Mar 5, 2010
We don’t want this to happen to anyone else
We don’t want this to happen to anyone else PressDemocrat.com, March 5, 2010
Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice Program Director Gerald Miller offers his insight on the overcrowding of California prisons. He discusses the criminalization of unwanted social behaviors, what overcrowding actually looks like, the effects it has on violence, and the important role community programs play in fixing this problem. Listen to staff Ashley Afferino interview CJCJ Program Director and SF Reentry Commissioner Gerald Miller on prison overcrowding. Brief History From…
Publications Mar 1, 2010
Are Teenage Criminals Getting Younger and Younger? Exposing another Urban Legend
Are Teenage Criminals Getting Younger and Younger? Exposing another Urban Legend
Blog Feb 24, 2010
Abuse in the LA County Juvenile Justice System
In my previous blog I wrote about the endemic nature of abuse in juvenile institutions. No sooner had I written that blog than the following article appeared in the Los Angeles Times regarding the beating and molestation of youths under the custody of the Los Angeles Probation Department. The article’s authors highlighted incidents where staff were actually prosecuted for particularly egregious criminal acts including sexual exploitation and beatings of youth in their custody. In one instance a…
Feb 19, 2010
Juvenile Justice Reform in Hawaii
Daniel Macallair, Executive Director of CJCJ, recently presented on Juvenile Justice Reform in Hawaii at the Western Society of Criminology’s 37th annual conference . Meda Chesney-Lind and Brian Bilsky (University of Hawaii-Manoa) and CJCJ’s Senior Research Fellow Randall G. Shelden (University of Nevada-Las Vegas) were his co-presenters. Mr. Macallair’s presentation focused on CJCJ’s role in Hawaii’s juvenile justice reform. In 1989, the Western Regional Office of the…
Blog Feb 17, 2010
Abuse in Youth Correctional Institutions
One of the most common examples of widespread abuse in American juvenile correctional institutions is the callous and malicious treatment often employed by institutional staff. Institutional abuse can mean many things, but usually refers to the physical or emotional cruelty inflicted on youth by staff. This pernicious reality has been constant throughout American history since the opening of the nation’s first youth correctional facility in 1825 — the New York House of Refuge. Occasionally,…
Blog Feb 3, 2010
Three judges and the California prison system
The recent decision by the three judge panel in the Coleman/Plata case should be applauded as a short but positive step forward in forcing some degree of sanity upon the broken California prison system. Unfortunately, the fact that a panel of Federal judges was forced to step in and force the state to make long overdue policy decisions is simply another poignant reminder of our political systems dysfunctionality. California’s prison crisis is a political construct that an evil scheming mad…
This text identifies the macroeconomic forces relevant to imprisonment — poverty and political powerlessness — and explores viable and humane alternatives to our current incarceration binge.
As every criminology student learns, the “Chicago School” brought us a tradition of research on a variety of topics guided largely by a methodology that looks at patterns of crime as they are related to social ecology. More specifically, this approach looks at how different types of crimes are distributed throughout urban areas. One of the most recent examples comes from a continuing series published by the Los Angeles Times on homicide . The latest in this series focuses on…
Blog Jan 10, 2010
Media Distortions of Youth Crime
I could not help but notice the first of a series of articles appearing in the Cape Cod Times shortly after I arrived for the holidays. The title itself (“Younger and twice as violent ”) conveys a message to the reader that is not uncommon in this day of media hype and distortion. The message seams to be that crime is being committed by people younger than ever before and, even more frightening, the crimes are getting more violent with each passing day. The appearance of this series is no…
Advocates for legal pot say time’s right in state Ventura County Star, January 9, 2010