criminal law research papers

Criminal Law

Unmasking the boston police department’s gang database: how an arbitrary system criminalizes innocent conduct, turkiye halk bankasi a.s. v. united states, policing “bad” mothers.

• I. Bennett Capers

Reframing the Indigent Defense Crisis

United states v. goliday.

Seventh Circuit Applies Buyer-Seller Exception to Guilty Pleas by Drug Dealers.

Stacked: Where Criminal Charge Stacking Happens — And Where it Doesn’t

United states v. johnlouis.

Fifth Circuit Delivers a New Law Enforcement Functions Test for Identifying Government Actors.

The Occasions Clause Paradox

Wooden v. united states, public carry and criminal law after bruen.

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

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Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology is a student-run publication at Northwestern University School of Law that prints four issues annually and rests upon a century of scholarship devoted to the scientific study of criminal law and criminology. Since its inception in 1910, the Journal strives to capture the breadth and depth of legal scholarship on crime through the publication of legal articles, criminological research, book reviews, and symposia. The Journal is consistently ranked among the most influential legal and criminology publications and remains the most widely read and cited criminal law journal. Our broad readership of judges, legal scholars, criminologists, and practitioners composes the second largest subscription base of all the nation's law journals.

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Current Issue: Volume 113, Issue 4 (2024) Spring

What If Criminal Lawmaking Becomes Trustworthy? Zachary S. Price

Fair Notice and Criminalizing Abortions Brian G. Slocum and Nadia Banteka

Forbidden Purposes: A New Path for Limiting Criminalization Raff Donelson

The Rule of Lenity as a Disruptor Maciej Hulicki and Melanie M. Reid

Extraterritorial State Criminal Law, Post-Dobbs Darryl K. Brown

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Criminal Justice Resources

Articles and papers/reports, selected books and law-related material, statistics/data, organizations, other sources, 50-state surveys, historical archives/research, what is happening in criminal justice, getting help, introduction.

This guide is meant to serve as a starting place for people researching criminal justice and related criminal law issues.  It focuses primarly on issues related to the United States.  For more criminal law sources (particularly for 1L's), be sure to check out our guides for Criminal Law and Law and Public Policy  and the Kennedy School Library's Criminal Justice guide.

Subject Guide

Indexing/abstracting resources focused on criminal justice

• Crime and Delinquency Abstracts Covers 1963-1972. National Council on Crime and Delinquency and National Clearinghouse for Mental Health Information. Previously,
• Criminal Justice Abstracts (Harvard Key Login) Criminal Justice Abstracts provides comprehensive coverage of U.S. and international criminal justice literature including scholarly journals, books, dissertations, governmental and non-governmental studies and reports, unpublished papers, magazines, newsletters and other materials. In addition to criminal justice and criminology, topics covered include criminal law and procedure, corrections and prisons, police and policing, criminal investigation, forensic sciences and investigation, history of crime, substance abuse and addiction, and probation and parole. 1968-current. more... less... Criminal Justice Abstracts provides comprehensive coverage of U.S. and international criminal justice literature including scholarly journals, books, dissertations, governmental and non-governmental studies and reports, unpublished papers, magazines, newsletters and other materials. In addition to criminal justice and criminology, topics covered include criminal law and procedure, corrections and prisons, police and policing, criminal investigation, forensic sciences and investigation, history of crime, substance abuse and addiction, and probation and parole.
• NCJRS The National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) is a federally funded resource offering justice and substance abuse information to support research, policy, and program development worldwide. The NCJRS Abstracts Database contains summaries of the more than 185,000 criminal justice publications housed in the NCJRS Library collection. Most documents published by NCJRS sponsoring agencies since 1995 are available in full-text online. A link is included with the abstract when the full-text is available. Use the Thesaurus Term Search to search for materials in the NCJRS Abstracts Database using an NCJRS controlled vocabulary. This controlled vocabulary is used to assign relevant indexing terms to the documents in the NCJRS collection.

Finding legal articles and papers

• Index to Legal Periodicals and Books
• Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective: 1908-1981 (Law Login Required) covers back to 1908 more... less... This retrospective database indexes over 750 legal periodicals published in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Annual surveys of the laws of a jurisdiction, annual surveys of the federal courts, yearbooks, annual institutes, and annual reviews of the work in a given field or on a given topic will also be covered.
• More resources for finding legal articles

Multidisciplinary databases

• Academic Search Premier (Harvard Login) more... less... Academic Search Premier (ASP) is a multi-disciplinary database that includes citations and abstracts from over 4,700 scholarly publications (journals, magazines and newspapers). Full text is available for more than 3,600 of the publications and is searchable.
• JSTOR more... less... Includes all titles in the JSTOR collection, excluding recent issues. JSTOR (www.jstor.org) is a not-for-profit organization with a dual mission to create and maintain a trusted archive of important scholarly journals, and to provide access to these journals as widely as possible. Content in JSTOR spans many disciplines, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. For complete lists of titles and collections, please refer to http://www.jstor.org/about/collection.list.html.

Other social science databases related to criminal justice

• PAIS International (Harvard Login) provides access to materials about public policy, including academic journal articles, yearbooks, books, reports and pamphlets. Items indexed include works by academics, agencies, international organizations and federal, state and local governments from 1972 to the present. PAIS covers over 1,600 journals and roughly 8,000 books each year. PAIS is international in scope and contains items in many romance languages. more... less... PAIS International indexes the public and social policy literature of public administration, political science, economics, finance, international relations, law, and health care, International in scope, PAIS indexes publications in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. The database is comprised of abstracts of thousands of journal articles, books, directories, conference proceedings, government documents and statistical yearbooks.
• More academic resources by field
• Law and Public Policy Guide
• Urban Studies Abstracts (Harvard Login) more... less... Electronic index and abstracts to the literature in the area of urban studies, including urban affairs, community development, and urban history. The backfile of this index has been digitized, providing coverage back to 1973.

Selected Journals and newsletters

• Annual Review of Criminal Procedure (Georgetown) Latest issue available in print at Law School KF9619 .G46

• Federal Sentencing Reporter also on Lexis

Congressional publications/government reports

• CRS reports
• House and Senate Hearings, Congressional Record Permanent Digital Collection, and Digital US Bills and Resolutions
• Federal Legislative History
• US Department of Justice
• PolicyFile (Harvard Login) Abstracts of and links to domestic and international public policy issue published by think tanks, university research programs, & research organizations. more... less... PolicyFile provides abstracts (more than half of the abstracts link to the full text documents) of domestic and international public policy issues. The public policy reports and studies are published by think tanks, university research programs, research organizations which include the OECD, IMF, World Bank, the Rand Corporation, and a number of federal agencies. The database search engine allows users to search by title, author, subject, organization and keyword.
• Rutgers University Don M. Gottsfredson School of Criminal Justice Gray Literature Database

Rules of Criminal Procedure

• Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure (Federal Rules of Practice & Procedure) Includes postings of proposed rule changes. From the uscourts.gov website.
• Rulemaking (Pending Rules)(US Courts)

Model Penal Code

• Criminal Law: Model Penal Code
• Model Penal Code and Commentaries (official draft and revised comments) : with text of Model penal code as adopted at the 1962 Annual Meeting of the American Law Institute at Washington, D.C., May 24, 1962.
• Model penal code : official draft and explanatory notes : complete text of Model penal code as adopted at the 1962 Annual Meeting of the American Law Institute at Washington, D.C., May 24, 1962.
• Model Penal Code (ALI Library) Includes drafts

Selected Criminal Law Treatises, Basic Texts and Practice Manuals

Below are sources related to criminal law generally or focused on federal criminal law.  For a particular jurisdiction, look for secondary sources related to that particular state.  For constitutional issues, see also secondary sources related to constitutional law more generally.

• United States Attorneys Manual
• Legal Division Reference Book
• United States Sentencing Commission, Guidelines Manual

Search and Seizure

• Search and Seizure also on Lexis

Sources for criminal justice statistics generally

• Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics Currently in transition (no longer funded by the Bureau of Justice Statistics), but still a good starting place. Data included as of 2013.
• Bureau of Justice Statistics
• FBI Uniform Crime Reports Annual report is Crime in the United States .
• National Crime Victimization Survey See also NCVS Victimization Analysis Tool and National Crime Victimization Survey Resource Guide .
• Justice Research and Statistics Association
• National Archive of Criminal Justice Data
• United States Sentencing Commission (USSC) Interactive Sourcebook
• Sunlight Criminal Justice Project Its Hall of Justice provides a searchable inventory of publically available criminal justice data sets and research.
• Arrest Data Analysis Tool underlying data from FBI's UCR (Uniform Crime Reports)
• Measures for Justice
• State Criminal Caseloads
• United States Historical Corrections Statistics - 1850-1984 from BJS abstract: "The introductory chapter contains a brief history of Federal corrections data collection efforts. Summary information on capital punishment includes data on illegal lynchings by race and offense, regional comparisons of the number of persons executed, the number under the death sentence, the number of women executed, and the number of persons removed from the death sentence other than by execution. Prison statistics cover the number in Federal, State, and juvenile facilities; the average sentence by sex, region, race, and offense; length of sentence; and type of release. Statistics also cover facility staff, inmate-staff ratio, and jail inmates. Probation and parole statistics address the numbers under supervision (both adults and juveniles), average caseload, terminations by method of termination, the average length of parole and percent with favorable outcome, and probationer and parolee profiles. Implications are drawn for current data collection efforts, and the appendix contains limited information on military prisons."
• Crime Solutions.gov

Crime Mapping

• NIJ Mapping and Analysis for Public Safety

Specialized sources of statistics/data

• Death Penalty Information Center
• Federal Sentencing Statistics
• The Counted: People Killed by Police in the US (The Guardian)
• Washington Post (People Shot Dead by Police)
• Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Protection's (OJJDP's) Statistical Briefing Book
• Stanford Open Policing Project Data on vehicle and pedestrian stops from law enforcement departments across the country.
• Corporate Prosecution Registry
• Police Crime Data
• Monitoring of Federal Criminal Sentences Series
• Citizen Police Data Project focused on Chicago
• Chicago Data Collaborative "Collaborative members collect data from institutions at all points of contact in the Cook County criminal justice system, including the Chicago Police Department, the Illinois State Police, the Office of the State's Attorney, and the Cook County Jail."
• Washington Post (Unsolved Homicide Database)
• American Violence Run by the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management, the initial iteration of this databases includes city-level figures on murder rates in more than 80 of the largest 100 U.S. cities. According to the website, the second iteration will feature neighborhood-level figures on violent crime in 30-50 cities with available data.
• Police Data Initiative "This site provides a consolidated and interactive listing of open and soon-to-be-opened data sets that more than 130 local law enforcement agencies have identified as important to their communities, and provides critical and timely resources, including technical guidance and best practices, success stories, how-to articles and links to related efforts." See map of participating agencies" .

Other sources for statistics

• American Fact Finder
• See Judicial Workload, Jury Verdicts and Crime Statistics generally
• Harvard Dataverse more... less... The Harvard-MIT Data Center is the principal repository of quantitative social science data at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The majority of its holdings are available to Harvard and MIT affiliates directly via its web site through its search engine. Graduate students and faculty with a Harvard or MIT Library card can check out paper code books from libraries at either institution, under Harvard's and MIT's reciprocal borrowing agreement. In addition, the Data Center has negotiated a special agreement for undergraduates and summer graduate students, who are not covered by the standard agreement.
• Proquest Statistical Insight (Harvard Login) more... less... Proquest Statistical Insight is a bibliographic database that indexes and abstracts the statistical content of selected United States government publications, state government publications, business and association publications, and intergovernmental publications. The abstracts may also contain a link to the full text of the table and/or a link to the agency's web site where the full text of the publication may be viewed and downloaded.
• Data.gov Includes data from the Department of Justice and other agencies.
• Data Citation Index (Web of Science)
• Historical Statistics of the United States (Harvard Login) more... less... Presents the U.S. in statistics from Colonial times to the present. Included are statistics on U.S. population, including characteristics, vital statistics, internal and international migration. Statistics on work and welfare, economic structure and performance, economic sectors, and governance and international relations. Tables may be downloaded for use in spreadsheets and other applications. This electronic database is also in a five volume hard copy set.

Books, reports and articles about criminal justice statistics and records

• Data and Civil Rights: Criminal Justice Primer Part of larger conference on Data and Civil Rights http://www.datacivilrights.org/ ; includes write-up from conference http://www.datacivilrights.org/pubs/2014-1030/CriminalJustice-Writeup.pdf
• Ensuring the Quality, Credibility, and Relevance of U.S. Justice Statistics (2009)
• Estimating the Incidence of Rape and Sexual Assault
• Modernizing Crime Statistics: Report 1: Defining and Classifying Crime

Case Processing and Court Statistics

• Federal Criminal Case Processing Statistics
• State Court Caseload Statistics See also Data Collection: Court Statistics Project and CSP Data Viewer .
• Statistics and Reports (Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts)

Criminal Records

• Search Systems A mega search site with links to public records by state, county, city and also by record type. A great place to start your research. more... less... From the website: We've located, analyzed, described, and organized links to over 55,000 databases by type and location to help you find property, criminal, court, birth, death, marriage, divorce records, licenses, deeds, mortgages, corporate records, business registration, and many other public record resources quickly, easily, and for free.
• BRB Publications BRB Publications maintains a page with links to more than 300 local, state and federal websites offering free access to public records.
• National Sex Offender Public Registry From the US Department of Justice. This site also has links to all 50 states, District of Columbia, US territories, and tribal registry websites.
• FBI's Sex Offender Database websites An alternate source for state level sex offender databases.
• FBI's Bureau of Prisons Inmate Finder
• VINELink VINELink is the online version of VINE (Victim Information and Notification Everyday), the National Victim Notification Network. This service allows crime victims to obtain timely and reliable information about criminal cases and the custody status of offenders 24 hours a day.

Research Organizations and Advocacy Groups

• Vera Institute of Justice
• Agencies, Think Tanks and Advocacy Groups
• Urban Institute-Crime and Justice
• National Center for State Courts
• National Conference of State Legislatures
• Innocence Project
• Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice (UPenn Law)
• Capital Jury Project

Professional Organizations

• American Bar Association (Criminal Justice section)
• National District Attorneys Association
• American Correctional Association
• National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers

Research guides from other libraries

• MSU Libraries, Criminal Justice Resources
• Georgetown Law Criminal Law and Justice Guide
• Harvard Kennedy School Library, Criminal Justice
• Criminal Law Prof Blog
• White Collar Crime Prof Blog

50-State-Surveys

• ABA Collateral Consequences Database
• National Conference of State Legislatures-Civil and Criminal Justice

HIstorical Archives/Projects

• National Death Penalty Archives
• ProQuest History Vault (Harvard Login)

Updates from popular criminal justice resources

New books in the library, new books in general.

• New Books Received at Rutgers

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• Published: 23 June 2023

The relationship between criminology and criminal law: implications for developing Chinese criminology

• Honglan Shuai 1 &
• Jianhong Liu 2  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  10 , Article number:  350 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

5395 Accesses

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• Criminology

During the last four decades, Chinese criminology has grown steadily but modestly. One consensus is the lack of a clear understanding of the relationship between criminology and criminal law. This paper attempts to provide a critical review of the relationship between the two disciplines by first tracing the historical development of criminology in both China and Western countries. It then clarifies the distinctions and overlaps between criminology and criminal law and explains how this relationship has influenced the growth of criminology in China. It concludes by proposing implications for developing criminology in China, particularly discussing potential collaborations that could be forged between criminology and criminal law and how such partnerships can benefit both fields in China.

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Introduction

Over the last four decades, criminology in China has evolved. However, a vast body of literature argued that its expansion has been relatively slow (Cao and Hebenton, 2018 ; Cao et al., 2014 ; He and Zhuo, 2016 ; Hebenton and Jou, 2010 ; Liu, 2021 ; Triplett, 2018 ). One problem is the lack of clarity about the link between criminology and criminal law. Contemporary scholarship in criminology and criminal law has grown into a vast field. Their overlaps and differences have created significant uncertainty about the relationship between the two. In China, many consider criminology a part of criminal law, while others consider it a social science field. As a result of this ambiguity, scholars in each field are largely unacquainted with the other’s subject matter.

Notwithstanding this ambiguity, this paper argues that progress in one field can benefit greatly from knowledge generated in another. Before providing concrete recommendations to strengthen the collaboration between and growth of Chinese criminology and criminal law, we start by revisiting the historical trajectory of Chinese criminology. We then proceed to provide a thorough analysis of the activities of the two fields before launching into explicating the intricate relationship between them. We do so by examining the relationship between criminology and criminal law both in China and Western democracies, summarising the significant influence of criminology on the development of criminal law with examples from the West and demonstrating the limited development of Chinese criminology. Relying on both the historical developmental paths and contemporary overlaps and distinctions between the two fields in the West and China, this paper concludes by providing three recommendations for the growth and development of criminology in China.

Relationship between criminology and criminal law in the West

The two ideas of “punishment” (criminal law) and “crime” (criminology) shared the exact intellectual genesis. The development of the former could be traced to Beccaria’s seminal work On Crimes and Punishments in the 18th century, which, as one part of the classical school, was also the origin of criminology (Walters and Bradley, 2019 ). However, during the subsequent century, human behaviour became a branch of natural science that could be researched using scientific approaches (see Mannheim, 1972 ; Wright, 2010 ). Under this influence, the positivist school gradually displaced the classical school of criminology. Modern criminology, as a scientific discipline, arose against this backdrop. What started as one unity under Beccaria’s paradigm of studying the causes and reactions to crime has evolved into two distinct developmental paths—criminology and criminal law.

The rise and development of classical and positivist criminology schools reveal the overlap and differences between criminology and criminal law in the West. On the one hand, criminology and criminal law are inextricably linked. First, they have connections in origin. By emphasising the rule of law and individual dignity, Beccaria, a noteworthy representative of the classical school of criminology, is known as the father of modern criminal law (Hostettler, 2011 ). The classical school of criminology is regarded as laying the groundwork for criminal law today. Second, both disciplines are involved in the study of crime. Criminal law regulates crimes that seriously danger society and should be punished according to the criminal code. These crimes are also the research subjects of criminology. In addition, some deviant behaviours that have minor danger to society or have not been provided in the criminal code may be explored in criminological research. Third, these two disciplines have ideals and values in common. Criminal law aims to realise the rule of law by identifying and punishing criminal and criminal behaviour. Criminology, based on the observation of crime phenomenon, explores the regularity of crime, particularly causes of crime, to prevent and control crime. They both serve to achieve crime control, maintain social order and protect public security. Fourth, as criminology and criminal law evolved, studies on topics in one discipline touched upon those in the other. For example, criminologists have been studying domestic violence, which criminal laws often did not address during the early era. However, as society develops and criminal law improves, domestic violence is criminalised and becomes an important topic discussed by scholars in criminal law.

On the other hand, criminology is distinguished from criminal law in perspectives like orientation, research methods, procedure, and so on. Criminal law concentrates on the legal norms of crime and the idea of legal dogmatic through applying interpretative, logical and inference methods. In contrast, criminology studies individual criminals or offenders using scientific or empirical methods (qualitative and quantitative research methods), such as surveys, interviews, experiments, content analysis and so on (Laufer, 2017 ; Mannheim, 1972 ). Procedurally, criminology is active; researchers actively discover social problems, observe crime phenomena, analyse data, draw conclusions, and make suggestions to governments or policymakers. However, criminal law procedure is passive: it cannot be initiated until a crime is reported, a criminal is arrested, or a criminal lawsuit is filed. For example, criminal law might not deal with minor theft if victims do not report it, while criminologists should still research it through a victimisation survey or report. Essentially, criminal law is a discipline focusing on criminals’ responsibilities and punishments, while criminology studies the nature and causes of crime and crime prevention at individual and social levels. Criminal law academics see criminals and non-criminals as equal. In contrast, criminologists see distinctions between criminals and non-criminals and argue that criminals should be treated rather than punished, given that crime is a disease (White et al., 2017 ).

The connection and distinctions between criminology and criminal law have aided the enormous advancement of both disciplines, as each may benefit significantly from the knowledge created in the other. As an example, this paper will look at the significant impact of criminology on criminal law in the West.

Great influence of criminology on criminal law in Western societies

The field of criminology, along with the broader academic trend of interdisciplinary growth and application of empirical research approaches, has dramatically influenced the development of criminal law in Western countries.

Criminological contributions towards theoretical innovation in criminal law

For many years, criminology has been regarded as an interdisciplinary science or an integrated discipline encompassing sociology, psychology, biology, economics, political science, etc. The scientific paradigms, interpretation tools and methodologies utilised in other social science disciplines constitute the bedrock for conducting research in criminological studies. In contrast, as a normative discipline, criminal law tends to rely on explanatory, logical and reasoning methods as its primary research methods; it concludes conviction and sentencing within the scope of existing legal norms or regulations (Zheng and Yang, 2014 ). Criminology has inspired researchers in criminal law to look at their field from a more scientific and objective perspective. For example, from a criminological perspective, American law professor Herbert Leslie Packer (1925–72) proposed two criminal justice systems models: the crime control and due process models (Packer, 1964 ). The former emphasises protecting victims’ rights and maintaining social stability through repressing criminal behaviours with as few restrictions on the authorities’ power of fact-finding as possible; the latter aims to protect defendants’ rights by restricting administrative power and requires police and prosecutors to observe the principle of presumption of innocence when investigating, examining, and interrogating suspects or defendants (Packer, 1964 ).

Application of empirical methods in criminal law

As a scientific discipline, criminology is mainly realised through empirical research methods. However, the general wisdom in criminal law is that punishment is a philosophical issue, not an empirical one (Von Hirsch, 1976 ). Despite this, empirical research is not new in criminal law (Ho and Kramer, 2013 ), and criminal justice academics have long benefited from social scientific research on crime causes and crime rates, or, put, from criminological research (Weisberg, 2013 ).

Since the 1900s, empirical research methods have been applied in dealing with crimes (Kritzer, 2009 ). Many European countries and nearly half of US states routinely publish statistics on crime and criminal cases (Goebel, 1912 ; MacDonald, 1910 ). As an essential forerunner of the legal realist movement, American legal scholar Roscoe Pound ( 1910 ) emphasised the significance of the social sciences in law in his well-known publication “Law in Books and Law in Action”. In addition, the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology was established in 1909 to advance the scientific study of crime, criminal law, and procedure (Rundell, 1912 ). During this period, empirical legal researchers focused on studying criminal justice systems, such as comparing cases with private attorneys and paid public defenders (Wood, 1916 ) and examining the behaviour of magistrates in misdemeanour trials (Everson, 1919 ).

During the 1920s and 1930s, the focus shifted to crime surveys. One notable example was the Cleveland Crime Survey, which included prosecution, police administration, criminal courts, and corrections (Pound et al., 1922 ). It is believed that most empirical legal work during this period was exclusively carried out by scholars in the United States (Kritzer, 2009 ). Starting in the mid-1960s, the law and society movement (Friedman, 1986 ) and the law and economics movement thrived, promoting the broader use of empirical methods among legal scholars (Kalven and Zeisel, 1966 ). Footnote 1 Empirical legal studies (ELS) developed more influentially around 2000 (Weisberg, 2013 ). The Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (JELS) and the Society for Empirical Legal Studies (SELS) were founded in 2004, and the first annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) was held in 2006.

Transformed idea of punishment in criminal law

The rehabilitation idea of criminology has deeply influenced the punishment idea of criminal law. Criminal law scholars commonly regard punishment as efforts based on revenge and deterrence, with their justification being retribution or retributive justice. In comparison, criminologists are more inclined to advocate consequentialism, a forward-looking rational approach to achieve rehabilitation or neutralisation (Koppel et al., 2018 ). Over time, the rehabilitation idea of criminology has gradually been adopted by the legal systems of Western countries. For example, the European Convention on Human Rights provides clear and detailed laws and regulations regarding rehabilitation measures, such as safeguarding and regulating the use and disposal of any criminal records (Ovey, 2014 ). The Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (c.53) passed by the British Parliament is an example. In addition, the United States Code has emphasised that “imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation.” Footnote 2 Furthermore, Massachusetts’ juvenile justice system has successfully applied rehabilitation instead of punishment (Macallair, 1993 ). All the above legal provisions demonstrate the spirit of humanitarianism and rehabilitation within criminal legal systems.

Also, most criminal law scholars hold the view that there is no significant difference between criminals and non-criminals, while criminologists posit a distinction between criminals and non-criminals (White et al., 2017 ). Thus, another topic concerning punishment is ensuring fair treatment for criminals who commit similar crimes. When modern criminal law emerged, minors and adults, or first offenders and recidivists, were treated equally and subjected to the same penalties (Richards, 2011 ). For example, no separate category of juvenile offender could be found in Western legal systems before the mid-19th century, and in Australia, six-year-old children were incarcerated in prisons (Cunneen and White, 2011 ). However, this ideal of absolute equality in criminal law was criticised because the ultimate result was inequality (Li, 2010 ). In criminological research, offenders have been studied according to gender, age, occupation, education, and other demographic characteristics. Criminologists have researched specific subjects, like juvenile delinquency (see Agnew, 2001 ; Shaw and McKay, 1942 ), white-collar crime (see Nelken, 1994 ; Sutherland, 1945 ), and so on, based on those subjects’ distinctive features. Thus, the equality idea of traditional criminal law has been dramatically influenced by criminology. For example, most countries now have specific procedures for treating juveniles in their legal systems, such as juvenile detention centres and courts, and matters involving children are commonly treated as civil rather than criminal cases (Richards, 2011 ). Therefore, criminological theories provide a reference for the more scientific and equal provisioning of criminal law.

Establishment of criminal policies and criminal legislation

Another influence of criminology on criminal law can be understood from the criminal policy perspective. The term criminal policy (German: Kriminalpolitik) was coined by the German legal scholar von Feuerbach (1775–1833) in his 1801 Textbook of Criminal Law Generally Applied in Germany, describing how governments established crime prevention policies through scientific methods. In 1898, another legal scholar and criminologist, Franz von Liszt (1851–1919), further proposed that goal-oriented social policy was the best and the most effective criminal policy (Gallo and Kim, 2016 ). Both von Feuerbach and von Liszt emphasised the significant role of scientific methods in criminal policy research and that of criminal policy in legislation. The research methods applied by criminal policy researchers are similar to those commonly used in the social sciences for programme evaluation (Babbie, 2015 ), given that criminal policy comprises a broad convergence of criminal law, criminology, criminal sociology, criminal psychology, and political science.

As suggested by Zaffaroni and Oliveira ( 2013 , p. 331), criminal policy is not only considered “a science of observation” (criminology) but also “the art of organising the fight against crime” (criminal law and criminal justice). To accurately explain responses to crime, criminal policy researchers should pay attention to the police and judicial statistics to verify the effects of law implementations (Zaffaroni and Oliveira, 2013 ). This observation does not constitute criminal policy per se but calls attention to the absence of legitimate criminal policy. According to Hans-Heinrich and Weigend ( 1996 ), recent fundamental advances in criminal policy can be attributed to criminology. Also, as art, criminal policy is created to drive society toward resisting crime by employing specific means to achieve previously established objectives (Ancel, 1981 ). It prepares effective strategies for reacting to crime, laying the foundation for criminal law and criminal justice (Zaffaroni and Oliveira, 2013 ). This paper will take the American “get tough” criminal policy as an example.

After the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, urban race riots in the United States led to sharp increases in the rate of violent crime. In 1970, the violent crime rate was about 364 per 100,000, compared with 161 per 100,000 in 1960 (Latzer, 2016 ). Attempts to rehabilitate criminals and use indeterminate sentencing during such times with rising crime rates proved ineffective (Martinson et al., 1974 ). Then, the political orientation began to shift. The Republicans called for a toppling of the soft policy favouring offenders’ rights over victims’ rights and advocated “enforcing law and order” and “fighting violence on the streets” (Gest, 2003 , p. 5). Thus, the get-tough criminal policy was established, marking a policy shift from rehabilitation orientation to punishment orientation (Mears, 2010 ). Correspondingly, the Supreme Court began favouring punishing offenders more severely (Goodstein and Hepburn, 1985 ). For instance, victims were protected in rape cases instead of being blamed.

Effective criminal justice (by criminal justice evaluation research)

Criminological research has played an essential role in evaluating the deterrence effect, which almost all criminal law systems in the world regard as their “primary and essential postulate” (Morris, 1966 , p. 631). As early as 1959, scholars suggested conducting controlled experiments in law to make criminal justice policy less discriminatory and less influenced by factors like race, sex, class, etc. (Zeisel et al., 1959 ). This suggestion later pushed Chief Justice Burger’s Advisory Committee on Experimentation in the Law to legalise controlled experiments in criminal law (Federal Judicial Centre, 1981 ). However, numerous obstacles, such as ethical objections and lack of funding, led to slow progress in this area in the United States and United Kingdom (Farrington, 1983 ) until the early 1960s, when controlled experiments thrived in a few correctional agencies and private justice research centres (see, for example, Empey and Erickson, 1972 ; Empey and Lubeck, 1971 ; Keve, 1976 ). A famous experiment testing Release on Recognizance (ROR) as an alternative to money bail contributed to ROR finally being adopted by legislatures across the United States and several other countries (Sherman, 1992 ).

Since the 1980s, interest groups have called attention to the under-enforcement of laws against some violent crimes, such as domestic violence, and advocated increasing the severity of criminal justice responses. On May 27, 1984, the US National Institute of Justice announced that arrest was the most effective response to misdemeanour domestic violence, based on the results of a randomised clinical trial conducted with the Minneapolis Police Department, where arrest had been the most common police policy for those cases for two years (Sherman, 1992 ; Sherman and Cohn, 1989 ). Nevertheless, this policy was criticised for its minimal use of “science, caution, and delay” (Sherman, 1992 , p. 3) and experiments in six more cities (Atlanta, Charlotte, Colorado Springs, Metro-Dade [Miami], Omaha, and Milwaukee) were conducted later (Sherman, 1992 ). It was suggested that criminology had never achieved such an impact on criminal law until this Minneapolis case (Sherman and Cohn, 1989 ). In conclusion, criminology can empirically evaluate whether implementing criminal law is effective, strongly influencing the practices and policies of the corresponding authority.

These various influences from the field of criminology do not exist independently but have combined to promote the reform and progress of criminal law in Western countries.

Historical trajectory of criminology in China and its relationship with criminal law

Criminology and criminal law in China have a more complicated relationship than in the West. The unclear boundaries between these two largely impede the expansion of Chinese criminology. Accurate knowledge of this relationship requires a thorough review of the historical evolution of China’s criminology.

Traditional criminological thinking in China

It is believed that, rather than being entirely imported from the West, Chinese criminology has native roots (Cao et al., 2014 ; Hebenton and Jou, 2010 ), which Chinese criminologists have greatly neglected. During the traditional Chinese period, many philosophers investigated the crime phenomenon. They put forward numerous illuminating arguments about its causation, which, while not systematic enough to be theories, coincide with some influential criminological mindsets of the modern era (Cao et al., 2014 ). For example, Confucius (551–479 BC), the founder of the Confucian school, said that crime resulted from personal traits and social factors like rulers’ misconduct Footnote 3 and poverty (Confucius, 1999 ). Mencius (372–289 BC), a follower of Confucius, stated that humans were born with good morals and should be educated to maintain their goodness and prevent them from committing offences. He noted the significant link between the economy and crime, emphasising that people were more prone to lose their “goodness” if they did not have “a certain livelihood” (Mencius, 1995 , p. 351). Footnote 4 Xunzi (313–238 BC), another notable Confucian scholar, inherited and further expanded Confucius and Mencius’s ideas, claiming that everyone was born wicked and should be schooled to contain their evil traits (Cao et al., 2014 ). For Xunzi, this evil nature was the internal, but not the exclusive, cause of crime. External political, economic, or environmental factors could trigger an offence (Xunzi, 1999 ). Footnote 5 Unlike these Confucian thinkers, the Chinese Legalist school considered the utilitarian personality and rational choice factors affecting whether people committed crimes, which is remarkably consistent with the classical school of Western criminology founded by Beccaria and Bentham (Cao, 2004 ; Cao and Jou, 2007 ). Generally, “it is not an exaggeration to say that one can find some precursors of almost all contemporary criminological theories in Chinese classics” (Cao et al., 2014 , p. 12).

Despite their differing insights into crime, these Chinese classics, to some extent, explained crime aetiology and proposed implications for governance-oriented crime prevention. The Chinese government employed these classic criminological ideas to address various factors triggering crime conceptually and embedded these ideas into different criminal policies. Thus, criminological ideas were integrated into the criminal legal system in traditional China. These indigenous roots of criminological thinking then developed alongside the criminal justice and penal systems through different dynasties, providing a firm foundation for the later development of Chinese criminology.

Development of criminology in modern China

In modern China, criminology has developed as an independent field through four periods: the 1900s to 1949 [influenced by the West], 1949 to the late 1970s [stagnation stage], the early 1980s to the late 20th century [rapid development] (Zhao and Lan, 1998 ), and the beginning of the 21st century to the present [increasing attention to the criminology paradigm].

The 1900s to 1949

Since the 1900s, Chinese liberal elites have advocated the “social sciences” as an alternative conceptual toolbox (Freedman, 1962 , p. 106), mainly by introducing various Western scientific disciplines. As a scientific discipline, criminology arose in China primarily through translating and interpreting Western criminological classics. Criminology scholars at this time mainly conveyed their personal opinions on Western ideologies rather than conducting empirical research, except for a few sociology-trained scholars like Yan and Liu (Liu, 1946 ; Yan, 1934 ). Both carried out empirical studies on crime within Chinese contexts, focusing on the impact of social and economic inequality on crime. At the same time, criminology courses grew and were adopted by many law schools and legal departments in China. A significant portion of criminological publications written by Chinese criminologists took the form of lecture notes (Zhao and Lan, 1998 ).

1949 to the late 1970s

In the early days after the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949, many criminological studies appeared due to the intense class struggle and prosecution of counter-revolutionary crimes. Criminology was not yet acknowledged as an independent discipline but was included in mainstream criminal fields such as criminal law, prison law and crime investigation (Cao et al., 2014 ; Zhao and Lan, 1998 ). After the mid-1950s, under the influence of leftist ideology, legal nihilism and the former Soviet Union’s negative attitude towards criminology and sociology, the Chinese government believed the socialist system could eliminate crime and paid no attention to criminology. From 1966 to 1976, criminology and all other legal disciplines stagnated due to the rampant trend of ultra-leftism and the interference and destruction of the Cultural Revolution. It is suggested that criminology had no place in China within 30 years of the founding of the People’s Republic (Kang, 1999 ; Zhao and Lan, 1998 ).

The 1980s to the late 20th century

Chinese criminology resurfaced after the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s. Given the dramatically rising crime rate, especially the youth delinquency rate, which would account for more than 60 per cent of total crime after 1980 (Bakken, 2005 ), the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) released the “Report on the CPC’s Attention to the Resolution of Youth Delinquency” in 1979, requesting that social science research departments and political and legal departments focus attention on the causes and regulation of juvenile delinquency (Kang, 1999 ; Zhao and Lan, 1998 ). Relevant scholars and judicial practitioners, therefore, comprehensively employed a variety of disciplines as well as scientific and technological tools to address this issue within Chinese contexts. Criminology in China has since proliferated, with numerous publications on the subject and increasing numbers of scholars and organisations in the field (for example, the establishment of the Chinese Society of Criminology in 1992 was a landmark) (Cao et al., 2014 ; Kang, 1999 ; Zhao and Lan, 1998 ). Also, various political and legal colleges began training master’s and doctoral students in criminology, laying a good foundation for the further development of criminology in China.

Although criminology in China developed rapidly during this period, it was not yet viewed as an independent discipline. Some considered it a branch of sociology (Comparative Criminology Editing Group, 1992 ; Hao, 1996 ), but most leading scholars regarded it as part of criminal law or criminal science (Chen, 1999 ; Chu, 1997 ). The fundamental justification for this was the influential idea of criminal science integration ( xing shi yi ti hua ) proposed by Chu Huaizhi (1997). Chu’s idea continued to be influential in the 21st century when the development of Chinese criminology reached a new stage.

The 21st century

The 21st century has witnessed a paradigm shift in criminology in China and the rest of the world. Internationally, criminological researchers have begun to pay attention to non-Western criminology, realising that Western criminological theories are not always supported in non-Western contexts (Wang et al., 2002 ; Zhang et al., 2007 ). Asian criminology has been deemed one of “the latest projects that seek to decolonise criminology from its Westerncentric bias”, with Jianhong Liu as its “most vocal advocate” (Moosavi, 2019 , pp. 257–258). In 2009, Liu proposed the Asian criminology paradigm as distinguished from the Western criminology paradigm, requiring that scholars “fully consider the diversity of Asia, particularly encouraging the in-depth study of particular Asian contexts, traditions, and theoretical or practice models, as well as topics that are particularly Asian” (Liu, 2009 , p. 8). The advancement of Asian criminology, to a certain extent, has promoted the progress of Chinese criminology, given that China has been a prominent region for Asian criminology research.

Simultaneously, in China, criminology scholars are keeping up with the international pace and putting forward a Chinese criminology paradigm (Li, 2005 ; Zhang, 2001 ; Zhang and Shan, 2005 ), emphasising the inheritance of traditional Chinese criminology ideas, the transformation from traditional speculation to empirical research, and the eventual creation of Chinese-style criminology. Although this innovation has not produced a systematic toolbox of theory and methodology like Asian criminology, it does mark that Chinese criminology has evolved into an independent field with Chinese characteristics rather than focusing on introducing, importing, and verifying Western criminology.

Regrettably, despite these vast breakthroughs, Chinese criminology still has not achieved official recognition as an independent academic discipline, retaining third-level or lower-level status in Chinese universities (as a subfield of criminal law or public security) since a decision by the National Planning Committee of Higher Education in the 1980s (Jin, 2007 ; Liu, 2019 ; Triplett, 2018 ; Zhang, 2007 ). To date, except for some political and law schools and police academies, many law schools paid no attention to criminology courses.

Criminology vs. criminal law: inextricably linked with no clear boundary

The trajectory of criminology in China reveals the unique relationship between Chinese criminology and criminal law: they are inextricably linked with no clear boundary. In traditional China, many criminological ideas were embedded in governance-oriented policies to deal with crime. After the introduction of Western criminology to modern China, more research was conducted on crime in the Chinese context, but criminology was still shackled to criminal law. Rather than using empirical sociological approaches, researchers were accustomed to employing criminal law thinking and methodologies to study crime problems. It was not until the 21st century that Chinese researchers began to realise the importance of the criminology paradigm, which has not yet led to independent disciplinary status. Criminology in China is still considered part of the discipline of criminal law.

Two reasons explain this. First, Chinese criminology was objectively born out of the historical traces of criminal law (Zhang, 2007 ). This idea was further strengthened by the criminal integration put forward in the late 1980s (Chu, 1997 ) and the idea proposed in the 21st century that criminology, criminal law, criminal policy, criminal procedure law and other criminal disciplines together constitute a substantial criminal discipline community (Wang and Zhao, 2007 ). These have influenced the discipline construction of Chinese criminology. Second, academic rationality has not yet relieved a long-standing stubborn bias toward criminal law research (Zhang, 2007 ). In China’s law schools, where the discipline of law is dominant, there is a collective attitude that criminology should be included in criminal law instead of being established independently (Pi, 2004 ).

Generally, the relationship between criminology and criminal law in China notably differs from that in the West, where criminology and criminal law grew into essential and independent disciplines with clear boundaries. In China, criminology has been a subfield of criminal law since the early 20th century. This subordination has inevitably led to the slow development of Chinese criminology.

Limited development of criminology in China

Although criminology in contemporary China has made significant advances (Hebenton and Jou, 2010 ; Triplett, 2018 ), its development remains slow compared to that in English-speaking countries. Cao and Hebenton ( 2018 , p. 2) summarised the growth of Chinese criminology as “continued expansion but still at a slower pace”. Several primary limitations explain the slow pace.

Limited theoretical and empirical research

Over the past 40 years, the number of criminological research papers published annually in China has increased but remained limited. From 1987 to 2009, 147 published empirical criminology articles were identified in China, with an annual average of six publications, about 60 per cent appearing after 2007 (Zhang and Lin, 2010 ). From 2007 to 2016, the total number of criminological research papers in China fluctuated by around 156 per year, based on the CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure) database, and no significant growing trend was seen (Liu et al., 2017 ). From 2017 to 2021, China’s criminology research entered a stable development phase. According to the CNKI database, the overall number of Chinese criminology papers in 2021 is estimated to be 2011, which is almost the same as that in 2017 (2441), 2018 (2130), 2019 (2084) and 2020 (2061) (Zhang and Xing, 2022 ). The good news is that the number of high-quality papers, that is, those published in Peking University Core (Chinese Core collection of Peking University) and CSSCI (Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index) journals, Footnote 6 has increased, indicating that Chinese criminology has developed in-depth and achieved certain breakthroughs (Zhang and Xing, 2022 ). Despite this, there remains a large gap between criminology publications in China and those in the English-speaking world during the same period (Liu, 2021 ; Zhang and Xing, 2022 ), which might be owing to the long-standing limitations of criminological theoretical and empirical research in China.

With the further in-depth study of Chinese criminology, more Chinese scholars have become interested in Western criminological theories and committed to their localisation. However, with little knowledge of mature Western criminological theories and the latest research progress, they often propose arguments or hypotheses that have been extensively criticised or proved insignificant or copy the theories without localised verification (Liu, 2021 ). In addition, empirical studies have been lacking in China (Yao, 2021 ) due to several factors (Yan, 2007 ; Zhang and Lin, 2010 ). First, criminological researchers’ lack of statistical and evaluation training limits their capacity; this may result from the course setting of Chinese criminology, which will be discussed later. Second, access to data is often a significant obstacle to empirical research. Official primary source data are sometimes unreliable and insufficient for definitive empirical research. Although criminology research centres in China have contributed many data, they always focus on specific issues. It remains challenging for investigators to initiate criminological research to get alternative and complementary indicators (Cao et al., 2014 ; Liu and Yu, 2010 ). Third, although Chinese scholars have recognised the significance of the criminological paradigm, they have not yet fully grasped the theory or method (Zhang and Xing, 2022 ). They still have a long way to go to conduct scientific theoretical and empirical research and establish new criminological theories within Chinese contexts or a Chinese criminological paradigm (Liu, 2021 ).

Limited support from all tiers of society

In addition to the weaknesses of criminological research in China, external support is also lacking for Chinese criminology. Cao, Sun and Hebenton ( 2014 , p. 342) state that “gaining access and official support is central for any kind of collaborative endeavour.” In a unitary one-party socialist republic like China, crime is still a sensitive issue, and the government controls organisational development and access to research funding and data (Cao et al., 2014 ; Mei and Wang, 2007 ). The foundation for gaining such support is officially recognised as an academic discipline, which Chinese criminology has not achieved due to its linkage with criminal law. As a result, Chinese criminology obtains less support from diverse sectors of society, including official departments (research funds), academic platforms (organisations and journals), higher education institutions (setting of courses) and so on.

Research funds

In China, research funding is available at various levels of society, from the national to the private sector. Key projects are mainly managed by governmental organisations such as the Ministry of Education, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science and the Ministry of Justice. However, no criminology projects can be found within the catalogue of those supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (NSSFC), the Ministry of Education’s Humanities and Social Sciences Fund, or the National Rule of Law and Legal Theoretical Research (Liu, 2021 ). Provincial and municipal government departments fund local higher educational institutions’ researchers, scientists, and academics. Still, criminology is rarely seen on those discipline lists. Chinese colleges and universities in the lower-level sector offer a range of grants to their faculty. However, they refer to the subject catalogue of the up-level departments when deciding on the discipline list. As a result, young scholars who have finished their criminology education and are committed to contributing to Chinese criminology usually obtain sparse support and opportunities after acquiring positions in higher education institutions. One way to improve the situation might be to turn to funding provided by professional research centres, such as the Crime Research Centre of Peking University, established in 1987, and the Criminology Research Centre of the Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences, established in 1992. However, research centres provide less funding than the state government and provincial and municipal government departments.

Academic platform support

In addition to the lack of research funds, academic platform support is also lacking for Chinese criminology. Although professional organisations in criminology have been established since the late 20th century, most are government-approved organisations. For example, the Chinese Society of Criminology’s president is also a member of the Central Committee of the CPC, and its costs are paid by the National Prosecutors’ College (Cao, 2012 ; Triplett, 2018 ). These organisations are often influenced by political factors when conducting relevant research. High-quality academic journals are another type of academic platform required for developing criminology. A few professional criminology journals are published in China, such as Crime and Correction , Chinese Criminology Review , Footnote 7 China Prison Journal, Issues on Juvenile Crimes and Delinquency , Juvenile Delinquency Prevention Research , etc. However, they are not CSSCI or Peking University Core journals. To date, the Journal of the People’s Public Security University of China (Social Sciences Edition) is the only journal in the Peking University Core collection and CSSCI Extended journals that include a crime research column, and this column has been selected as a famous column by China’s Ministry of Education (Liu, 2021 ; Zhang and Xing, 2022 ).

Setting of criminology courses

In addition to financial and platform support, teaching criminology in Chinese higher education institutions is indispensable for popularising criminology knowledge and cultivating criminology talents. However, the current setting of criminology courses is somewhat inappropriate. On the one hand, existing university courses on criminology have been cut (Kang, 2012 ), possibly because there are few full-time teaching and research personnel in the field or because of the view “that criminology … produces no direct economic benefits and therefore is unlikely to attract any financial support from businesses or government” (Liu and Jiang, 2011 , p. 494). On the other hand, criminology courses are disregarded by most colleges and universities in China. Only the People’s Public Security University of China has established a criminology college and incorporated criminology into the first-level discipline system of public security (Ren, 2019 ).

Limited market for the products

Academia generally acknowledges the considerable role of government. It should be noted, however, that the market usually influences government decisions and actions. Therefore, this paper will examine the Chinese criminology market in depth. Theoretically, many bodies have strongly demanded criminology talents and products, such as the government, which administers crime prevention and control; security technology enterprises that safeguard individuals and groups; individuals concerned with personal protection, etc. Nevertheless, human resource departments of Chinese government institutions, enterprises and social organisations rarely include the major of criminology in their recruitment (Liu, 2021 ). Even political and legal personnel practising in the field (more than two million) have no rigid demand for criminology knowledge (Zhang and Xing, 2022 ).

Besides criminological talent, criminological products are seriously neglected in China (Liu, 2021 ). The reason might be that quite a range of crime countermeasures are not based on random sampling and scientific analysis, leading to so-called unreliable conclusions . Also, there is a lack of adequate scientific evaluation of the implementation effects of most crime prevention projects. Chinese policymakers, thus, have not paid much attention to criminology research or criminologists’ views, despite the normative shift in academic scholars’ understanding of the value of social science and statistics (Cao et al., 2014 ; Zhang and Lin, 2010 ). Furthermore, traditional criminological knowledge is less applicable with the emergence of new crimes in professional fields such as telecommunication, cyber, corporate, and other crimes with certain technical thresholds. All these factors have weakened the practical value of criminology products, making the criminology market an urgent problem that needs to be solved to develop Chinese criminology further.

In general, the unique relationship between Chinese criminology and criminal law, mainly the unclear borders between them, can largely explain the limited development of Chinese criminology. This provides some inspiration for the future development of Chinese criminology.

Implications for developing Chinese criminology

Based on the previous exposition of the relationship between Chinese criminology and criminal law and the limited development of Chinese criminology, this paper puts forward several implications for the development of Chinese criminology, including strengthening both disciplinary distinction and academic collaboration between criminology and criminal law in China and paying more attention to the cultivation of Western analytical thinking and empirical approaches.

Strengthening disciplinary distinction

The development of Chinese criminology is both an academic and a political issue. Scholars, practitioners, and policymakers must actively participate in negotiations and manoeuvres inside and outside institutions to direct the research from the top down (Bourdieu, 1988 ; Zhou, 2019 ). Unlike China, the West developed this discipline from the bottom up over time (Zhou, 2019 ). This difference in disciplinary development modes reveals that the development of Chinese criminology requires official top-down promotion, especially official recognition of independent disciplinary status.

Criminology has proven its independent disciplinary value in that its research subjects and theoretical systems are distinct from other disciplines, especially criminal law. It plays an irreplaceable role in identifying the causes of crime, preventing crime, and maintaining social stability. However, the field’s growth trajectories, social cognition, and talent cultivation differ between Chinese and Western criminology. Therefore, scholars have suggested that Chinese criminology should be active in an independent capacity at the forefront of the legal discipline system (Jin, 2007 ; Zhang, 2007 ), just as criminal law has been in China.

The formal establishment of Interdiscipline in China also provides an opportunity for Chinese criminology, given that criminology is fundamentally interdisciplinary. On December 30, 2020, the China Academic Degrees Committee of the State Council and the Ministry of Education issued the “Notice on Establishing the Category of ‘interdiscipline’ and the First-level Disciplines of ‘Integrated Circuit Science and Engineering’ and ‘National Security’”. Footnote 8 Before that, the National Natural Science Foundation of China established the Department of Interdisciplinary Science (see https://www.nsfc.gov.cn ). Then in September 2022, the fifth edition of the Professional Catalogue of Graduate Education Disciplines was published, which newly established seven interdisciplinary subjects and will be implemented in 2023. Footnote 9 These reforms aimed to establish a new interdisciplinary training mechanism and promote cultivating high-quality composite talents. The category of interdiscipline is now an option in project declarations, especially for provincial and municipal projects. Many colleges and universities have established interdisciplinary disciplines according to the need for talent development. For example, the China University of Political Science and Law has set up Criminal Psychology as an interdisciplinary subject. It is expected that criminology can be found as an independent or interdisciplinary discipline in higher education institutions.

Strengthening academic collaboration

In addition to the disciplinary distinction, academic collaboration is an essential and feasible route to promoting criminology and criminal law in modern China. Marvin Wolfgang raised the idea of collaboration between criminal law and criminology in 1974. He emphasised the intersection of criminology and criminal law with the concept of “disciplinary mix” in his publication “The Social Scientist in Court.” He argued that criminologists could be employed as expert witnesses in court, while criminal justice doctrines could be used to guide criminology research (Wolfgang, 1974). Agreeing with Wolfgang’s concept, Chinese scholars put forward several theories on disciplinary integration, such as the theory of criminal science integration raised by Chu Huaizhi ( 1997 ) and the theory of multidimensional criminal law raised by Liu Renwen ( 2003 ). They state that considering criminology is essential when understanding the knowledge and promoting the development of criminal law. This integration has produced Legal Sociology (or “law and society”), an interdisciplinary field within legal research. It reflects the integration of criminal law and criminology discipline. Given the much tardier development of criminology in China, academic collaboration appears to be more urgent. Scholars in criminal law need to acknowledge the outstanding contribution of criminology to the development of criminal law. At the same time, criminologists should also absorb valuable criminal law knowledge to promote criminology’s innovation and progress.

Significant role of Chinese criminology in criminal law

A shift in attitudes towards criminology has appeared among Chinese criminal law scholars. The prominent criminal law scholar Zhang Mingkai ( 2021a ) has recognised the critical role of criminological research in formulating criminal policy, improving criminal legislation and reforming the penalty system. He stated that criminal law could not exclude any knowledge and methods that assisted in achieving its goals and proposed an equal emphasis on factual science (criminology) and normative science (criminal law) (Zhang, 2021b ). Furthermore, scholars in the fields of criminal law and criminal procedure law have acknowledged metaphysical approaches as outdated (Bai, 2009 ; Chu, 1987 ; Zhao, 2005 ) and started to employ empirical techniques for legal research (Zhang, 2016 ), though most of the research carried out has been more like decoration than rigorous empirical research, given that the researchers were not professionally trained and criminal law was more involved with values than measurable indicators (Liu, 2007 ; Weisberg, 2013 ). Recently, opinions and arguments of various parties have been collected before criminal law amendments and judicial interpretations are issued. Among them, those of criminology scholars and researchers are deemed indispensable.

Additionally, Chinese criminology has proven its significant role in criminal law from different perspectives. From the legislation perspective, criminological research has helped guide criminal legislation and legal amendments in China, especially regarding criminalisation (or decriminalisation) and penalisation (or depenalisation), through evaluating the social effects of policy implementation. Specifically, 2011 saw pickpocketing, burglary and stealing with a lethal weapon being adopted as new types of theft crime by the Amendment (VIII) to the Criminal Law of the PRC (hereinafter “the Amendment VIII”) Footnote 10 (Article 39 of the Amendment VIII). It was criminological research that finally triggered the criminalisation of these behaviours. Revision and amendment to the Chinese criminal provisions involving the amount also required the statistical results of relevant criminological research as reference. As reported by Lu and Liu ( 2017 ), in China, theft cannot be filed as a crime until the amount in question meets the requirement, which is 300–600 yuan under the 1991 Notice, 500–2000 yuan under the 1997 Judicial Interpretation and 1000–3000 yuan under the 2013 Judicial Interpretation. From the punishment perspective, Chinese criminal law mandates different punishments for different offenders, consistent with criminological thinking regarding offender treatment. Footnote 11 For instance, based on the restorative justice theory advanced by the illustrious Australian criminologist John Braithwaite ( 1989 ; 2002 ), China established a juvenile delinquency protection system, a community correction system (Article 269 of the 2018 Chinese Criminal Procedure Law) and a criminal reconciliation system (Articles 288, 289, 290 of the 2018 Chinese Criminal Procedure Law). Footnote 12

From the theory perspective, two criminological theories are applied for crime prevention, especially on some specific crime types. One is the “situational crime prevention” theory, which stresses that a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a capable guardian must simultaneously occur in a crime (Cornish and Clarke, 2003 ; Smith and Clarke, 2012 ). It is imperative for crime prevention in China, which has taken many measures to prevent favourable situations or opportunities that facilitate the creation of criminal motives, such as criminal objectives (e.g., children, women, the disabled), means (e.g., the use of the internet), weapons (e.g., ammunition, firearms, explosives) and so on. The other is the “broken window” theory, which focuses on the physical and social environment of the community (Wilson and Kelling, 1982 ). According to this theory, a community with a disordered climate (e.g., graffiti walls, dirty roads) signals the offender that the community is not monitored, and crime could be committed there. Therefore, more and more Chinese cities and communities are required to maintain a clean and ordered physical environment, which will increase community coherence and contribute to crime prevention. Generally, growth in criminology has provided opportunities for reform and development of criminal law in China (Yuan, 2017 ).

Significant contribution of criminal law to the advancement of criminology in China

Criminal law has also undoubtedly contributed to the advancement of criminology in China. As Triplett argued, realising the full potential of Chinese criminology partially depends on progress in other areas, such as the Chinese rule of law itself (Triplett, 2018 ). For any research activity, meeting social demands and demonstrating research value are as essential as satisfying intellectual knowledge (Zheng and Yang, 2014 ). The successful development of criminal law in China has offered many new topics for criminology. For example, Bai ( 2001 ; 2003 ) believed that rules (principles) behind criminal law provisions were difficult to see but did exist. Therefore, he explored to what extent the weight of crimes explained the severity of penalties by sorting, quantifying, and analysing more than 400 crimes under Chinese criminal law, recognised as an empirical study of criminal norms (Bai, 2001 ; Bai, 2003 ). Attempts to examine criminal law from a criminological perspective and study the content of legal norms using empirical research methods will inevitably result in corresponding interdisciplinary results—more specifically, the progress of criminology. Therefore, collaboration is particularly essential for promoting the development of both fields. The story of criminology is inseparable from the support of criminal law while also driving progress and innovation in criminal law.

Facilitating the collaboration of criminal law and criminology through the interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary approach

Collaborative working between two or more disciplines often requires specific methods to synthesise broad perspectives, knowledge, and skills in an academic activity. The methods are usually acknowledged as interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary approaches, through which researchers can answer questions or address problems that are too complex or too big to be fully understood by a single discipline or profession (Klein and Newell, 1997 ). The interdisciplinary approach can be categorised as method crossing, theoretical introducing, problem pulling, and culture blending based on different perspectives. The first two approaches often combine methods or theories from diverse disciplines or transplants methods or theories from one field to another. The inter-influence between criminology and criminal law in China mentioned in the previous parts demonstrated the employment of these two approaches. Thus, this part focuses on the problem-pull approach, which might be the most effective approach for facilitating collaboration between disciplines, considering the other approaches involves narrowly, usually involving one aspect.

The problem-pull approach or perspective involves an interdisciplinary synthesis process centred on significant problems that emerge from reality. It has been applied in increasing multidisciplinary studies and has attracted much attention in China. For example, on April 06, 2023, the National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences in China released the 2023 NSSFC Project Application Guide. Compared to the previous guides that provided topics within every single discipline, it added selected synthesis topics for the first time. Footnote 13 It encourages applicants to conduct interdisciplinary research, focusing on major theoretical and practical issues related to the overall development of the party and the country and the critical fundamental theoretical and frontier academic issues associated with the construction of philosophy and social sciences with Chinese characteristics. For example, one of the synthesis topics is “Research on the Modernisation of National Security System and Capabilities”, which involves the post-event governance of criminal law and the pre-event prevention of criminology. It proves that China has officially offered opportunities for interdisciplinary research, such as between criminology and criminal law, from the perspective of more significant issues.

As the fourth approach, cultural blending refers to the mutual penetration and integration of the cultural backgrounds on which different disciplines rely. On this task, the interaction between criminology and criminal law involves cultural conflicts between the West and China since criminology in China is introduced earlier primarily from the West. How to address the cultural conflicts and achieve the cultural blending between these two disciplines is another task that requires another paper to handle.

Cultivating western analytical thinking based on Chinese native roots

Strengthening the disciplinary distinction and academic collaboration between criminology and criminal law is recommended based on the different characteristics of their relationship in the West and China. However, Western experiences, especially the Western analytical thinking mode, should not be ignored in promoting Chinese criminology.

The thriving Chinese approach to crime has always regarded it as a normative or good governance issue that requires applying holistic thinking. In contrast, the Western approach considers the study of crime a scientific enterprise whose main features are analytical thinking and empirical research methods (Nisbett et al., 2001 ). Footnote 14 Differences between holistic and analytic thinking inevitably lead to different ways of reasoning about crime in China and the West. Specifically, rulers and scholars in China have been accustomed to interpreting crime causality from a relational and dynamic perspective, considering the combined effects of various changing factors. They believe specific issues should be addressed through specific analyses and that different principles apply to different people and circumstances. Thus, no general rules or patterns for addressing crime can be derived. However, Westerners tend to regard crime as having general or universal rules or patterns that can be used empirically to explain cause and effect. These rules or patterns do not change and apply to all contexts. Most other potentially relevant factors can be excluded as intervention or control variables. Therefore, modern criminology has been established as a scientific discipline in the West, comprising prominent theories and methods conducive to crime studies.

To a certain extent, the Chinese thinking mode has resulted in a lack of mature criminological theories and empirical research methods, which has hindered the establishment of scientific criminology in China. Thus, the further advancement of Chinese criminology requires official recognition of independent disciplinary status and cultivation of the Western analytical thinking mode based on China’s native roots.

Chinese criminology has grown slowly due to its complicated relationship with criminal law. Unlike in Western countries where criminology and criminal law are closely related but also distinguished, in China, criminology and criminal law have been closely related for decades with no clear disciplinary boundaries. Chinese criminology has not yet achieved officially recognised independent disciplinary status. Given the breadth and prosperity of Chinese criminal law, modern China must develop the criminology discipline. The possible implications include paying more attention to disciplinary distinction and academic collaboration between criminology and criminal law, and cultivating Western analytical thinking in China. The development of criminology in the pursuit of rehabilitative justice will offset the consequences resulting from extensive criminal law aiming at punishment, ultimately promoting the dual goals of “control of crime” and “rule of law” in modern China.

Data availability

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

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孔子在《论语·子张》中说到: “其身正, 不令而行。其身不正, 虽令不从。” “When a ruler” s personal conduct is correct, his government is effective without giving orders. If his personal conduct is not correct, even he may give orders, but they will not be followed”.

孟子在《梁惠王上》中指出:“若民, 则无恒产, 因无恒心。苟无恒心, 放辟邪侈, 无不为己。及陷于罪, 然后从而刑之, 是罔民也。” “If they have not a certain livelihood, they have not a fixed heart. And if they have not a fixed heart, there is nothing which they will not do in the way of self-abandonment, of moral deflection, of depravity, and of wild license. When they have thus been involved in crime, to follow them up and punish them:—this is to entrap the people”.

荀子在《荀子·劝学》中指出:“邪秽在身, 怨之所构。施薪若一, 火就燥也; 平地若一, 火就湿也。” “Evil and filthy things exist within themselves and constitute resentment. If you add firewood, the fire will be more vigorous; if you add earth, the fire will be extinguished”.

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Shuai, H., Liu, J. The relationship between criminology and criminal law: implications for developing Chinese criminology. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 10 , 350 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-01851-3

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Reflections on Criminal Justice Reform: Challenges and Opportunities

Pamela k. lattimore.

RTI International, 3040 East Cornwallis Road, Research Triangle Park, NC 27703 USA

Associated Data

Data are cited from a variety of sources. Much of the BJS data cited are available from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data, Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research. The SVORI data and the Second Chance Act AORDP data are also available from NACJD.

Considerable efforts and resources have been expended to enact reforms to the criminal justice system over the last five decades. Concerns about dramatic increases in violent crime beginning in the late Sixties and accelerating into the 1980s led to the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Crime” that included implementation of more punitive policies and dramatic increases in incarceration and community supervision. More recent reform efforts have focused on strategies to reduce the negative impacts of policing, the disparate impacts of pretrial practices, and better strategies for reducing criminal behavior. Renewed interest in strategies and interventions to reduce criminal behavior has coincided with a focus on identifying “what works.” Recent increases in violence have shifted the national dialog from a focus on progressive reforms to reduce reliance on punitive measures and the disparate impact of the legal system on some groups to a focus on increased investment in “tough on crime” criminal justice approaches. This essay offers some reflections on the “Waged Wars” and the efforts to identify “What Works” based on nearly 40 years of work evaluating criminal justice reform efforts.

The last fifty-plus years have seen considerable efforts and resources expended to enact reforms to the criminal justice system. Some of the earliest reforms of this era were driven by dramatic increases in violence leading to more punitive policies. More recently, reform efforts have focused on strategies to reduce the negative impacts of policing, the disparate impacts of pretrial practices, and better strategies for reducing criminal behavior. Renewed interest in strategies and interventions to reduce criminal behavior has coincided with a focus on identifying “what works.” Recent increases in violence have shifted the national dialog about reform. The shift may be due to the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 epidemic or concerns about the United States returning to the escalating rise in violence and homicide in the 1980s and 1990s. Whichever proves true, the current rise of violence, at a minimum, has changed the tenor of policymaker discussions, from a focus on progressive reforms to reduce reliance on punitive measures and the disparate impact of the legal system on some groups to a focus on increased investment in “tough on crime” criminal justice approaches.

It is, then, an interesting time for those concerned about justice in America. Countervailing forces are at play that have generated a consistent call for reform, but with profound differences in views about what reform should entail. The impetus for reform is myriad: Concerns about the deaths of Black Americans by law enforcement agencies and officers who may employ excessive use of force with minorities; pressures to reduce pretrial incarceration that results in crowded jails and detention of those who have not been found guilty; prison incarcerations rates that remain the highest in the Western world; millions of individuals who live under community supervision and the burden of fees and fines that they will never be able to pay; and, in the aftermath of the worst pandemic in more than a century, increasing violence, particularly homicides and gun violence. This last change has led to fear and demands for action from communities under threat, but it exists alongside of other changes that point to the need for progressive changes rather than reversion to, or greater investment in, get-tough policies.

How did we get here? What have we learned from more than 50 years of efforts at reform? How can we do better? In this essay, I offer some reflections based on my nearly 40 years of evaluating criminal justice reform efforts. 1

Part I: Waging “War”

The landscape of criminal justice reform sits at the intersection of criminal behavior and legal system response. Perceptions of crime drive policy responses. Perceptions of those responsible for crime also drive responses. And perceptions of those responses result in demands for change. To establish context for the observations that follow, this section describes trends in crime, the population of justice-involved individuals, and the expenditures supporting the sprawling criminal justice enterprise in the United States since the mid-to-late twentieth century.

But first, my perspective: Over the last nearly 40 years, I have observed justice system reform efforts since working, while a first-year graduate student in 1983, on a National Institute of Justice (NIJ) grant that funded a randomized control trial of what would now be termed a reentry program (Lattimore et al., 1990 ). After graduate school, I spent 10 years at NIJ, where I was exposed to policy making and the relevance of research for both policy and practice. I taught for several years at a university. And, for most of my career, I have been in the trenches at a not-for-profit social science research firm. Throughout my career, I have conducted research and evaluation on a broad array of topics and have spent most of my time contemplating the challenges of reform. I’ve evaluated single programs, large federal initiatives, and efforts by philanthropies to effect reform. I’ve used administrative data to model criminal recidivism to address—to the degree statistical methods allow—various dimensions of recidivism (type, frequency, and seriousness). I’ve developed recidivism models for the practical purpose of assessing risk for those on community supervision and to explore the effects of covariates and interventions on recidivism and other outcomes. I’ve participated in research attempting to understand the shortcomings of and potential biases in justice data and the models that must necessarily use those data. While most of my work has focused on community corrections (e.g., probation and post-release interventions and behavior) and reentry, I have studied jail diversion programs, jail and pretrial reform, and efforts focused on criminal record expungement. These experiences have illuminated for me that punitiveness is built into the American criminal justice system—a punitiveness that traps many people from the time they are first arrested until they die.

Crime and Correctional Population Trends

The 1960s witnessed a dramatic rise in crime in the United States, and led to the so-called “War on Crime,” the “War on Drugs,” and a variety of policy responses, culminating with the passage of the Violent Offender Incarceration and Truth-in-Sentencing Act of 1994 (“The 1994 Crime Act”; Pub. L. 103–322). Figure  1 shows the violent crime rate in the United States from 1960 to 1994. 2 In 1960, the violent crime rate in the United States was 161 per 100,000 people; by 1994 the rate had increased more than four-fold to nearly 714 per 100,000. 3 As can be seen, the linear trend was highly explanatory (R-square = 0.96)—however, there were two obvious downturns in the trend line—between 1980 and 1985 and, perhaps, between 1991 and 1994.

US Violent Crime Rate, 1960–1994

Homicides followed a similar pattern. Figure  2 shows the number of homicides each year between 1960 and 1994. In 12 years (1960 to 1972), the number of homicides doubled from 9,100 to 18,670. By 1994, the number had grown to 23,330—but it is worth noting that there were multiple downturns over this period, including a drop of more than 4,000 between 1980 and 1984. These figures show the backdrop to the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Crime” that led reformers to call for more punitive sentencing, including mandatory minimum sentences, “three-strikes laws” that mandated long sentences for repeat offenders, and truth-in-sentencing statutes that required individuals to serve most of their sentences before being eligible for release. This was also the period when the 1966 Bail Reform Act, which sought to reduce pretrial detention through the offer of money bond, was supplanted in 1984 by the Pretrial Reform Act, which once again led to increased reliance on pretrial detention.

United States Murder and Non-negligent Manslaughter Rate, 1960–1994

The 1994 Crime Act, enacted during the Clinton Administration, continued the tough-on-crime era by enabling more incarceration and longer periods of incarceration that resulted in large increases in correctional populations. In particular, the Violent Offender Incarceration and Truth-in-Sentencing (VOI/TIS) Incentive Grant Program, funded by the Act, provided $3 billion to states to expand their jail and prisons capacities between FY1996 and FY2001 and to encourage states to eliminate indeterminate sentencing in favor of laws that required individuals to serve at least 85% of their imposed sentences.

Figure  3 shows the dramatic rise in the number of state and federal prisoners prior to passage of the 1994 Crime Act—the number of prisoners more than tripled between 1980 and 1994. 4 The increase in numbers of prisoners was not due to shifts from jail to prison or from probation to prison, given that all correctional populations increased dramatically over this 14-year period—jail populations increased 164% (183,988 to 486,474), probation increased 166% (1,118,097 to 2,981,022), and parole increased 213% (220,438 to 690,371).

State and Federal Prisoners in the US, 1960–1994

So, what happened after passage of the 1994 Crime Act? Fig.  4 shows the violent crime rate from 1960 through 2020. As can be seen, the decrease in the violent crime rate that began prior to passage of the 1994 Crime Act continued. And, notably, it preceded the influx of federal funding to put more police on the streets, build more jails and prisons, and place more individuals into the custody of local, state, and federal correctional agencies. Even with a small increase between 2019 and 2020, the violent crime rate in 2020 was 398.5 per 100,000 individuals, well below its 1991 peak of 758.2. 5

United States Violent Crime Rate (violent crimes per 100,000 population), 1960–2020

Figure  5 shows the US homicide rate from 1960 to 2020. Consistent with the overall violent crime rate, the homicide rate in 2020 remained well below the peak of 10.2 that occurred in 1981. (Rates also may have risen in 2021—as evidenced by reports of large increases in major U.S. cities—but an official report of the 2021 number and rate for the U.S. was not available as of the time of this writing.) The rise in this rate from 2019 to 2020 was more than 27%— worthy of attention and concern. It represents the largest year-over-year increase between 1960 and 2020. However, there have been other years where the rate increased about 10% (1966, 1967, 1968, 2015, and 2016), only then to drop back in subsequent years. Further, it is difficult to determine whether the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused massive disruptions, is a factor in the increase in homicides or to know whether the homicide rate will abate as the pandemic ebbs. Finally, it bears emphasizing that during this 60-year period there have been years when the homicide rate fell by nearly 10% (e.g., 1996, 1999). From a policy perspective, it seems prudent to be responsive to increases in crime but also not to over-react to one or two years of data—particularly during times of considerable upheaval.

United States Murder and Nonnegligent Manslaughter Rate, 1960–2020

The growth in correctional populations, including prisoners, that began in the 1970s continued well into the twenty-first century—in other words, long after the crime rate began to abate in 1992. Figure  6 shows the prison population and total correctional population (state and federal prison plus jail, probation, and parole populations summed) between 1980 and 2020. Both trends peaked in 2009 at 1,615,500 prisoners and 7,405,209 incarcerated or on supervision. Year-over-year decreases, however, have been modest (Fig.  7 ), averaging about 1% (ignoring the steep decline between 2019 and 2020). The impact of factors associated with COVID-19, including policy and practice responses, resulted in a 15% decrease in the numbers of state and federal prisoners and a 14% decrease in the total number of adults under correctional control. Based on ongoing projects in pretrial and probation, as well as anecdotal evidence related to court closures and subsequent backlogs, it is reasonable to assume that some, if not most, of the decline in populations in 2020 was due to releases that exceeded new admissions as individuals completed their sentences and delays in court processing reduced new admissions. To the extent that these factors played a role, it is likely that in the immediate near term, we will see numbers rebound to values closer to what prevailed in 2019.

United States Prison and Total Correctional Populations, 1980–2020

Year-over-Year Change in Prison and Total Correctional Populations, 2981–2020

Responding with Toughness (and Dollars)

The increase in crime beginning in the 1960s led to a political demand for a punitive response emphasized by Richard Nixon’s “War on Crime” and “War on Drugs.” In 1970, Congress passed four anticrime bills that revised Federal drug laws and penalties, addressed evidence gathering against organized crime, authorized preventive detention and “no-knock” warrants, and provided $3.5 billion to state and local law enforcement. 6 Subsequent administrations continued these efforts, punctuated by the Crime Act of 1994. As described by the U.S. Department of Justice:

The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 … is the largest crime bill in the history of the country and will provide for 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons and $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs …. The Crime Bill provides $2.6 billion in additional funding for the FBI, DEA, INS, United States Attorneys, and other Justice Department components, as well as the Federal courts and the Treasury Department. 7

Much of the funding went to state and local agencies to encourage the adoption of mandatory minimum sentences, “three strikes” laws, and to hire 100,000 police officers and build prisons and jails. This funding was intended to steer the highly decentralized United States criminal justice “system” towards a more punitive approach to crime; this system encompasses all levels of government (local, state, and federal) and all branches of government (executive, judicial, legislative).

The nation’s crime rate peaked in 1992. So, this “largest crime bill in the history of the country” began a dramatic increase in funding for justice expenditures just as crime had already begun to decline. Figure  8 shows that expenditures increased roughly 50% in real dollars between 1997 and 2017—from $188 billion to more than $300 billion dollars (Buehler,  2021 ). 8 More than half of that increase-—$65.4 billion additional—went to police protection. Roughly $50 billion additional went to the judiciary and corrections.

United States Justice Expenditures, 1997–2017

So, what did these increases buy? Dramatically declining crime rates (Figs. ​ (Figs.4 4 and ​ and5) 5 ) suggest that numbers of crimes also declined. That can be seen in Fig.  9 , which shows offenses known and an estimate of offenses cleared for selected years between 1980 and 2019. 9 In 1991, there were 11,651,612 known property offenses and 1,682,487 known violent offenses—these numbers declined 47% and 34% by 2019.

Offenses Known and Cleared in the US, Selected Years 1980–2019

Declining numbers of crimes and dramatic increases in expenditures on policing and justice system operation would suggest that there should have been improvements in offense clearance rates during this time. This did not happen. Crime clearance rates stayed roughly constant, which means that the numbers of offenses cleared declined by percentages like declines in the number of offenses over this period—49% for property offenses and 33% for violent offenses. More than 750,000 violent offenses and more than 2 million property offenses were cleared in 1991 compared to about 500,000 violent offenses and 1 million property offenses in 2019.

Presently, as violent crime ticks up, we are hearing renewed calls for “tough-on-crime” measures. Some opinion writers have compared 2022 to Nixon’s era. Kevin Boyle noted:

[Nixon] already had his core message set in the early days of his 1968 campaign. In a February speech in New Hampshire, he said: “When a nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is torn apart by lawlessness, when a nation which has been the symbol of equality of opportunity is torn apart by racial strife … then I say it’s time for new leadership in the United States of America.” There it is: the fusion of crime, race and fear that Nixon believed would carry him to the presidency. 10

Responding to the recent increase in violent crime, President Joseph Biden proposed the Safer America Plan to provide $37 billion “to support law enforcement and crime prevention.” 11 The Plan includes more than $12 billion in funds for 100,000 additional police officers through the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program. This proposal echoes the “100,000 cops on the street” that was a centerpiece of the 1994 Crime Act, which created the COPS office and program. Unlike the 1994 Crime Act, however, the Safer America Plan does not include funding for prisons and jails. Both the 1994 Crime Act and the Safer America Plan address gun violence, strengthen penalties for drug offenses, and provide support for programs and interventions to make communities safer and to address criminal recidivism.

The previous 50 or 60 years witnessed reforms efforts other than these that largely focused on bolstering the justice system infrastructure. The 1966 Bail Reform Act sought to reduce pretrial detention through the offer of money bond, but subsequently was supplanted by the 1984 Pretrial Reform Act that once again promoted pretrial detention. 12 This century—as jail populations exceeded 700,000, with most held prior to conviction—there has been considerable attention to eliminate money bond, which disproportionately leads to pretrial detention for poor and marginalized individuals (and release for the “well-heeled”). Private philanthropy has led much of this focus on pretrial and bail reform. For example, the MacArthur Foundation has spent several hundred million dollars on their Safety and Justice Challenge since 2015 with a goal of reducing jail populations and eliminating racial and ethnic disparity. 13 The Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF) took a different approach and has invested substantial sums in the development and validation of a pretrial assessment instrument (the Public Safety Assessment or PSA) that provides assessments of the likelihood an individual will fail to appear to court or be arrested for a new crime or new violent crime if released while awaiting trial. 14 Although assessment algorithms have been criticized for lack of transparency and for perpetuating racial bias, the PSA scoring algorithm is publicly available and has not shown evidence of racial bias in a series of local validations conducted by RTI for LJAF. New York and New Jersey are among the states that have attempted to reduce reliance on money bond. However, as violent crime has increased, these efforts have faced considerable pushback.

The bail bonds industry has been a vocal opponent of efforts to reduce or eliminate the use of money bond. This industry is not the only one that profits from the imposition of punishment. As Page and Soss ( 2021 ) recently reported, “Over the past 35 years, public and private actors have turned US criminal justice institutions into a vast network of revenue-generating operations. Today, practices such as fines, fees, forfeitures, prison charges, and bail premiums transfer billions of dollars from oppressed communities to governments and corporations.” Fines, fees, and forfeitures generally profit the governments and agencies that impose them—although supervision fees to private probation services benefit businesses, as do fees for electronic monitoring, and drug testing. The Prison Policy Institute reports that there are more than 4,000 companies that profit from mass incarceration. 15 Court and supervision fees can quickly add up to hundreds or even thousands of dollars, burdening people with crushing debt and the threat of jail if they don’t pay. 16 There can be other consequences as well. After Florida passed a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights to individuals once they had completed their carceral or community sentence, the State specified that the right to vote would not be restored until an individual had paid all outstanding fees and fines. In addition, mistakenly voting with outstanding fees and fines is a felony. 17

Other work to reform pretrial justice includes early provision of defense counsel, and implementation of diversion programs for individuals charged with low-level offenses or who have behavioral health issues. The sixth amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees criminal defendants in the United States a right to counsel. In some jurisdictions (and the Federal court system), this is the responsibility of an office of public defense. In others, private defense counsel is appointed by the Court. Regardless, public defense is widely understood to be poorly funded. As noted by Arnold Ventures, a philanthropy currently working to improve access to defense, “The resulting system is fragmented and underfunded; lacks quality control and oversight; and fails to safeguard the rights of the vast majority of people charged with crimes who are represented by public defenders or indigent counsel.” 18

Mental health problems are prevalent among individuals incarcerated in local jails and prisons. The Bureau of Justice Statistics, in a report by Bronson and Berzofsky ( 2017 ), reported that “prisoners and jail inmates were three to five times as likely to have met the threshold for SPD [serious psychological distress] as adults in the general U.S. population.” Bronson and Berzofsky further reported that 44% of individuals in jail reported being told they had a mental disorder. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration’s GAINS Center has been at the forefront of efforts to implement jail diversion programs for individuals with mental health or substance use disorders and has also played a significant role in the establishment of treatment courts. 19 Crisis Intervention Training (CIT) for law enforcement to improve interaction outcomes between law enforcement and individuals in crisis. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) notes that “The lack of mental health crisis services across the U.S. has resulted in law enforcement officers serving as first responders to most crises. A Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) program is an innovative, community-based approach to improve the outcomes of these encounters.” 20 Non-law enforcement responses—such as the CAHOOTS program that was developed in Eugene, Oregon—to certain calls for service are also being tested in multiple communities. 21 Despite multiple efforts to identify appropriate alternatives to jail, individuals with mental health disorders continue to disproportionately fill the nation’s jails.

A Recapitulation

The 1970 crime bills that passed early in Nixon’s presidency set the stage for the infusion of federal dollars that has provided billions of dollars in funding for police and prisons. Between 1970 and 1994, the number of adults in state and federal prisons in the United States increased from less than 200,000 to nearly 1 million. In 2019, that number stood at more than 1.4 million down from its peak in 2009. Another 734,500 individuals were in jail and more than 4.3 million were in the community on probation or parole. Although representing a dramatic decline since these populations peaked about 2009, this still means that more than 6 million adults were under the supervision of federal, state, and local corrections agencies in 2019.

Thus, it is important to recognize that we are at a very different place from the Nixon era. Today, the numbers (and rates) of individuals who are “justice-involved” remain at near record highs. As the progressive efforts of the twenty-first century encounter headwinds, it is worth waving a caution flag as the “remedies” of the twentieth century—more police, “stop and frisk,” increased pretrial detention—are once again being proposed to address violent crime.

Part II: Finding “What Works”

The 1994 Crime Act and subsequent reauthorizations also included funding for a variety of programs, including drug courts, prison drug treatment programs, and other programs focused on facilitating reentry and reducing criminal recidivism. Subsequent legislation authorized other Federal investments that resurrected rehabilitation as a goal of correctional policy. The Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (SVORI) provided $100 million (and some limited supplements) to agencies to develop programs that began in prison and continued into the community and were intended to improve outcomes across a range of domains—community reintegration, employment, family, health (including mental health), housing, substance abuse, supervision compliance and, of course, recidivism (see Lattimore et al., 2005b ; Winterfield et al., 2006 ; Lattimore & Visher, 2013 , 2021 ; Visher et al., 2017 ). Congress did not reauthorize SVORI but instead authorized the Prisoner Reentry Initiative (PRI) managed by the U.S. Department of Labor; PRI (now the Reintegration of Ex-Offenders or RExO program) provides funding for employment-focused programs for non-violent offenders. In 2006, a third reentry-focused initiative was funded—the Marriage and Incarceration Initiative was managed by the Department of Health and Human Services and focused on strengthening marriage and families for male correctional populations. In 2008, Congress passed the Second Chance Act (SCA) to provide grants for prison and jail reentry programs. The SCA grant program administered by the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) was reauthorized in 2018; it continues to provide reentry grants to state and local agencies (see Lindquist et al., 2021 ). These initiatives all primarily focused on supporting efforts at the state and local level. The First Step Act of 2018 focused on reforms for the federal prison system. These efforts signified a substantial increase in efforts aimed at determining “what works” to reduce criminal behavior—and provided an opportunity to rebut the “nothing works” in correctional programming that followed the publication of research by Lipton ( 1975 ).

Elsewhere, I have summarized some of the research into Federal initiatives that I have conducted over the years (Lattimore, 2020 ). These studies comprise work in dozens of states, involving thousands of individuals and have included studies of drug treatment, jail diversion, jail and prison reentry, and probation. Some involved evaluation of a substantial Federal investment, such as the multi-site evaluation of SVORI.

These evaluations, as has been largely true of those conducted by others, have produced mixed results. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses focusing on the effectiveness of adult correctional programming have yielded findings of modest or negligible effects (e.g., Aos et al., 2006 ; Bitney et al., 2017 ; Lipsey & Cullen, 2007 ; MacKenzie, 2006 ; Sherman, et al., 1997 ). In an updated inventory of research- and evidence-based adult programming, the Washington State Institute for Public Policy (Wanner, 2018 ) identified a variety of programs for which evidence suggests significant if modest effect sizes. As has been identified by others (e.g., MacKenzie, 2006 ), the most effective programs focused on individual change, including, for example, cognitive behavior therapy (estimated effect size of -0.11). Treatment-oriented intensive supervision programs were found to reduce recidivism by about 15%, while surveillance-oriented intensive supervision was found to have no demonstrated effects. Several types of work and educational programs (correctional industries, basic adult education, prison-based vocational education, and job training and assistance in the community) were found to reduce recidivism between 5 and 22%. Most non-zero treatment effect sizes were between about 5% and 15%. Lipsey and Cullen ( 2007 ) also suggest 14% to 22% reductions in recidivism for adult rehabilitation treatment programs.

Two thoughts about these small effects warrant consideration. The first, of course, is why reducing criminal behavior appears to be so difficult. Second, however, is that, in recognizing the first, perhaps we should adapt more realistic expectations about what can be achieved and acknowledge that even small effects can have a meaningful impact on public safety.

Challenges: Why Is Effective Criminal Justice Reform So Difficult?

One issue with most federal funding streams is “short timelines.” For example, typical of grant programs of this type, SVORI grantees were given three years of funding. During this time, they had to develop a programmatic strategy, establish interagency working arrangements, identify program and service providers, develop a strategy for identifying potential participants, and implement their programs. Three years is a very short time to develop a program that incorporates needs assessment, provides a multiplicity of services and programs within an institution, and creates a path for continuation of services as individuals are released to various communities across a state.

The “short timelines” problem underlies, and contributes to, a variety of other considerations that can plague efforts to identify “what works.” Based on my experiences, these considerations, which I discuss further below, include the following:

• People: Justice-involved individuals have multiple needs and there is an emerging question as to whether addressing these needs is the best path to desistance.
• Programs: Interventions often lack adequate logic models and are poorly implemented.
• Methods: Evaluations frequently are underpowered and unlikely to scale the alpha 0.05 hurdle typically used to identify statistically significant effects.

First, it is important to recognize that justice-involved individuals face serious and complex challenges that are difficult to remedy. Many scholars have highlighted the myriad of challenges faced by individuals returning to the community from prison (e.g., see Petersilia, 2003 ; Travis, 2005 ; Travis & Visher, 2005 ). In interviews conducted with 1,697 men and 357 women who participated in the SVORI multisite evaluation, 95% of women and 94% of men said at the time of prison release that they needed more education. Nearly as many—86% of women and 82% of men—said they needed job training. More than two-thirds indicated that they needed help with their criminal thinking and three-quarters said they needed life skills training. They were somewhat less likely to report needing substance use disorder or mental health treatment but still—at the time of prison release—66% of the women and 37% of the men reported needing substance use treatment and 55% of the women and 22% of the men reported needing mental health treatment.

Half of these individuals had participated in SVORI programs while incarcerated and the proportions reported reflect their self-assessment of need after in-prison receipt of programming. Figure  10 shows the percentages of SVORI and non-SVORI groups who reported receiving a select set of services and programs during their incarceration. Several things standout: (1) The receipt of programs and services during incarceration was much less than the indicated need at the time of release; and (2) SVORI program participants were more likely to report receiving services than the comparison group members who were not in SVORI programs.

Self-reported service receipt during incarceration for SVORI program evaluation participants. Note: * =  p  <  = 0.05. Educ = educational programming, EmplSrv = employment-related services, CrimAtt = programs for criminal attitudes including cognitive behavior therapy, LifeSk = life skills, AODTx = substance abuse treatment, and MHTx = mental health treatment. Sample sizes were SVORI men (863), non-SVORI men (834), SVORI women (153) and non-SVORI women (204).

Source: Lattimore & Visher (2009)

More recently, Lindquist et al. ( 2021 ) completed a seven-site evaluation of Second Chance Act reentry programs that were a mix of jail- and prison-based programs. About half of the study participants reported having received substance use disorder treatment and about one-third reported having received mental health treatment. At release, they reported limited-service receipt. For example, there was no significant difference between receipt of educational programming (23% of SCA program participants compared with 17% for comparison group members). SCA program participants were more likely to report receiving any employment services (60% versus 40%), which included job assistance, employment preparation, trade or job training programs, vocational or technical certifications, and transitional job placement or subsidized employment. SCA program participants were also more likely to report receiving cognitive behavioral services (58% versus 41%). But, again, not all program participants received services despite needing them and some comparison subjects received services.

Limited access to treatment by program participants and some access to treatment by comparison subjects were also observed in a multi-site study of pre- and post-booking jail diversion programs for individuals with co-occurring substance use disorder and serious mental illness (Broner et al., 2004 ; Lattimore et al., 2003 ). Across eight study sites, 971 diverted subjects and 995 non-diverted subjects were included in this evaluation; the research found only modest differences in the receipt of services and treatment at 3- and 12-months follow-up. For example, at the 3-month interview, 26% of both groups reported receiving substance abuse counseling, and at the 12-month interview, 0.7% of those diverted versus no non-diverted participant received two or more substance abuse counseling sessions. At 3 months, 38% of the diverted subjects and 30% of the non-diverted reported mental health counseling versus 41% and 38% at 12 months, respectively.

The service needs expressed by these individuals reflect their lack of education, job experience, vocational skills, and life skills, as well as the substance abuse and mental health issues identified among justice-involved individuals. The intervention response to these needs is reflected in the variety of services prescribed in the typical “reentry program bucket.” These involve the services and programs shown in Fig.  10 , as well as case management and reentry planning to coordinate services with respect to needs.

The identification of needs followed by efforts to meet those needs underlies the Risk-Needs-Responsivity (RNR) approach to addressing justice-involved populations (e.g., Andrews & Bonta, 1994 , 2006 ; Latessa, 2020 ). The RNR approach to addressing criminal behavior is premised on the assumption that if you address identified needs that are correlated with criminal behavior, that behavior will be reduced. In other words, recidivism can be addressed by providing individuals the education and job skills and treatment they need to find gainful employment, reduce substance use, and mitigate symptoms of mental illness. Latessa ( 2020 ) recently discussed the RNR approach, reiterating the importance of assessing individual criminogenic and non-criminogenic needs to improve reentry programs. He also reiterated the importance of focusing resources on those identified as high (or higher) risk by actuarial risk assessment instruments—pointing to important work he conducted with colleagues that found that interventions reduced recidivism among high-risk individuals and increased it among low-risk individuals (Lowenkamp & Latessa, 2002 ; Latessa et al., 2010 ). This approach to reentry programming is reflected in the requirements of most federal grants—like the SVORI and SCA—that require programs to incorporate reentry planning that includes needs assessment and services that address criminogenic and non-criminogenic needs.

As noted, most justice-involved individuals have limited education and few job skills, and many have behavioral health issues, anger management issues, and limited life skills. But if addressing these deficits is the key to successfully rehabilitating large numbers of individuals caught in the carceral and community justice system, the meager results of recent research suggests two possibilities. First, this is the right approach, but poor or incomplete implementation has so far impeded findings of substantial effects (a common conclusion since the Martinson report). Second, alternatively, this approach is wrong (or insufficient), and new thinking about the “what and how” of rehabilitative programming is needed. I address the second idea next and turn to the first idea shortly.

MacKenzie ( 2006 ) and others (e.g., Andrews and Bonta, 2006 ; Andrews et al., 1990 ; Aos et al., 2006 ; Lipsey, 1995 ; Lipsey & Cullen, 2007 ) have stressed that programs focused on individual change have been found to be effective more often than those providing practical services. The SVORI evaluation also found support for this conclusion. Services we classified as “practical” (e.g., case manager, employment services, life skills, needs assessment, reentry planning, and reentry program) were associated with either no or a deleterious impact on arrest chances—although few were statistically different from a null effect. Individual-change services (e.g., anger management, programs for criminal attitudes including cognitive behavior therapy, education, help with personal relationships, and substance abuse treatment) were associated with positive impacts on arrest. The original SVORI evaluation had a follow-up period of about 2 years and findings suggested that the overall impact of SVORI program participation on rearrest and reincarceration were positive but not statistically significant. In contrast to these findings, a longer follow-up that extended at least 56 months showed participation in SVORI programs was associated with longer times to arrest and fewer arrests after release for both men and women. For the men, SVORI program participation was associated with a longer time to reincarceration and fewer reincarcerations, although the latter result was not statistically significant ( p  = 0.18). For the women, the reincarceration results were mixed and not significant.

Support for positive impacts of programs focused on individual change are consistent with theories associated with identity transformation and desistance from criminal activity. Bushway ( 2020 ) has recently discussed two alternative views of desistance, contrasting the implications of desistance either as a process (i.e., the gradual withdrawal from criminal activity) or reflective of an identify shift towards a more prosocial identity. In examining these two ideas, Bushway posits that the second suggests that individuals with a history of a high rate of offending may simply stop (as opposed to reducing the frequency of criminal acts). If individuals do (or can or will) stop, the implication is clear: policies that focus on an individual’s criminal history (e.g., for employment or parole decisions) may fail to recognize that the individual has changed. This change may be evidenced by in-prison good behavior (e.g., completing programs and staying out of trouble) or positive steps following release (e.g., actively seeking meaningful employment or engaging in positive relationships). Tellingly, Bushway ( 2020 ) notes: “Individuals involved in crime get information about how they are perceived by others through their involvement in the criminal justice system. Formal labels of ‘criminal’ are assigned and maintained by the criminal justice system. As a result, identity models are much more consistent theoretically with an empirical approach that revolves around measures of criminal justice involvement rather than criminal offending per se.” He goes on to discuss the relationship of identity-based models of stark breaks and criminal career models. In short, reflecting insights that labeling theorists have long emphasized, the labels the criminal justice system and society place on individuals may impede the desistance process that is the supposed goal of the system.

The second consideration are concerns about program design and implementation—What is the underlying logic model or theory of change? Is there adequate time to develop the program and train staff to implement it appropriately? Is the resulting program implemented with fidelity? The two or three years usually provided to implement complex programs suggest that these goals are unlikely to be met. The “notorious” findings of Martinson (1975) that “nothing works” was more appropriately interpreted as “nothing was implemented.” Unfortunately, nearly 50 years later, we largely observe something similar—not “nothing” but “something” that is far short of what was intended.

As discussed in detail by Taxman (2020), the usual approach to program development and testing skips over important formative steps, doesn’t allow time for pilot testing, and provides little opportunity for staff training or for achievement and maintenance of program fidelity (if there is even a program logic model). From an evaluator’s perspective, this short timeline imposes multiple challenges. An evaluator must identify study participants (and control or comparison subjects), follow them largely while they are in the program, and hope to have at least one year of post-program follow-up—generally without being able to accommodate the impact of likely weak implementation on evaluation power to detect effects.

Thus, it may not be surprising that effects are generally small. However, these small effects may not be negligible from a public safety perspective. In a study of the effects of non-residential drug treatment for a cohort of probationers, Lattimore et al. ( 2005a ) found that treatment reduced the number of probationers with a felony arrest by 23% during the first year and 11% over the first two years. The total number of arrests was also reduced by 17% over 12 months and 14% over 24 months. “Back of the envelope” calculations suggested that if treatment cost $1,000 per individual, it would have been cost effective to provide treatment to all members of the cohort as long as the (average) cost of arrest (and all related criminal justice processing and corrections) exceeds about $6,463.

Another example is to consider that the impact of a treatment effect in the 10% range applied across all prison releases would imply the aversion of many crimes. For example, assuming 750,000 prison releases each year over a five-year period and a 66% rearrest rate within 3 years (and no additional arrests after 3 years), then 3.75 million prisoners will be released over the five years; of these individuals, 2.475 million will be arrested at least once during the three years following release. A 10% reduction in first-time rearrests would mean 247,500 fewer first-time rearrests. To the extent that many offenders are arrested multiple times, this figure represents a lower bound on the number of averted arrests. A similar analysis could be conducted assuming 2,000,000 probation admissions each year and a 39% rearrest rate within 3 years. In this case, there would be 10,000,000 probation admissions that would generate 3.9 million first-time arrests over the three years after admission to probation. A 10% reduction in first-time rearrests would mean 390,000 fewer arrests. In total, therefore, reducing recidivism—as measured by rearrest by 10% for these hypothetical correctional populations—would translate into 637,500 averted arrests. Extrapolating further and assuming that roughly 10% of the arrests were for violent crime and 90% for property crime, and applying the inverse of the crime clearance rates for these two types of crime to generate a “crimes averted” count, we find that a 10% reduction in recidivism for these two populations would translate into 140,110 violent and 3,519,939 property crimes averted. 22 Thus, “modest” improvements in recidivism may provide substantial public benefits—in crimes averted, and lower demands on law enforcement, prosecution, and correctional resources. 23

The third consideration is the adequacy of the evaluation methods we routinely apply to this complex problem of inadequate interventions that are partially and sometimes poorly implemented. At minimum, we need to explicitly recognize the impacts of the following:

• Programs partially implemented and partially treated control conditions.
• Recidivism outcomes conditioned on an intermediate outcome.
• Follow-up periods too short to accommodate short-term failure followed by long-term success.
• Focusing on a binary indicator of recidivism ignores frequency and seriousness of offending.

The impact of partial treatment of both treatment and control groups on effect sizes and the consequential impact on statistical power is seldom discussed—either in initial estimates of needed sample sizes or in subsequent discussions of findings. As shown earlier and is true for most justice evaluations, the control or comparison condition is almost never “nothing.” Instead, it is generally “business as usual” (BAU) that means whatever the current standard of treatment entails. Thus, the treatment group may receive some services that aren’t available to the control group, but in many cases both groups have access to specific services and programs although the treatment group may get priority.

As we saw in Fig.  10 , treatment was reported by some individuals in both the SVORI and non-SVORI groups. Table ​ Table1 1 shows the implications of partial treatment using data from the SVORI evaluation. 24 The percent treated for the SVORI and non-SVORI men are shown in columns three and four. Column 2 presents the effect sizes for four interventions as identified by Wanner ( 2018 ). If we assume that the recidivism rate without treatment is 20%, 25 the observed recidivism rate for the SVORI and non-SVORI men as a result of receiving each treatment is shown in columns four and five. Column six shows that the observed differences in recidivism between the two groups in this “thought experiment” are less than two percent—an effect size that would never be detected with typical correctional program evaluations. 26

Hypothetical treatment effects with incomplete treatment of the treatment group and partial treatment of the comparison group, assuming untreated recidivism rate is 20 percent

* Estimates from Wanner ( 2018 ).

Similar findings emerge when considering the effects on recidivism of interventions such as job training programs that are intended to improve outcomes intermediate to recidivism. Consider the hypothetical impact of a prison job training program on post-release employment and recidivism. The underlying theory of change is that training will increase post-release employment and having a job will reduce recidivism. 27 Suppose the job training program boosts post-release employment by 30% and that, without the program, 50% of released individuals will find a job. A 30% improvement means that 65% of program participants will find employment. Randomly assigning 100 of 200 individuals to receive the program would result in 50 of those in the control group and 65 of those in the treatment group to find employment. (This outcome assumes everyone in the treatment group receives treatment.) Table ​ Table2 2 shows the treatment effect on recidivism under various assumptions about the impact of employment on recidivism. The table assumes a 50% recidivism rate for the unemployed so, e.g., if the effect of a job is to reduce recidivism by 10% employed individuals will have a recidivism rate of 45%. If there is no effect—i.e., recidivism is independent of being employed—we observe 50% failure for both groups and there is no effect on recidivism rates even if the program is successful at increasing employment by 30%. On the other hand, if being employed eliminates recidivism, no one who is employed will be recidivists and 50% of those unemployed will be recidivists—or 25 of the control group and 17.5 of the treated group. The last column in Table ​ Table2 2 shows the conditional effect of job training on recidivism under the various effects of employment on recidivism shown in column 1. The effects shown in the last column are the same regardless of the assumption about the recidivism rate of the unemployed. So, employment must have a very substantial effect on the recidivism rate to result in a large effect on the observed recidivism rate when, as is reasonable to assume, some members of the control group who didn’t have the training will find employment. As before, this finding underscores the need to carefully consider the mechanism affecting recidivism and potential threats to effect sizes and statistical power.

Hypothetical effects of job training on employment and recidivism assuming job training increases employment by 30% and control (untreated) employment is 50%

A third concern is that follow-up periods which typically are 2 years or less may be too short to observe positive impacts of interventions (Lattimore & Visher, 2020). Although this may seem counterintuitive, it is what was observed for the SVORI multisite evaluation. The initial SVORI evaluation focused on the impact of participation with at least 21 months of follow-up following release from prison and showed positive but insignificant differences in rearrests for the SVORI and non-SVORI groups. A subsequent NIJ award provided funding for a long-term (at least 56 months) examination of recidivism for 11 of the 12 adult programs (Visher et al., 2017 ; also see Lattimore et al., 2012 ). In contrast to the findings in the original study, participation in SVORI programs was associated with longer times to arrest and fewer arrests after release for both men and women during the extended follow-up period of at least 56 months. Although untestable post hoc, one plausible hypothesis is that the early period following release is chaotic for many individuals leaving prison and failure is likely. Only after the initial “settling out period” are individuals in a position to take advantage of what was learned during program participation. In any event, these findings suggest the need to conduct more, longer-term evaluations of reentry programs.

A final consideration is the indicator of recidivism used to judge the success of a program. Recidivism, which is a return to criminal behavior, is almost never observed. Instead, researchers and practitioners rely on proxies that are measures of justice system indicators that a crime has occurred—arrest, conviction, and incarceration for new offenses—and, for those on supervision, violation of conditions and revocation of supervision. A recent National Academy of Sciences’ publication ( 2022 ) highlights some of the limitations of recidivism as a measure of post-release outcomes, arguing that indicators of success and measures that allow for the observation of desisting behavior (defined by the panel as a process—not the sharp break advanced by Bushway) should be used instead. These are valid points but certainly in the short run the funders of interventions and those responsible for public safety are unlikely to be willing to ignore new criminal activity as an outcome.

It is worth highlighting, however, some of the limitations of the binary indicator of any new event that is the usual measure adopted by many researchers (e.g., “any new arrest within x years”) and practitioners (e.g., “return to our Department within 3 years”). These simple measures ignore important dimensions of recidivism. These include type of offense (e.g., violent, property, drug), seriousness of offense (e.g., homicide, felony assault, misdemeanor assault), and frequency of offending (equivalent to time to the recidivism event). As a result, a typical recidivism outcome treats as identical minor acts committed, e.g., 20 months following release, and serious crimes committed immediately. Note too that this binary indicator fails in terms of being able to recognize desisting behavior, that is, where time between events increases or the seriousness of the offense decreases. Survival methods and count or event models address the frequency consideration. Competing hazard models allow one to examine differences between a few categories of offending (e.g., violent, property, drug, other). The only approach that appears to have tackled the seriousness dimension is the work by Sherman and colleagues (Sherman et al., 2016 ; also, see www.crim.cam.ac.uk/research/thecambridgecrimeharminde ) who have developed a Crime Harm Index that is based on potential sentences for non-victimless crimes. To date, statistical methods that can accommodate the three dimensions simultaneously do not, to my knowledge, exist. At a minimum, however, researchers should use the methods that are available to fully explore their recidivism outcomes. Logistic regression models are easy to estimate and the results are easily interpretable. But an intervention may be useful if it increases the time to a new offense or reduces the seriousness of new criminal behavior.

The last forty years or so have seen strides at identifying interventions that are promising, but much work remains to be done to find programs that result in substantial, broad-based improvements. Challenges in program development and implementation, partial treatment of treatment groups and control groups, and limited focus on recidivism as a binary indicator of failure were highlighted as some of the issues confronting practitioners and evaluators. 28 There is reason for optimism—if expectations are realistic from both a programmatic and methodological perspective: Identify promising programs, apply best practices of implementation science, calculate reasonable statistical expectations, and build on what has been tried.

Conclusions

In the past several decades, dramatic increases in crime resulted in large-scale legislative changes and expenditures. Correctional populations dramatically increased even as crime rates plunged. In addition, despite large increases in funding to law enforcement and other justice agencies, the number of offenses cleared declined. During this time, there were multiple federal initiatives focused on reducing criminal recidivism. Some, such as the Residential Substance Abuse Treatment (RSAT) programs, focused singularly on reducing drug use, while others focused broadly on addressing the multi-faceted needs of justice-involved individuals.

These changes occurred in a context of a highly decentralized approach to criminal justice, one that creates a myriad of costs and incentives. For example, if a federally funded reentry program reduces crime, the immediate agency beneficiaries are local law enforcement (due to fewer crimes to solve), prosecution (due to fewer crimes to prosecute), and the courts (due to fewer cases to try). That can reduce admissions to prison. But for cost-savings to occur, agencies have to respond to reductions in crime by reducing costs. That tends to run counter to the natural inclination of administrators, especially if it means reducing staffing. And it runs counter to what happened as crime declined over the last roughly 30 years.

We increasingly have research evidence that some programs can reduce recidivism, but many challenges, such as underpowered research designs, sometimes undermines this evidence. Even so, it is important to note that even modest reductions in recidivism imply opportunities to avert substantial numbers of crimes and subsequent criminal justice system processing and costs.

This essay suggests that it is time to embrace the modest improvements in recidivism that have been forthcoming from programs that have been subjected to the most rigorous evaluations. And it suggests that it is time to downsize our expectations for a “silver bullet” and, instead, prepare for a long-term and sustained investment in programming that will improve, refine and augment programs and approaches that “work.” By using “what works” today as the basis for the successful adaptation of multi-faceted programs that address the multiplicity of offender needs, criminal justice policy and practice will develop the tools needed to help a heterogeneous population of prisoners successfully reenter their communities.

Finally, as policymakers grapple with a recent increase in violent crime, it is important to recognize that the “tough-on-crime” responses of the twentieth century led to a 252% increase in the number of citizens under legal system control—including a 312% increase in prison populations—between 1980 and 2000. Correctional populations peaked in 2008 but in 2019 remain 255% above 1980 levels with more than 6.5 million individuals in prisons, jails, or on probation or parole. 29 As the current administration proposes the Safer America Plan, it is important that proper attention be addressed to assure that the result of these expenditures is not to reinvigorate the mass incarceration and mass supervision that followed the adaptation of the as the 1984 Pretrial Reform Act and the Violent Offender Incarceration and Truth-in-Sentencing Act of 1994. And it is important that we attend to widespread support for high-quality implementation of programs that have been shown to reduce recidivism.

is a Principal Scientist with RTI International’s Justice Practice Area. She has more than 35 years of experience evaluating interventions, investigating the causes and correlates of criminal behavior, and developing approaches to improve criminal justice operations. She was principal investigator for multi-site, multi-method evaluations including the Multi-Site Evaluation of the Serious and Violent Offender Initiative, the Second Chase Act Adult Offender Reentry Demonstration Program Evaluation, and the HOPE Demonstration Field Experiment. She is principal investigator for research examining pretrial risk assessment, policy, and practice; state-level reforms for adult probation; implementation and impact of criminal record expungement; development and implementation of dynamic risk assessment algorithms for Georgia probation and parole; and the long-term impact of a three-state RCT of the 5-Key Reentry Program Model. She is a past Chair of the American Society of Criminology Division on Corrections and Sentencing, a Fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology, and a recipient of the American Correctional Association Peter P. Lejins Researcher Award, the American Society of Criminology Division on Corrections and Sentencing Distinguished Scholar Award, and the Academy of Experimental Criminology Joan McCord Award. Dr. Lattimore has published extensively, has served on the editorial boards of multiple journals, and was the inaugural co-editor of the annual series Handbook on Corrections and Sentencing published by Routledge Press.

Data Availability

1 Some of the ideas presented here were initially explored in Lattimore ( 2020 ) and Lattimore et al. ( 2021 ).

2 Data 1960 to 1984 are FBI, Uniform Crime Reports, prepared by the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data; downloaded March 5, 2006; data from 1985 to 2020 are from https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend , downloaded July 12, 2022.

3 Violent crime commands the most attention and hence is the focus here, but property crimes are much more prevalent—directly affecting many more individuals. Property crime rates also increased in the 1960s and 1970s. The property crime rate increased from 1,726.3 per 100,000 in 1960 to 4,660.2 in 1994—an 170% increase. The property crime rate peaked in 1980 at 5,353.3 per 100,000—a 210% increase over 1960.

4 Data for 1960 and 1970 prisoners are from Cahalan, M.W. and Parsons, L.A. ( 1986 ). Data from 1980–2014 are from Glaze, L., Minton, T., & West, H. (Date of version: 12/08/ 2009 ) and Kaeble, D., Glaze, L., Tsoutis, A., & Minton, T. ( 2015 ). Data from 2015–2020 are from Kluckow, DSW, & Zeng, Z. (Date of version: 3/31/ 2022 ).

5 As noted in footnote 3, property crime rates also rose between 1960 and 1980—peaking at 5,353.3 per 100,000. With some minor fluctuations, the property crime rate has declined steadily since the 1980s and was 1958.2 per 100,000 in 2020.

6 The Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 (PL 91–513); the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 (PL 91–452); the District of Columbia Court Reorganization and Criminal Procedure Act of 1970 (PL 91–358); and the Omnibus Crime Control Act of 1970.

7 https://www.ncjrs.gov/txtfiles/billfs.txt

8 The trend shown in Fig.  9 continued a trend. Between 1982 and 1997, total justice expenditures increased 125% from $84.1 billion to $189.5 billion (2007 dollars), Kyckelhahn, T. ( 2011 ).

9 Data are from the FBI Crime in the United States publications for 1980, 1991, 1995, 2000, 2010 and 2019 https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/ . Numbers of offenses cleared were estimated by multiplying the offenses known by the offense clearance rates reported by the FBI.

10 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/31/opinion/richard-nixon-america-trump.html

11 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/08/01/fact-sheet-president-bidens-safer-america-plan-2/

12 For some thoughts on recommendations for reforms for pretrial and sentencing see Lattimore, Spohn, & DeMichele ( 2021 ). This volume also has recommendations for reform across the justice system.

13 Safety and Justice Challenge.

14 https://www.arnoldventures.org/

15 https://www.prisonpolicy.org/research/economics_of_incarceration/

16 For an example of how a minor traffic offense can result in thousands of dollars in fines and fees for extensive terms of private probation see In Small-Town Georgia, A Broken Taillight Can Lead to Spiraling Debt—In These Times.

17 See for example, https://www.propublica.org/article/florida-felonies-voter-fraud

18 https://www.arnoldventures.org/work/public-defense

19 https://www.samhsa.gov/gains-center

20 https://www.nami.org/Advocacy/Crisis-Intervention/Crisis-Intervention-Team-(CIT)-Programs

21 https://www.eugene-or.gov/4508/CAHOOTS

22 In 2005, the Uniform Crime Reports reported 1,197,089 known violent offenses and 8,935,714 known property offenses or a ratio of about 1:9. Clearance rates were 45.5% for violent and 16.3% for property crimes known to police. The estimated total number of arrests for 2005 was 14,094, 186. Thus, the violent and property arrests account for about 72% of all arrests. Of course, these estimates rest on many assumptions—in some cases, these assumptions would imply that we are estimating the lower bound, since each member of our study population is allowed only one arrest while many will have many more than one. On the other hand, to the extent that individuals are arrested who have committed no offenses, the estimates would over represent the impact of a reduction in crime. The goal here was not to generate a precise estimate but to illustrate that a 10% reduction in recidivism translates into substantial reductions in crime.

23 A model-based estimate of the effect of non-residential drug treatment on 134,000 drug-involved individuals admitted to probation in Florida showed treatment reduced arrests by more than 20% (Lattimore et al., 2005a , 2005b ). This analysis was extended to a cost-effectiveness framework in which it was shown that it would be cost effective to spend $1000 treating all drug-involved probations as long as the average cost of an arrest averted (including arrest, and the costs of judicial processing and corrections) is at least $6,463.

where R = recidivism rate for the group, r = recidivism rate in the absence of treatment, T = percentage of group that is treated, and p = the percentage reduction in recidivism due to treatment (the treatment effect). Differences in outcomes are constant with respect to the assumed recidivism rate in the absence of treatment.

25 Differences in outcomes are constant with respect to the assumed recidivism rate without treatment.

26 Lipsey ( 1998 ) discusses the issue of underpowered evaluations.

27 A similar example was presented in Lattimore, Visher, & Steffey ( 2010 ).

28 Although not addressed here because of page limitations additional important methodological considerations include whether a comparison group exists for some interventions such as incarceration (see Lattimore & Visher 2021 for a brief discussion) and, even more challenging, whether replication is even possible given the heterogeneity of context and populations. For an interesting consideration of the implications of the latter for examining the impact of incarceration see Mears, Cochran & Cullen ( 2015 ).

29 Correctional populations dropped dramatically in 2020 as law enforcement and the criminal justice system adapted to COVID-19.

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30 Engaging Criminal Law Research Paper Topics, Essential Tools, and Effective Writing Strategies

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Welcome, future legal eagles! Whether you're in the midst of your studies or about to embark on your academic journey, there's one thing we all understand about law school - research papers are an integral part of the curriculum. This blog post serves as a beacon to guide you through the vast ocean of potential research topics in the field of criminal law.

Choosing the right topic for your research paper is not just about ticking a box; it's about exploring the legal cosmos and finding a corner that interests you, resonates with you, or perhaps, even baffles you. It's about finding that sweet spot where law, fact, and your keen intellect intersect. And when that happens, not only does it make your paper stand out, but it also makes the process of writing more engaging and less of a chore.

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Our focus here is criminal law, a field filled with intriguing precedents, contentious debates, and real-life consequences. This post will provide a host of research paper topic ideas centered around criminal law, specifically in the context of the United States and the United Kingdom. So, buckle up, grab your gavel, and let's get into it!

15 Criminal Law Research Topics – US

1. The Evolution and Impact of the Three Strikes Law : Analyze how the Three Strikes Law has transformed over the years, its effectiveness in reducing crime, and its potential drawbacks.

2. Effectiveness of the Death Penalty in Deterring Crime : Research whether the death penalty serves as a deterrent to violent crime, incorporating statistical analysis and ethical considerations.

3. The Role of Race and Bias in Sentencing Decisions : Explore the connection between racial bias and disparities in sentencing outcomes, along with potential legislative solutions.

4. White-Collar Crime: Trends and Penalties : Investigate the current trends in white-collar crime and the associated penalties, questioning whether they are proportionate and effective.

5. The Intersection of Drug Policy and Racial Disparity in Incarceration Rates : Examine the correlation between drug policies, race, and incarceration rates. Does the war on drugs contribute to racial disparity in prisons?

6. The Influence of Social Media on Criminal Proceedings : Analyze how social media can impact criminal proceedings, from evidence gathering to influencing jury perception.

7. Juvenile Justice System: Are We Doing Enough? : Evaluate whether the juvenile justice system effectively balances punishment with rehabilitation, considering recent reforms and ongoing challenges.

8. Police Brutality and Accountability : Legal Perspectives: Explore the legal mechanisms for holding law enforcement accountable in cases of police brutality, their effectiveness, and potential improvements.

9. Cybercrime and Legislation : Are Current Laws Effective?: Review existing laws on cybercrime, their enforcement, and whether they adequately address modern cyber threats.

10. Sexual Assault Laws : Do They Provide Enough Protection?: Investigate how sexual assault laws protect victims, the potential gaps, and areas for improvement.

11. Gun Control Laws and Their Effect on Violent Crime Rates : Analyze the relationship between gun control laws and violent crime rates. Do stricter laws lead to fewer crimes?

12. Criminal Justice Reform: Impact of Recent Developments : Evaluate recent criminal justice reforms, their objectives, and their impact on the criminal justice system.

13. The Legal Implications of Using DNA Evidence in Criminal Cases : Examine the role of DNA evidence in criminal cases, its reliability, and its implications for justice.

14. The Impact of Mental Health on Criminal Behavior and Sentencing : Explore how mental health issues affect criminal behavior and how the justice system addresses these complexities.

15. Crime and Immigration: Is there a Connection? : Investigate the often-politicized connection between crime rates and immigration, sifting fact from fiction.

Summary: Key Points from US Criminal Law Topics

Our dive into US criminal law has unearthed a trove of exciting topics - from the complex interplay of race and sentencing to the evolving landscape of cybercrime laws. Remember, a great research paper not only presents facts but also questions and analyses. It's about getting to the heart of the matter and shining a light on the path forward. So, as you embark on your research journey, remember to probe, to question, and to explore. The world of criminal law is a challenging one, but it's also filled with opportunities for learning and growth.

15 Criminal Law Research Topics – UK

1. The Effectiveness of Rehabilitation versus Punishment in the UK : Explore the balance between rehabilitation and punishment in the UK criminal justice system. What works better for reducing reoffending rates?

2. The Impact of Brexit on UK Criminal Law : Analyze the changes that Brexit has brought to UK criminal law, from extradition to cooperation with EU law enforcement agencies.

3. Hate Crimes Legislation: How Effective Is It? : Evaluate the effectiveness of hate crime legislation in the UK. Does it adequately protect vulnerable groups and deter offenders?

4. The Role of Forensic Evidence in UK Law : Examine the use of forensic evidence in UK courts. How does it affect the outcomes of criminal cases?

5. Racial Profiling by UK Police: An Examination : Investigate the issue of racial profiling by police in the UK. What are its effects, and how can it be addressed?

6. Effectiveness of Cyber Crime Laws in the UK : Review the effectiveness of cybercrime laws in the UK. Are they keeping up with the rapidly changing digital landscape?

7. Implications of the Human Rights Act on Criminal Law : Explore the impact of the Human Rights Act on criminal law and criminal proceedings in the UK.

8. Terrorism Legislation in the UK: Balancing Security and Liberty : Examine the balance between national security and individual liberties in the UK's terrorism legislation.

9. Role of Social Media in UK's Criminal Proceedings : Analyze the influence of social media on UK criminal proceedings, considering its implications for evidence and fair trials.

10. The UK's Approach to Drug-related Crimes : Investigate the UK's policies towards drug-related crimes. Are current laws effective in reducing drug abuse and related crimes?

11. Knife Crime in the UK: Legal Responses and Implications : Evaluate the legal responses to knife crime in the UK. How effective are these measures, and what improvements could be made?

12. Legal Challenges in Dealing with Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking : Examine the legal challenges faced by the UK in addressing modern slavery and human trafficking. Are existing laws sufficient?

13. Youth Crime in the UK: Understanding the Underlying Causes : Explore the causes of youth crime in the UK and analyze potential legal and societal solutions.

14. Domestic Violence Laws in the UK: Are they Effective? : Investigate the effectiveness of domestic violence laws in protecting victims and punishing perpetrators in the UK.

15. The Impact of Mental Health Issues on Criminal Behavior and Sentencing in the UK : Evaluate the way mental health issues are considered in criminal behavior and sentencing in the UK. Is there room for improvement?

Summary: Key Points from UK Criminal Law Topics

We've traversed the fascinating terrain of criminal law topics specific to the United Kingdom, highlighting key areas that intersect with societal issues, human rights, and evolving digital landscapes. As you navigate your chosen topic, keep in mind that effective research is both a deep dive and a wide survey - it's about looking closely at your specific topic and its broader context. It's about questioning, comparing, and connecting. And it's about understanding that in the realm of criminal law, your research can be a powerful tool for change.

Essential Research Tools: Navigating Legal Databases, Libraries, and Online Resources for Law Students

Diving into your research paper necessitates equipping yourself with the right resources. A well-researched paper, after all, is built on the backbone of credible information. To that end, here are some key databases, law libraries, and online resources to assist in your academic voyage:

Westlaw : As one of the most extensive legal research databases available, Westlaw provides a treasure chest of case law, legislation, and academic sources for both US and UK jurisdictions.

LexisNexis : Another invaluable resource, LexisNexis offers a robust collection of legal resources including case law, statutes, secondary sources, and a vast news archive.

HeinOnline : With a concentration on law journals, HeinOnline is perfect for scholarly articles, legal classics, and historical legal statutes.

JSTOR : Although not exclusively law-focused, JSTOR contains a vast collection of academic articles, many of which cover legal topics and provide invaluable insights.

Google Scholar : A free resource, Google Scholar can be used to find both legal opinions and journals. Its cited by feature can also assist you in discovering related research.

Local Law Libraries : Don't forget about your local law library. These libraries often provide access to databases that may otherwise require a subscription.

Government Websites : Both US and UK government websites publish numerous reports and statistics that could provide useful data for your paper.

Remember, each resource comes with its own strengths, so make sure to use a combination to get a well-rounded perspective on your topic. Be persistent, be critical, and remember to cross-check information across different sources. Happy researching!

Strategies and Tips for Writing an Impactful Law Research Paper

Embarking on your law research paper journey can be a challenging task. From formulating your research plan to presenting a convincing argument, each step is crucial. Here are some helpful tips to guide you in crafting an impactful research paper:

Develop a Comprehensive Research Plan : Before you dive into writing, lay out a comprehensive plan. Identify your key questions, the resources you'll need, and a timeline. This not only provides a roadmap for your research but also helps keep you focused and on track.

Understanding and Analyzing Legal Issues : Law isn't about memorizing statutes; it's about understanding and interpreting them. When you tackle a legal issue, aim to comprehend its complexities, evaluate different viewpoints, and provide a balanced analysis.

Create a Strong Thesis Statement : Your thesis statement is the compass that guides your paper. It should be clear, concise, and debatable. It should present your main argument and give the reader a glimpse of your conclusion.

Maintain Logical Flow : A well-written research paper maintains a logical flow. Each paragraph should be linked to the next, each argument should build upon the previous, and every piece of evidence should support your thesis.

Cite Your Sources Properly : Citing your sources is essential in a law research paper. It not only gives credit where it's due but also allows your reader to trace your research path. Make sure to familiarize yourself with the citation style your institution prefers (e.g., Bluebook, Oxford, etc.).

Avoid Plagiarism : Plagiarism is a grave academic offense. Always ensure that your work is original, and whenever you use someone else's work or ideas, make sure to cite it properly.

Proofread and Edit Your Paper : Never underestimate the power of a well-edited paper. After writing, take the time to read your paper aloud, check for grammatical errors, and ensure that your arguments are clear and logical. If possible, have a classmate or a mentor review your paper. They can provide valuable feedback and catch errors you might have missed.

Remember, writing a research paper is not just an academic exercise; it's a craft. It's about distilling complex information into understandable insights. It's about persuasion and storytelling. And, it's about demonstrating your understanding and passion for the law. So, put on your lawyer's hat and get writing!

Conclusion: The Journey Towards Crafting an Impactful Law Research Paper

As we conclude our deep dive into the world of criminal law research topics, it's important to take a moment to reflect on the journey ahead. Crafting a law research paper is no small feat. It requires a keen understanding of the law, a critical and analytical mindset, and an eloquent way with words. However, the road to an impactful paper is not one you must walk alone.

Remember, every journey starts with a single step - choosing your research topic. And we hope this extensive list of topics helps spark your curiosity and set you on the right path. Utilize the research tools we discussed and the writing tips we shared, and you'll find that the process becomes more manageable and even enjoyable.

We also understand that there might be times when you need additional assistance, and that's perfectly fine. Research paper writing services like Writers Per Hour are here to provide that extra support. Their team of experienced writers is well-versed in various facets of criminal law, offering you valuable insights and relieving some of the stress that comes with academic writing.

So, as you embark on this exciting academic adventure, know that you're not alone. Remember, the pursuit of knowledge is a journey, and every piece of research, every written word, brings you one step closer to your goal. So go forth and conquer that research paper! We wish you the best of luck.

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Criminal Law Research Paper

This sample criminal law research paper features: 10200 words (approx. 34 pages), an outline, and a bibliography with 32 sources. Browse other research paper examples for more inspiration. If you need a thorough research paper written according to all the academic standards, you can always turn to our experienced writers for help. This is how your paper can get an A! Feel free to contact our writing service for professional assistance. We offer high-quality assignments for reasonable rates.

Introduction

Criminal law in the new england colonies, the pennsylvania experiment in criminal law, jefferson’s proposed reform of the penal law of virginia, pennsylvania and the degrees of murder, edward livingston and criminal law, the movement to abolish the death penalty, field’s reforms in new york state, the juvenile court, the cleveland survey, the wickersham commission, the model penal code.

• Bibliography

It is an undeniable fact that the law of crimes in the United States has historically suffered from a malevolent neglect. In other fields of the law, there has always been a tradition of judges, legislators, and legal commentators being willing, if not eager, to scrutinize fundamental premises and push doctrinal reform if they believed society demanded it. The predominant view of the American legal profession regarding the penal law, however, appears to have been that if it needed change, it would improve itself. Therefore, it is not unexpected that criminal law has long been one of the least developed, most convoluted, and, in a way, most primitive branches of American law.

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Certainly, there are a number of notable exceptions to this general rule of neglect. Throughout American history, there have been periodic surges of interest in criminal jurisprudence, accompanied by the emergence of reformers who, in one way or another, have sought to humanize the criminal law, modernize it, or even just add a degree of clarity to it. These endeavors have had differing effects on the course of legal advancements due to their vastly different motivations, scopes, and quality. However, they have all signified an awareness of the significance of criminal law and a willingness to confront at least some of its fundamental flaws. Consequently, they stand out as brilliant landmarks in an otherwise drab terrain.

This research paper examines the tumultuous history of criminal law reform in the United States. Emphasis is placed primarily on substantive penal law, which includes the law guiding the treatment of criminal offenders. Nonetheless, there are a few remarks regarding efforts to alter criminal procedure and the administration of justice.

Criminal Law during The Colonial Period

It is logical to begin a study of the history of criminal law reform with the colonial period, as it was at this time that the first improvements were made. All of the American colonies based their criminal law primarily on the jurisprudence and statutes of the home nation. Obviously, small groups of colonial settlers, few of whom have legal expertise, do not create criminal codes out of thin air. However, from the first, the colonists shown a willingness to experiment with revisions to the English legacy if their own ideals demanded it. In the very first set of rules established in British North America, the Plymouth Code of 1636, the punishment for serious offenses diverged significantly from the English model. The death sentence in Plymouth was restricted to treason, murder, arson, and a number other morals offenses, but the list of capital offenses in England was extensive and encompassed nearly all significant sins. This document should not be accorded excessive weight, as it was, in many ways, a basic set of regulations and Plymouth was a little community that would soon fall into obscurity. However, its amendments to the criminal law foreshadowed a pattern that was eventually adopted by other colonies.

The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts (1648), a much more sophisticated document than the Plymouth Code, incorporated significant improvements to the common and statutory criminal law of the home country. It, like English law, limited the amount of capital offenses and generally imposed more mild punishments for noncapital offenses. The universal prohibition on “cruel and barbaric” penalties was an innovation in and of itself. The entire code was equally influenced by the Old Testament and the English common law. Deuteronomy and other portions of the Pentateuch were frequently referenced to justify punitive clauses, and this reliance on the Bible had the net effect of making the law less harsh than it otherwise would have been. Only those crimes for which the Bible plainly dictated the death penalty were designated capital crimes. The code also incorporated several substantial enhancements to criminal procedure. A conviction for a capital offense required the evidence of two witnesses (this criterion was also founded in the Bible), and all capital cases were entitled to an appeal.

In addition to being inspired by the Bible, The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts were imbued with a spirit of logic and a healthy dislike for the numerous incidental elements of English criminal law. The device of clerical benefit, for instance, was viewed as a consequence of historical accident, with no basis in Scripture or reason, and was therefore removed from the law.

The significance of these New England criminal codes, particularly those of Massachusetts Bay, lay as much in their status as codes as in the revisions they made to specific elements of English criminal law. Underlying the codes was the conviction that a community’s criminal law was too vital to be allowed to develop piecemeal, as many Puritan settlers believed had happened with the English common law.

Rather, it was something that needed to be built methodically and with consideration to reflect the community’s deepest moral sense and to advance the social reasons for which the society existed. Later years tragically lost sight of this lesson.

Despite the fact that the criminal code of the American colonies was generally less retributive than that of the mother country, it was by no means less punitive and was quite harsh by contemporary standards. In the colonial imagination, crime and sin were nearly synonymous. The criminal was viewed as a moral actor with free will, and punishment was justified as a form of communal vengeance or divinely ordered, albeit humanly administered, retribution. The punishment schedules were little more than clumsy attempts to correlate the severity of the punishment to the wickedness of the conduct, and the unique circumstances of the offender received almost no consideration. However, the penal regulations created by Pennsylvania colony in the final decades of the seventeenth century exhibited a quite different mentality. There, between 1682 and 1718, William Penn and other prominent Quaker figures conducted a remarkable experiment in criminal law reform. Despite its unfortunate conclusion, it planted seeds that would later bear fruit.

A year after it was founded by William Penn under a royal charter, Pennsylvania passed a comprehensive code of criminal laws, part of a larger codification known as the Great Law of 1682, that was radically different from anything that had come before. The colony’s Quaker founders rejected in principle brutality, senseless slaughter, and, excepting the most exceptional circumstances, the taking of human life. They were repulsed by the English criminal system and felt obligated to seek alternatives. The alternative they discovered was imprisonment. The period of imprisonment varied according to the nature of the offense and the conditions under which it was committed. In general, the conditions of incarceration were not terrible. Therefore, the penalty for burglary was three months in prison and quadruple reparation to the victim. In the judgment of the court, arson was punishable by one year of hard labor and physical punishment (often lashing). One month in prison was the penalty for assaulting a magistrate. Assault and battery, along with manslaughter, were to be penalized based on the nature and circumstances of the offenses. In contrast to the relatively light penalties associated with these offences, the Quaker law dealt harshly with sexual offenses. Bigamy, for instance, was punishable by life imprisonment for the first offense and rape for the second.

Another unique aspect of the Pennsylvania code was its treatment of religious offenses, a common category of crime in most jurisdictions. These types of crimes were fully eradicated, and all citizens were guaranteed complete freedom of conscience.

The Pennsylvania code of 1682 constituted the purest form of Quaker criminal law. The colony’s criminal legislation was changed throughout the next three decades by a succession of legislative acts and became somewhat stricter. More crimes were made punishable by incarceration, jail periods were lengthened, and harsh physical punishments such as branding were established for some transgressions. In spite of these modifications, Pennsylvania’s criminal code remained a model of enlightenment and humanity compared to that of its neighbors. However, the Quaker experiment abruptly ended in 1718. The colony had been lobbying the Crown for some time to permit Quakers to testify on affirmation rather than under oath, and the Crown had been attempting to bring the colony’s criminal code closer to that of the mother country. In exchange for the colony’s decision to adopt the English criminal code in place of its own, the Quakers were granted recognition for affirmation.

The Revolution and Its Aftermath

The American Revolution prompted a number of attempts at criminal law reform, all of which were noteworthy for the new ideas toward punishment they revealed, but only one had lasting benefits. Following their separation from the United Kingdom, the newly independent colonies were faced with the dilemma of how much of the home country’s legal system they desired to keep. Some patriots argued that the United States’ criminal law was especially in need of reform. They maintained that its punitive requirements reflected a British rather than an American mindset. These points resonated well in a number of state capitals. The original state constitution of New Hampshire (adopted in 1784) urged the government to address the state’s draconian criminal statutes. It ruled that it was not prudent to apply the same punishment to offenses as different as forgery and murder since “the true purpose of all punishments is to reform, not exterminate, mankind” (article 1, section 18). Regrettably, the legislature declined the invitation, and the state’s penal code did not change significantly. Virginia witnessed similar developments.

A few weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the General Assembly of Virginia passed an act for the revision of the Laws (ch. 9 (1776), Hening’s Virginia Statutes at Large 175 (Richmond, Va., 1821)) with the intention of bringing the state’s laws more in line with the spirit of republicanism. George Mason and Thomas Jefferson served on the committee charged with revising the document. As part of the remodeling process, Jefferson drafted a bill proposing a new system of criminal penalties. This draft is the result of a comprehensive review of ancient to contemporary theoretical texts on punishment and the treatment of criminal offenders. The footnoted form of the bill found in Jefferson’s archives includes references to Anglo-Saxon laws in their original language. It is widely considered as a literary drafting model (Boyd, p. 594).

None of the thinkers Jefferson studied had a greater influence on him than the great Italian criminologist Cesare Beccaria, whose essay On Crimes and Punishments (1764) was generating vigorous debate in educated colonial circles. Beccaria advocated a strictly utilitarian approach to the criminal law, and Jefferson’s penology was infused by his beliefs. Jefferson’s guiding principles were: (1) that the only purpose of the penal law was the deterrence of crime; (2) that sanguinary laws were self-defeating because men shied away from enforcing them to the full and thus left many crimes unpunished; (3) that if punishments were proportionate to the crime, men would be more likely to ensure the laws were observed; and (4) that the reform of criminals was a worthy goal worthy of the law’s promotion. Finally, Jefferson’s criminal law reflected a preoccupation with the theory of analogical punishments, which held that punishments should be symbolic reflections of the actions to which they are fastened, so that crimes and their consequences are inextricably linked in the minds of citizens. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this peculiar hypothesis had a profound effect on the evolution of penological thought.

These concepts produced a suggested system of punishments that was generally lenient and enlightened, but was tarnished by certain fairly peculiar characteristics. Jefferson limited the broad list of crimes punishable by death under the prevailing law to treason and murder, and imposed far lighter punishments for the vast majority of these typically lethal acts. As a result of a near-obsession with similarity and balance, however, the punishments imposed for certain infractions took on a very macabre tint. Thus, the penalty for treason was being buried alive. Murder by poison was punished with poison, rape with castration, and mayhem with mutilation. The Virginia legislature vigorously debated Jefferson’s proposals but ultimately rejected them.

Pennsylvania, which had previously experimented with large-scale modifications to its prison regime, was the first state where the new champions of penal law reform were able to transfer theory into practice. During the American Revolution, numerous Pennsylvania political offices fell into the hands of a mix of populist farmers and Philadelphia radicals, which may have made the soil even more fertile. In any case, the state adopted a constitution in 1776 that had measures about the reform of the criminal code that were remarkably similar to those included in the New Hampshire Constitution of 1784. (It’s possible that New Hampshire borrowed part of its language from the Pennsylvania document.) The difference was that Pennsylvania mandated, as opposed to urged, its lawmakers to modify the state’s penal laws and make punishments more commensurate to the offenses. The constitution echoed a popular idea of the new generation of reformers by stating that conspicuous punishments of extended duration, such as incarceration, prevented crime more effectively than harsh, brutal, but fleeting sanctions (Pa. Const. of 1776, 38–39).

Ten years later, the Pennsylvania Assembly took the first move toward penal law reform by eliminating the death penalty for robbery, burglary, and sodomy (Act of Sept. 15, 1786). Act of September 23, 1791, sections 5 and 8 abolished the death penalty for witchcraft and ended the barbaric practice of branding for adultery and fornication.

Despite these advancements, there were indications in the early 1790s that the momentum produced during the Revolution in favor of fundamental and extensive criminal law reform was beginning to wane. In 1790, for instance, Pennsylvania’s new constitution did not even mention the matter. Possibly with this in mind, a number of renowned Pennsylvanians began to strongly and publicly advocate for the reformer cause.

James Wilson, the first law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a co-author of the United States Constitution, gave a series of lectures on crime and punishment in Philadelphia in 1790. Citing with approval the views of Beccaria and that other great eighteenth-century legal theorist, Montesquieu, Wilson argued vehemently that prevention was the only purpose of punishment and that anything more severe than the minimum punishment required to deter crime was incompatible with a civilized society. In 1792, Benjamin Rush, a professor of medicine at the same university, wrote an essay titled “Considerations on the Injustice and Impolicy of Punishing Murder by Death” in which he claimed that death punishment was “contrary to reason and to the order and happiness of society.” In the same year, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice William Bradford entered the fray. In a report on the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent against crime, prepared at the request of Governor Thomas Mufflin, Bradford argued that the death penalty was completely unnecessary and cited statistics showing that the imprisonment penalty provided by the act of 1786 was just as effective in deterring burglary, robbery, and sodomy as the earlier death penalty.

Taking a lead from Bradford’s memorandum, Governor Mufflin advocated to the Pennsylvania assembly that further reforms to the criminal system were necessary and urged it to explore making other reforms. The response of the legislature was equivocal. It was extremely loath to travel the full distance down the path that Bradford, Wilson, and others were encouraging it to go, but it did agree that the punishment of death ought to be administered only when it was absolutely necessary to safeguard the public safety. In light of this theory, it drafted legislation that, for the first time in Anglo-American legal history, differentiated between two degrees of murder. The first degree, punishable by death, related to homicides performed by lying in wait or by poison, or to any other kind of willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing. (There were echoes here of the statute of 1682.) All other sorts of murder were categorized as murder in the second degree, punished by imprisonment at hard labor or in solitary confinement or both for a duration not to exceed twenty-one years. This law was duly enacted by the legislature in 1794 with the inclusion of criminal murder to the category of the first degree (Act of April 22, 1794, § 2).

The classification of murder into two degrees proved to be Pennsylvania’s greatest lasting contribution to the general criminal law of the United States. Virginia approved a similar statute in 1796, which was followed by Ohio in 1824, Missouri in 1835, Michigan in 1846, and the great majority of American jurisdictions ultimately.

Criminal Law during The Antebellum Period

The passing of the law on the degrees of murder significantly weakened the Pennsylvania campaign for the complete abolition of the death penalty. The movement stayed dormant for several decades before reviving in the 1820s as part of a larger anti-death-penalty campaign that flourished on the national arena between roughly 1820 and 1850. This debate will be resumed below, but the focus must now shift to the state of Louisiana and the work of Edward Livingston, the most creative and productive of all nineteenth-century penal code reformers.

Born in New York State, Edward Livingston (1764–1836) had a notable political career before focusing on criminal law reform. He served in the House of Representatives, as U.S. attorney, and as mayor of New York City. Livingston departed New York in 1804 and settled in New Orleans, where he began a law business and became involved in Louisiana politics almost immediately. Simultaneously, he maintained a longstanding interest in jurisprudence and the reform of the law.

Livingston was elected to the Louisiana assembly in 1820 and was crucial in the passage of an act authorizing the construction of a code of criminal law “based on one principle, namely the prevention of crime” (Livingston, vol. 1, pp. 1–2). The next year, he was named as the effort’s leader.

Livingston combed through all available resources on criminal law and engaged in extensive correspondence with jurists and legal practitioners from other states and abroad in order to draw on their thoughts and expertise. In 1826, he presented the state of Louisiana’s General Assembly with a finished work.

The Livingston Code had four distinct sections: a code of crimes and punishments, a code of process, a code of evidence, and a code of reform and prison discipline. Each code was accompanied by a report detailing its history and underlying philosophy. In addition, there were two extensive reports in which Livingston expressed his overall opinions on criminal law. In one of them, he made clear that he believed his code to be the first serious attempt, at least in the Anglo-American world, to set criminal law on a strong, scientific foundation. He compared the former criminal law to pieces of fretwork, the result of caprice, fear, and negligence, which jeopardized the lives and liberties of the people due to cruel or disproportionate punishment and conflicting laws (Livingston, vol. 1, p. 11).

Livingston freely recognized that he owed his largest intellectual debt to the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and the entire structure of the code is based on Benthamite ideas. First, there is a dedication to the notion that all educated citizens should have complete access to the content of the laws. Livingston wrote: “Penal laws should be written in plain language, clearly and unequivocally expressed, so that they cannot be misunderstood or perverted” (vol. 1, p. 5). The code contains surprisingly little of the technical verbiage that attorneys love so much. It is one of the few pieces of legislation that can be described as actually enjoyable to read.

Consistent with Benthamite ideology, the code is imbued with a profound mistrust of judges and a hostility to any form of judicial lawmaking. The code of crimes and punishments prevented the punishment of conduct not specifically rendered illegal by statute, and judges were prohibited from punishing anything not made criminal by the letter of the law under the pretext that the act in issue was within the spirit of the law (vol. 2, p. 15). Livingston intended to prohibit judges from injecting their own moral convictions into the criminal code.

Lastly, in an effort to involve the average person in the lawmaking process, the code aimed to make clear the rationale behind its various provisions. Thus, explicit prohibitions on types of action were frequently supported with examples and justifications for their inclusion. Livingston believed that people would be more inclined to respect the law if they perceived that it was rational and based on the fundamental concept of utility.

In general, Livingston’s code represented a significant consolidation and clarification of the existing penal laws, as well as the removal of much of its weedlike overgrowth; he was adamant that there were too many crimes and that the criminal sanction was overused when the civil sanction would suffice. In addition, a large number of the code’s substantive sections were relatively novel. This was particularly true regarding civil freedoms and privacy. It was deemed a crime to open a letter addressed to another (vol. 2, p. 166), and it was a misdemeanor to interfere with someone’s right to free expression or free assembly (vol. 2, p. 69). Homosexuality was removed from the list of criminal offenses on the grounds that describing such transgressions in a code could corrupt young readers and criminalizing sexual deviance was an invitation to blackmail (vol. 1, p. 27).

The most notable innovation in Livingston’s law was the removal of the death punishment (volume 1, pages 185–224). This proposition was extensively defended by Livingston in his “Introductory Report to the Code of Crimes and Punishments” His primary point was that the state could only justify taking a life if it could prove that it was extremely essential. But, he argued, it could be demonstrated through logic and experience that lighter punishments would enough to deter major offenses. He also pointed out that public executions had a corrupting influence on society morality, that courts frequently erroneously convicted criminals, and that it was impossible to fix these mistakes under a system that permitted capital punishment. Livingston also maintained, in a relatively ignored portion of his discourse, that capital penalty was insufficient to deter the commission of significant crimes. The dread of death was just insufficient to deter potential criminals from acting on their intense desires to commit crimes. The voracious spendthrift, he claimed, would risk the temporary, but acute, pain of death to advance his interest in a life of idleness and dissipation, whereas the threat of a life lived under a harsh jail regime might be enough to quell his thieving tendencies (vol. 1, pp. 37–40).

Livingston’s proposed system for the treatment of social deviance had never been proposed previously. He understood that poverty and idleness led to crime, therefore his code of reform and prison discipline called for a house of refuge, which would employ people who were unemployed, and a home of industry for those who refused to work in the house of refuge. This institution would also provide work to recently released inmates. For the treatment of genuinely criminal offenses, he proposed a fines-to-incarceration scale that was delicately graduated. The conditions of confinement were graded according to the severity of the crime. The objective of incarceration was to both rehabilitate the offender and serve as an example to dissuade crime.

In most ways, Livingston’s code of reform and jail discipline was decades ahead of its time. It prohibited abuse of prisoners and required that they be appropriately dressed and fed. It also stipulated training and conduct requirements for jail officials. Incorporating relatively basic psychological manipulation techniques on both the offender and the rest of the public who were to be deterred by his example, it also had a less palatable aspect. For the remainder of their lives, murderers, for instance, were to have no contact with people from the outside world other than official visitation and little contact with their fellow prisoners. Their cell walls were to be painted black, and an inscription was to be hung on the outside of the cells stating that the inhabitants were dead in all but body; their bodily existence was being prolonged solely so that they might remember their crimes and repent of them, and so that their trials could serve as an example to others (vol. 2, p. 573).

Livingston campaigned vehemently for the approval of his penal law in the assembly, but it was not approved and was never adopted. It was an odd development in the backward, slave-holding society of pre-Civil War Louisiana.

As previously mentioned, a movement to abolish the death penalty arose and prospered on the national stage throughout the second part of the antebellum period. Beginning in New England and Pennsylvania, the movement swiftly expanded to other states and soon had a nationwide following. Eleven states had well-organized anti-capital-punishment societies by the 1840s, and in 1845, George Dallas, the vice president of the United States, became the first president of a nationwide society. In the vanguard of the movement were Quakers and others who opposed the death sentence on the basis of Christian humanitarianism, but also prominent were those who drew inspiration from the tradition of enlightened rationalism and utilitarianism. These opponents, many of whom were attorneys, frequently leaned on Edward Livingston’s penological beliefs in their arguments.

There was substantial overlap between the antislavery crusade and the death-penalty campaign, thus the term abolitionists was aptly used to the supporters. Wendell Phillips, for instance, was one of the Massachusetts society’s founders. The abolitionists were notably active in state legislative chambers. Typically, their tactic consisted of influencing legislative or outside consulting groups to investigate the efficacy and necessity of capital punishment. These investigations yielded various outcomes.

In 1836, Massachusetts Governor Edward Everett convened a committee led by Robert Rantoul, the prominent Jacksonian lawyer and promoter of codification, to examine if the death penalty might be repealed for all offenses save murder. The committee delivered a report that rapidly became a movement classic, combining utilitarian and biblical reasons in its call for abolition. The legislature did not accept Rantoul’s views, but in 1839 it did eliminate the death penalty for burglary and highway robbery (Act of April 8, 1839). Also in New York, there was legislative pressure for reform.

During the 1830s, the abolition of the death sentence was frequently debated on the floor of the New York Assembly and the subject of numerous committee investigations. On occasion, these deliberations resulted in dismal outcomes for opponents of the death penalty. Thus, in 1838, an assembly committee rejected the Livingstonian argument that jail was a more effective deterrent than the death penalty, arguing that since the majority of criminals were destitute, the promise of free shelter and food in prison would be favorably appealing to them.

In 1846, the Michigan legislature voted to abolish the death penalty for all offenses except treason (Mich. Rev. Stat. tit. 30, chs. 152–153, 658 (1846)). This was the movement’s most notable victory. Rhode Island and Wisconsin followed suit in 1852 and 1853, respectively. However, after these occurrences, the movement began to lose its momentum. By the eve of the Civil War, its influence on the public psyche had diminished significantly.

During the Progressive Era, the anti-death penalty movement saw a brief revival, and six states were persuaded to abolish the death sentence. However, the majority of these states reintroduced the death penalty within a few years of the repeal of the death penalty due to public pressure.

Criminal Law during The Postbellum Period

The second part of the nineteenth century was not characterized by significant substantive criminal law reform. During this period of industrialization and economic prosperity, American lawyers and legislators were generally busy with other problems. New York’s endeavor, led by David Dudley Field, to entirely restructure the state’s criminal code was, however, a significant exception to the pattern.

David Dudley Field (1805–1894) was one of the towering characters of the nineteenth-century American bar, and by the time of the American Civil War, he had become the country’s foremost advocate for codification. His attempts for penal-law reform were a component of his greater codification endeavor. In 1846, a New York constitutional convention, convened in large part due to the effective lobbying of Field and other Jacksonian Democrats, passed a resolution requiring the New York assembly to codify all of the state’s laws in a written and systematic code. A groundbreaking code of civil process was drafted by Field and other members of a specially formed panel and adopted by the New York assembly prior to the Civil War (1849 N.Y. Laws, ch. 438), but the other codes were not to be finished until after the war.

In 1857, a new commission, of which Field was once again a member, was tasked with drafting a civil code, a political code, and a penal code. The bulk of the work on the last code, which was given to the New York legislature in 1865, was completed by Field’s two cocommissioners, Curtis Noyes and B. V. Abbot, who lacked professional or scholarly knowledge in criminal law. Nevertheless, Field played a limited role in the drafting, and as he was the driving force behind the entire New York codification endeavor, it is fitting that the penal code, along with all the other New York codes, has always carried his name.

First among the declared goals of the Field Penal Code’s authors was to consolidate the entirety of the state’s criminal law into a single document. The drafters observed that the state’s penal provisions were dispersed throughout the collected statutes and that many acts were criminal only by virtue of court decision; if deemed criminal by statute, they may be defined purely by reference to common law rulings. All of this, they claimed, infused New York’s criminal law with doubt. Second, the intent of the drafters was to correct flaws and mistakes in the current definitions of offenses. Finally, they desired to penalize actions that should have been criminal but were not (New York State Commissioners of the Code, pp. iii-vi).

It was a vast and audacious goal, and there appeared to be at least the potential for a thorough, critical reexamination of the fundamental concepts of American criminal law, a work that had not been addressed by anyone other than Livingston. In this regard, however, the commissioners’ final output was a deeply unsatisfactory paper. Field and his colleagues may have believed that their reform mission was accomplished when the disparate elements of the state’s penal code were brought together and a semblance of order was introduced to this assortment of statutes. There is no indication in the document of a desire to clarify or reformulate any of the confused or archaic common law concepts that formed the foundation of Anglo-American criminal law, or to simplify or consolidate the vast corpus of statutory crimes and regulatory offenses that had been added to the state’s criminal law since the Revolution. This “reformist” code did not significantly alter the existing quo.

The Field Code was successful in achieving its goal of incorporating all of the criminal law into a single volume. The provisions of the code included every occasion in which a criminal penalty was imposed for any action. No items were left outside, nor was any effort made to combine. Thus, there are separate, specific laws regarding “the refilling of mineral bottles” (section 417), “the failure to mark packages of hay” (section 449), and “the discharge of gas tar into public waters” (section 434). Each type of arson is regulated by a different provision ( 531–539), ranging from maliciously torching an inhabited building at night to torching an uninhabited building during the day. Separate clauses address willful mischief to railroads, public highways or bridges, toll houses or turnpikes, mile markers and guideposts, and telegraph wires ( 690–695). This is possibly the most absurd example of overspecification.

Despite these limitations, the Field Code proved to be immensely popular. It was ultimately established by the New York assembly in 1881 (1881 N.Y. Laws, ch. 676), adopted virtually in its whole by California and the Dakotas, and had a considerable impact on the criminal code of numerous other western states, including Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming.

Progressivism and Criminal Law

In the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, the middle and upper classes of American society were swept by a sophisticated, dynamic social reform movement known as Progressivism. Progressives were a diverse group with a diverse political and social agenda. But among their primary goals were the eradication of corruption in politics, the introduction of efficiency and scientific technique into the governmental process, the uplift of the disadvantaged, and the assimilation into the mainstream of American society of the record-breaking immigrant masses who were flooding into the country at the time. The entire Progressive program hinged on two essential tenets: belief in the perfectibility of man and implicit faith in the capacity of the state to foster individual happiness. The primary innovations in the treatment of criminal offenders—probation, parole, and the juvenile court—introduced or popularized during the Progressive Era may be viewed as embodiments of the Progressive spirit.

Probation, whose philosophy holds that at least some criminal offenders are more likely to be rehabilitated by being placed in the community under the supervision of a trained official than by being incarcerated, is an American invention that has its origins in the work of Boston shoemaker John Augustus in the 1840s and 1850s. With the approval of the courts, Augustus had for over two decades accepted into his care those convicted of (often minor) criminal acts with the intention of rehabilitating them. Augustus amassed an excellent record, but his arrangement with the Boston courts remained totally informal, and his example did not inspire imitation anywhere else. In 1878, Massachusetts passed a law permitting the mayor of Boston to appoint a paid probation officer, and in 1880, this authority was extended to all cities and towns in the state (Mass. Probation Act of 1880, 1880 Mass. Acts, ch. 129). Other states experimented with the concept of enacting similar reforms but refrained due to constitutional concerns with the program. In 1894, the New York Supreme Court ruled that a state law authorizing judges to suspend sentence, a necessary prerequisite to any system of probation, was not an unconstitutional infringement on the executive power of pardon (People ex rel. Forsyth v. Court of Sessions, 141 N.Y. 288, 36 N.E. 368 (1894)). Twelve states established probation for juvenile offenders between 1900 and 1905; the number increased to twenty-three by 1911. By 1925, all 48 states had legalized the use of juvenile probation. During the Progressive Era, adult probation progressed at a considerably slower rate, but yet made continuous progress.

Probation stressed the specialized treatment of the offender by professionals: offenders were no longer viewed as bad and deserving of punishment, but as ill and in need of therapy. As such, it was consistent with the Progressives’ deeply held confidence in the scientific method’s capacity to educate everyone. The same applied to parole. In New York’s Elmira Reformatory, which began admitting juvenile offenders in 1877, parole and the other reform that typically accompanied it, the indeterminate sentence, were initially established. The reformatory was to hold its inmates for as long as was necessary to rehabilitate them, after which they were to be turned over to trained professionals for further noncustodial supervision or treatment in the community. In 1889, New York established a broad indeterminate sentencing statute (1889 N.Y. Laws, ch. 382, 74), and by 1891, eight additional states had enacted some sort of indeterminate-sentence or parole legislation.

Of all the criminal justice reforms advocated by progressives, the juvenile court was the most symbolic. Child welfare was a primary emphasis of Progressive action, as Progressivism was a child-centric movement. Before the advent of juvenile court, jurisdictions frequently devised means of sparing juvenile offenders the full rigors of the legal system. However, as has been pointed out, what was lacking was the notion that a young person who violated the law should be treated from the outset “not as a criminal, but as a person in need of care, education, and protection” (Warner and Cabot, p. 600). During the 1890s, a broad range of enlightened professionals, including members of the bar and representatives of the burgeoning behavioral sciences, advocated for the separation of juvenile offenders from the adult criminal procedure and the implementation of a separate treatment system. Illinois was the first state to respond positively to these requests, establishing a juvenile court for Chicago in 1899. (1899 Ill. Laws, ch. 131). The act, which was prepared by a committee of the Chicago Bar Association, essentially constituted the court as an equity court with administrative powers. The aim was for the court to assume guardianship of wayward or neglected children when the circumstances warranted it in order to provide them with the same care, custody, and discipline that a good parent would provide for his or her own children. In conclusion, the court was to assume the role of parens patriae, which is not foreign to equity courts. The juvenile court was to work under relatively flexible, non-adversarial processes, with counsel’s role diminished, and its function was to be viewed as rehabilitative rather than punitive. The issue before the court would not be whether the juvenile defendant was guilty of a crime, but rather whether he was “delinquent” and hence in need of care and education from the state.

As a result of the passing of the Illinois Act, the juvenile court movement took on certain characteristics of a crusade. In other states, the reform’s proponents strongly advocated for its passage. In addition to theoretical considerations, they now had an actual experience to support their demands, and they found enthusiastic and willing friends among the professionals of the Chicago juvenile court. For instance, the court’s chief administrator, Timothy Hurley, published the monthly Juvenile Court Record, which documented the effectiveness of his institution and the advancement of the movement. The advocates found little to no pushback, and state after state hurried to adopt the Chicago model. Certain individuals did raise the question of whether the juvenile court’s loose, informal procedure and the enormous discretion of the juvenile magistrate effectively protected juveniles against arbitrary deprivation of liberty. These voices, however, were drowned out by the growing chorus of applause. By 1920, all states but three had established juvenile courts.

Twentieth-Century Developments in Criminal Law

In the 1920s, the focus changed from the improvement of strategies for individual offender rehabilitation to the management of criminal conduct as a whole. This was the time of the great national experiment of Prohibition, which led to an increase in all criminal activities. Citizens around the nation, but especially in large cities, grew increasingly angry at what they saw to be an alarming rise in crime and the criminal justice system’s apparent failure to combat it. Some alleged that the criminal element’s corruption of government officials was the main cause of the problem, and there were several examples of political corruption during the time period. Others felt that the criminal justice system was fundamentally flawed and in dire need of reform. Widespread calls for action were heard.

The city of Cleveland was the first to try a systematic solution to the problem. It had suffered from a rising crime rate for some years, and mistrust loomed over the municipal criminal justice system. In the spring of 1920, the top judge of the city’s municipal court was compelled to resign as a result of his cooperation in a heinous crime. A number of civic organizations, led by the Cleveland bar, convinced the Cleveland Foundation, a private philanthropic organization, to support a criminal justice survey in the city. A team of investigators led by Roscoe Pound, dean of the Harvard Law School at the time, and Felix Frankfurter, a professor of law at Harvard, was assembled. They delivered a lengthy report on Cleveland’s criminal justice system after two years of empirical observation and the collection of vast quantities of statistics. It was the most thorough, detailed, and accurate depiction ever generated of the issues of metropolitan law enforcement. From the police administration to the criminal courts and the city’s correctional facilities, every nook and crevice of the criminal justice system was examined. Even a section on law education in Cleveland and its influence on the criminal justice system was included.

The research identified numerous faults in the present criminal justice system and made recommendations for reform. However, these recommendations were not revolutionary but rather ameliorative. Instead of a drastic redesign of the existing system, the research suggested streamlining and modernizing its operation. The focus was on incorporating more efficiency into all parts of the criminal justice system. For instance, a great deal of space was devoted to describing how prosecution staffs and courts could handle the overwhelming number of criminal cases more efficiently and effectively. The report also highlighted the necessity for the complete professionalization of criminal justice personnel and the elevation of the criminal law practitioner’s status.

The Cleveland crime study inspired the development of crime commissions with comparable responsibilities in other municipalities. Georgia in 1924, Minnesota and Missouri in 1926, Memphis in 1928, and Illinois and New York State in 1929 all initiated their own investigations of the local police enforcement environment. In general, though, they were pale imitations of the original.

At this moment, the national government made the decision to intervene. In 1929, President Herbert Hoover selected United States Attorney General George Wickersham to lead the National Commission of Law Observance and Enforcement. The Wickersham Commission, as it came to be known, was initially tasked with examining issues of law enforcement under the Eighteenth Amendment, but it quickly enlarged its mandate to embrace the entire field of criminal justice. In the subsequent two years, it conducted a comprehensive examination into crime and law enforcement in the United States and issued fourteen volumes of reports covering all aspects of the process. In many ways, its results and suggestions matched those of the Cleveland survey, but it also broke significant new territory. Its report on police procedures, for instance, uncovered patterns of police mistreatment of suspects and emphasized the need to eradicate these practices. According to the committee, one full volume, The Causes of Crime, provided a sociological picture of criminal conduct and suggested techniques for combating the environment that nurtured crime.

The focus of the great crime surveys of the 1920s was almost entirely procedural, but Pound, the guiding spirit of the Cleveland survey, had repeatedly highlighted the enormous inconsistencies and anachronisms embedded in the American substantive law of crimes and emphasized how these stood in the way of constructing a truly modern and effective system of criminal justice. Additionally, the Wickersham Commission drew attention to the dismal and disorganized status of the federal substantive criminal law. In addition, researchers in criminal law, the behavioral sciences, and the embryonic subject of criminology have been attacking the theoretical foundations of the criminal law since the turn of the century and continuing throughout the 1920s. They questioned the scientific validity of such fundamental concepts as “criminal intent,” “deliberation,” and “premeditation,” as well as the utility of the nuanced and even odd definitional distinctions that had developed over the ages in the common law of crimes.

Certainly, a number of these critiques were tainted by a naive determinism; a few even went so far as to claim that science had completely undermined the concept of free will or was on the cusp of finding the biological and psychological kinds that invariably lead to criminal action. The majority, on the other hand, were significantly more nuanced and circumspect, and there is no denying that there were several flaws in the current criminal law, which was the argument made by everyone.

The American Law Institute, a group of attorneys, judges, and legal experts, was established in 1923 to clarify and improve the law. Unhappiness with the condition of the criminal law was one of the key factors that led to its foundation, therefore it is not surprising that criminal law reform was a top priority from the beginning. Nonetheless, it was challenging to put this concern into action. The institute swiftly determined that the process of restatement that looked relevant in other areas of law was inapplicable to the law of crime. As the main theorist of criminal law, Herbert Wechsler, subsequently noted, “the need was less for a description and reaffirmation of existing law than for a guide to long-delayed reform” (1974, p. 421). In 1931, a proposal was made for a model penal code, but the scale of the project was so broad that it could not be funded during the Great Depression.

In 1950, a substantial donation from the Rockefeller Foundation brought the model penal code project back to life. The American Law Institute has created a committee of eminent experts in the subject of criminal law to serve in an advisory capacity. Wechsler was chosen the enterprise’s lead reporter, and Louis Schwartz, another famous specialist in the subject, was made the enterprise’s coreporter.

Wechsler made it plain early on in the project’s development that he and his colleagues were facing a monumental undertaking. According to Wechsler, American society began the twentieth century without ever having properly established “the law on which men placed their ultimate reliance for protection against the gravest harms that human conduct can inflict on individuals and institutions” (1974, p. 420). Instead, the penal law of the various states was a hopelessly disorganized and internally inconsistent mass of common and statute law, with the statutes often being more important in their gloss than in their text. This was less the result of deliberate, informed selection than of accident, chance, and unreflective imitation. According to Wechsler, American criminal law was a mixture of the old and the new that only history can explain (1955, p. 526).

Wechsler was the project’s guiding spirit from beginning to end, and he deserved the most of the credit for its successful completion. However, Wechsler did not act alone in the creation of the Model Penal Code. It was a collaborative endeavor that utilized the expertise of almost the whole academic criminal law establishment, a substantial number of judges, and a few practitioners. It was also a methodically and deliberately conducted endeavor. The drafting of the Code took ten years, from 1952 to 1962, and thirteen drafts were circulated for pubic discussion and criticism after debate in the project’s advisory committee and on the floor of the American Law Institute.

In 1962, the institute released its Proposed Official Draft of the Model Penal Code, the most significant effort since Livingston’s time to put the house of penal law in some sort of reasonable order. In reality, the Proposed Official Draft was, in many ways, an extremely Livingstonian text. This was most evident in its devotion to the assumption that the main objective of criminal law is the control of harmful behavior and to the view that clarity of concept and expression are vital to the accomplishment of this purpose. However, the draft was devoid of the intellectual arrogance and imperiousness that occasionally marred the work of Livingston and his mentor, Bentham. As befitting a product of the American intellect of the middle of the twentieth century, the draft was imbued with a spirit of pragmatism, albeit tempered by principles.

The Code consisted of four sections: general laws, definitions of individual offences, treatment and correction, and correctional organization. Each contained substantial advances relative to existing law. New standards of criminal responsibility were established in the Code’s general provisions in accordance with the premise that the sole goal of the criminal law is to prohibit culpable and destructive behavior, and the principle that flawless behavior should be exempt from punishment. In the domain of inchoate crimes, for instance, the law of attempt was amended to eliminate all doubts regarding factual impossibility and to place emphasis on the actor’s view of the circumstances surrounding the conduct of his act ( 5.01). In conspiracy, on the other hand, the conventional common law rule that held every conspirator accountable for every act that was reasonably foreseeable to be committed by another conspirator was rejected. Instead, the culpability of a co-conspirator was restricted to those crimes of the principal that the co-conspirator sought to aid or encourage ( 5.03). Similarly, the use of defensive force was deemed justified in circumstances of perceived, as opposed to actual, necessity ( 3.04) in the purpose of protecting flawless conduct. The defense of reasonable mistake of fact was upheld for offences such as bigamy ( 230.1). In addition, a limited ignorantia legis defense was made accessible to defendants who held good faith beliefs regarding the innocence of their behavior due to reliance on official opinion or the unavailability of the statute they were accused of breaching ( 2.02, 2.04).

Those provisions in the Code’s general portion that aimed to articulate a new definition of the mental element of crime were the most notable. The common law employed a bewildering array of phrases to describe the mental culpability (mens rea) that was required for a person to be guilty of a crime. In lieu of this plethora of phrases, the drafters of the Code substituted four modes of conduct with respect to the material ingredients of offenses: intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, and negligently. One of these modes must be present for criminal culpability to attach ( 2.02). The Code established a creative solution in the area of strict liability by defining such actions as violations punished solely by penalties, thereby enabling their possibility.

In addition to seeking to organize and rationalize the broad, underlying concepts of criminal culpability, the Model Penal Code introduced various modifications to the definitions of particular offenses. Perhaps the most significant accomplishment in this regard was the adoption of a uniform law of theft in place of the variety of common law offenses known as larceny, larceny by trick, false pretenses, and embezzlement. It also tried to increase the rationale and fairness of sentence for convicted criminals. It advocated a system of determinate sentencing that categorized all felonies into three penalty categories and all misdemeanors into two. Upper and lower limitations of sentences were established for each category, with the judge’s discretion permitted to determine the exact length ( 6.06, 6.08). Extended sentences were permitted for repeat offenders and career criminals ( 7.03, 7.04).

The American Law Institute never anticipated nor intended that its Model Penal Code would be accepted in its entirety anywhere nor would it result in the development of a uniform national penal code. The diverse political histories and demographics of the many states rendered this hope impossible. Rather, the institution hoped that the Code would inspire a comprehensive reevaluation of the criminal code in numerous jurisdictions and that its principles would be broadly applied. This expectation was not to be dashed for the institute. By 1980, thirty states had adopted new criminal codes, mostly as a result of the Model Penal Code, and another nine had either begun or finished code reforms pending approval. It is hardly an exaggeration to assert, as did Sanford Kadish, that the Model Penal Code had “permeated and transformed” American substantive law within three decades of the first circulation of Code drafts (p. 1144).

A last positive effect of the Model Penal Code is the impetus it gave to the effort to codify the federal criminal law for the first time in the truest sense of the word. In 1962, when the Proposed Official Draft of the Code was issued, federal criminal law was in a worse situation than that of the majority of states. Since the inception of the republic, it had developed in an unsystematic, fragmentary manner, and the earlier attempts to establish it on a more reasonable basis had not been very successful. In 1866, the U.S. Congress, disturbed by the unchecked growth of federal criminal law since 1800, appointed a commission to bring order to the chaos. The work of this panel resulted in the enactment of a set of updated statutes that, at the very least, reorganized federal penal provisions into some semblance of coherence (U.S. Congress). In 1897 and 1909, federal penal legislation underwent amendments and rearrangements (Appropriations Act of June 4, 1897, ch. 2, 30 Stat. 11; Act of March 4, 1909, ch. 321, 35 Stat. 1088 (codified in scattered portions of 18 U.S.C.)). After eight years of study by another panel, Congress enacted Title 18 of the United States Code in 1948, claiming it to be the first codification of federal criminal law. If it was a codification, it was of the Fieldian variety as opposed to the Benthamite-Livingstonian variety, and even that may be an exaggeration.

The National Commission on Reform of Federal Criminal Laws was established by Congress in 1966 to study the current state of federal criminal law and propose reforms. The measure was conducted in part to please an anxious public that demanded Congress do something about rapidly rising crime rates, but it was also driven by a genuine desire to reform and enhance the legislation. Congress made it abundantly clear that it desired a comprehensive reevaluation of federal criminal law, and its directive was followed. Eventually, the commission presented a comprehensive rewrite of the federal substantive law of crimes, and numerous legislation were immediately introduced for its enactment in some form.

Due in part to the efforts of Wechsler and his colleagues, the middle decades of the 20th century witnessed a general resurgence of interest in the field of criminal justice, as well as significant efforts to change the criminal code. The future will determine whether this marked the reversal of previous patterns of inattention and the beginning of a new, long-term trend, or whether it was only a brief infatuation with the topic.

Bibliography:

• American Law Institute. Model Penal Code: Proposed Official Draft. Philadelphia: ALI, 1962.
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• Beccaria, Cesare. On Crimes and Punishments (1764). Translated with an introduction by Henry Paolucci. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963.
• Boyd, Julian, ed. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 2. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950.
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