This report presents the findings and recommendations of the Youth Justice Board, a youth leadership program that gives teenagers an opportunity to inform public debate about issues that affect them. During the 2016-17 school year, members examined the intersection between youth homelessness and the justice system in New York City in order to identify opportunities to better support homeless youth, reduce their interactions with the justice system, and prevent homelessness in the future.
Directed at justice-system practitioners and agencies and others working with victims and offenders, this fact sheet provides answers to some of the most common and salient questions about intimate partner sexual abuse. It also includes a series of concrete recommendations to aid the justice system in identifying and responding to the abuse in order to better support the safety and healing of victims and to hold offenders accountable.
This document describes the Native American method of peacemaking—a non-adversarial form of justice focusing on restoration and the long-term healing of relationships—and offers detailed guidelines for implementation by state courts.
This two-page handout is designed for courts that include programming for abusive partners in their case dispositions. It lists the 10 most important questions court staff should ask as they consider making referrals and provides general information on national best practices.
This study suggests relying on summary risk scores alone to decide on treatment options for an important, hitherto under-emphasized, subpopulation of drug court participants may be leading to counter-productive outcomes.
This study documents perceptions of intimate partner violence in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Using community surveys and focus groups, researchers found just over a third of community members surveyed perceived intimate partner violence to be a major problem in the community. The study also examines some residents’ conflicting feelings about calling for police intervention and the perceived absence of alternatives.
Programs that work with perpetrators of intimate partner violence are changing as practitioners across the United States employ new strategies to improve outcomes for both offenders and survivors. Courts and judges have an opportunity to build on this exciting time of change. This document describes the innovative approaches to risk assessment, treatment modality, compliance, and procedural fairness that intervention programs for abusive partners are using to enhance victim safety and offender accountability.
A number of jurisdictions across the U.S. are seeking ways to understand and prevent violence with a broader multidisciplinary approach, treating violence collaboratively as both a public health issue and a crime problem. This report summarizes the results of a roundtable conversation on the topic of public health and law enforcement collaborations.
For many proponents of the use of pretrial risk assessments, the hope is they provide an evidence-based counter to racial bias in the criminal justice system. However, as has become apparent with the more widespread adoption of the tools, they can also end up reproducing the very racial bias they were intended to disrupt. This paper grapples with the question of whether it is possible to address the problematic aspects of risk technologies without abandoning their use.
This paper explains the science underlying risk-based decision-making and explores both the promise and controversies associated with the increasing application of “big data” to the field of criminal justice.
