- "Federal and state policy makers should....significantly reduce the rate of incarceration in the United States" according to the recommendations of a new report by the National Research Council. Written by a panel of researchers, it concluded the recent rise in incarceration was historically unprecedented, the product of a punitive political climate, and has done harm to people and communities. The full report can be accessed here; the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Crime Report and the Harvard Kennedy School have all produced summaries and responses.
- St. Lawrence County will begin providing counsel at first appearance May 15 according to this coverage in the Daily Courier-Observer.
- We can reduce the cost of criminal justice without sacrificing public safety according to this report from the VERA Institute of Justice on the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, a Federal program active in several states (though not New York) which recently boasted $4.6bn saved through reforms to probation, parole and sentencing laws with little public safety value.
- More work needs to be done on the impact of legal representation for parents according to a National Research Council report on research in child abuse and neglect. The report examined the causes and consequences of child abuse and neglect and reviewed existing evidence on the effectiveness of various interventions including those in the court system. The full report can be found here.
- Addressing the legal needs of parents could reduce foster care costs according to this recent article in the William Mitchell Law Review. Vivek Sankaram, author of several studies on the societal benefits of parent representation, argued multidisciplinary representation able to address legal issues associated, for example, with welfare or housing will ultimately serve to keep families intact, preserving both parent rights and foster care resources. In the final section, Sankaram lists several sources of funding for this improved representation.
- A Federal review of execution procedures has been commissioned by the President after an attempt to execute Oklahoma inmate Clayton Lockett with drugs of unknown provenance ended in his death from an apparent heart attack. Days earlier, this study in The Proceedings of the National Academic of Science (summarized here in Nature) revealed 4% of death row inmates would be exonerated if they lived on death row long enough. The real rate of exoneration is lower, due to the fact many inmates leave death row either through execution or commutation.
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