about crime control has been gloom-laden and dystopian. By contrast, this volume seeks to contribute to a more constructive sensibility in the social analysis of penality: one that is worldly, hopeful and actively engaged in thinking about how to create more just penal arrangements. Justice and Penal Reform is a key resource for academics and as a supplementary text for students undertaking courses on punishment, penology, prisons, criminal justice and public policy. This book approaches penal reform from an international perspective and offers a fresh and diverse approach within an established field.

Criminality in Context

Criminality in Context PDF Author: Craig Haney
Publisher: Psychology, Crime, and Justice
ISBN: 9781433831423
Category : LAW
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking book that is built on decades of work on the front lines of the criminal justice system, expert psychologist Craig Haney encourages meaningful and lasting reform by changing the public narrative about who commits crime and why. Based on his comprehensive review and analysis of the research, Haney offers a carefully framed and psychologically based blueprint for making the criminal justice system fairer, with strategies to reduce crime through proactive prevention instead of reactive punishment. Haney meticulously reviews evidence documenting the ways in which a person's social history, institutional experiences, and present circumstances powerfully shape their life, with a special focus on the role of social, economic, and racial injustice in crime causation. Haney debunks the "crime master narrative"--the widespread myth that criminality is a product of free and autonomous "bad" choices--an increasingly anachronistic view that cannot bear the weight of contemporary psychological data and theory. This is a must-read for understanding what truly influences criminal behavior, and the strategies for prevention and rehabilitation that follow.

Reforming Juvenile Justice

Reforming Juvenile Justice PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309278937
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
Adolescence is a distinct, yet transient, period of development between childhood and adulthood characterized by increased experimentation and risk-taking, a tendency to discount long-term consequences, and heightened sensitivity to peers and other social influences. A key function of adolescence is developing an integrated sense of self, including individualization, separation from parents, and personal identity. Experimentation and novelty-seeking behavior, such as alcohol and drug use, unsafe sex, and reckless driving, are thought to serve a number of adaptive functions despite their risks. Research indicates that for most youth, the period of risky experimentation does not extend beyond adolescence, ceasing as identity becomes settled with maturity. Much adolescent involvement in criminal activity is part of the normal developmental process of identity formation and most adolescents will mature out of these tendencies. Evidence of significant changes in brain structure and function during adolescence strongly suggests that these cognitive tendencies characteristic of adolescents are associated with biological immaturity of the brain and with an imbalance among developing brain systems. This imbalance model implies dual systems: one involved in cognitive and behavioral control and one involved in socio-emotional processes. Accordingly adolescents lack mature capacity for self-regulations because the brain system that influences pleasure-seeking and emotional reactivity develops more rapidly than the brain system that supports self-control. This knowledge of adolescent development has underscored important differences between adults and adolescents with direct bearing on the design and operation of the justice system, raising doubts about the core assumptions driving the criminalization of juvenile justice policy in the late decades of the 20th century. It was in this context that the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) asked the National Research Council to convene a committee to conduct a study of juvenile justice reform. The goal of Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach was to review recent advances in behavioral and neuroscience research and draw out the implications of this knowledge for juvenile justice reform, to assess the new generation of reform activities occurring in the United States, and to assess the performance of OJJDP in carrying out its statutory mission as well as its potential role in supporting scientifically based reform efforts.

Justice and Security Reform

Justice and Security Reform PDF Author: Lisa Denney
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136000240
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Justice and Security Reform: Development Agencies and Informal Institutions in Sierra Leone undertakes a deep contextual analysis of the reform of the country’s security and justice sectors since the end of the civil war in 2002. Arguing that the political and bureaucratic nature of development agencies leads to a lack of engagement with informal institutions, this book examines the challenges of sustainably transforming security and justice in fragile states. Through the analysis of a post-conflict context often held up as an example of successful peacebuilding, Lisa Denney reveals how the politics of development agencies is an often forgotten constraint in security and justice reform and development efforts more broadly. Particularly suited to upper-level undergraduates and postgraduate students, as well as practitioners, this book is relevant to those interested in security and justice reform and statebuilding, as well Sierra Leone’s post-conflict recovery.

Prisoners of Politics

Prisoners of Politics PDF Author: Rachel Elise Barkow
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 0674919238
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
A CounterPunch Best Book of the Year A Lone Star Policy Institute Recommended Book “If you care, as I do, about disrupting the perverse politics of criminal justice, there is no better place to start than Prisoners of Politics.” —James Forman, Jr., author of Locking Up Our Own The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The social consequences of this fact—recycling people who commit crimes through an overwhelmed system and creating a growing class of permanently criminalized citizens—are devastating. A leading criminal justice reformer who has successfully rewritten sentencing guidelines, Rachel Barkow argues that we would be safer, and have fewer people in prison, if we relied more on expertise and evidence and worried less about being “tough on crime.” A groundbreaking work that is transforming our national conversation on crime and punishment, Prisoners of Politics shows how problematic it is to base criminal justice policy on the whims of the electorate and argues for an overdue shift that could upend our prison problem and make America a more equitable society. “A critically important exploration of the political dynamics that have made us one of the most punitive societies in human history. A must-read by one of our most thoughtful scholars of crime and punishment.” —Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy “Barkow’s analysis suggests that it is not enough to slash police budgets if we want to ensure lasting reform. We also need to find ways to insulate the process from political winds.” —David Cole, New York Review of Books “A cogent and provocative argument about how to achieve true institutional reform and fix our broken system.” —Emily Bazelon, author of Charged