Community courts

This plenary featured three significant areas of NIJ research investment that have had a tremendous impact on both the research community and the field of practice: advances in forensic DNA, police body armor standards, and place-based analyses of public safety. Each topic was explored by a collection of people representing the researcher, practitioner, policymaker, and advocacy perspectives, exploring how evidence generation resulted in changes that improved public safety and yielded more equitable criminal justice outcomes.

No single criminal justice agency can promote desistance on its own. Partnerships across state, local, and federal agencies — along with the support of family and community stakeholders — are instrumental in supporting desistance from crime and reducing recidivism.

Law enforcement, courts, corrections, and community supervision agencies play a key role in the desistance process and reducing recidivism.

This webinar features a discussion of previously published research on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 Booker decision - which effectively transformed the United States Sentencing Guidelines from a mandatory, to an advisory, system. The presentation will address selected research findings from the last 15 years. Individual participants will briefly review their previous research findings with particular attention paid to the analytic methods used.

On February 16-18, 2021, the National Institute of Justice hosted the Virtual Conference on School Safety: Bridging Research to Practice to Safeguard Our Schools. This video includes a welcome message, an overview of the Comprehensive School Safety Initiative and School Safety Research at NIJ, and the presentation on "A Philadelphia Story: Innovating and Improving in a Large Urban District," by Abigail Gray and Kevin Bethel, School District of Philadelphia.

Change doesn't come easy, particularly within an institution as large and complex as the criminal justice system. Greg Berman, Director of the Center for Court Innovation, offered lessons from several efforts to make reform stick in criminal justice settings. In particular, he focused on the development of community courts — experimental court projects that are attempting to reduce both crime and incarceration in dozens of cities across the U.S. and around the world.