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Issues of crime, justice, and incarceration play a crucial role in electoral politics. Recent Gallup polls reveal that nearly half of Americans view crime as an extremely serious or very serious problem. Such polls also reveal that Americans have little confidence in the criminal justice system. These issues have been exacerbated recently by the deaths of several young Black men including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York, and Laquan McDonald in Chicago, Illinois, which brought national attention to the strained relationships between local law enforcement agencies and the communities that they are sworn to serve and protect. Ironically, this concern coincides with a U.S. crime rate that has dropped steadily for more than a decade. Why is the American public increasingly concerned with crime if crime rates are steadily dropping? This chapter explores the role of crime, politics, and media imagery in the making of criminal justice policy. We argue that crime is one of the most enduring political issues of this century and that, in turn, politicians have played a fundamental role in constructing criminal justice policies. The implications for public governance and policymaking are many, as criminal justice policies rely on the public perception of officials as legitimate and just. Scandal and corruption reduce the legitimacy of public officials and lead to public questions about the discretionary decision-making of criminal justice actors as well as the disproportionate consequences in the criminal justice system for poor and minority communities.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it explains the current records management practices for Canadian criminal records. Second, it details the larger social and cultural implications of those practices, toward considering the role records management plays in long‐term sustainable offender rehabilitation outcomes.

This paper is based on a thorough literature review, which considered research on the history of Canadian criminal record management; current records management procedures for Canadian criminal records; and current Canadian social and cultural understandings of offenders, criminal records, and the relationship between criminal record management and public policy.

This paper finds that Canadian records management procedures for criminal records can have grave impacts on offenders' lives. Specifically, this paper explores how records management practices are shaped by the social norms and values embedded in public policy mandates, which ultimately appear to disrupt, rather than support, offenders' rehabilitation.

This paper's research is limited by its current approach. Consequently, it encourages researchers to further develop its findings in the future, both domestic to Canada and internationally.

This paper includes implications that advocate for increased awareness about how public policy dictated records management procedures can limit offenders' ability to reintegrate into society.

This paper addresses the grave social consequences and burdens offenders face when they are unable to seal their previous criminal record.

This paper addresses the need to study how offenders' rehabilitation is affected by the policy dictating the management of their criminal record.

Most criminal justice scholars agree that the past three decades have witnessed a punitive shift in criminal justice policy, public opinion, and political rhetoric. Have these political trends also left their mark on policy approaches to due process rights? The provision of counsel to indigent defendants is a signature issue in debates over due process rights. The Supreme Court expanded dramatically the circumstances under which states were required to provide counsel in the 1960s and 1970s, though decisions about the implementation of this mandate were left to individual states. We examine the evolution of indigent defense policy, at the state and local level, over the past three decades, and ask two questions: First, did policies evolve in the directions expected by reform advocates? Second, to the extent that policies developed differently across states, how can we account for those differences? We find that refomers' optimistic projections about structure and funding have not been realized, and that adoption of progressive policies has been uneven across states. Most importantly, we find evidence that the politics of ideology and racial conflict have played a significant role in states' indigent defense policy over the past three decades.

Collateral consequences (CCs) of criminal convictions such as disenfranchisement, occupational restrictions, exclusions from public housing, and loss of welfare benefits represent one of the salient yet hidden features of the contemporary American penal state. This chapter explores, from a comparative and historical perspective, the rise of the many indirect “regulatory” sanctions flowing from a conviction and discusses some of the unique challenges they pose for legal and policy reform. US jurisprudence and policies are contrasted with the more stringent approach adopted by European legal systems and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in safeguarding the often blurred line between criminal punishments and formally civil sanctions. The aim of this chapter is twofold: (1) to contribute to a better understanding of the overreliance of the US criminal justice systems on CCs as a device of social exclusion and control, and (2) to put forward constructive and viable reform proposals aimed at reinventing the role and operation of collateral restrictions flowing from criminal convictions.

Barriers to employment are a significant issue in the United States and abroad. As civil rights legislation continues to be enforced and as employers seek to diversify their workplaces, it is incumbent upon the management field to offer insights that address obstacles to work. Although barriers to employment have been addressed in various fields such as psychology and economics, management scholars have addressed this issue in a piecemeal fashion. As such, our review will offer a comprehensive, integrative model of barriers to employment that addresses both individual and organizational perspectives. We will also address societal-level concerns involving these barriers. An integrative perspective is necessary for research to progress in this area because many individuals with barriers to employment face multiple challenges that prevent them from obtaining and maintaining full employment. While the additive, or possibly multiplicative, effect of employment barriers have been acknowledged in related fields like rehabilitation counseling and vocational psychology, the Human Resource Management (HRM) literature has virtually ignored this issue. We discuss suggestions for the reduction or elimination of barriers to employment. We also provide an integrative model of employment barriers that addresses the mutable (amenable to change) nature of some barriers, while acknowledging the less mutable nature of others.

The number of reported cases for Japanese Penal Code offenses amounted to 2.5 million in 1997 and increased every year, reaching 3.6 million in 2002 and 2003. However, the number decreased from 2004 to 2008 to 2.5 million. Almost throughout the same period, the number of cases and persons cleared remained comparatively steady between 1.3 and 1.5 million and 1 and 1.2 million respectively, but the latter finally fell below one million in 2011. In this chapter I describe such a rise and fall as a “Mt. Fuji-line” that appears as a mountain-shaped curve on a graph.

The Japanese government reacted to the increase of crimes, which was seen as a reflection of a weakened or broken security and safety. The most effective policy, it was thought therefore, was to increase the number of policemen. This policy followed the strategy of New York City, made famous by its then Mayor Giuliani, who declared “A War on Crimes” and increased the number of police officers by ten thousand to revive New York from “A Crime City.” As criminologists have experienced so-called “labeling shocks” and learned from the approach of symbolic interactionism, criminologists can no longer simply accept that statistical data reflect weakened or broken security issues. Agencies of criminal justice, especially police officers, use such data as statistical evidence to show that the crime situation got worse.

I argue that the rise and fall of crimes, especially the increasing and decreasing number of reported cases, reflects changes of crime control policies. I analyze the Mt. Fuji-line from 1998 to 2011. The increase of crimes as well as the weakened or broken security and safety functioned as evidence that justified the reinforcement of police power and a new criminal justice shift for a lay judge system in the rising phase (1998–2003). Since the concept of a bigger justice system needs, however, lots of personnel and material sources, the Japanese government eventually gave up sustaining it. Agencies used their discretion to skip petty crimes and divert suspects because of a reduction of excessive burdens and inappropriate prison population, but they stepped into a new stage to adjust their burdens, keeping their own empowered framework of criminal justice system. These changing policies resulted in the reduction of crime in a falling phase (2004–2011).

These phenomena are explained from the viewpoint of Jürgen Habermas’ crisis theory. I conclude that the framework and capacity of the Japanese criminal justice system grew far bigger and that original functions of crime control through criminal procedure became weaker by being outsourced to other peripheral social systems and agencies. Thus the crime control system has been successful in bringing about a net-widening effect.

This chapter considers overlapping legal and policy issues related to hate crimes, summarizing the problem with an emphasis on societal responses. The theoretical insight that law can be understood as an expression of societal values is combined with an emphasis on the empirical study of law in action. The approach taken is theoretical and conceptual in nature, but is also informed by relevant case law and various empirical studies and is concerned to suggest how hate crime research can address issues of both theoretical and policy significance by analyzing how hate crime law is practiced. Some of the findings are that hate crime law can be seen to express values in a wide variety of settings and to express values intentionally, neither of which has been properly acknowledged to date. It is important for public policy analysis and practice as well as for theory development to acknowledge the limitations of both rational choice/deterrence approaches and moral education theories in the hate crime policy domain. Instead of understanding criminal law as a type of threat or type of instruction, in the case of hate crimes the law may be practiced and evaluated most realistically without assuming that hate criminals will be attentive to potential legal sanctions or amenable to moral education. The discussion includes elements of literature review, policy debate, theoretical analysis, and methodological reflection suggesting how hate crime law can be analyzed as expressive law in action, providing material relevant for students, theorists, policy-makers and analysts, and researchers.

Global mobility remains one of the most pressing challenges of our times. Countries in the north are turning to major ‘sending’ countries in the south to secure their cooperation in controlling their borders and in repatriation processes. By explicitly linking migration to global security threats and weak governance, these migration control initiatives are justified by development goals and sometimes financed by official development assistance (ODA). By connecting criminology with international development scholarship, this chapter seeks to advance our understanding of the novel intersections between criminal justice, security and development to govern mass migration. Focusing on UK policies and the analysis of specific programmes, it interrogates what does the sustainable development goal (10.7) of facilitating ‘orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration’ concretely entail? And to what extent does the language of ‘managed migration’ legitimise restrictive border controls policies and even conflict with other global development goals?

The purpose of this study is to explore spatiotemporal factors that affect the empirical analysis of whether crime rates in buffer areas surrounding abandoned properties transferred to a Land Bank that differed among three regimes: before transfer, during Land Bank stewardship and after disposition and whether those differences were associated with differences in relative crime activity in the neighborhoods in which they were located.

This study analyzed crime incidents occurring between 2010 and 2018 in 0.1-mile buffer areas surrounding 31 abandoned properties sold by the Land Bank and their neighborhoods in which those properties were located. Using Copulas, researchers compared concordance/discordance in the buffer areas across the three regime states for each property and approximately matched time periods for associated neighborhoods.

In a substantial number of cases, the relative crime activity levels for buffer areas surrounding individual sold properties as measured by the Copulas shifted from concordant to discordant states and vice versa. Similarly, relative crime activity levels for neighborhoods shifted from concordant to discordant states across three matched regimes. In some cases, the property and neighborhood states matched, while in other cases they diverged. These cross-level interactions indicate that criminal behavioral patterns and target selection change over time and relative criminal activity. The introduction of Copulas can improve the reliability of such models over time and when and where they should be customized to add more granular insights needed by law enforcement agencies.

The introduction of Copulas can improve the spatiotemporal reliability of the analysis of criminal activity over space and time.

Spatiotemporal considerations should be incorporated in setting interventions to manage criminal activity.

This study provides support for policies supporting renovation of abandoned properties.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this research is the first application of Copulas to crime impact studies. As noted, Copulas can help reduce the risk of applying intervention or enforcement programs that are no longer reliable or lack the precision provided by insights into convergent/divergent patterns of criminal activity.

Scholars increasingly recognize the centrality of legal ideas and language to the political vision that inspires American conservatism. However, relevant studies have been limited to the discursive practices that motivate conservative activism at the grass-root level. Exploration of the legal discourses employed by prominent public officials thus carries significant scholarly potential. For example, this chapter's investigation of President Ronald Reagan reveals that his political vision was suffused with legal discourse. Reagan's legal discourse, moreover, has exerted constitutive effects both on American conservatism and on the form and substance of a great deal of contemporary American public policy.