Criminal Justice Policy Review

Historically, battering has been a culturally and legally acceptable form of social control within the United States. This article provides an examination of how this legacy of social acceptance has influenced the development of laws and social policies related to battering. We provide a critique of our current approach to battering and our historical reliance on private or social helping agencies intended to hide and protect victims. We call for a transformation of our current policies that provides for the removal of the batterer—not the victim and her children—from the family home through a process of bail denial and preventative detention.

Executive Order 12898 (42 U.S.C. § 4321 [2000]) mandates that federal agencies in the United States make it their purpose to achieve environmental justice. As a result, agencies often rely on empirical studies to provide crucial information that can be used to implement policies to combat inequality. Although numerous studies now examine the distribution of environmental burdens and benefits, there are no systematic empirical studies that examine inequality in criminal penalties. This study corrects that omission by presenting findings on the relationship between community demographics and monetary penalties against corporations for 121 criminal violations of federal environmental law that were adjudicated between the years 2005 and 2010. Our results suggest that monetary penalties are not correlated with the demographics of residents living near the crime. That is, corporations that committed their environmental crimes in minority and poor areas did not receive lower monetary penalties as a result. Thus, environmental justice concerns appear to be satisfied with respect to federal criminal prosecutions.

The Disproportionate Minority Confinement, and later Contact (DMC), mandate was developed by Congress to reduce minority overrepresention in the U.S. juvenile justice system. Presently, this federal provision compels states to decrease the disproportionate number of minorities handled at all of their juvenile processing stages. The DMC mandate has recently captured political attention due to its compulsory status and system-wide focus, but its impacts on the treatment of minority youth are less clear. This study uses original juvenile processing data from Pennsylvania to evaluate whether the DMC mandate has diminished the size of processed minority youth populations. Empirical assessments demonstrate the DMC mandate has successfully generated substantial declines in minority processing throughout the state’s juvenile justice system. The results highlight the potential of a national reform to remedy racial inequalities in juvenile justice.

Recent critiques of the decision to make monetary sanctions a condition of probation have suggested that the practice could hinder the successful completion of probation. However, few studies have explored this relationship empirically, and among those that do, the findings are relatively inconclusive and often dependent on the sample and measures used. Building on this research, the current study examines the imposition of four monetary sanctions on a sample of felony cases involving indigent adult probationers from a Florida public defender’s office. The results indicate that although monetary sanctions have relatively little impact on probation violations generally, the effects of these penalties vary based on the severity of the violation. Legal factors are consistently the most significant predictors of the likelihood and severity of probation violations.

This article presents the first look at the prevalence of veteran deaths in state prisons using data from the National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP). We find that overall veterans are not statistically more likely than nonveterans to die in prison, but that differences exist between age groups based on age at admission to prison. Age-adjusted estimates of risk of death show that veterans admitted to prison above 44 years of age are statistically less likely to die in prison, suggesting veterans are healthier than their nonveteran counterparts. In terms of predicted probability of death, veterans admitted between ages 40 and 59 have a 1.3 to 2.1 percentage point lower probability of death over a 20-year period, or between 13 and 21 fewer deaths per 1,000 admissions. Estimates for the youngest ages also suggest the possibility of generational differences, though more research is needed.