"Truly meaningful reforms to the criminal justice system cannot be accomplished without acknowledgement of its racist underpinnings. Immediate and focused attention on the causes and consequences of racial disparities is required in order to eliminate them. True progress towards a racially just system requires an understanding of the variation in racial and ethnic inequities in imprisonment across states and the policies and day-to-day practices that drive these inequities."

RamSearch Discovery Tool

• Search (almost) all our databases at once
• Lets you limit results to peer-reviewed
• If full-text version not available, provides a partially filled-out interlibrary request form

Subject-Specific Databases

• Lets you limit results to peer-reviewed
• If full-text version not available, may provide a partially filled-out interlibrary request form
• See the databases considered best for criminal justice articles:
  • Criminal Justice Abstracts
  • Gale OneFile: Criminal Justice
  • SocINDEX with Full Text

Selected Journals:

• Critical Criminology: "Addresses issues of social harm and social justice, including work exploring the intersecting lines of class, gender, race/ethnicity, and heterosexism and oppression."
• Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice:"Explores the prejudice that currently affects our judicial system, our courts, our prisons & our neighborhoods all around the world."
• Race and Justice: "A quarterly forum for the best scholarship on race, ethnicity, and justice. The journal seeks to engage and promote progressive means of thinking by publishing articles from diverse, inclusive, and intersectional perspectives, theories, methodologies, and ways of knowing."

Google Scholar

• Has no peer-review limiter; must look at journal's home page on the web to see if it says it's peer-reviewed
• If full-text not available free online, search for the entire article title as a phrase via the RamSearch box to see if FSU has it

No full-text? Request a PDF copy (Interlibrary Loan Request)

• No cost to you
• ILL Dept. operates during the M - F work week; no weekend service
• We have no control over delivery time; please plan accordingly

FBI

• Crime Data Explorer

ICPSR Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan

• National Archive of Criminal Justice Data

Mass.gov

• Court Data, Metrics & Reports
• MA Dept. of Correction Research Statistics and Reports

• How to request research access to MA criminal record data

MassTransparency

• Here because they're collecting and publishing records missing from the 'official' MA.gov POST records

National Institute of Justice

• A clearinghouse of 'best practices' among criminal justice programs and practices.
• "The programs and practices presented on CrimeSolutions are identified, screened, reviewed, and rated using a standardized process."

Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) :

• Statistical Briefing Book

Pew Research Center

• Dataset and survey question access
• Recent Relevant Reports:
  • Black Americans Have a Clear Vision for Reducing Racism but Little Hope It Will Happen
  • Black Americans are more likely than others to say they see problematic news coverage of Black people
  • How Black Americans view the use of face recognition technology by police
  • Clear majorities of Black Americans favor marijuana legalization, easing of criminal penalties
  • Black women account for a small fraction of the federal judges who have served to date

Prison Policy Initiative

• State Incarceration Profiles:  "When the federal government stopped publishing state-level racial disparity data for prisons and jails in 2006, we found a way to fill that gap and give state-advocates the data they need to hold their state accountable."