Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons^™

We Can Move Mountains: Engaging In State-Level Policy Work, Lisa M. Growette Bostaph, Melissa Wintrow

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications and Presentations

An increasing number of academic researchers are becoming involved in state-level policy work as a result of existing local partnerships or direct requests by agency directors or elected officials. Most faculty and policymakers do not receive any training in doing such collaborative work and, for each party in the partnership, it can often seem like landing on another planet or, at the very least, visiting a foreign country, with different jargon, players, and stakes. This essay provides a brief guide to navigating the world of state-level partnerships in policymaking.

How Criminal Code Drafting Form Can Restrain Prosecutorial And Legislative Excesses: Consolidated Offense Drafting, Paul H. Robinson, Matthew Kussmaul, Muhammad Sarahne

All Faculty Scholarship

Solving criminal justice problems typically requires the enactment of new rules or the modification of existing ones. But there are some serious problems that can best be solved simply by altering the way in which the existing rules are drafted rather than by altering their content. This is the case with two of the most serious problems in criminal justice today: the problem of overlapping criminal offenses that create excessive prosecutorial charging discretion and the problem of legislative inconsistency and irrationality in grading offenses.

After examining these two problems and demonstrating their serious effects in perverting criminal justice, the essay …

Police Quotas, Shaun Ossei-Owusu

All Faculty Scholarship

The American public is slowly recognizing the criminal justice system’s deep defects. Mounting visual evidence of police brutality and social protests are generating an appetite for something different. How to change this system is still an open question. People across the political spectrum vary in their conceptions of the pressing problems and how to solve them. Interestingly, there is one consequential and overlooked area of the criminal justice system where there is broad consensus: police quotas.

Police quotas are formal and informal measures that require police officers to issue a particular number of citations or make a certain number of …