About

A growing bipartisan consensus at the local, state, and federal levels holds that the American criminal justice system needs to be reimagined. Incarceration rates have expanded at an exponential rate, without corresponding public safety outcomes. Indeed, in the effort to keep our communities safe, our criminal justice policies and practices often infringe upon human dignity, diminish social trust, and waste government resources. We criminalize blameless conduct. We over-punish those who commit low-level, nonviolent crimes. We struggle to rehabilitate or reintegrate prisoners into their communities. We ignore the rights and voices of crime victims. And we police in a manner that all too often weakens the fundamental bond between community and law-enforcement.

The Academy for Justice brings a scholarly light to bear on these problems with the hope of illuminating a path toward a more equitable, humane, and fiscally responsible criminal justice system. The Academy for Justice envisions a criminal justice system where actual practices correspond with best practices, and policy decisions are based on data and evidence, rather than raw politics or mere rhetoric. We are committed to the belief that criminal justice reform is not–and should not be–a partisan issue and that a well-functioning criminal justice system benefits victims, defendants, and society at large. Our independent, research-driven approach to criminal justice reform leads us to support a number of changes to the existing system, including: implementing policing strategies that bolster both public safety and community relations; limiting criminal liability to culpable actors; aligning punishment with the nature and seriousness of an offense; affording victims a meaningful role in the justice process; and ensuring that prisoners return to their communities with meaningful opportunities and the knowledge and skills necessary to realize them.

The Academy for Justice bridges the gap between academia and on-the-ground criminal justice reform efforts by acting as a conduit between scholarly research and ideas and criminal justice policymakers, stakeholders, journalists, and the public. Our primary objectives include:

- Identifying the major challenges confronting our criminal justice system;
- Developing and promoting fact-based, non-partisan scholarship that identifies potential reforms;
- Facilitating the sharing of information between academics and those responsible for making and implementing criminal justice policy