Criminal Justice

The editorial board of The Florida Times-Union calls out the Florida justice system for failing to accomplish what states like Texas and Georgia have realized through reform. In response to the Florida TaxWatch’s report on how to lower the state’s recidivism rate, the board supports the report’s recommendations, such as expanding vocational and educational programs, […]

Incarceration not only affects the offenders but also their families and communities. Gene Mills and Pat Nolan argue for reform in The Advertiser after viewing the negative effects children experience when they have incarcerated fathers. Around 2.5 million children nationwide and 94,000 children in Louisiana have had at least one parent incarcerated in their lifetimes, […]

Mandatory minimum sentencing poses a real threat to both public safety and human dignity in the United States, increasing the risk of recidivism among nonviolent offenders and failing to give judges the ability to exert discretion in the context of a given case. Yet the human side of the criminal justice system is often neglected […]

Today we celebrate the 211th birthday of Alexis de Tocqueville, whose seminal work Democracy in America stands out as one of the first classical liberal defenses of the American experience. In an op-ed for The Federalist, Craig DeRoche explains how Tocqueville’s writings on the criminal justice system in America are still relevant to today’s controversies. […]

Writing for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Charles Mitchell and J.C. Watts, two self-styled tough on crime conservatives, say that years of pro-incarceration policies and sentences have created a “bloated, hugely expensive criminal-justice system” that “has produced disappointing results.” The authors argue that the time is right for Pennsylvania to adopt reform measures in its criminal justice […]

Jacob Sullum of Reason highlights several cases where police relied on faulty suspicions of drug possession to arrest, detain, and convict people. Furthermore, he writes that thousands of people nationwide have potentially faced similar situations. Highlighting one example, Sullum explains that sheriff’s deputies in Leawood, Kansas, detained the Harte family for more than two hours […]

A study from Roland G. Fryer Jr., a professor of economics at Harvard University, claims that although black men and women are disproportionately subject to most forms of force from law enforcement, there does not appear to be a disproportionate impact in terms of police shootings themselves. In response to the recent deaths of black […]

A recent ruling raises questions regarding the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and whether it needs to be reformed. The particular case, United States v. Nosal, upheld some of the charges against a man who used another individual’s password to access his former employer’s client database. What is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act […]

One reason African Americans are disproportionately the victims of police brutality and excessive use of force is the sheer number of potentially hostile interactions that occur between police and low-income African Americans, according to Ilya Somin in The Washington Post. Somin highlights data showing that low-income African Americans have a very high number of encounters with […]

According to Gary Fields of The Wall Street Journal, due to changes in federal sentencing guidelines around 14,100 people have been released early from prison and given probation since 2010. As a result of this sentencing reform, the federal probation case load has increased by seven percent. Fields notes, however, that this rise in cases […]