Crime & Deliquency Study: Nearly half of black men arrested by age 23

As reported by MSNBC:

Nearly half of all black men and four in ten white men have been arrested for a non-traffic-related crime by the age of 23, according to a new study. 

The study published in “Crime & Delinquency” journal comes from criminal justice professors who studied data collected annually from a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey between 1997 and 2008, and found that while there were differences between the arrest rates of males across race, those gaps virtually disappeared among females. 

By the age of 18, about three in ten black men, one in four Hispanic men and just over one in five white men reported a prior arrest. By 23, those numbers climbed to 49% for black men, 44% for Hispanic men, and 38% for white men.

Women reported significantly lower arrest rates, with 20% of black women, 16% of Hispanic women, and 18% of white women recording at least one arrest by the age of 23.

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Released Inmates Need Programs to Meet Basic, Mental Health Needs, Study Shows

Science News - When inmates with severe mental illness are released from jail, their priority is finding shelter, food, money and clothes. Even needs as basic as soap and a place to bathe can be hard to come by for people leaving jail, according to a new study from Case Western Reserve University's social work school.

Reentering the community after a period of incarceration in jail is a complex situation," said Amy Wilson, who researches jail and prison issues, and even more difficult for inmates who suffer from a major mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia.

Read the article here.

& find the full study here.

Despite scandals, nation's crime labs have seen little change

NPR - January 15th

The nation's crime labs are no strangers to scandal. Last year in Massachusetts, bogus testing by former chemist Annie Dookhan called into question tens of thousands of cases and led to the release of more than 300 people from the state's prisons.

There are currently no uniform standards or regulations for forensic labs. Congress could take up legislation this year to improve oversight, but critics are skeptical.

Read and listen to the story here.

'The Poisoner's Handbook' on PBS: Review

Review from LA Times' Television Critic Robert Lloyd

Debuting Tuesday as part of the PBS series "American Experience," "The Poisoner's Handbook" offers a fascinating look back at how the chemical age changed police work.

Based on Deborah Blum's 2010 book "The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York," it is divided into toxin-specific "chapters," (cyanide, arsenic, carbon monoxide, lead, radium, denatured alcohol and so on), but there is nothing particularly instructional about it. A certain sort of viewer might get ideas, of course, but should he watch to the end he will learn that poisoning is a hard crime to get away with anymore.

Some credit for this goes to pioneering main characters Charles Norris, a crusading, visionary New York City medical examiner, and Alexander Gettler, who ran his toxicology labs. They were an unlikely pair, Norris from Philadelphia money but with a healthy sense of noblesse oblige (he paid for equipment and subsidized salaries in his department when money was short); Gettler, a Lower East Side Jew who liked bowling and playing the ponies. But both were dedicated to "a medical-legal justice system" and the rule of science.

Read the rest here.