Latest Reports from the Justice Policy Center

John Roman's testimony before the Judiciary Committee of the State of Delaware Senate on the cost to a state of having the death penalty.

Social welfare problems in Maryland and elsewhere have remained intractable because their scale is beyond the ability of government to address alone, John Roman told the Appropriations Committee of the Maryland House of Delegates. Social impact bonds’ integration of private capital into traditionally public-sector activities is a promising mechanism for addressing these challenges. On March 6, 2013, this testimony was presented to the Maryland Senate Committee on Budget and Taxation regarding the Senate version of the social impact bond legislation.

Just over a quarter of youth in a current or recent relationship experience cyber dating abuse victimization, with girls more likely to experience abuse than boys. Victims of sexually-oriented cyber abuse are seven times more likely to experience sexual coercion. These and other findings from a survey of 5,647 youth in three northeastern states shed new light on how technology is used to perpetrate abuse and sexual violence among youth, as well as implications for prevention and intervention.

One in four dating teens is abused or harassed online or through texts by their partners, according to the largest survey to date on the subject. Social networking sites, texts, cell phones, and e-mails haven’t pushed abuse rates up, but they have given abusers another way to control, degrade, and frighten their partners, even when apart. Digital harassment also warns of a deeper pattern of abuse offline. Victims are 2 times as likely to be physically abused, 2.5 times as likely to be psychologically abused, and 5 times as likely to be sexually coerced.

The Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center on Wednesday released a new study examining the role technology plays in teen dating abuse. According to the study, 26 percent of teens in a romantic relationship said their partners had digitally abused them during the previous year using social media, email, and text messages. The findings, published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, are based on a survey of 5,647 dating middle-school and high-school students, making it the most comprehensive study of its kind to date.

This Model Bullying Prevention Policy is a comprehensive strategy that was developed for all youth-serving agencies in the District of Columbia. The policy employs a three-level public health model to prevent bullying, which involves shifting agency norms; delivering services to at-risk youth; and responding to bullying incidents in a way that inhibits subsequent acts, with an emphasis on data analysis to measure intervention success. The policy was developed by the Urban Institute in collaboration with the 42-members of the District of Columbia Mayor's Bullying Prevention Task Force and Office of Human Rights.

This report identifies methods for addressing violence and disorder around bars. We find that safe drinking environments and strong community partnerships are key buffers against alcohol-related crimes. Safer drinking environments can be fostered by training bouncers in conflict resolution, ensuring bar design does not create overcrowding, and enforcing laws restricting service to intoxicated persons aggressively. Building partnerships with local businesses and neighborhood groups creates public support both for setting bar safety standards and for closing bars that are chronically problematic. This project was funded by the Justice Grants Administration in the Executive Office of the Mayor.

The federal prison population exceeds 218,000, a tenfold increase since 1980. This massive growth is projected to continue and is accompanied by increasing costs, which account for 25% of the Department of Justice's budget and edge out other important public safety priorities. This brief describes the main drivers of the federal prison population, half of whom are drug offenders. Front-end decisions about who goes to prison and for how long have the greatest impact, suggesting that reductions in sentence lengths -particularly for drug offenders - can most directly contain future growth. "Back-end" changes, such as increasing earned credits for early release, can also help alleviate the pressure. The federal system can learn much from state efforts to contain prison populations and costs; doing so will require the cooperation and support of numerous players across all branches of the federal system.

Growth in the size of the federal prison population over the past decade is largely driven by increases in time served, and particularly by longer lengths of stay for drug offenders. This research report, which examines changes in the federal Bureau of Prison's population from 1998 to 2010, also notes that a higher conviction rate in drug cases and heightened enforcement of immigration and weapon offenses contribute to prison population growth. This growth was moderated by reductions in the rate at which sentenced offenders were admitted to prison and modest declines in the federal prosecution rate. Report findings were based on a statistical decomposition analysis using data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics' Federal Justice Statistics Program.

A new report by the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center highlights the increasing size of the federal prison system, leading to unsustainable cost growth and more dangerous conditions inside prison walls. The increased costs of incarceration also run the risk of edging out support for other important public safety priorities.