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Despite a growing body of research on prison visitation, very few studies have examined visitation among committed juvenile offenders. As a result, we have little understanding of how youth experience visits and why some never receive them. This article fills these gaps. Using surveys collected from 1,202 youth released from residential facilities in Florida, we found that among youth who were visited, they had positive experiences with visits and that families went to great lengths to visit. For those youth who were not visited, the most common barrier was distance from home. However, some youth were not visited because they refused visits or because families withheld visits as punishment. Moreover, despite the possibility that lack of visitation is harmful, we found that most not-visited youth had positive perceptions of their future success. Policy implications and directions for research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study provides an evaluation of the major policy shift in sentencing practices over the past half-century - namely the shift from indeterminate to determinant sentencing policies and the use of sentencing guidelines. The theoretical literature on courtroom organization and focal concerns informs this evaluation of determinate sentencing practices in Florida. Drawing from prior theoretical and empirical research, hierarchical linear and generalized linear models are estimated to assess courtroom effects on individual level sentencing outcomes. The findings document that location matters when sentenced in Florida. Specifically, the likelihood of being sentenced to prison and the length of sentence varies across counties, even after controlling for individual case and offender characteristics and a variety of contextual characteristics. Additionally, the influence of legal and extra-legal factors on prison in/out and sentence length decisions varies significantly across counties. Several court characteristics, including court size, caseload pressure and trial rate assert direct influence on a county's likelihood of prison in/out and mean sentence length decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past three decades, the number of people housed in local jails has more than tripled. Yet when it comes to reforming the nation's incarceration policies, write Jennifer Copp and William Bales, researchers, policymakers, and the public alike have focused almost exclusively on state and federal prisons. If you took a snapshot on a single day, the prison population would far exceed the population of local jails. But, the authors show, compared to prisons, roughly 18 times more people are admitted to and released from jails every year. Furthermore, about two-thirds of jail inmates have yet to be convicted of a crime, and they often languish behind bars only because they can't afford to pay bail. And although jails are intended for adults, on any given day roughly 4,000 young people under age 18 are confined in local jails. In this article, Copp and Bales provide a broad overview of US jails, including facilities and operations, characteristics of inmates, and the conditions of confinement, and they make a number of suggestions for policy and practice. In particular, they argue that the justice system should slash the use of money bail, which disproportionately harms the poor and minorities. Specifically, they recommend that jurisdictions adopt validated risk assessment tools to help make decisions about who should and shouldn't be detained before trial; expand pretrial services that can, among other things, monitor compliance with release conditions; divert more people away from the criminal justice system; consider alternatives to jail, such as probation, for convicted offenders; and expedite case processing to decrease the time to trial and thus the overall length of jail stays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Specter program was a vocational work program offered by the Florida Department of Corrections from 1997–2012. Using propensity score matching, inmates who earned a Specter vocational certificate had statistically significantly lower rates of recidivism within three years of release from prison compared to inmates who had not earned a certificate. However, those who earned a Specter certificate did not have statistically significant improvements in postrelease employment within three months of release. As a result, we will discuss the possibilities for conflicting findings regarding employment and recidivism as well as potential avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Conventional wisdom holds that white‐collar offenders operate with relative impunity because of widespread public and governmental apathy. The present study, however, examines whether public tolerance and governmental leniency toward white‐collar offenders have endured the series of national white‐collar crime scandals emerging in 2001–2002. This study analyzes sentencing guidelines data from Florida for the period 1994 to 2004, modeling legal and extra-legal factors related to the decision to incarcerate white‐collar and street property offenders. In/out incarceration sentences imposed upon white‐collar offenders are compared with those imposed upon burglars and thieves to determine whether 21st‐century white‐collar offenders are treated more leniently than street‐level property offenders. Additional analyses consider the roles of social status and of recent corporate scandals in influencing sentencing disparities. Findings indicate that, despite operating under sentencing guidelines designed to reduce disparities, white‐collar offenders are afforded greater leniency, though this relationship varies by the type of white‐collar crime considered, the offender's social status, and whether the sentencing occurred before or after the Enron scandal. Conclusions emphasize the salience of the definition of white‐collar crime when discussing punitiveness disparities and the relationship between white‐collar crime scandals and punishment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite the marked increase in incarceration over the past 30 years and the fact that roughly two thirds of released offenders are rearrested within 3 years of release, we know little about how the social ecology of the areas to which offenders return may influence their recidivism or whether it disproportionately affects some groups more than others. Drawing on recent scholarship on prisoner reentry and macrolevel predictors of crime, this study examines a large sample of prisoners released to Florida communities to investigate how two dimensions of social ecology—resource deprivation and racial segregation—may independently, and in interaction with specific populations, influence recidivism. The findings suggest that ecology indeed is consequential for recidivism, and it differentially influences some groups more than others. We discuss these findings and their implications for theory, research, and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study related to prison drug treatment in Florida to examine the effectiveness of drug treatment for incarcerated inmates upon succeeding community reintegration and desistance from crime. Florida's drug treatment prison has the third largest state prison population in the United States. Prisoners who participate in prison-based substance abuse treatment programs have been more successful in society reentry.

Presents the relative effect mandatory minimum sentences have on the length and cost of imprisonment in Florida along with their accumulative effect on prison capacity needs. Consequences these sentencing options produce; Types of mandatory minimum sentences; Methods and data sources; Mandatory minimum sentencing and the length and cost of imprisonment; Historical trends; Projected inmate populations under mandatory minimum sentencing; Conclusions.

The authors offers their concerns on analysis of correlates of terrorist attacks in the U.S. by country. Topics covered include violent actions of terrorist and paramilitary groups focusing on specific geographic sites, the importance of law enforcement agencies in prevention of terrorist attacks in the country, and the role of law enforcement agencies in addressing cultural diversity and subsequent intergroup tensions in their local communities.

A justification for lengthier stays in prison stems from the belief that spending more time in prison reduces recidivism. Extant studies, however, have provided limited evidence for that belief and, indeed, suggest the effect of time served may be minimal. Few studies have employed rigorous methodological approaches, examined time spans of more than one to two years, or investigated the potential for the relationship between recidivism and time served to be curvilinear. Drawing on prior scholarship, this paper identifies three sets of hypotheses about the functional form of the time served and recidivism relationship. Using generalized propensity score analysis to examine data on 90,423 inmates released from Florida prisons, we find three patterns: greater time served initially increases recidivism but then, after approximately one year, decreases it, and, after approximately two years, exerts no effect; estimation of the effects associated with durations of more than five years are uncertain. The results point to potential criminogenic and beneficial effects of time served and underscore the need to identify how varying durations of incarceration affect recidivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]