I have praised and promoted work done over at The Crime Report for many years, and the site remains a daily must-read for criminal justice fans. And in the last few days, TCR has had two new pieces headlined with two questions that are timely and enduring. Here are the headlines, links and brief excerpts:
"Can the U.S. Abolish Life Sentences?" (Q&A with Ashley Nellis)
TCR: You write, “Perhaps the most glaring omission of relevant data was the failure of the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), the well-regarded research arm of the Department of Justice, to document the scale of life imprisonment.” Do you think this omission was on purpose or by accident? And why?
Nellis: I think it’s not on purpose, there just a lack of resources in the research arms. There’s also a lack of general interest from the public, so there was no incentive to document the expansion of life sentences. We shouldn’t be surprised that there hasn’t been data on the expansion because it goes along with laws and policies of the 1990s.
[The BJS] is not a political entity, but it seems to be. If you pass legislation at federal level that is bound to increase your incarcerated population… you should probably document the impact of those policies. If you pass mandatory minimums with the elimination of parole, it seems wise to document how many people go to prison because you did that. Once a lot of the public sees the dramatic growth of life sentences— nearly five-fold increase over time — then they ask “why did nobody notice this before?” The answer is because nobody was recording it.
"Do We Really Need Probation and Parole?" (commentary by
Although “mass supervision” on probation or parole has not yet garnered the attention of “mass incarceration,” its impact is no small matter. There are 4.5 million people under community supervision in America, twice as many as are incarcerated, a figure that amounts to more than the population in half of all U.S. states. About four in ten people entering America’s prisons and jails each year are under supervision. Many of those are incarcerated, not for committing new crimes, but for breaking a wide array of supervision rules.
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