Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> Incarceration rates in the United States are far higher than in the world's other Western democracies, so high that they are referred to as mass incarceration. After nearly 40 years of sustained growth in US incarceration rates, a broad consensus exists to bring them down. The Iron Law of Prison Populations directs attention to the fact that 51 different jurisdictional-level penal policies, rather than crime, drive incarceration rates, making systematic policy reform difficult. However, the fact that prison populations have already begun to decline, combined with the emerging public will to reduce incarceration and dropping age-specific incarceration rates, promotes optimism in the decarceration agenda. Three issues remain to be resolved: the eventual target rate of incarceration, what to do with people convicted of violent crimes, and how to avoid the distracting focus on reentry programming. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This review synthesizes the historical literature on the criminalization and incarceration of black Americans for an interdisciplinary audience. Drawing on key insights from new histories in the field of American carceral studies, we trace the multifaceted ways in which policymakers and officials at all levels of government have used criminal law, policing, and imprisonment as proxies for exerting social control in predominantly black communities from the colonial era to the present. By underscoring this antiblack punitive tradition in America as central to the development of crime-control strategies and mass incarceration, our review lends vital historical context to ongoing discussions, research, and experimentation within criminology and other fields concerned about the long-standing implications of institutional racism, violence, and inequity entrenched in the administration of criminal justice in the United States from the top down and the ground up. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The past 40 years have been a time of great change in life sentencing, during which the use of life sentences has dramatically grown and the quality of life sentences has markedly hardened. The rise of life without parole in the United States is a particularly recognizable development, but life sentencing has increased worldwide, and the use of other forms of punishment that hold people in prison until death has also intensified. This article focuses on these transformations by examining several important areas in which thinking and scholarship on life sentencing have been altered and spurred by recent developments. The review concludes by pointing to gaps in the field of research and highlighting issues on which social scientific research on life sentencing has more to contribute going forward. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Revenue generated through the criminal justice system has become a key component of local government budgets across the United States. Although numerous restrictions exist to constrain traditional sources of revenue, only recently have legislators introduced checks on the fiscal profitability of fines, fees, forfeitures, and asset seizures. Left unrestricted, fiscal incentives have demonstrably manifested in the enforcement patterns and discretionary decisions of police. The transformation of officers into agents of revenue creation leads to increased targeting of minority populations and out-of-towners, with emphasis on arrests that yield potential property seizure, with negative consequences for both community trust and the provision of public safety. Those burdened with legal financial obligations are disproportionately poor, positioning the criminal justice system as a pointedly regressive form of taxation. We discuss the mechanisms behind criminal justice revenue generation, the consequences to law enforcement outcomes, and policies designed to reform and mitigate revenue-driven law enforcement. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Diversion programs allow criminal justice actors to send defendants out of the court system, compelling them instead to attend treatment programs, participate in educational opportunities, and/or perform community service. These programs exist for both adult and juvenile offenders. Although some diversion programs are administered within the court system, prosecutors design and operate a substantial number of these programs themselves. Because the prosecutor does not need to obtain input from judges or other actors in these programs, they carry higher risks of performance problems, such as net widening and unequal application of program criteria. Furthermore, because of the local focus of most prosecutors’ offices in the United States, their diversion programs differ from place to place. The published program evaluations are too often site-specific, offering few general insights about this category of programs. The fragmented literature about prosecutor-led diversion programs should expand the metrics of success for these programs and monitor the effects of the prosecutor-dominated governance structure. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The traditional US heroin market has transformed into a broader illegal opioid market, dominated first by prescription opioids (PO) and now also by fentanyl and other synthetic opioids (FOSO). Understanding of opioid-use disorder (OUD) has also transformed from being seen as a driver of crime to a medical condition whose sufferers deserve treatment. This creates new challenges and opportunities for the criminal justice system (CJS). Addressing inmates’ OUD is a core responsibility, including preventing overdose after release. Treatment can be supported by diversion programs (e.g., drug courts, among others) and by providing medication-assisted treatment in prison, not only as a crime-control strategy but also because of ethical and legal responsibilities to provide appropriate healthcare. The CJS also has opportunities to alter supply that were not relevant in the past, including deterring pill-mill doctors and disrupting web sites used to distribute FOSO. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article documents the diffusion of plea bargaining and other mechanisms to reach criminal convictions without a trial and argues that their spread implies what this article terms an administratization of criminal convictions in many corners of the world. Criminal convictions have been administratized in two ways: ( a) Trial-avoiding mechanisms have given a larger role to nonjudicature, administrative officials in the determination of who gets convicted and for which crimes, and ( b) these decisions are made in proceedings that do not include a trial with its attached defendants’ rights. The article also proposes a way this phenomenon could be quantitatively measured by articulating the rate of administratization of criminal convictions, a metric to allow for comparison among different jurisdictions. The article then presents cross-national data from 26 jurisdictions on their rate of administratization of criminal convictions and different hypotheses that may help explain variation across jurisdictions on this rate. </jats:p>

<jats:p> A brief autobiographical history is presented covering my 57-year career as a criminologist. I begin with my early childhood experiences, growing up during World War II, my undergraduate and graduate school experiences, and my early career years at San Diego State University and the University of Colorado, Boulder. I then discuss two of the major themes in my research developed during these early career years: self-report measures of delinquent behavior and the Integrated Theory of delinquency. My later career years are described, and the third major theme of my work, the identification and promotion of effective delinquency prevention programs, is discussed. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The Department of Justice's pattern-or-practice police reform program has been an unprecedented event in American policing, intervening in local and state law enforcement agencies as never before and requiring a sweeping package of reforms. The program has reached reform settlements with forty agencies, including twenty with judicially enforced consent decrees. Academic research on the program, however, has been fairly modest. Social scientists have largely focused on a few selected issues. There is no study of the full impact of the program on one agency, and there is no comprehensive study of the impact of the program as a whole. Evaluations of individual agencies have been generally favorable, although with backsliding in some agencies. This review argues that the combination of several major goals and the various elements of specific consent decree reforms has created a web of accountability that is unmatched by any previous police reform effort. </jats:p>