International Criminal Justice Review

Supervised injection facilities (SIFs) or supervised consumption rooms are a component of harm reduction strategies that attempt to reduce drug overdoses and risky injection behaviors among injection drug users. The purpose of this study is to determine whether expanding SIFs into the City of Toronto, Ontario, would be a fiscally responsible decision. By analyzing secondary data gathered in 2013, this article relies on mathematical models to estimate the number of new HIV and hepatitis C virus infections prevented as a result of SIF locations in Toronto. After factoring in the costs associated with SIFs, the models produce cost–benefit and cost-effectiveness outputs. With very conservative estimates, it is predicted that establishing SIF locations in Toronto is cost effective with an average benefit–cost ratio of 1:1.2 for the first two facilities based on the sensitivity analysis at 30% sharing rate. Consequently, funding SIFs in Canada’s largest city appears to be an efficient and effective use of financial resources in the public health domain with cost savings in excess of CAN$728,620 per year for the first two facilities.

In 1999, major changes to Japan’s criminal justice system were proposed, and over the next 10 years, many were implemented. One of the changes created the lay judge system (saiban-in seido), wherein citizens serve as fact finders during trials of serious criminal cases. The purpose of the lay judge is to enhance public trust in the judiciary while improving the quality of justice through the common sense of the average person. This article reviews how this major change to Japan’s court system was implemented, describes the process by which lay judges are selected and the requirements of their service, and then discusses some of the reviews and evaluations that have been completed of the system itself. The conclusion suggests that an understanding of Japan’s model could be instructive for other jurisdictions considering justice reform.

Substantial theoretical and empirical attention has been directed at isolating the structural conditions that lead to shifts in the size of metropolitan police departments in the United States. These studies rely heavily on ethnic and racial threat explanations, which imply that larger police forces will be employed in jurisdictions with larger minority populations. It is entirely unclear, though, whether such accounts are applicable outside the United States. This study fills this void in the literature by assessing the extent to which ethnic threat hypotheses can explain variations in police strength using data on 40 large Canadian cities from 1996 to 2006. Results show that the size of the minority population significantly influences the size of metropolitan police departments.