Criminal Justice Policy Review

Correctional practitioners have long argued that evaluators focus too heavily on recidivism measures and thus understate the value of their programs. The author asserts that the impact of community corrections programs can be more comprehensively evaluated when evaluation plans include measures that assess whether program goals, objectives, and overall mission were met. Therefore, the intent of this article is to offer a model for evaluating community corrections programs based on what they promised to do in their mission statements. Justification for the model, conceptual framework, and an example of how to use the model are discussed below.

As noted by Flanagan (1996), public opinion polls about crime and justice can act as a social barometer providing important data to policy makers regarding what the public is willing, or is not willing, to accept when it comes to proposed legislation and/or intervention programming. This paper reports findings from the 2001 Penn State Poll, a random telephone survey of Pennsylvanians, 18 years of age or older, in which citizens were asked about their attitudes toward and perceptions of such issues as fear of crime, capital punishment, the most important goal of prison, and where they would most like to see their tax dollars spent (building more prisons vs. early intervention programs with troubled youth). Significant differences were found within certain demographic groups across these sets of questions, and in a predictive model, gender, race/ethnicity, and education had a greater impact on citizens’ support for capital punishment than did their fear of crime. Overall, findings suggest that the public is not as punitive as it is sometimes believed to be by legislators and policy makers.

In 1970, Congress enacted what some scholars view as the most sweeping criminal statute ever passed at the federal level, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), with the primary objective of prosecuting organized crime. The legislative intent was to destroy criminal organizations by adopting mandatory fines and lengthy sentences. Thirty-two years after its implementation, however, RICO continues to be questionable and polemic. Thus, the primary objective of this study was to obtain a better understanding of RICO by conducting face-to-face interviews with 23 practitioners. The findings suggest that RICO has been extremely successful against traditional organized crime. Although it is not possible to quantify whether the benefits substantially outweigh the negative consequences, both benefits and ramifications appear to be significant and substantial and thus worthy of further analyses.

The primary objective of the federal sentencing guidelines is to reduce judicial discretion and unwarranted disparity by prescribing like sentences for like defendants convicted of the same offense. The guidelines are based on real-offense sentencing, which links relevant conduct or actual offense behavior to the sentencing process. This study analyzes the indictment stage where the charging decisions by the federal prosecutor in conjunction with relevant conduct are first conceived. Our major finding is that the number of counts within the indictment has a statistically significant effect on the length of sentence, the magnitude of the discount for downward departures, and the ratio of the difference between the presumptive sentence and the sentence discount. The number of counts has no effect on the offender’s likelihood of receiving either a downward departure or a substantial assistance departure. This suggests that offenders convicted of the same crime do not necessarily receive the same sentence.

During the first 6 months of 2001, the Wichita (Kansas) Police Department collected information on 37,454 stops conducted by its employees. The initial analysis of these data indicates a substantial disparity between the proportions of Black residents (11.4%) and Black citizens stopped (20.7%). A subsequent analysis of the data, conducted at the patrol beat level, indicates that (a) moderate to high correlations exist between the race of individuals stopped and the predominant racial representation of the beat; (b) officer deployment is influenced by the crime rate and population of the beats; (c) the predominate race of the beat does not affect the level of officer deployment; (d) in beats predominately populated by non-Black residents, stops involving Black citizens are over represented (proportionally); and (e) in beats predominately populated by Black residents, stops involving non-Black citizens are over represented (proportionally). A potential theoretical explanation for race-based policing is offered.

In a recently published article in this journal titled “Future Dangerousness Revisited,” DeLisi and Munoz (2003) offered a number of findings regarding the major disciplinary and violent misconduct of inmates in the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADOC). Most prominently, they opined that their findings demonstrated that death row inmates are more dangerous than other inmate groups. The methodology and analysis of DeLisi and Munoz, however, suffered from such fundamental flaws and errors that their conclusions were without support. Our own comparison of rates of assault between death row and general prison population inmates in ADOC failed to reveal significant differences. Our analysis of the disciplinary records and current risk classifications of all inmates on the Arizona death row in 2003 revealed that although averaging 10 years at risk on death row, 82% had no serious violent misconduct and 87% were rated by ADOC at the lowest risk of institutional violence.

This rejoinder responds to criticisms levied by Cunningham, Sorensen, and Reidy on the finding that death row inmates were significantly likely to commit acts of prison violence. We acknowledge two genuine errors in our study that could render the statistical finding spurious; however, Cunningham et al.’s response is ineffective in advancing the substantive issues pertaining to the future dangerousness of capital defendants. Although we respect future dangerousness as a legal doctrine and an area of research, it is ultimately a superfluous and largely academic topic that pales to other justifications for capital punishment.