The South Carolina Budget and Control Board, Division of General Services published the findings of an audit of the procurement policies and procedures of the South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy.
This issue brief explains the definition of a disabled person and how they are considered in American Politics. It also examines the interactions of disabled persons and the criminal justice system.
Strengthening the rule of law is widely regarded among traditional donors, multilateral institutions, and a growing number of middle income and fragile states as a necessary precondition for sustainable peace, poverty alleviation, and development. Crime and violence deter investment and lower employment, undermine social institutions, and divert resources through direct and indirect costs, all of which hinder development. It is likely to disproportionately affect poor and marginalized populations by limiting access to basic services. The formal criminal justice system is seen in many environments as failing to deliver justice. Most states experiencing fragility do not have the capacity to effectively prevent crime, enforce laws, or peacefully resolve disputes across the whole of their territories. There is another powerful deterrent for communities to seek redress through state criminal justice institutions: they are frequently a primary instrument for the government and elites to maintain power and control through the perpetration of injustice. The informal system, however, is alone insufficient to handle the pressing justice requirements of fragile states, not least for preventing and responding to inter-communal conflict, to serious organized and cross-border crime, and to public corruption and other 'white collar' crime.
Democracy is often equated with majority rule. But closer analysis reveals that, in theory and by constitutional design, our criminal justice system should be supermajoritarian, not majoritarian. The Constitution guarantees that criminal punishment may be imposed only when backed by the supermajoritarian-historically, unanimous-approval of a jury drawn from the community. And criminal law theorists' expressive and retributive justifications for criminal punishment implicitly rely on the existence of broad community consensus in favor of imposing it. Despite these constitutional and theoretical ideals, the criminal justice system today is majoritarian at best. Both harsh and contested, it has lost the structural mechanisms that could ensure supermajoritarian support. By incorporating new supermajoritarian checks and reinvigorating old ones, we could make criminal punishment consonant with first principles and more responsive to community intuitions of justice.
From secret stingray devices that can pinpoint a suspect's location, to advanced forensic DNA-analysis tools, to recidivism risk statistic software—the use of privately developed criminal justice technologies is growing. So too is a concomitant pattern of trade secret assertion surrounding these technologies. This Article charts the role of private law secrecy in shielding criminal justice activities, demonstrating that such secrecy is pervasive, problematic, and ultimately unnecessary for the production of well-designed criminal justice tools. This Article makes three contributions to the existing literature. First, the Article establishes that trade secrecy now permeates American criminal justice, shielding privately developed criminal justice technologies from vigorous cross-examination and review. Second, the Article argues that private law secrecy surrounding the inner workings—or even the existence—of these criminal justice technologies imposes potentially unconstitutional harms on individual defendants and significant practical harms on both the criminal justice system and the development of well- designed criminal justice technology. Third, the Article brings the extensive literature on innovation policy to bear on the production of privately developed criminal justice technologies, demonstrating that trade secrecy is not essential to either the existence or operation of those technologies. The Article proposes alternative innovation policies that the government, as both a funder of research and the primary purchaser of criminal justice technologies, is uniquely well-positioned to implement.
Includes abstract. ; Includes bibliographical references (p. 226-252). ; Fisheries compliance theory has evolved over the past two decades in an attempt to understand the factors that influence fishers' behaviour and to develop appropriate strategies to enhance compliance. However, much of this research, which draws on both rationalist and normative perspectives, has largely focussed on the industrial fisheries. Empirical research on the small-scale fisheries sector, therefore, has been lacking. The overall aim of this thesis has been to develop a conceptual framework for understanding and addressing small-scale fisheries compliance by drawing on experiences in South Africa. This has been achieved through a detailed investigation of two small-scale fisheries case studies, as well as a review of the small-scale fisheries sector generally. The findings from this research have emphasised the need to rethink ourunderstanding of fisheries compliance in the small-scale sector. By drawing onempirical evidence, as well as the literature review, a conceptual framework has beendeveloped that enhances existing compliance theory. This study highlights that anunderstanding of compliance behaviour first requires a critical analysis of how lawhas evolved, its history and the power dynamics that have shaped it. The conceptualframework further emphasises the need to understand compliance within a fisherysystem, acknowledging that social, economic, institutional and biophysical factors allimpact on whether or not fishers' comply with rules and laws. By applying theconceptual framework to two case studies in South Africa, key drivers that influencefisher behaviour over time are identified and changes within the fishery system areanalysed and documented. This thesis has also contributed to fisheries compliancetheory by identifying the underlying principles that are seen as necessary to guide an alternative and more integrated approach to small-scale fisheries compliance. In addition to the principles of legitimacy and deterrence, which are incorporated into existing theories of compliance, this study emphasises that the principle of social justice is required to develop a more holistic approach to understanding and addressing small-scale fisheries compliance. By embracing these principles, it is argued that fisheries policies will shift away from a sole reliance on criminal justice to achieve compliance, to a more integrated approach that aims to sustain the fishery system as a whole.
In addition to the more conventional approaches of the criminal justice system, this article suggests that there is a need for restorative justice as another method of addressing sexual crime. In support of this view, the present article explores the possibility of a hybrid justice system based on a complementary relationship between restorative justice and the criminal justice system. An analysis of the limits of the criminal justice system and the need for restorative justice in the contentious area of sexual violence will be followed by a detailed examination of key justice considerations when trying to marry both criminal justice and restorative justice perspectives. Such considerations include the meaning of justice, legislation, sentencing principles, due process, victims' rights and the location of restorative justice within/alongside/outside the criminal justice system. The aim of this article is to determine whether it is possible to reconcile two seemingly juxtaposed methods of justice delivery in the context of sexual violence in order to create a hybrid system of justice that best protects and responds to the rights and needs of victims and offenders. ; European Commission ; Daphne III
This article examines one element of the state&rsquo ; s responses to crime: the provision of a taxpayer-funded compensation scheme for victims of personal and sexual violence. The Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme 2012 sits within a political context that seeks to ensure that victims of crime are better served by the criminal justice system of England and Wales, the jurisdiction that is the focus of this article. The government&rsquo ; s fundamental policy is that this scheme exists to compensate only those victims who are &lsquo ; blameless&rsquo ; either in terms of their character, criminal record, conduct at the time of the incident, or in their engagement with the criminal justice agencies. It is a policy that illuminates elements of two of the questions that the editors posed for this Special Issue of Societies. Reviewing the increased urgency in government policies concerning the treatment of victims of crime, the first section addresses the question of how, why and when victims came to shape political and criminal justice discourse and practice. The question of how, and to what end, cultural representations have shaped perceptions of victims is addressed in the second and third sections, which examine the notion of victim status and illustrate the ways in which eligible (&lsquo ; ideal&rsquo ; ) victims are perceived and their claims under this scheme are determined.
American criminal justice systems blend elected or politically appointed leaders with career civil servants. This organizational hybrid creates challenges at the intersection of democratic accountability and enforcement discretion. In moments of stasis in the politics of criminal justice, those challenges are largely invisible: the public, elected officials, and civil servants generally share a unity of interest, borne of like-minded policy commitments that have developed over time. But in moments of political transition—that is, when public preferences on criminal justice policy are in flux—the relationship between bureaucracy and democracy can be fraught. Public demand for change may or may not accord with the commitments, ideals, and culture of the bureaucracy's front-line actors. Elected leaders are voted in with high expectations for transformative change, but may be stymied by institutional resistance to it. The bureaucracy, in turn, may seek to alter the political narrative that is fueling the political transition, further complicating the democratic process. And in a system in which criminal lawmaking and enforcement power is spread across three different levels of government—local, state, and federal—with overlapping authority yet different constituencies, the complexity of interplay between "public" and bureaucracy deepens. Across America, a growing number of jurisdictions are entering moments of political transition in criminal justice. This Article explores the political and institutional arrangements that alternatively impede, permit, or even accelerate a resulting change in criminal enforcement on the ground. Drawing on the democracy/bureaucracy framework developed in the fields of political theory and public administration, the Article considers how these fields and others can enrich our understanding of current political and institutional dynamics in American criminal justice. The Article then reflects on these dynamics' implications for democratic responsiveness and systemic legitimacy, arguing, counterintuitively, that the very features of the democracy/bureaucracy relationship capable of slowing democratically sanctioned change in criminal enforcement can also end up hastening political shifts; and that, properly leveraged, the criminal enforcement bureaucracy can help realize deliberative and participatory democratic ideals.
There has been a lot of recent debate over whether the economic crisis presents an opportunity to reduce prison populations and improve the state of criminal justice in this country. Some commentators suggest that the financial crisis has already triggered a move towards reducing the incarcerated population. Some claim that there is a new climate of bipartisanship on punishment. Kara Gotsch of the Sentencing Project, for example, suggests that we are now in a unique political climate embodied by the passage of the Second Chance Act under President George W. Bush – a climate that is substantially different than the era marked by President Bill Clinton's Omnibus Crime Bill. Others, such as Jonathan Simon at Berkeley, have suggested that our prison population is a bubble that will eventually burst. In his article in Daedalus, Clearing the "Troubled Assets" of America's Punishment Bubble, Simon suggests that the crisis of mass incarceration can be mapped onto the housing crisis and argues that the analogy may reveal potential remedies to the current situation.
This brief will focus on some of the major issues concerning Middle-Eastern Americans and the Criminal Justice system. It can be thought of as examining two aspects of the relationship between these two: an overly passive set of protections provided by the Criminal Justice system, and an overly active, racially biased set of power extensions within the Criminal Justice system as warranted by the Federal Government.
Collective forms of participation in criminal justice from members of marginalized groups—for example, when people gather together to engage in participatory defense, organized copwatching, community bail funds, or prison labor strikes—have a profound effect on everyday criminal justice. In this Essay I argue that these bottom-up forms of participation are not only powerful and important, but also crucial for democratic criminal justice. Collective mechanisms of resistance and contestation build agency, remedy power imbalances, bring aggregate structural harms into view, and shift deeply entrenched legal and constitutional meanings. Many of these forms of contestation display a faith in local democracy as a tool of responsive criminal justice, while simultaneously maintaining a healthy skepticism of the law and existing legal institutions that maintain the status quo. These forms of resistance and contestation are not antagonistic, but agonistic; not revolutionary, but devolutionary. Without facilitating critical resistance from below, well-meaning criminal justice reforms are in danger of reproducing the anti-democratic pathologies that plague our existing system. Indeed, it is from the voices of those who have been most harmed by the punitive nature of our criminal justice system that we can hear the most profound reimaginings of how the system might be truly responsive to local demands for justice and equality. This Essay concludes by sketching out the dual roles of the state in a criminal justice system that values contestation: to facilitate methods of participation that originate with and are led by non-elite actors from marginalized populations; and to create criminal justice institutions that transfer agency and control to people ordinarily left out of criminal justice decisionmaking.
Many of our criminal justice woes can be traced to the loss of the community's decisionmaking ability in adjudicating crime and punishment. American normative theories of democracy and democratic deliberation have always included the participation of the community as part of our system of criminal justice. This type of democratic localism is essential for the proper functioning of the criminal system because the criminal justice principles embodying substantive constitutional norms can only be defined through community interactions at the local level. Accordingly, returning the community to its proper role in deciding punishment for wrongdoers would both improve criminal process and return us to fundamental criminal justice ideals.
This brief will explore the relationships between Middle-Eastern Americans and US criminal justice by focusing essentially on the way anti-terrorist and immigration legislation have affected this group since 9/11, and how they responded to it. Particular attention will be given to Arab and Muslim Americans, who were especially impacted by these policies.
It is widely recognized that the American criminal system is in a state of crisis, but views about what has gone wrong and how it could be set right can seem chaotically divergent. This Essay argues that, within the welter of diverse views, one foundational, enormously important, and yet largely unrecognized line of disagreement can be seen. On one side are those who think the root of the present crisis is the outsized influence of a vengeful, poorly informed, or otherwise wrongheaded American public and the primary solution is to place control over the criminal system in the hands of officials and experts. On the other side are those who think the root of the crisis is a set of bureaucratic attitudes, structures, and incentives divorced from the American public's concerns and sense of justice and the primary solution is to make criminal justice more community focused and responsive to lay influences. The former view reflects a norm of bureaucratic professionalization; the latter view reflects a norm of democratization. This Essay defines the two camps, specifies the concepts of bureaucracy and democracy underlying each one, and identifies some of the unifying ideas on the democratization side. This Essay thus attempts to bring conceptual order to the present cacophony of voices on criminal justice reform by specifying the conflict of visions at their center. As the opening piece of this Symposium Issue of the Northwestern University Law Review—a symposium not just about democratizing criminal justice but in defense of democratizing criminal justice—this Essay also paves the way for what will follow: a full-throated defense of the democratic criminal justice vision.