The CJCJ Justice Policy Journal provides an international forum for researchers and policymakers to examine current justice issues and promote innovative policy solutions in a Web-based format that maintains the standards of an academic publication.

• Editor Randall Shelden, Ph.D., Senior Research Fellow with CJCJ, Professor of Criminal Justice, University of Nevada-Las Vegas
• Editor Elizabeth Brown, Ph.D., Professor of Criminal Justice, San Francisco State University
• Editor Daniel Macallair, M.P.A., Executive Director of CJCJ

Justice Policy Journal

Volume 6 - No. 2 - Fall 2009 ( ISSN 1530-3012 )

From the Editor

 

We are happy to announce the fall, 2009 issue of the Justice Policy Journal.  With this issue we are introducing a new feature that we hope will be permanent: a special commentary.  This commentary is written by one of the co-editors, Randall G. Shelden.  The title tells a lot: “Exit Exams, the Prison Pipeline and Getting Tough Anyway.”  In this commentary the author reviews some revealing studies about the growing use of “exit exams” at the high school level and the corresponding decline in graduation rates, which began not too long after the introduction of these exams.  Not surprisingly, the highest rate of dropping out is among racial minorities.  Both are connected to what some researchers are calling the “prison pipeline” – a direct connection between doing poorly in school, dropping out, getting involved in the juvenile justice system, which in turn leads to adult prisons.  Despite the growing research documenting this phenomenon, politicians continue to ignore the data and continue their “get tough” stance.

 

We encourage readers of the journal to contribute short commentaries of no more than 2,000 words on any current policy issue for consideration in upcoming editions of JPJ.

This issue continues with four excellent pieces of research on varied topics, beginning with “A Review of Conceptual Contributions to Juvenile Justice and Youth Development Arenas” Morghan Vélez Young. The author, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University’s School of Education, has spent the past four years engaged in observational studies in several different juvenile institutions.  In this paper she critically reviews four strategies that have been used to address the problem of juvenile crime.  The first three she reviews are well-known and are (1) juvenile rehabilitation programs (which she categorizes as “well intentioned, but uninformed”); (2) deterrence and incapacitation responses to youth crime; and (3) research-based rehabilitation programs for “vulnerable” youth.  The fourth model is what she calls an attempt to dismantle the “essentualizing” frameworks that see delinquents as a “certain kind of person” (e.g., “bad,” “delinquent”) by drawing on the research of “ethnomethodologists”. These researchers provide detailed observations of what goes on within juvenile institutions and how the daily routine undermines attempts at reforming juvenile offenders.  She argues that this kind of research “can dismantle the taken-for-granted rehabilitation versus punishment dichotomy” and help lead the way to fresh approaches.
 
The second article is “Public but Opaque: The Problems of Tracking Homicide Charging in a California County,” written by Paul Kaplan, Romy Ganschow, Shanda Angioli and Larissa Tabin.  This article offers an informative insight into problems facing researchers when trying to use official data.  In this case, researchers were trying to gather data on active homicide cases in a large California county.  Essentially, all they wanted was to collect basic demographic data that was publicly – and legally – available. It turned out to be almost impossible to obtain. Surprisingly, the usually easily available variable of race was recorded in the records for just one-fourth of the offenders and only 36% of the victims out of a sample of 121. They repeatedly ran into one obstacle after another – mostly related to “bureaucratic overload, indifference, and most importantly, the absence of a systematic data collection and analysis infrastructure in the criminal justice system for tracking active cases.”  Their article is a fascinating insight into the hazards of collecting data – something that all researchers have probably faced and something that policy makers should be addressing (they personally have tried to get a bill passed by the California legislature to address this problem).

 

The third article is “A Century of Losing Battles: The Costly and Ill-Advised War on Drugs in the United States” written by Arthur J. Lurigio, Mikaela Rabinowitz and Justyna Lenik.  The authors offer an excellent history of the war on drugs in this country, starting with the passage of the Harrison Act in 1914 and continuing through the present day.  They offer an alternative approach, one that deals with drugs as a “public health” issue, which shifts most resources away from the traditional supply-side to demand-side initiatives (e.g., drug treatment programs).

 

Finally, we have a study that is rather unique to this journal and that presents a critical analysis of preventive detention.  This is undertaken by Bradley Chilton in “The Limits of Preventive Detention: Habeas Corpus, Boumediene v. Bush (2008) and Comparative Preemption Policy.”  Chilton presents a review of a Supreme Court decision in the case of Boumediene v. Bush (2008) where the Court found unconstitutional a congressional statute passed in 2006 that tried to forbid federal judges from engaging in a habeas corpus review of the “preventive detentions” of unlawful “enemy combatants.” Chilton, with both a doctorate and law degree, does an excellent job of sifting through the precedents of the case and makes some comparisons with other nations, including England, Turkey and Canada.
 
Happy reading!

by Elizabeth Brown, Ph.D. and Randall G. Shelden, M.A., Ph.D.