What's Changing in Prosecution? Report of a Workshop (2001) / Chapter Skim
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6 Promising Areas for Future Research
6 Promising Areas for Future Research
Pages 41-48
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From page 41... ...
Participants stressed the need to ask the right questions. The underlying questions addressed by workshop participants were whether and how prosecution has changed, whether it should change, and how we might measure the impacts of changes in prosecution, or of changes in criminal justice policy on both crime and the sense of fairness in punishment on which society relies.
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From page 42... ...
Professional associations such as the National District Attorney's Association and the American Prosecutor's Research Institute might be enlisted to help design such a system. Forst asserted that such an idea is no more far-fetched than that of the Uniform Crime Reporting System, which, over a period of several decades, has been able to get the cooperation of virtually all 20,000 independent police departments in the United States.
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From page 43... ...
But, as highly promoted innovations such as community prosecution take hold, more than descriptive information is needed to determine the true nature of the change and to compare outcomes to those of more traditional approaches. For example, what are the outcomes of community prosecution and how are those outcomes related to the original goals of the innovation?
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From page 44... ...
There is a similar lack of systematic information on whether party affiliation matters, how personal political and social contacts influence reselection, how activist groups influence elections through advocacy for an emerging cause, or how media coverage of crime affects election outcomes. Because politics is so intrinsic to much of the prosecution function.
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From page 45... ...
Finally, the influence of political processes on policy and management decisions could be discovered through systematic observational studies and structured interviews with district attorneys. Evaluating Management Some workshop participants decried the lack of information on how individual prosecutors make decisions and how organizational structures within offices may support or impede a prosecutor's work.
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From page 46... ...
Recent research on capital cases has found that misconduct by prosecutors was a factor in 16 percent of erroneous convictions (Liebman et al., 20001. Several workshop participants felt there needed to be better information on the extent and nature of such abuses and on the conditions that foster them.
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From page 47... ...
The police role in the urban unrest of the 1960s and concern about increasing violent crime rates in the late 1960s and early 1 970s are probably principal factors explaining this. In addition, police are the visible arm of the law, a group whose past instances of poor management, corruption, and abuses of authority have been transparent to the public through the media, and have resulted in various investigations and major legal reforms over the years.
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From page 48... ...
The research questions sketched here build on conceptual work done by prosecutors in the Harvard Executive Session and by scholars in the prosecution research field, many of whom participated in this workshop. Participants noted that attracting good scholars to this field in the future will require a considerable funding investment, so that a long-term, systematic, rigorous, and objective program, characterized by well-established peer review procedures, can be mounted.
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