A youth club in every 'hood?

That's the new plan out of Great Britain, whose young people have the highest rates of drinking, drug use, gang membership, and fighting in all of Europe.

But just having a center at which to congregate may not do the trick. Youths need organized activities and mentorship.

So says the Institute for Public Policy Research, a British think tank. Research by the Institute determined that young people who participated in organized activities at age 16 were less likely to be depressed, living in poverty, or incarcerated as adults.

The research is available online, as is a BBC report and commentary.

Court interpreters increasingly needed

The proliferation of languages spoken in the United States has created a new and costly challenge for courts: How to provide an interpreter to each criminal defendant who claims to need one.

The challenge is garnering headlines with the dismissal of charges against a Liberian man accused of raping a 7-year-old relative. A court-appointed psychiatrist recommended that the defendant, Mahamu Kanneh, be given an interpreter. But his native language is Vai, which is spoken by only about 100,000 people in West Africa.

One interpreter tearfully left the courtroom because “she found the facts of the case disturbing,” according to a Washington Post story on the case, and a second was “rejected for faulty work.” The case was finally dismissed because a replacement could not be found in time to provide Kanneh with a speedy trial. The prosecutor's office in Montgomery County, Maryland, is appealing the dismissal.

Court interpreters and linguists say the case demonstrates the need for a national database of interpreters.

The full story is in the July 22 Washington Post.

Rape prosecution - an uphill battle

I’ve come across several stories lately pertaining to the difficulty of prosecuting rape cases. Many of you readers will have heard about the recent Nebraska trial in which the judge forbade witnesses – including the alleged victim – from using the word rape (or related words such as “victim,” “assailant,” or “sexual assault kit”). That trial resulted in a hung jury.

You are less likely to have heard about international data coming out of New Zealand, Australia, Great Britain, Scotland, and elsewhere about astonishingly low rape conviction rates in recent years. For example, data from Victoria, NZ indicate that only one of six rapes reported to police proceeds to prosecution and less than one-fourth of those result in a rape conviction. With only a tiny proportion of rapes being reported in the first place, this attrition has led to what some call the “virtual decriminalization” of sexual violence.

While these stories were coming across my desk this month, I happened to be in the middle of a provocative analysis by law professor and former sexual assault prosecutor Andrew Taslitz. Rape and the Culture of the Courtroom uses social science research to explain why rape prosecutions remain so difficult, despite the rape reform laws of the 1980s. Through linguistic analysis of actual cases, Taslitz shows how subtle innuendos, proxies, and other linguistic devices can cue jurors to place the victim into certain cultural narratives, such as that of “slut” or “scorned woman” – in other words, “liar.”

Taslitz’ linguistic analysis jives with my experiences in court. When I’ve been retained as an expert for the government (prosecution) in rape cases in which the defense was consent, I’ve been amazed at how rarely jurors convict even when the evidence is pretty solid and the woman has no plausible reason to lie. Taslitz emphasizes that even jurors who are consciously pro-feminist may fall prey to appeals to subconscious cultural scripts about virtuous womanhood.

Taslitz’ blueprint for legislative reforms includes such controversial ideas as allowing rape victims to present their stories in an uninterrupted narrative, using “intermediaries” rather than defense attorneys to question the victims, and having linguistic experts explain to jurors the effects of subconscious biases on decision-making.

My full review of the book is on Amazon.

The Nebraska trial of Pamir Safi, an Army reservist, is featured at Time Magazine’s online site.

Photo credit: fabbio (Creative Commons license).

Emotions and prisoner reintegration

Now that the punishment pendulum appears to have hit its most extreme, the new buzzword in criminology is "reintegration." How can criminal recidivism be reduced by helping newly released prisoners succeed? As I've previously posted, more resources are being devoted to projects aimed at assisting prisoners transition, through job training, housing, and mental health services.

A new study out of Australia looks at the role of a prisoner’s emotional state. The study, funded by the Criminology Research Council and available from the Australian Institute of Criminology, examines the association between successful reintegration and the emotions of depression, anger and anxiety.

Photo credit: Carf (Creative Commons License)

New report on racial disparities in sentencing

The Sentencing Project has issued a new report, “Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration by Race and Ethnicity.” The study found that African Americans were incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites and Latinos at nearly double the rate. The 23-page report is based on data from five states in the Northeast and Midwest. The report recommends “addressing disparities through changes in drug policy, mandatory sentencing laws, reconsideration of “race neutral” policies, and changes in resource allocation.”

Rand study: Mental health court cost-effective

People with mental illnesses are vastly overrepresented in prisons and jails.

In a promising attempt to rectify this problem, mental health courts have sprung up around the United States in the past decade. These courts are designed to divert nonviolent, mentally ill offenders out of their pattern of cyclical incarceration through individually tailored treatment programs.

In 1997, there were only four such courts nationwide. In 2004, the courts got a boost with passage of the federal Mentally Ill Offender Treatment and Crime Reduction Act, which authorized $50 million for states and counties to establish more mental health courts and provide other mental health resources to prisoners. Now, there are dozens of courts. As I write, one is even getting off the ground in my own county (Contra Costa County, California).

Because the courts are relatively new, they have not been widely studied. Now, the imminently respectable Rand Corporation has weighed in with a new study on the fiscal side of one such court, the Allegheny County Mental Health Court in Pennsylvania.

The study’s bottom-line conclusion: Sending people to treatment instead of to jail has the potential to save the taxpayers money.

The full report, “Justice, Treatment, and Cost,” is available online.

For more information on the movement toward reducing prison expansion through model prisoner reentry programs, see the web site of the Re-Entry Policy Council, a public/private partnership involving the U.S. departments of Justice, Labor, and Health.