American political parties have long existed in a gray area of constitutional law because of their uncertain status. Parties in this country are neither fully public nor fully private entities. This constitutional ambiguity has meant that political parties are considered private organizations for some purposes and public ones for others. This “public-private entity” problem has arisen in many different legal contexts over the years. However, given their case-by-case method of judicial review, courts have typically dealt with only very discrete parts of this larger problem. This work is an endeavor to describe and analyze the constitutional status of political parties in this country by synthesizing the best judicial and scholarly thinking on the subject. In the final chapter, I draw on these ideas to propose my own scheme for how political parties might be best accommodated in a democracy.

Even though youth crime rates have fallen since the mid-1990s, public fear and political rhetoric over the issue have heightened. The Columbine shootings and other sensational incidents add to the furor. Often overlooked are the underlying problems of child poverty, social disadvantage, and the pitfalls inherent to adolescent decisionmaking that contribute to youth crime. From a policy standpoint, adolescent offenders are caught in the crossfire between nurturance of youth and punishment of criminals, between rehabilitation and "get tough" pronouncements. In the midst of this emotional debate, the National Research Council's Panel on Juvenile Crime steps forward with an authoritative review of the best available data and analysis. Juvenile Crime, Juvenile Justice presents recommendations for addressing the many aspects of America's youth crime problem. This timely release discusses patterns and trends in crimes by children and adolescentsâ€"trends revealed by arrest data, victim reports, and other sources; youth crime within general crime; and race and sex disparities. The book explores desistanceâ€"the probability that delinquency or criminal activities decrease with ageâ€"and evaluates different approaches to predicting future crime rates. Why do young people turn to delinquency? Juvenile Crime, Juvenile Justice presents what we know and what we urgently need to find out about contributing factors, ranging from prenatal care, differences in temperament, and family influences to the role of peer relationships, the impact of the school policies toward delinquency, and the broader influences of the neighborhood and community. Equally important, this book examines a range of solutions: Prevention and intervention efforts directed to individuals, peer groups, and families, as well as day care-, school- and community-based initiatives. Intervention within the juvenile justice system. Role of the police. Processing and detention of youth offenders. Transferring youths to the adult judicial system. Residential placement of juveniles. The book includes background on the American juvenile court system, useful comparisons with the juvenile justice systems of other nations, and other important information for assessing this problem.

Paul Powell emerged from the hill country of southern Illinois to serve in state government from 1935 until his death in 1970. His political tenure included three terms as Speaker of the Illinois House, four terms as minority leader, and two terms as secretary of state. The sponsor of hundreds of bills, he worked tirelessly for his constituents in southern Illinois. He also worked tirelessly to promote his own interests. In this first political biography of Powell, Robert E. Hartley follows the money. He tells how this man of humble origins and meager means amassed a world-class political and financial base. Part of that story is the disclosure of a personal fortune that boggled minds, including the unbelievable yarn of the $800,000 cash found in the hotel room following Powell's death. Powell never earned a state salary of more than $30,000 per year, yet in the last year of his life, his federal income tax return showed an income of more than $200,000. At his death his estate totaled $3.2 million, and, when settled in 1978, was worth $4.6 million, including nearly $1 million in racetrack stock. Following Powell's story, Hartley takes us deep into the Illinois political world of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, a time when politicians were on an "honor system" regarding their financial holdings. This was before disclosure of political contributions, before computer records, and before public meetings laws.

Illinois political scandals reached new depths in the 1960s and ’70s. In Illinois Justice, Kenneth Manaster takes us behind the scenes of one of the most spectacular. The so-called Scandal of 1969 not only ended an Illinois Supreme Court justice’s aspirations to the US Supreme Court, but also marked the beginning of little-known lawyer John Paul Stevens’s rise to the high court. In 1969, citizen gadfly Sherman Skolnick accused two Illinois Supreme Court justices of accepting valuable bank stock from an influential Chicago lawyer in exchange for deciding an important case in the lawyer’s favor. The resulting feverish media coverage prompted the state supreme court to appoint a special commission to investigate. Within six weeks and on a shoestring budget, the commission mobilized a small volunteer staff to reveal the facts. Stevens, then a relatively unknown Chicago lawyer, served as chief counsel. His work on this investigation would launch him into the public spotlight and onto the bench. Manaster, who served on the commission, tells the real story of the investigation, detailing the dead ends, tactics, and triumphs. Manaster expertly traces Stevens’s masterful courtroom strategies and vividly portrays the high-profile personalities involved, as well as the subtleties of judicial corruption. A reflective foreword by Justice Stevens himself looks back at the case and how it influenced his career. Now the subject of the documentary Unexpected Justice: The Rise of John Paul Stevens, Manaster’s book is both a fascinating chapter of political history and a revealing portrait of the early career of a Supreme Court justice.

Proactive policing, as a strategic approach used by police agencies to prevent crime, is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. It developed from a crisis in confidence in policing that began to emerge in the 1960s because of social unrest, rising crime rates, and growing skepticism regarding the effectiveness of standard approaches to policing. In response, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, innovative police practices and policies that took a more proactive approach began to develop. This report uses the term "proactive policing" to refer to all policing strategies that have as one of their goals the prevention or reduction of crime and disorder and that are not reactive in terms of focusing primarily on uncovering ongoing crime or on investigating or responding to crimes once they have occurred. Proactive policing is distinguished from the everyday decisions of police officers to be proactive in specific situations and instead refers to a strategic decision by police agencies to use proactive police responses in a programmatic way to reduce crime. Today, proactive policing strategies are used widely in the United States. They are not isolated programs used by a select group of agencies but rather a set of ideas that have spread across the landscape of policing. Proactive Policing reviews the evidence and discusses the data and methodological gaps on: (1) the effects of different forms of proactive policing on crime; (2) whether they are applied in a discriminatory manner; (3) whether they are being used in a legal fashion; and (4) community reaction. This report offers a comprehensive evaluation of proactive policing that includes not only its crime prevention impacts but also its broader implications for justice and U.S. communities.

This report of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice -- established by President Lyndon Johnson on July 23, 1965 -- addresses the causes of crime and delinquency and recommends how to prevent crime and delinquency and improve law enforcement and the administration of criminal justice. In developing its findings and recommendations, the Commission held three national conferences, conducted five national surveys, held hundreds of meetings, and interviewed tens of thousands of individuals. Separate chapters of this report discuss crime in America, juvenile delinquency, the police, the courts, corrections, organized crime, narcotics and drug abuse, drunkenness offenses, gun control, science and technology, and research as an instrument for reform. Significant data were generated by the Commission's National Survey of Criminal Victims, the first of its kind conducted on such a scope. The survey found that not only do Americans experience far more crime than they report to the police, but they talk about crime and the reports of crime engender such fear among citizens that the basic quality of life of many Americans has eroded. The core conclusion of the Commission, however, is that a significant reduction in crime can be achieved if the Commission's recommendations (some 200) are implemented. The recommendations call for a cooperative attack on crime by the Federal Government, the States, the counties, the cities, civic organizations, religious institutions, business groups, and individual citizens. They propose basic changes in the operations of police, schools, prosecutors, employment agencies, defenders, social workers, prisons, housing authorities, and probation and parole officers.