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In 2009, the National Research Council issued a report on forensic analysis in court. It found that few forensic investigative techniques are supported by sufficient science.The Federal Rules of Evidence require judges to admit evidence from expert witnesses, like...
Many people agree that our criminal justice system relies too much on pretrial detention -- keeping people in jail because they are assigned bail they can't afford. Ideally, we could tell who is a flight risk and who is a danger to the community in some logical way...
As we consider the causes of mass incarceration in the United States, we start with the knowledge that crime has been dropping since the mid-1990s. That should mean that arrest rates are also dropping, but that isn't always the case.Furthermore, 25 years ago, the...
The federal First Step Act was passed in late 2018 in an effort to reverse course on some overly harsh sentences that had been passed down over the last several decades. It also allowed for the early release of terminally ill people and passed a variety of reforms to...
According to data collected by the FBI, law enforcement officers in the U.S. arrested approximately 663,000 people for marijuana-related offenses in 2018, the latest year for which data is available. It's still the most commonly charged drug in the U.S., despite the...
Both the legal attitudes and public perceptions of marijuana have changed. What was once a taboo substance has become more accepted than ever nationwide and in the Midwest.While marijuana has gained greater acceptance and legalization across the country and as close...
In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court said that "plea bargaining . . . is not some adjunct to the criminal justice system; it is the criminal justice system."Over 95% of all criminal charges in the U.S. are resolved via plea bargain. That's not simply because bringing all...
How much has the mass incarceration trend affected Iowa? More than you might think.The independent public policy research group Vera Institute of Justice has assembled data from state and local correctional authorities and the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics in...
The holiday season is a time when people have a lot going on, from workplace events to neighborhood get-togethers and family parties. Alcohol is ubiquitous, and some people will indulge too much before driving.According to the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, 800...
In the 1980s and 1990s, both states and the federal government began to crack down on drug offenses at every level. Fighting drug crime was prioritized. Mandatory minimum sentence laws were passed. Prosecutors began stacking sentences to keep people in prison for...