Crime Prevention

The Bureau of Justice Assistance released a "Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP) Compliance Guide" this month to offer support to PIECP certification holders. First instituted in 1979, the PIECP encourages state and local governments to create work opportunities in prisons that aim to place justice-involved individuals in real-world environments that encourage meaningful employment opportunities upon release.

This past November, the Council of State Governments Justice Center in collaboration with the National Police Foundation published “Creating Buy-In: Best Practices for Collaborating with Referral Sources for Crisis Stabilization Units.” Crisis stabilization units (CSU) provide law enforcement officers and mobile crisis teams a safe space to bring individuals during a behavioral health crisis. Buy-in from referral sources, particularly law enforcement agencies, is crucial to ensuring that people are suitably connected to the appropriate CSU.

In September, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention released an analysis conducted by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) Infant Abductions Program. Often, the most challenging task at hand upon the receipt of a missing child report is identifying the key factors surrounding the case. This crucial assessment of the initial facts will determine what actions the responding law enforcement agency will perform.

In accordance with the Crime Victims with Disabilities Awareness Act, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released this month a report on the violent victimization rates of persons with and without disabilities using 2008-2019 National Crime Victimization Survey data. In 2019, the rate of violent victimization to persons with disabilities was nearly four times the rate of persons without disabilities.

This month, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) released a white paper that shares successful international interventions that have been initiated to foster desistance. Since the mid-1990s, there have been regularly sustained research efforts to expand global knowledge of why people stop offending, which have been instrumental for increased awareness of desistance causes. However, a critical gap remains of practical strategies for implementation in crime-prevention practices and sentencing procedures within the criminal justice system.

In August, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention conducted a literature review of national evidence-based research on restorative justice for juveniles. The framework has long been debated on its differences to more traditional interactions with justice-involved individuals. By uniting victims, justice-involved youths, community members, and other key stakeholders, restorative justice programs seek to help youths understand the implications of their actions and offer opportunities for community reconnection and harm reduction.

This year, AEquitas released a guide for preventing and responding to violent crime by enhancing prosecutors’ ability to build safer communities through increased collaboration with community leaders. As key members of the criminal justice system, prosecutors can play an important role in uniting community leaders to create and implement policies, practices, and initiatives for sustainability and the reduction of violence.

The Vera Institute of Justice has recently developed a guide to analyzing jail data to better inform impactful policy creation and social change. The guide provides strategies for obtaining quantitative data on jail populations from local government and other sources, definitions of data points generally collected about jail populations, best-practices for prepping data sets for most effective analysis, and suggestions for different types of analysis that could be performed with that data.

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) and the National Gang Center (NCG) have published a guide for law enforcement officials to developing a framework to address youth gang problems in their communities. A Law Enforcement Official’s Guide to the OJJDP Comprehensive Gang Model aims to provide law enforcement leaders with an overview of the OJJDP Comprehensive Gang Model, which is an evidence-based framework for the coordination of multiple data-driven, anti-gang and violence-reduction strategies to address youth gang problems.