this story caught my eye this week — it is an interesting example of creative — and possibly restorative–Justice. the new york times sets up the story as follows: “What punishment should be imposed on a man who shot a police officer almost 40 years ago and fled to Canada, but went on to live an upstanding life as a husband and father who worked in a library?”

the answer, in this case, is an unusual plea bargain in which the offender, joseph pannell, will serve 30 days in jail, spend 2 years on probation, and give $250,000 to a foundation that helps the families of injured chicago police officers. the broker of the deal was actually the victim, who suffered permanent damage to his arm, but said: “Something good had to come out of this…The easy way out would have been to have a trial, and cost this county hundreds of thousands of dollars, have him go to jail, and cost the prison system hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

for his part, pannell, now 58, took responsibility for the shooting which took place when he was 19, saying: “We must seek to move away from adversarial confrontation and towards peaceful reconciliation and conflict resolution…Today is about acceptance of responsibility, atonement and redemption.”

no one went to prison, yet all parties seem satisfied with this resolution. too bad such creative Justice negotiations are the exception rather than the rule.

the bureau of Justice statistics just released a new report on campus crime and law enforcement. what can be learned from these data? in comparison to the general population, college campuses have a relatively low rate of violent crime (about 62 per 100,000 population on campus, relative to about 466 per 100,000 in the general population). overall, rates of both violence and property crime declined on campus from 1994 to 2004. in both years, crime rates were significantly higher in private than in public schools, with the private campus violent crime rate actually rising over this period. i’m not sure how to account for this, but i’d imagine there is great heterogeneity within both the private and the public campus categories.

the report shows that NYU had the largest campus law enforcement agency, but that howard university reported the greatest number of sworn officers (those with full arrest powers granted by a state or local government).

top-10 campuses ranked by number of full-time law enforcement employees
345 New York University
235 University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
202 Temple University
200 Howard University
194 University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey
190 University of Southern California
180 Michigan State University
170 University of Alabama – Birmingham
156 George Washington University
155 University of Florida

i’d like to see more than the top-10 before drawing any inferences, but east coast universities such as temple and penn appear to hire more sworn officers than universities in the west or midwest. i may end up digging a bit deeper into these data, as there is some talk of expanding campus law enforcement to address security concerns at the minnversity.

top-10 campuses ranked by number of sworn officers
166 Howard University
119 Temple University
100 University of Pennsylvania
97 University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey
95 George Washington University
86 University of Florida
79 Georgia State University
78 Yale University
76 University of Maryland – College Park
76 Vanderbilt University

having just posted on an espn magazine article about perceptions of the n.b.a. as an urban league, i came across a similarly thought- provoking observation in the same issue. brian scalabrine of the celtics offers this li’l thought experiment on race and perceived criminality:

i’m not sure he’s correct, but mr. scalabrine’s argument is so well-stated that i might have to try it out on my delinquency class this semester. having read the quote, i just had to check out scalabrine.com to see where the young man went to school and whether he might’ve taken a good sociology course or two. sure enough, his bio notes that mr. scalabrine “earned his degree in social science from USC.”

as a wise sociologist told me in graduate school, “the people won’t tell ya a thing if yer sittin’ way over there in the non-smoking section.” these days, however, smoking is forbidden in public spaces throughout my home state of minnesota.

well, at least one clever smart alec is resisting the status politics of the smoking ban. mark benjamin noticed that the law carved out certain exceptions to the statewide prohibition:

“scientific study participants, native americans, tobacconists, truckers, farmers, actors and actresses and … wait! What was that last one? That’s right. When the smoking ban was debated, some theater-going, latte-drinking, Volvo-driving legislators got their undies all in a bundle that a few performers might not be allowed to smoke cigarettes on stage. Really. They worried that performers might have to suck on straws or pencils or — you know — “act” like they were smoking. Heavens! Whatever would become of The Theatre?”

spotting this loophole, mr. benjamin hatched a novel plan. he was so moved by the specter of heroic old regulars chased out of the state’s vfw’s and american legion halls that he suggested the following:

“if you’re a bar owner and don a beret, declare your bar a stage, hand out scripts and direct your patrons — ahem — performers to fire up some heaters, then you’ve got a bona fide “theatrical production” going on…Our shameless legislators favored the artistic integrity of a few theater owners over the blue-collar work ethic of a few thousand small bar owners. But our bar owners don’t have to take it any longer. If they want, they can put on their very own “Theater Nights,” set up “Acting” and “No Acting” sections, notify patrons that there will be some smoking during the performance and defy the government to define Art. It’s not the Freedom to Breathe Act; it’s the Freedom to Act Act. If you’re a small bar owner, hand out scripts and cigs and tell your patrons to break a leg.

mr. benjamin wasn’t just posing a hypothetical. last weekend, he organized an impromptu production of the tobacco monologues at a friendly bar called barnacles, somewhere in greater minnesota. there’s a video, of course, with a theatrically dressed mr. benjamin waxing poetic about the class politics of smoke-free bars.
though i’ve never smoked and i enjoy the fresh air in modern taverns, i’ve gotta confess that i’m rooting for this guy. of course, i’ll be rooting from the non-acting section.

grant duwe of the minnesota department of corrections emailed today with news of an opening for a research analyst. the department is doing some innovative research these days, so the job would be intellectually rewarding as well as remunerative.

Research Analyst Specialist – Minnesota Department of Corrections (St. Paul, MN)

Open Period: February 11, 2008-March 14, 2008

Position: Full-time permanent

Salary Range: $18.72-$27.46 hourly

Job Duties: This position will be responsible for evaluating correctional programs and conducting research on sex offenders, offender re-entry, and restorative Justice.

Minimum Qualifications Required:
* Graduate degree (Master’s or Ph.D.) in the social sciences (Criminology, Criminal Justice, Sociology or similar) with advanced training and/or professional experience in quantitative and qualitative research methods and multivariate statistics.

AND

* Demonstrated ability to write research reports for a variety of audiences, as evidenced by the preparation of legislative reports, program evaluation reports, or publications in peer-reviewed academic journals.

* Demonstrated ability to use SPSS, SQL or Access in combining multiple data sets into one final database to conduct bivariate and multivariate statistical analyses.

* Human relations and strong written/oral communications skills essential to work with department managers and staff, research and corrections professionals in the community and other state agency staff.

* Experience managing multiple research projects.

Preferred Qualifications:
* Experience in the criminal Justice system and field of corrections.

* Knowledge of advanced multivariate statistical techniques (e.g. logistic regression, poisson regression, Cox proportional hazards models) commonly used in corrections research.

* Demonstrated ability to design surveys and use appropriate statistical techniques to analyze and interpret survey data.

To apply: go to http://www.doer.state.mn.us/ and get your resume in Resume Builder. Save it and submit it into the database. Search for Job posting number: 08CORR000034. The job posting can also be found here.

second chance day on the hill is bringing people to the minnesota state capitol to talk about reintegration of those with criminal records. the core principle of the organizers is that “punishment should have a beginning and an end,” which might have been taken straight from beccaria (1767).

sometimes department chairs just gaze in wide wonder at the issues awaiting them on any given morning. i arrived today, for example, to find that someone had broken into the li’l glass bookcase showcasing “new releases” by our faculty.

dang, i really like that case. it is positioned outside some molasses-slow elevators, so it draws great attention to the many fine books written by our faculty. the thieves only made off with about a third of the monographs in the case, so i couldn’t resist trying to suss out why they selected some books and left others behind.

part of me worried that the miscreants were students upset with book costs, but i’m pretty sure it was just kids. unlike the university of chicago, the university of pennsylvania, or other urban campuses i’ve visited, the minnversity maintains a light security presence. i often encounter small groups of males in their mid-teens walking the halls on sundays, sometimes just before i discover smashed-in vending machines or other mischief. i’d long assumed that bitter faculty members had been smashing the candy machines, but now i’m starting to put two and two together.

at least the miscreants broke the lock, rather than smashing the more-costly-to-replace glass case itself. a few mysteries remain:

1. why did they bother breaking into a locked case to steal books when there was a free shelf just five feet away, loaded with books that had greater resale value? the poor saps could’ve taken a free copy of earl babbie’s bestselling methods book, for example, which would have brought a far greater return on their efforts than the more esoteric titles in the case. i think that the locked case probably signaled market value, so we might have been better off leaving our titles on an unlocked shelf and locking up some old telephone directories and 1974 software manuals instead.

2. how did they decide which books to steal? i was outraged (outraged, i tell you!) that they literally reached right past my book but stole both of hartmann’s titles. the nerve! didn’t they read the jackets? c’mon, which of us is out there advocating for the rights of convicted felons? i was getting pretty worked up about this until my research assistant reassured me that, of course, the thieves must have already purchased several copies of locked out: felon disenfranchisement and american democracy. aside from their anti-uggen bias, they didn’t seem to choose hardcover over paperback, or qualitative over quantitative, or brand new over slightly older, or attractive cover art over less-attractive cover art. why didn’t they just grab ’em all? my working theory involves a fargo-like dispute among the co-conspirators, so i wouldn’t be surprised to discover, say, a severed human foot beneath our industrial paper shredder.

3. the replacement costs will be high for the department, but what is the street value of a handful of sociology books? wouldn’t they have been better off breaking into the candy machines again?

4. it looks like i’ve got a decision to make. should we adopt the time-tested but lame method of stapling book jackets to a department bulletin board? or, should we stick to our guns, buy some new books, and bring in a serious security force?

the los angeles times maintains a homicide report blog with the names, faces, and brief stories of each of the area’s murder victims. the daily entries quickly orient readers to the super-concentration of homicide along age, race, class, and gender lines. the grim catalog is powerfully affecting, even for those familiar with the bivariate correlates of violent victimization. we might already know that young african american and latino men from poor neighborhoods are disproportionately victimized, but we might better appreciate the force of such patterns after reading the individual stories arrayed on page after page of cases.

via the urban institute’s Justice policy center:

Broken Bonds: Understanding and Addressing the Needs of Children with Incarcerated Mothers
Thursday, February 14
9 am ET / 8 am CT / 7 am MT / 6 am PT
Program length: 1.5 hours

Register Now
Description
As the population of incarcerated women grows, so does the number of children whose mothers are absent from their lives. Current estimates indicate that on any given day, more than 150,000 children have a mother in prison, yet far too little is known about these children and their needs and experiences. What are their home environments like before, during, and after incarceration? If they are in foster care, when did they enter the system, and what are their prospects for family stability? What are the barriers to healthy mother-child relationships? What emotional and behavioral challenges do these children face? What can charitable organizations, service providers, and policymakers do to address those challenges?

With these questions in mind, this panel seeks to cast a bright light on this often invisible population of children. The discussion will illustrate the scope of the problem; explore the challenges these children will likely encounter as they negotiate new living arrangements, family relationships, and financial circumstances; and highlight programs and policies that hold promise for better serving this vulnerable population.

Speakers:
Sandra Barnhill, executive director and CEO, Foreverfamily
Amy Dworsky, senior researcher, Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago
Thomasina Hiers, director of programs and services, Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services
Nancy La Vigne, senior research associate, Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute
Moderator: Laura Sullivan, correspondent, National Public Radio

Register for the Webcast Today!
The audio recording of the webcast will be available online at http://www.urban.org/Pressroom/events/index.cfm by February 19.
The webcast is free. To join the webcast, you need a computer with a high-speed Internet connection. The audio for the webcast is available over the Internet only (no telephone connections).

Resources
Families Left Behind: The Hidden Costs of Incarceration and Reentry (pdf)
Prisoners Once Removed: The Impact of Incarceration and Reentry on Children, Families, and Communities
Audio recording – Racial Disparity in the Child Welfare System

via nij: the national institute of Justice is hosting an online discussion forum this week on research bearing on the prison rape elimination act. even basic questions about the prevalence of prison sexual assault are fiercely contested, so i’d expect a lively discussion.

Sexual Victimization in Prisons: Moving Toward Elimination

February 7, 2008: 2pm–4pm ESTFree online event. Registration required.
One of every 22 men and women sentenced to imprisonment in the United States reported that they were assaulted sexually while incarcerated.

Sexual victimization in prisons is the issue, elimination is the goal. Join a group of experts to discuss the state of Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) research—what data is available and what’s yet to come. The experts will examine ways to move from better understanding to reliable prevention and eventual elimination. View a detailed description of the event and register today.