Administration of Justice

Administration of Justice
44.503

TITLE	DESCRIPTION
What's Changing in Prosecution?	Assigned Feb. 15. Short report by the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education in 2001.
Pretrial Drug Testing: And Overview of Issues and Practices	Assigned March 4. (NCJ 176341), Bureau of Justice Assistance, D. Alan Henry, John Clark, July 1999. This bulletin overviews drug testing issues and practices at the pretrial stage of the criminal justice system. Also available in a text version.
Rethinking Rehabilitation: Why Can't We Reform Our Criminals?	Assigned March 17; watch the video and read Farabee's monograph. Early this year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the federal sentencing guidelines are optional, renewing interest in sentencing legislation and criminal recidivism. As Congress looks for new strategies to combat increasing prisoner recidivism rates, a new book by UCLA research psychologist, David Farabee, warns of the pitfalls of returning to certain implementations of the "social programs" approach (e.g. prisoner visitation, life-skills, cognitive-behavioral) that was favored in the 1960s and 1970s, and appears to be re-emerging now. In Rethinking Rehabilitation: Why Can’t We Reform Our Criminals (AEI Press, 2005), Farabee reviews the most common forms of offender rehabilitation, outlines their underlying assumptions about the causes of crime, and provides a contrasting perspective that emphasizes closer monitoring, indefinite community supervision, and increased personal responsibility. A discussion will further explore the issue, featuring panelists Amy Solomon of the Urban Institute, John Laub of the University of Maryland, Jessica Nickel from the office of Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), and James Q. Wilson of AEI and Pepperdine University.
John Laub's interview with Ed Lemert	Interview from the book Criminology in the Making.
How Goes the "War on Drugs"?	Assigned March 29. For the past 15 years, the RAND Corporation’s Drug Policy Research Center (DPRC) has been analyzing trends in drug use and consequences in the United States and evaluating policies intended to respond to drug-related problems. This article is a recent summary of where we've been and where we stand now.
State Is Joining Shift on Prisons	Assigned March 29. By insisting that California make rehabilitation a focus of prison life, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is joining a national movement of political leaders who believe it is time for a new approach to incarceration.
Issues Paper 2	Due April 26. Outline for issues paper 2.
Racial Disparity and the Legitimacy of the Criminal Justice System	Minority (over) representation in the criminal justice system remains a puzzle. How the criminal justice system operates, through the various policies, procedures, and practices, affects who is involved with different phases of the criminal justice system. This article reviews the policies and practices of the criminal justice system that are directly related to churning, or the recycling of individuals through the same processes. In conducting our review, we describe how select communities are also adversely affected by these same processes and practices. The article identifies areas of the criminal justice system that can impact the offender's and community's perception of the legitimacy of the criminal justice system in its goals of preserving order and deterring aberrant, anti-social behavior. A research agenda is then presented to address the consequences of the resulting behavior in a manner that tips the scales for individual and communities in terms of their likely involvement with the criminal justice system.
Prisoner Reentry in Massachusetts	This report describes prisoner reentry in Massachusetts by examining the trends in incarceration and prisoner releases in the state, the characteristics of the state’s returning adult and juvenile inmates, the geographic distribution of returning inmates, and the social and economic climates of the communities that are home to the highest concentrations of returning inmates. This document consolidates existing data on incarceration and release trends and presents a new analysis of data on Massachusetts inmates released in 2002. The data used for this report were derived from several sources, including the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, the Massachusetts Division of Youth Services, the Massachusetts State Parole Board, the Suffolk County House of Correction, and the U.S. Census Bureau.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Governor’s Commission on Corrections Reform	In Massachusetts, prisons are often viewed as little more than the “end of the line” for criminal offenders. Some believe that once an individual is sent to prison, he or she no longer poses a threat to public safety. Unfortunately, this view fails to consider the fact that the vast majority of inmates in Massachusetts (97%) are eventually released to our communities. Many of those released walk directly out of a maximum security facility onto the street. And most of those released from prison do not have any ongoing monitoring or supervision. The public safety consequences are alarming. Nearly one out of every two of those released will be convicted of a new crime within just three years.
Assessing The Impact of Institutional Culture on Prison Violence and Disorder	The National Institute of Corrections has embarked on an ambitious multistage, multimodal strategy to fundamentally change the "culture" of state and federal prisons in this country. In the following review, we examine the major problems facing state and federal prison administrators, and then provide an overview of NIC's response to the problem, which is grounded in the reform strategy used by advocates of problem-oriented policing to change police practices in this country (see, e.g. National Research Council, 2004). When applied to prisons, the problem-oriented perspective is based on the notion that we need to take proactive steps to address the underlying causes of negative prison culture, rather than continue to react to its consequences (e.g. violence, disorder, sexual assault). We conclude by reviewing the steps that need to be taken before NIC's culture change initiative can be fully implemented and its effects evaluated.

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