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In the mid-1990s New York City inaugurated its era of mass misdemeanors by pioneering policing tactics featuring intensive enforcement against low-level offenses as part of its quality-of-life and urban crime control strategy. These tactics have since spread across the country and around the globe. But the New York City experiment embarrasses our traditional understanding of how an expansion of criminal enforcement should work: as misdemeanor arrests climbed dramatically as part of an intentional law enforcement strategy, the rate of criminal conviction fell sharply. Using extensive, original data from a multiyear study, this Article exposes an underappreciated model of criminal administration in New York City's processing of mass misdemeanors, one that makes sense of this trend. Misdemeanor justice in New York City has largely abandoned what I call the adjudicative model of criminal law administration–concerned with adjudicating specific cases–and instead operates under what I call the managerial concemodel–rned with managing people through engagement with the criminal justice system over time. The adjudicative model holds that courts stand between the proscriptions of substantive criminal law and the hard treatment of punishment by employing the criminal process to select the right people for punishment and to determine the proper amount. The managerial model does not depend on punishing individual instances of lawbreaking, but rather on using the criminal process to sort and regulate the populations targeted with these policing tactics over time. These findings challenge the \"assembly-line\" account so often associated with lower criminal courts, showing that misdemeanor courts engage in a tremendous amount of discretionary differentiation in the treatment of the people who flow through their operations. However, the basis of this differentiation is not what we would expect from the traditional adjudicative model of criminal law, namely guilt and blameworthiness.

Objective : to fill a research gap by examining the shortand long-term impact of community mediation in criminal misdemeanor cases within the context of potentially ongoing relationships. Methods : dialectical approach to cognition of social phenomena, using the general scientific and specific scientific methods of cognition, based on it, including telephone polling and studying cases data. Results : Diversion of criminal misdemeanors to mediation by district attorneys has been practiced since the 1970s, but research on its impact on critical outcomes like recidivism is scant and outdated. This quasi-experimental study compares 78 mediated cases from a county that diverts cases to mediation with 128 cases in a similar neighboring county that does not, using phone surveys and case review to ask whether recidivism in mediated cases differs from cases prosecuted or treated as usual over the subsequent year. Controlling for case factors and attitudes toward conflict, a case that is not mediated was five times more likely to result in judicial action, five times more likely to result in jury trial demand, and ten times more likely to result in supervised probation or jail time, and mediated cases were almost five times less likely to return to criminal court in the subsequent year than those that were not mediated. Scientific novelty : Preliminary analysis of case characteristics revealed that cases in the mediation and comparison group had the following characteristics: defendants had no prior felony convictions, did not have multiple misdemeanor charges, and had no outstanding warrants. Charges involving any type of weapon, drugs, or violence more serious than second degree assault had been excluded from the comparison group since they are usually excluded from diversion to mediation. Practical significance : the main provisions and conclusions of the article can be used in scientific, pedagogical and law enforcement activities when considering the issues related to mediation in criminal misdemeanor cases. The article was first published in English language by Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society and The Western Society of Criminology Hosting by Scholastica. For more information please contact: CCJLS@WesternCriminology.org. For original publication: Charkoudian, L., Walter, J., Harmon-Darrow, C., Bernstein, J. (2021). Mediation in Criminal Misdemeanor Cases. Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society, 22 (3), 14–29. Publication URL: https://ccjls.scholasticahq.com/article/30144-mediation-in-criminal-misdemeanor-cases  

Court-related fines and fees are widely levied on criminal defendants who are frequently poor and have little capacity to pay. Such financial obligations may produce a criminalization of poverty, where later court involvement results not from crime but from an inability to meet the financial burdens of the legal process. We test this hypothesis using a randomized controlled trial of court-related fee relief for misdemeanor defendants in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma. We find that relief from fees does not affect new criminal charges, convictions, or jail bookings after 12 months. However, control respondents were subject to debt collection efforts at significantly higher rates that involved new warrants, additional court debt, tax refund garnishment, and referral to a private debt collector. Despite significant efforts at debt collection among those in the control group, payments to the court totaled less than 5 percent of outstanding debt. The evidence indicates that court debt charged to indigent defendants neither caused nor deterred new crime, and the government obtained little financial benefit. Yet, fines and fees contributed to a criminalization of low-income defendants, placing them at risk of ongoing court involvement through new warrants and debt collection.

In misdemeanor cases, pretrial detention poses a particular problem because it may induce innocent defendants to plead guilty in order to exit jail, potentially creating widespread error in case adjudication. While practitioners have long recognized this possibility, empirical evidence on the downstream impacts of pretrial detention on misdemeanor defendants and their cases remains limited. This Article uses detailed data on hundreds of thousands of misdemeanor cases resolved in Harris County, Texas—the third-largest county in the United States—to measure the effects of pretrial detention on case outcomes and future crime. We find that detained defendants are 25% more likely than similarly situated releasees to plead guilty, are 43% more likely to be sentenced to jail, and receive jail sentences that are more than twice as long on average. Furthermore, those detained pretrial are more likely to commit future crimes, which suggests that detention may have a criminogenic effect. These differences persist even after fully controlling for the initial bail amount, offense, demographic information, and criminal history characteristics. Use of more limited sets of controls, as in prior research, overstates the adverse impacts of detention. A quasi-experimental analysis based on case timing confirms that these differences likely reflect the causal effect of detention. These results raise important constitutional questions and suggest that Harris County could save millions of dollars per year, increase public safety, and reduce wrongful convictions with better pretrial release policy.

While research provides numerous insights about the fear and insecurity that Latino immigrants experience at the hands of the police, much less is known about the experiences and practices of local police vis-à-vis Latino immigrant residents. This article contributes to research on street-level bureaucracies and immigrant incorporation by examining police practices in a new immigrant destination. Drawing on two years of fieldwork with the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, it offers an extended ethnographic look at policing dilemmas in the era of immigration control. As the findings reveal, police bureaucracies respond to immigrant residents in contradictory ways. On one hand, the department has an official community policing program to increase trust and communication with Latino immigrant residents. On the other hand, street-level patrol officers undermine these efforts by citing and arresting Latino residents who lack state-issued ID. Thus, alongside ostensibly sincere efforts to incorporate immigrant residents, ultimately, police produce a form of social control and urban discipline through their discretionary decisions.

Objective: to examine the court processing of shoplifting offenses before and after the 2014 passage of Mississippi House Bill 585 in a rural jurisdiction.Methods: dialectical approach to cognition of social phenomena using the general scientific (analysis, synthesis, induction) and specific scientific (formal-legal, systemic, comparative-legal, sociological) methods of cognition.Results: the research revealed several important policy implications. The first revolves around the importance of reducing the number of individuals charged with shoplifting that miss their court appearance. Previous research has revealed that, in many jurisdictions, individuals fail to appear in court not because they consciously refuse to appear but often because they are unaware or unable to appear. This may be a particular problem in the study city because they lack reliable public transportation of any form (making individuals heavily reliant on friends and relatives to help them get to their court appearance) and the court does not have a court appearance reminder notification system in place. This jurisdiction, and others who share these problems, would likely be well-served in considering a notification system whereby the individual who is to appear at court is notified 48-72 hours prior to their court appearance and required to respond to that notification. If no response is received, a follow-up inquiry should be submitted. If no response is received after the second notification, additional steps could be implemented prior to charging the individual with failure to appear or adjudicating them as guilty in absentia. A second important implication from this study has to do with the role of Walmart in the local community and criminal justice system. Walmart often has the largest loss prevention presence of any business in small, rural communities like this one. Thus, these security personnel have a vested interest in reducing shoplifting at Walmart . Local criminal justice officials should thus make special efforts to incorporate Walmart into crime prevention and reduction strategies in the community. Regular meetings between Walmart security personnel, the police chief and sheriff, and judges and corrections personnel would likely result in strategies that would both reduce shoplifting at Walmart and reduce the burden of shoplifting.Scientific novelty: the work showed that House Bill 585 increased the threshold required to move shoplifting from a misdemeanor to a felony (from $500 to $1,000) and took away the requirement that the third and subsequent arrests for shoplifting (for less than $500) were automatically enhanced as felonies. The findings reveal that the gender and racial gap in shoplifting arrests in the jurisdiction under study were reduced after House Bill 585. On the other hand, overall numbers of shoplifting arrests, failures to appear, and guilty dispositions increased after House Bill 585.Practical significance: the main provisions and conclusions of the article can be used in scientific, pedagogical and law enforcement activities when considering issues related to the crime prevention and suppression.

Academic misconduct among students is common, particularly now that AI tools are widely available. Students with dark personality traits may be more likely to engage in misconduct. Drawing on social cognitive theory, this study examines how the dark personality traits of materialism, narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism are associated with academic dishonesty, anxiety, and procrastination, and, in turn, frustration, negative thinking and generative AI use habits. Self-reported data from 504 Chinese university art students were analyzed using structural equation modeling. The findings highlight how personality traits are related to problematic academic behaviors and psychological difficulties. Academic institutions should provide appropriate training and psychological support to counter academic dishonesty and ensure students understand the value of academic ethics.

As the US reconsiders its stance on mass incarceration, misdemeanor decriminalization has emerged as an increasingly popular reform. Seen as a potential cure for crowded jails and an overburdened defense bar, many states are eliminating jailtime for minor offenses such as marijuana possession and driving violations, replacing those crimes with so-called \"nonjailable\" or \"fine-only\" offenses. But decriminalization has a little-known dark side. Decriminalization preserves many of the punitive features and collateral consequences of the criminal misdemeanor experience, even as it strips defendants of counsel and other procedural protections. It actually expands the reach of the criminal apparatus by making it easier to impose fines and supervision on an ever-widening population, a population that ironically often ends up incarcerated anyway when they cannot afford fines or comply with supervisory conditions. As courts turn increasingly to fines and fees to fund their own operations, decriminalization threatens to become a kind of regressive tax, turning the poorest populations into funding fodder for the judiciary and other government budgets.

During the First World War, a criminalization process started in Hungary and economic crimes began to be regulated. Due to the financial crisis and the economic recession, the function of criminal law changed because it had to protect the national economy and its main institutions, which led to the adoption of Act IX of 1916 on overpricing misdemeanors. After analyzing the relevant legal literature and the parliamentary debates from the Hungarian Parliamentary Collection, I draw the conclusion that the act was intended to stop the increase of the prices of convenience goods and illegal chain trade. After a dogmatic analysis, I examined the decisions of the Royal Regional Court of Budapest in the Budapest City Archives and reached the conclusion that the courts used a teleological interpretation regarding the definitional elements unknown in the criminal law before 1916.

In 1982, James Q. Wilson and George Kelling suggested in an influential article in the Atlantic Monthly that targeting minor disorder could help reduce more serious crime. More than twenty years later, the three most populous cities in the United States-New York, Chicago, and, most recently, Los Angeles-have all adopted at least some aspect of Wilson and Kelling's theory, primarily through more aggressive enforcement of minor misdemeanor laws. Remarkably little, though, is currently known about the effect of broken windows policing on crime. According to a recent National Research Council report, existing research does not provide strong support for the broken windows hypothesis-with the possible exception of a 2001 study of crime trends in New York City by George Kelling and William Sousa. In this Article, we reexamine the 2001 Kelling and Sousa study and independently analyze the crime data from New York City for the 1989-1998 period. In addition, we present results from an important social experiment known as Moving to Opportunity (MTO) underway in five cities, including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, as well as Baltimore and Boston, that provides a unique opportunity to overcome some of the problems with previous empirical tests of the broken windows hypothesis. Under this program, approximately 4,600 low-income families living in high-crime public housing communities characterized by high rates of social disorder were randomly assigned housing vouchers to move to less disadvantaged and disorderly communities. Taken together, the evidence from New York City and from the five-city social experiment provides no support for a simple first-order disorder-crime relationship as hypothesized by Wilson and Kelling, nor for the proposition that broken windows policing is the optimal use of scarce law enforcement resources.