Justice and Security Reform: Development Agencies and Informal Institutions in Sierra Leone undertakes a deep contextual analysis of the reform of the country’s security and justice sectors since the end of the civil war in 2002. Arguing that the political and bureaucratic nature of development agencies leads to a lack of engagement with informal institutions, this book examines the challenges of sustainably transforming security and justice in fragile states. Through the analysis of a post-conflict context often held up as an example of successful peacebuilding, Lisa Denney reveals how the politics of development agencies is an often forgotten constraint in security and justice reform and development efforts more broadly. Particularly suited to upper-level undergraduates and postgraduate students, as well as practitioners, this book is relevant to those interested in security and justice reform and statebuilding, as well Sierra Leone’s post-conflict recovery.

How can conflict-prone countries ensure better delivery of security and justice services? How can they establish structures and mechanisms which will ensure effective and accountable security and justice institutions? Although there has been ...

Prioritizing Security Sector Reform: A New U.S. Approach argues that security sector reform should be at the core of a new U.S. policy to strengthen the security sector capacity of countries where U.S. interests are at stake. Today's fragile environments feature a host of postconflict and postauthoritarian states and transitioning and new democracies that have at least one critical thing in common: Their security sectors are dysfunctional. Why these states cannot fulfill their most basic function-the protection of the population and their government-varies widely, but the underlying reason is the same. The security sector does not function because security sector institutions and forces are absent, ineffective, predatory, or illegitimate. In place of large, boots-on-the-ground interventions relying on expensive train and equip programs with only fleeting impact, Washington needs a new approach for engaging in fragile environments and a policy for prioritizing where it engages and for what purpose. The volume offers case studies to exemplify the context in which a new U.S. approach might be warranted, discusses other countries' experiences with security sector reform policies and examines how the United States should design and implement a security sector reform policy. Book jacket.

Securing Development: Public Finance and the Security Sector highlights the role of public finance in the delivery of security and criminal justice services. This book offers a framework for analyzing public financial management, financial transparency, and oversight, as well as expenditure policy issues that determine how to most appropriately manage security and justice services. The interplay among security, justice, and public finance is still a relatively unexplored area of development. Such a perspective can help security actors provide more professional, effective, and efficient security and justice services for citizens, while also strengthening systems for accountability. The book is the result of a project undertaken jointly by staff from the World Bank and the United Nations, integrating the disciplines where each institution holds a comparative advantage and a core mandate. The primary audience includes government officials bearing both security and financial responsibilities, staff of international organizations working on public expenditure management and security sector issues, academics, and development practitioners working in an advisory capacity.

Global Justice Reform critiques and rethinks two neglected subjects: the nature of comparison in the field of comparative law and the struggles of national judicial systems to meet global rule of law objectives. Hiram Chodosh offers a candid look at the surprisingly underdeveloped methodology of comparative legal studies, and provides a creative conceptual framework for defining and understanding the whys, whats, and hows of comparison. Additionally, Chodosh demonstrates how theories of comparative law translate into practice, using contemporary global justice reform initiatives as a case study, with a particular focus on Indonesia and India. Chodosh highlights the gap between the critical role of judicial institutions and their poor performance (for example, political interference, corruption, backlog, and delay), discussing why reform is so elusive, and demonstrating the unavoidable and essential role of comparison in reform proposals. Throughout the book, Chodosh identifies several sources of comparative misunderstanding that impede successful reforms and identifies the many predicaments reformers face, detailing a wide variety of designs, methods, and social dilemmas. In response to these seemingly insurmountable challenges, Chodosh advances some novel conceptual strategies, first by drawing on a body of non-legal scholarship on self-regulating, emergent systems, and then by identifying a series of anti-dilemma strategies that draw upon insights about the nature of comparison.

The events of September 11, 2001, combined with a pattern of increased crime and violence in the 1980s and mid-1990s in the Americas, has crystallized the need to reform government policies and police procedures to combat these threats. Public Security and Police Reform in the Americas examines the problems of security and how they are addressed in Latin America and the United States. Bailey and Dammert detail the wide variation in police tactics and efforts by individual nations to assess their effectiveness and ethical accountability. Policies on this issue can take the form of authoritarianism, which threatens the democratic process itself, or can, instead, work to "demilitarize" the police force. Bailey and Dammert argue that although attempts to apply generic models such as the successful "zero tolerance" created in the United States to the emerging democracies of Latin America—where institutional and economic instabilities exist—may be inappropriate, it is both possible and profitable to consider these issues from a common framework across national boundaries. Public Security and Police Reform in the Americas lays the foundation for a greater understanding of policies between nations by examining their successes and failures and opens a dialogue about the common goal of public security.

Multilateral organizations - the United Nations (UN) in particular - have played, and continue to play, an important role in shaping the security sector reform (SSR) agenda, both in terms of policy development and the provision of support to a wide range of national SSR processes. This volume presents a variety of perspectives on UN support to SSR, past and present, with attention to policy and operational practice. Drawing from the experience of UN practitioners combined with external experts on SSR, this volume offers an in-depth exploration of the UN approach to SSR from a global perspective.

Placed within the context of the past decade's war on terror and emergent Latino migrant movement, Reform without Justice addresses the issue of state violence against migrants in the United States. It questions what forces are driving draconian migration control policies and why it is that, despite its success in mobilizing millions, the Latino migrant movement and its allies have not been able to more successfully defend the rights of migrants. Gonzales argues that the contemporary Latino migrant movement and its allies face a dynamic form of political power that he terms "anti-migrant hegemony". This type of political power is exerted in multiple sites of power from Congress, to think tanks, talk shows and local government institutions, through which a rhetorically race neutral and common sense public policy discourse is deployed to criminalize migrants. Most insidiously anti-migrant hegemony allows for large sectors of "pro-immigrant" groups to concede to coercive immigration enforcement measures such as a militarized border wall and the expansion of immigration policing in local communities in exchange for so-called Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Given this reality, Gonzales sustains that most efforts to advance immigration reform will fail to provide justice for migrants. This is because proposed reform measures ignore the neoliberal policies driving migration and reinforce the structures of state violence used against migrants to the detriment of democracy for all. Reform without Justice concludes by discussing how Latino migrant activists - especially youth - and their allies can change this reality and help democratize the United States.

Mass incarceration. In recent years it's become clear that the size of America's prison population is unsustainable -- and isn't needed to protect public safety. In this remarkable bipartisan collaboration, the country's most prominent public figures and experts join together to propose ideas for change. In these original essays, many authors speak out for the first time on the issue. The vast majority agree that reducing our incarcerated population is a priority. Marking a clear political shift on crime and punishment in America, these sentiments are a far cry from politicians racing to be the most punitive in the 1980s and 1990s. Mass incarceration threatens American democracy. Hiding in plain sight, it drives economic inequality, racial injustice, and poverty. How do we achieve change? From using federal funding to bolster police best practices to allowing for the release of low-level offenders while they wait for trial, from eliminating prison for low-level drug crimes to increasing drug and mental health treatment, the ideas in this book pave a way forward. Solutions promises to further the intellectual and political momentum to reform our justice system.

Adolescence is a distinct, yet transient, period of development between childhood and adulthood characterized by increased experimentation and risk-taking, a tendency to discount long-term consequences, and heightened sensitivity to peers and other social influences. A key function of adolescence is developing an integrated sense of self, including individualization, separation from parents, and personal identity. Experimentation and novelty-seeking behavior, such as alcohol and drug use, unsafe sex, and reckless driving, are thought to serve a number of adaptive functions despite their risks. Research indicates that for most youth, the period of risky experimentation does not extend beyond adolescence, ceasing as identity becomes settled with maturity. Much adolescent involvement in criminal activity is part of the normal developmental process of identity formation and most adolescents will mature out of these tendencies. Evidence of significant changes in brain structure and function during adolescence strongly suggests that these cognitive tendencies characteristic of adolescents are associated with biological immaturity of the brain and with an imbalance among developing brain systems. This imbalance model implies dual systems: one involved in cognitive and behavioral control and one involved in socio-emotional processes. Accordingly adolescents lack mature capacity for self-regulations because the brain system that influences pleasure-seeking and emotional reactivity develops more rapidly than the brain system that supports self-control. This knowledge of adolescent development has underscored important differences between adults and adolescents with direct bearing on the design and operation of the justice system, raising doubts about the core assumptions driving the criminalization of juvenile justice policy in the late decades of the 20th century. It was in this context that the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) asked the National Research Council to convene a committee to conduct a study of juvenile justice reform. The goal of Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach was to review recent advances in behavioral and neuroscience research and draw out the implications of this knowledge for juvenile justice reform, to assess the new generation of reform activities occurring in the United States, and to assess the performance of OJJDP in carrying out its statutory mission as well as its potential role in supporting scientifically based reform efforts.