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1. Public Trust, Institutional Legitimacy, and the Use of Algorithms in Criminal Justice

   https://doi.org/10.5406/21520542.36.2.03  

   Purves, Duncan; Davis, Jeremy (April 2022, Public Affairs Quarterly)

   Abstract A common criticism of the use of algorithms in criminal justice is that algorithms and their determinations are in some sense “opaque”—that is, difficult or impossible to understand, whether because of their complexity or because of intellectual property protections. Scholars have noted some key problems with opacity, including that opacity can mask unfair treatment and threaten public accountability. In this paper, we explore a different but related concern with algorithmic opacity, which centers on the role of public trust in grounding the legitimacy of criminal justice institutions. We argue that algorithmic opacity threatens the trustworthiness of criminal justice institutions, which in turn threatens their legitimacy. We first offer an account of institutional trustworthiness before showing how opacity threatens to undermine an institution's trustworthiness. We then explore how threats to trustworthiness affect institutional legitimacy. Finally, we offer some policy recommendations to mitigate the threat to trustworthiness posed by the opacity problem. 

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2. Prosecutors, court communities, and policy change: The impact of internal DOJ reforms on federal prosecutorial practices*

   https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12275  

   Lynch, Mona; Barno, Matt; Omori, Marisa (January 2021, Criminology)

   The current study examines how key internal U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) policy changes have been translated into front-line prosecutorial practices. Extending courts-as-communities scholarship and research on policy implementation practices, we use U.S. Sentencing Commission data from 2004 to 2019 to model outcomes for several measures of prose- cutorial discretion in federal drug trafficking cases, including the use of mandatory minimum charges and prosecutor-endorsed departures, to test the impact of the policy changes on case processing outcomes. We contrast prosecutorial measures with measures that are more impervious to discretionary manipulation, such as criminal history, and those that represent judicial and blended discretion, including judicial departures and final sentence lengths. We find a significant effect of the policy reforms on how prosecutorial tools are used across DOJ policy periods, and we find variation across districts as a function of contextual conditions, consistent with the court communities literature. We also find that a powerful driver of changes in pros- ecutorial practices during our most recent period is the confirmation of individual Trump-appointed U.S. Attorneys at the district level, suggesting an important theoretical place for midlevel actors in policy translation and implementation. 

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3. Cyber Security and Criminal Justice Programs in the United States: Exploring the Intersections

   https://doi.org/110.5281  

   Payne, Brian K; Hadzhidimova, L (July 2018, International Journal of Criminal Justice Sciences)

   The study of cyber security is an interdisciplinary pursuit that includes STEM disciplines as well as the social sciences. While research on cyber security appears to be central in STEM disciplines, it is not yet clear how central cyber security and cyber crime is to criminal justice scholarship. In order to examine the connections between cyber security and criminal justice, in this study attention is given to the way that criminal justice scholars have embraced cyber crime research and coursework. Results show that while there are a number of cyber crime courses included in criminal justice majors there are not a large number of cyber crime research studies incorporated in mainstream criminal justice journals. ________________________________________________________________________ 

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4. US cities increasingly integrate justice into climate planning and create policy tools for climate justice

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-33392-9  

   Diezmartínez, Claudia V.; Short Gianotti, Anne G. (December 2022, Nature Communications)

   Abstract Climate change is one of the most important ethical issues of our time. Urban scholars and policymakers now recognise the need to address justice concerns associated with cities’ responses to climate change. However, little empirical research has examined whether and how cities have integrated justice into climate mitigation planning. Here, we show that large cities in the US are increasingly attending to justice in their climate action plans and that the recognition of structural and historical injustices is becoming more common. We demonstrate that justice is articulated differently across mitigation sectors, uncover local characteristics that may impact cities’ level of engagement with justice, and introduce four policy tools that pioneer cities have developed to operationalise just climate policies on the ground. More attention to justice in policy implementation and evaluation is needed as cities continue to move toward just urban transitions. 

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5. 94 different countries? Time, place, and variations in federal criminal justice

   https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38KW57J58  

   Lynch, Mona (January 2018, Berkeley journal of criminal law)

   null (Ed.)

   Frank Zimring and Gordon Hawkins’s 1991 book, The Scale of Imprisonment, was a pioneering intellectual effort to explain what was then just coming into view to social scientists and legal scholars: the massive growth and transformation of American criminal justice, particularly as manifested in what soon came to be called mass incarceration. Zimring and Hawkins endeavored to disentangle multiple forces in play, ranging from formal law, to local and regional legal norms, to a series of broader social and political transformations. In doing so, Zimring and Hawkins set out to disentangle the complex, multi-jurisdictional political and legal structures that govern imprisonment policy in the U.S. In this Article, I apply their insights about locale-based variations in criminal justice operations over time to the case of federal sentencing. Specifically, I empirically examine variations in how the “criminal history” provision of the federal sentencing guidelines is applied as a function of both time and place to demonstrate the limits of formal law in accounting for punishment outcomes. In doing so, I hope to shed additional light on how vast differences in legal practices and outcomes are produced, especially in response to top-down legal change. 

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