Editorial Introduction to Special Issue of Justice Quarterly 2021: Addressing High Priority, “Big” Policy Questions in a Polarized Society

The goal of this special issue is to provide sound empirical research addressing high priority, big policy questions in crime and justice amid the increasingly partisan divide in the United States. I was drawn to the topic of this special issue primarily for two reasons. First, recent years have shown that Americans are seriously polarized on many important issues, and we can no longer assume that our “democratic” society is built on consensus or that the public, policymakers, and/or practitioners can compromise and agree on what the problems are (Dimock & Wike, 2020). This predicament makes it much more difficult to work together to find solutions. In many ways, this situation has left me so discouraged. Yet, I regularly remind myself and my students that the problems we face as scholars of and practitioners in juvenile and criminal justice are much too important to allow ourselves to be paralyzed by frustration about slow or stilted progress or impact. As I noted in my introduction to the last special issue honoring Joan Petersilia, working on research that addresses important practical justice problems is hard but critical because so many people are affected (Lane, 2020). Especially as the problems related to the current polarization in views remain evident in the news, this point continues to ring true for me. Scholars must persist in our efforts to help solve crime and justice problems despite hurdles, setbacks, and varying willingness among our audiences to heed our advice and expertise. This special issue provides a venue for scholars to think and write about how we do this work and how we make an impact on major social problems in the face of our current societal context.

Second, the topic of this issue also is timely because the field of criminology and criminal justice continues to struggle with “big” policy questions, which for me means those related to problems that either affect or can affect large segments of our population or are at the forefront of our current societal concerns. A key goal of this special issue has been to pull together sound empirical research that addresses these important policy questions and to consider real, practical implications of this research for policy and practice. While some articles included here do better at suggesting clear practical solutions than others, all of them somehow address problems that at least SHOULD matter to large segments of the American population. More importantly, the topics are fundamental policy and practice issues that the work of scholars in our field can and should inform. Manuscripts here, for example, address disproportionate minority contact, violent offending in schools, public opinion about arming teachers, mandatory sentencing, gun control, police priorities and safety, race effects on police decision-making, reducing incarceration, solitary confinement, perceptions of justice, and the effects of college in prison. While people in the public likely vary a lot in their true knowledge about these “hot topics,” my guess is that just their mention often can provoke intense conversations and strong opinions. As Bill Selke at Indiana University said on the first day of my first freshmen criminal justice class in the Fall of 1986(!), crime and criminal justice are topics on which “everyone has an opinion,” contrasting what he characterized as “barroom criminology” to the sound knowledge and advice produced by scholars. This special issue provides the latter and is an important set of work on these big policy questions which can inform scholarly, policy and practical work in the field.

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Notes on contributors

Jodi Lane

Jodi Lane is professor of criminology in the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law at the University of Florida and Special Issue Editor for Justice Quarterly. Her work focuses broadly on reactions to crime, including policy, practitioner, and public responses.