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We address the organization of criminal justice forecasting and implications for its use in criminal justice policymaking. We argue that the use of forecasting is relatively widespread in criminal justice agency settings, but it is used primarily to inform decision-making and practice rather than to formulate and test new policy proposals. Using predictive policing and prison population forecasting as our main examples of the range of forecasting methods adopted in criminal justice practice, we describe their uses, how their use is organized, and the implications of the organizational arrangements for the transparent, reviewable, and consensual use of forecasting. We point out that both prison population forecasting and predictive policing have long histories that have led to advances in methodology. Prison population forecasting has generally become embedded in budget decision-making processes that contribute to greater transparency in method and applications. Predictive policing has been less transparent in method and use, partly because the methods are more complicated and rely on larger amounts of data, but it generally has not be used in ways to foster community engagement and build public support. Concerns about the legitimacy of its use persist.

In The Growth of Incarceration in the United States, the National Research Council documents the large and persistent racial disparities in imprisonment that accompanied the more than quadrupling of the U.S. incarceration rate since the 1980s. Largely unnoticed by policy makers and opinion leaders in recent years is an unprecedented decrease in the number of African American women incarcerated at the same time that the number of white women in prison has grown to new heights. The result of these recent changes is a near convergence in black-white female incarceration rates from 2000 to 2016. In some states, the changes occurred abruptly and almost instantaneously. In other states, the convergence has been gradual. We find that changes in the population composition—the fraction of the population that is black—was the major contributor to the decline in the disparity among women. We also find that race-specific differences in drug overdose deaths stemming from the recent increases in opioid use lowered the disparity by increasing the white female imprisonment rate and lowering it for black women.

Unprecedented growth in the size of the U.S. jail and prison populations during the late 20th century was accompanied by rapid increases in the size of the probation population. Probation, while intended to be an alternative to incarceration, has been described as a pathway to an incarceration stint because of its onerous conditions and other requirements. An emerging literature is examining how one of these conditions, legal financial obligations (e.g., fines, supervision fees, restitution), affect probation outcomes. However, this research is limited because data on legal financial obligations often do not detail the various types, amounts, and frequencies of payments toward LFO debt. In this paper, we tap the 1995 Survey of Adults on Probation (SAP) to study the impacts of debt burden (e.g., the amount, frequency, and type of LFO) on probationers’ capacity to make the required payments. Importantly, we find that of the seven types of LFOs included in the SAP, restitution alone was consistently shown to be the LFO associated with missing a payment across model specifications. Although the SAP data are from 1995, research indicates the use of LFOs has expanded since then. Thus, we are more likely to underestimate the impacts of the differential burden of specific LFOs on people on probation.

Justice reinvestment was introduced in the early 2000s as a means to respond to the massive growth in incarceration in the United States that had occurred during the past three decades by diverting offenders from prison and redirecting a portion of the associated corrections expenditures into communities to build their capacities to manage offenders locally. Over the next 17 years, the concept evolved into a Congressionally funded federal grant program that shifted the focus of reinvestment away from community reinvestment and toward a state-agency practice improvement model that ultimately aimed to improve public safety. A distinct form of justice reinvestment, the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI), was the dominant practice of justice reinvestment in the United States. It was organized as a public–private partnership that engaged states in bipartisan efforts to enact legislative reforms and other policies to address sentencing and corrections practices and adopt high-performing evidence-based practices (EBPs) that would yield the desired public safety benefits. JRI contributed to legislative reforms and adoption of EBPs, especially in community supervision. The federal JRI effort has not yet provided peer-reviewed, published evidence that it has achieved its objectives.

During the late 20th century, imprisonment rates in the United States saw unprecedented growth, leading correctional systems across the country to face widespread overcrowding and underfunding. Subsequently, policy makers sought out alternatives to incarceration for certain categories of offenses. Community supervision, such as probation, emerged as a popular solution to both reduce prison and jail populations as well as to generate revenue to fund the rapidly expanding legal system. With the rise in community supervision came increases in the number of people on probation for lower-level and non-violent offenses. The expansion of legal financial obligations (LFO) placed additional burdens on these persons, who disproportionately sit in lower socio-economic status brackets. Using data from the 1995 Survey of Adults on Probation (SAP), the current study adds to the literature on probation and LFOs in an important way. The SAP data contain information on the amount, frequency, and type of LFO. Thus, this paper examines the distinct types of LFOs to determine the differential burden that each type of LFO has on people on probation. This paper finds that of all types of fees, those associated with victim restitution are most likely to lead to missed payments, while those that generate revenues do not contribute significantly to missed payments. This paper discusses the implications of this for procedural justice and fairness.

Persons processed into and through jail facilities in the United States may be particularly vulnerable during an influenza pandemic. Among other concerns, public health and corrections officials need to consider flow issues, the high turnover and transitions between jails and the community, and the decentralized organization of jails. In this article, we examine some of the unique challenges jail facilities may face during an influenza pandemic and discuss issues that should be addressed to reduce the spread of illness and lessen the impact of an influenza pandemic on the jail population and their surrounding communities.

Objective: The purpose of this article is to: (1) illustrate the application of life table methodology to child abuse and neglect report data and (2) demonstrate the use of indicators derived from the life tables for monitoring the risk of child maltreatment within a community. Method: Computerized records of child maltreatment reports from a large, urban county in Ohio are cumulated for 11 years and linked for each child. Life table methods are used to estimate the probability that children from birth to age 10 will be reported victims of maltreatment by age, race, and urban or suburban residence. Results: Using life tables, the estimates in the county of this study are that 33.4% of African American children and 11.8% of White children will appear in substantiated or indicated child abuse or neglect report(s) by their 10th birthday. The age-specific probability of a maltreatment report is highest in the first year of life for both groups. The probability of a child being reported for a substantiated or indicated incident of maltreatment before his or her 10th birthday is more than three times higher for city dwellers than for suburbanites in the urban county studied here. Conclusions: Life table methodology is useful for creating child well-being indicators for communities. Such indicators reveal that a larger portion of the child population is affected by maltreatment reports than would be concluded from examining cross-sectional rates and can be used to identify racial or geographic disparities.

The capacity of communities to prevent violence is examined fromthree perspectives: youth violence, child maltreatment, and intimate partner violence. The analysis suggests that community social control and collective efficacy are significant protective factors for all three types of violence, but these need to be further distinguished for their relationships to private, parochial, and state controls. It is argued that strong interpersonal ties are not the only contributor to collective efficacy and violence prevention. Weak ties, including those outside the community, and organizational ties are also seen as necessary. Violence prevention programs should be structured in ways that contribute to the communities’ own capacity to prevent violence.

Research Summary: This paper reviews and evaluates the existing (and limited) evidence that increases in incarceration have affected the ability of residential neighborhoods to perform their traditional social control functions. It suggests that, although comparatively weak, the evidence points to the increases in the level and clustering in social and geographic space of incarceration as contributing to changes in the social organization of affected communities by weakening family formation, labor force attachments, and patterns of social interaction among residents. At the same time, however, the paper does find support for the contention that incarceration leads to reductions in crime in affected communities. Policy Implications: To the extent that mass incarceration disrupts patterns of social interaction, weakens community social organization, and decreases the stigma of imprisonment, its longer-run effects may be to reduce its effectiveness.

Objective To determine the mortality attributable to smoking and years of potential life lost from smoking among people in prison and whether bans on smoking in prison are associated with reductions in smoking related deaths. Design Analysis of cross sectional survey data with the smoking attributable mortality, morbidity, and economic costs system; population based time series analysis. Setting All state prisons in the United States. Main outcome measures Prevalence of smoking from cross sectional survey of inmates in state correctional facilities. Data on state prison tobacco policies from web based searches of state policies and legislation. Deaths and causes of death in US state prisons from the deaths in custody reporting program of the Bureau of Justice Statistics for 2001-11. Smoking attributable mortality and years of potential life lost was assessed from the smoking attributable mortality, morbidity, and economic costs system of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Multivariate Poisson models quantified the association between bans and smoking related cancer, cardiovascular and pulmonary deaths. Results The most common causes of deaths related to smoking among people in prison were lung cancer, ischemic heart disease, other heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, and chronic airways obstruction. The age adjusted smoking attributable mortality and years of potential life lost rates were 360 and 5149 per 100 000, respectively; these figures are higher than rates in the general US population (248 and 3501, respectively). The number of states with any smoking ban increased from 25 in 2001 to 48 by 2011. In prisons the mortality rate from smoking related causes was lower during years with a ban than during years without a ban (110.4/100 000 v 128.9/100 000). Prisons that implemented smoking bans had a 9% reduction (adjusted incidence rate ratio 0.91, 95% confidence interval 0.88 to 0.95) in smoking related deaths. Bans in place for longer than nine years were associated with reductions in cancer mortality (adjusted incidence rate ratio 0.81, 95% confidence interval 0.74 to 0.90). Conclusions Smoking contributes to substantial mortality in prison, and prison tobacco control policies are associated with reduced mortality. These findings suggest that smoking bans have health benefits for people in prison, despite the limits they impose on individual autonomy and the risks of relapse after release.

By analysing long-run trends in the courts' use of custodial sanctions, this paper compares the reasons for the limited success in diverting adult offenders from imprisonment by increasing the use of fines during the late 1950s and 1960s, and the subsequent replacement of fines by imprisonment as the range of alternatives to custody expanded. These changes are explained by the role of information and previous sentencing practices in reducing uncertainly in the sentencing environment, Additionally, it is argued that statutory limitations are insufficient to compel sentencers to change practices. The effects of the Criminal Justice Act 1982, with implications for the Criminal Justice Act 1988, on the sentencing of young adults are given as an illustration of this point.

Conventional wisdom about the criminal justice system suggests that extralegal factors such as race or employment status should not affect sentencing outcomes. In this paper we examine an alternative model of the relationship between imprisonment and unemployment and race. The model suggests that penal practices are shaped by the labor market conditions of a system of production and that prisons, as part of a larger set of institutions providing support for economically-dependent populations, help to regulate the most superfluous group of workers in the industrial economy of the Northern states of the United States—unemployed black workers who comprise a large fraction of the pool of “reserve” workers necessary for price stability and economic expansion. We find support for the structural model that links black imprisonment (and Northern imprisonment in general) to manufacturing output and black unemployment.

This paper reviews trends in black-white incarcerations in the North and South from 1870 to 1980. Using census data on imprisonments it finds that the degree of disproportionate imprisonment of blacks (relative to their representation in the general population) has been higher in Northern states than in Southern states from the middle of the 19th century through the present, although recently the trends have begun to converge. After reviewing explanations for the higher imprisonment rates of blacks in the North, it reviews black-white patterns of arrests and imprisonments by state for 1960, 1970 and 1980 and finds that the variations in black-white imprisonments are not fully accounted for by arrests. Finally, it comments on appropriate methodologies for examining racial differences in treatment in the criminal justice system.

Deeply rooted historical patterns allow us to make a correlation between imprisonment and unemployment and the marginalization of blacks. This paper examines the interrelationships among criminal activity, punishment, and cycles of the economic system based on the influence of political and economic forces on forming penal policies. The penal system is viewed as a device by which labor market fluctuations can be regulated. We examine differences between blacks and whites and between the North and the South to arrive at this paper's thesis: that race provides the link among economic cycles, employment, and crime.