Category: Press Coverage

Lockup guard slugged a skinny kid. Prosecutors say it’s justified. Here’s the video.

BY CAROL MARBIN MILLER cmarbin@miamiherald.com Broward County prosecutors have ruled that a former detention center officer was justified when he slugged a 14-year-old boy in the face — breaking the teen’s nose in two places — because the juvenile was aggressive with staff and causing a disturbance in the county’s long-troubled lockup. … … An expert in juvenile justice policy and research said that prosecutors’ justification for declining to press charges suggests an office-wide bias in favor of officers. “The memorandum from the state attorney uses language revealing the intent of the office, which is to minimize the violent nature…

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The New ‘Superpredator’ Myth

by Alex S. Vitale March 23, 2018 — read the original The criminologist John DiIulio sparked a panic in 1995 when he predicted there would be an explosion of juvenile superpredators in the coming years, resulting in widespread violence. His baseless theory was wrong; youth crime has fallen dramatically ever since. … Instead of doubling down on gang-suppression policing, New York City should invest in better alternatives. The city supports 18 Cure Violence programs to reduce shootings. The program’s sites, often a substantial portion of the area’s police precincts, rely on community-based “violence interrupters” who work with young people. New…

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The Recidivism Trap

Commentary Counting failure is no way to encourage success Jeffrey A. Butts and Vincent Schiraldi Any discussion of criminal justice policy inevitably includes the word “recidivism.” Usually more than once. Recidivism is the reoccurrence of crime among people known to have committed crimes before. At all levels of justice, from local probation offices to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, if we judge the impact of interventions at all, we do so in part by measuring recidivism. In a report we published today with the Harvard Kennedy School, we conclude that recidivism is often the wrong measure. And using it exclusively…

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Program Keeping Convicted Youths Closer to Home Enjoys Success, Faces Cuts

by Wendy Davis March 2, 2018 City Limits … Just a few years ago, it’s likely that a family court judge would have sent Jim to a facility outside New York City. If so, he could have been as far away as Ithaca, Lansing or other upstate locales hundreds of miles from his family in Brooklyn. That longstanding approach was problematic at best, according to Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College. “We’re setting ourselves up for failure when we take a young person who is 14- or 15-years-old, send them hours away from…

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Analyst: Violent crime rate will go up

by Jasmine Stole / jstole@guampdn.com Guam Police Department’s chief of police said violent crime declined from 2015 to 2016. Experts with a New York-based criminal justice university say that’s right — but they also predict more violent crime for 2017. “For violent crimes, there seems to be an upward trend across time and a downward trend for property crimes,” said Sheyla Delgado, deputy director for analytics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice Research and Evaluation Center. Analysts from John Jay looked at Guam crime data from 2010 through 2016. Delgado said local crime data shows positive to negative…

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States Set Aside Millions of Dollars for Crime Victims. But Some Gun Violence Survivors Don’t Get the Funds They Desperately Need

Elizabeth Van Brocklin  The Trace … A resource does exist to help vulnerable crime victims, including gunshot survivors, though many never tap into it. Perhaps the most fundamental flaw of compensation programs is how few crime survivors know that they exist. “Because victim compensation is not as well-known as other forms of compensation (i.e., workers compensation), lack of awareness is often the primary obstacle that victims and survivors must overcome,” wrote Douglas Evans, a researcher at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in a 2014 report. [  read the original article at The Trace  ]  

NYC Dives Into Tough Neighborhoods, Emerges as Safest Big City

At Tompkins, in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, crime is down 45 percent since 2013, with no murders and just two shootings in each of the last two years. In an era when most major American cities are reporting less crime, New York’s 85 percent drop in violent offenses since 1990 outperforms them all.

‘Interrupters’ Peek at Social Media to Stop Street Violence

by Jan Ransom (@Jan_Ransom) January 21, 2018 — read original story In one Facebook post, two teenage boys posed in a photo with handguns on each of their laps. In another, a group of young men threatened to attack another man whom they believed had cooperated with detectives investigating a string of robberies. … … “People who feel they’ve been disrespected on social media will take it to the streets,” said Jeff Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who has evaluated violence prevention programs in New York. “It’s about pride and…

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Why Does Crime Keep Falling in New York City?

The John Jay College of Criminal Justice Research and Evaluation Center found that between 2014 and 2016, there was a 50 percent decrease in gun injuries in East New York, Brooklyn and a 37 percent reduction in the South Bronx, two communities where Cure Violence has been implemented. by Samar Khurshid January 08, 2018 Mayor Bill de Blasio and the New York Police Department have much cause for celebration. Last year was undoubtedly the safest year on record in decades, setting new benchmarks for crime reduction across most major categories, according to the latest crime data released by the NYPD…

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