| Recent Research Reports in the Field of Criminal Justice |
| Compiled December 2016 |
| for |
| The Florida Council of Churches |
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Civil Citations
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| 1. “Stepping Up: Florida’s Top Civil Citation Efforts: 2016 Study.” ACLU of Florida. |
| a. Publication Date: Sept. 2016. |
| b. Type: State-specific study |
| c. Florida is mentioned 142 times. |
| 2. “Stepping Up: Florida’s Top Civil Citation Efforts: 2016 County Report.” ACLU of Florida. |
| a. Publication Date: Sept. 2016. |
| b. Type: County-specific study |
| c. Florida is mentioned 309 times. |
| 3. “Civil Citation Dashboard.” Florida Department of Juvenile Justice. |
| a. Publication Date: July 2016. |
| b. Type: Official Florida government data |
| 4. “State Policy Implementation Project: CIVIL CITATIONS FOR MINOR OFFENSES.” American Bar Association: Criminal Justice Section. |
| a. Publication Date: Oct. 2015. |
| b. Type: ABA Report and recommendations |
| c. Florida is mentioned 16 times. |
| d. Selected quote(s): “The ABA urges states to implement civil citation programs for non-violent, minor misdemeanors to promote judicial efficiency and save taxpayer money.” “Of communities implementing these programs, Florida’s civil citation programs stand out as models that focus on rehabilitation, community safety, and efficiency.” |
| 5. “Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.” President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. |
| a. Publication Date: May 2015. |
| b. Type: Nationwide report & recommendations covering a variety of criminal justice issues |
| c. Florida is mentioned 9 times. |
| d. Selected quote(s): “Law enforcement agencies should consider adopting preferences for seeking ‘least harm’ resolutions, such as diversion programs or warnings and citations in lieu of arrest for minor infractions.” |
| 6. “An Adult Civil Citation Program Can Save Taxpayer Dollars.” Florida TaxWatch. |
| a. Publication Date: Jan. 2014. |
| b. Type: Nationwide report from an “independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit taxpayer research institute and government watchdog” |
| c. Florida is mentioned 24 times. |
| 7. “Smart Justice for Drug, Alcohol and Other Non-Violent Misdemeanors.” Civil Citation Network / Florida Juvenile Justice Association. |
| a. Publication Date: Sept. 2013. |
| b. Type: Summary of Florida’s Adult Civil Citation Program |
| c. Florida is mentioned 6 times. |
| d. Selected quote(s): “In Florida, taxpayers spend over $2.3 billion a year to supervise and incarcerate offenders.” “Reliance on non-incarceration intervention is both more effective and more cost-efficient than traditionally invasive methods and will allow Florida to redirect valuable resources from prosecuting nonviolent misdemeanors to more vital and pressing public safety concerns.” |
| 8. “Florida Makes Pact with State’s Youthful Offenders.” National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. |
| a. Publication Date: Winter 2007. |
| b. Florida is mentioned 14 times. |
| 9. “The Move from the Principal’s Office to the Police Station: Criminalizing Nonviolent Student Behavior.” Seton Hall University. |
| a. Publication date: May 1, 2013. |
| b. Type: Academic analysis |
| c. Florida is mentioned 17 times. |
| 10. “Collection of Supporting Research.” Civil Citation Network. |
| a. Type: Collection of resources on civil citation programs and other alternatives to arrest |
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Death Penalty
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| 1. “The Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective.” Oxford University Press. |
| a. Publication date: 2015. |
| b. Type: Global report |
| c. Florida is mentioned 33 times. |
| 2. “Facts about the Death Penalty.” Death Penalty Information Center. |
| a. Publication Date: Nov. 17, 2016. |
| b. Type: Fact Sheet |
| c. Florida is mentioned 4 times. |
| d. Selected quote(s): “Enforcing the death penalty costs Florida $51 million a year above what it would cost to punish all first-degree murderers with life in prison without parole. Based on the 44 executions Florida had carried out since 1976, that amounts to a cost of $24 million for each execution. (Palm Beach Post, January 4, 2000).” |
| 2. “Support for death penalty lowest in more than four decades.” Pew Research Center. |
| a. Publication Date: Sept. 29, 2016. |
| b. Type: Summary of Nationwide Research |
| c. Florida is mentioned 0 times. |
| 3. “Mental Illness and the Death Penalty” ACLU. |
| a. Publication Date: May 5, 2009. |
| b. Type: Issue overview |
| c. Florida is mentioned 0 times. |
| 4. “The Death Penalty in Alabama: Judge Override” Equal Justice Initiative. |
| a. Publication Date: July 2011. |
| b. Type: State-specific study focusing on Georgia, but also covers Florida |
| c. Florida is mentioned 29 times. |
| 5. “A Death Before Dying: Solitary Confinement on Death Row” ACLU. |
| a. Publication Date: July 2013. |
| b. Type: Nationwide Report |
| c. Florida is mentioned 2 times. |
| d. Selected quote(s): “[N]ow retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in 2009 of a Florida man who had spent 32 years on death row before his execution: ‘As he awaits execution, petitioner has endured especially cruel conditions of confinement, spending up to 23 hours per day in isolation in a 6- by 9-foot cell. Two death warrants have been signed against him and stayed only shortly before he was scheduled to be put to death. The dehumanizing effects of such treatment are undeniable. Moreover, as I explained in Lackey, delaying an execution does not further public purposes of retribution and deterrence but only diminishes whatever possible benefit society might receive from petitioner’s death. It would therefore be appropriate to conclude that a punishment of death after significant delay is so totally without penological justification that it results in the gratuitous infliction of suffering.’ ” |
| 6. “Symposium: Criminal Procedure in the Spotlight: The American Death Penalty and the (In)Visibility of Race.” University of Chicago Law Review. |
| a. Publication Date: Oct. 2, 2016. |
| b. Type: Law review article |
| c. Florida is mentioned 6 times. |
| 7. “Florida’s Supreme Court Declares State Death Penalty Law Unconstitutional.” NPR. |
| a. Publication Date: Oct. 14, 2016. |
| b. Type: Article by NPR |
| c. Florida is mentioned 10 times. |
| 8. “Death of the Death Penalty.” Time Magazine. |
| a. Publication Date: June 8, 2015. |
| b. Type: Article by Time Magazine |
| c. Florida is mentioned 5 times. |
| 9. “Photos from a Botched Lethal Injection.” The New Republic. |
| a. Publication Date: May 29, 2014. |
| b. Type: Article by The New Republic |
| c. Florida is mentioned 17 times. |
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Direct File
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| 1. “No Place for A Child: Direct File of Juveniles Comes at a High Cost; Time to Fix Statutes.” The James Madison Institute. |
| a. Publication Date: Feb. 2016. |
| b. Type: Policy brief |
| c. Florida is mentioned 62 times. |
| d. Selected quote(s): “Florida’s direct file law is the reason that the state transfers more children to adult court than any other state.” |
| 2. “Branded for Life Florida’s Prosecution of Children as Adults under its “Direct File” Statute.” Human Rights Watch. |
| a. Publication Date: Apr. 2014. |
| b. Type: State-specific study |
| c. Florida is mentioned 353 times. |
| 3. “Criminal justice reform: ACLU launches campaign to keep kids out of prison.” ACLU. |
| a. Publication Date: Oct. 20, 2016. |
| b. Type: ACLU report by Jeff Borg, board member of the ACLU of Florida |
| c. Florida mentioned 6 times. |
| d. Selected quote(s): “Young lives get jerked off track by direct file, when prosecutors charge juveniles in adult court, without the consent of a judge, parents, the defendant, or anyone else.” “At least 60 percent of more than 12,000 juvenile suspects in adult courts during a recent five-year period had been charged with nonviolent crimes, The Miami Herald reported.” |
| 4. “Florida’s Direct File Law: How State Attorneys Hold Too Much Power.” University of Miami Law Review. |
| a. Publication Date: Nov. 20, 2014. |
| b. Type: Law Review article |
| c. Florida mentioned 27 times. |
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Mass Incarceration/Sentencing Reform
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| 1. “Confronting Mass Imprisonment and Restoring Fairness to Collateral Review of Criminal Cases.” The Harvard Law Review. |
| a. Publication Date: Summer 2006. |
| b. Type: Law Review Article |
| 2. “A Living Death: Life Without Parole for Nonviolent Offenders” ACLU. |
| a. Publication Date: Nov. 2013. |
| b. Type: Nationwide Report |
| c. Florida is mentioned 115 times. |
| 3. “At America’s Expense: The Mass Incarceration of the Elderly” ACLU. |
| a. Publication Date: June 2012. |
| b. Type: Nationwide Report |
| c. Florida is mentioned 18 times. |
| 4. “Incarceration’s Front Door: The Misuse of Jails in America” The Vera Institute. |
| a. Publication Date: Feb. 2015. |
| b. Type: Nationwide Report |
| c. Florida is mentioned one time. |
| d. Selected quote(s): “ In Florida, for example, agencies expect to collect only nine percent of fines and fees assessed.” |
| 5. “The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons” The Sentencing Project. |
| a. Publication Date: June 2016. |
| b. Type: Nationwide Report |
| c. Florida is mentioned 12 times. |
| 6. “In for a Penny: The Rise of America’s Debtor Prisons” ACLU. |
| a. Publication Date: Oct. 2010. |
| b. Type: Nationwide Report with a high level focus |
| c. Florida is mentioned 0 times. |
| 7. “Growing Up Locked Down: Youth in Solitary Confinement in Jails and Prisons Across the United States” ACLU. |
| a. Publication Date: Oct. 2012. |
| b. Type: Nationwide Report |
| c. Florida is mentioned 95 times. |
| 8. “CHILDREN AND FAMILIES OF THE INCARCERATED FACT SHEET.” National Resource Center on Children & Families of the Incarcerated |
| a. Publication Date: N/A |
| b. Type: Fact sheet |
| c. Florida is mentioned 0 times. |
| 9. “Prisoners in 2014.” Bureau of Justice Statistics. |
| a. Publication Date: Sept. 2015 |
| b. Type: Data |
| c. Florida is mentioned 12 times. |
| 10. “Growth in Federal Prison System Exceeds States.” Pew Charitable Trusts. |
| a. Publication Date: Jan. 22, 2015. |
| b. Type: Data report |
| c. Florida is mentioned 0 times. |
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Rights Restoration
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| 1. “Disenfranchisement News: How Florida’s felony disenfranchisement laws impact elections.” The Sentencing Project. |
| a. Publication Date: Nov. 8, 2016. |
| b. Type: State-specific Report |
| c. Florida is mentioned 7 times. |
| 2. “Democracy Imprisoned: The Prevalence and Impact of Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States.” The Sentencing Project. |
| a. Publication Date: Sept. 30, 2013. |
| b. Type: Nationwide Report |
| c. Florida is mentioned 21 times. |
| 3. “6 Million Lost Voters: State-Level Estimates of Felony Disenfranchisement, 2016.” The Sentencing Project. |
| a. Publication Date: Oct. 6, 2016. |
| b. Type: Nationwide break down of each state |
| c. Florida is mentioned 22 times. |
| 4. “Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in The United States” The Sentencing Project. |
| a. Publication Date: Apr. 28, 2014. |
| b. Type: Primer fact sheet |
| c. Florida is mentioned 4 times. |
| d. Selected quote(s): “In three states – Florida (23%), Kentucky (22%), and Virginia (20%) – more than one in five African Americans is disenfranchised.” “In 2007, the Office of Executive Clemency voted to amend the state’s voting rights restoration procedure to automatically approve the reinstatement of rights for many persons who were convicted of non-violent offenses. This decision was reversed in 2011, and persons seeking rights restoration must now wait at least five years after completion of sentence.” |
| 5. “Criminal Disenfranchisement Laws Across the United States.” Brennan Center for Justice. |
| a. Publication Date: Oct. 6, 2016. |
| b. Type: Nationwide study |
| c. Florida is mentioned 2 times. |
| 6. “Democracy Unchained: Judicial Review of Felon Disenfranchisement Laws in America and an International Comparison” Seton Hall University. |
| a. Publication date: 2016. |
| b. Type: Academic analysis |
| c. Florida is mentioned 0 times. |