A sex offender is a person who has committed a sex crime. What constitutes a sex crime differs by culture and legal jurisdiction. The majority of convicted sex offenders have convictions for crimes of a sexual nature; however, some sex offenders have simply violated a law contained in a sexual category. Some of the serious crimes which usually result in a mandatory sex-offender classification are sexual assault, statutory rape, bestiality, child sexual abuse, incest, rape, and sexual imposition.
Seattle University School of Law is the law school affiliated with Seattle University, located in Seattle, Washington, United States.
Rosa Brooks is an American law professor, journalist, author and commentator on foreign policy, U.S. politics and criminal justice. She is the Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Law and Policy at Georgetown University Law Center. Brooks is also an adjunct scholar at West Point's Modern War Institute and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. From April 2009 to July 2011, Brooks was a counselor to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy.
Joette Katz is an American attorney who is a partner at the law firm, Shipman & Goodwin LLP. She was an associate justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court, where she also served as the administrative judge for the state appellate system, and later was the Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Children and Families. In various roles during her career she has had an impact on issues of state and national importance, such as: criminal law, capital punishment, civil rights and the right to education, eminent domain, same-sex marriage, LGBTQ rights, sexual assault, sex trafficking, and helping children in state care move from institutions to families.
Heather Lynn Mac Donald is an American conservative political commentator, essayist, attorney, and author. She is known for her pro-police views and opposition to criminal justice reform. She is a fellow of the Manhattan Institute think tank and a contributing editor of its City Journal.
Arthur Lawrence Liman was an American lawyer and partner at the New York firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Liman served as the chief counsel for both the New York state commission for the Attica Prison riot in 1971 and the investigation of the Iran-Contra Affair in 1987.
Milton Heumann is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. He received his B.A. from Brooklyn College and his M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Yale University. He taught at the University of Michigan before joining the Rutgers faculty in 1981. He has spent many semesters as a Visiting Lecturer and Guggenheim Fellow at Yale Law School. He was chair of the Political Science Department of Rutgers from 1997 - 2003. His principal research interests are in the area of legal process, criminal justice and civil liberties.
Elyn R. Saks is associate dean and Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology, and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California Gould Law School, an expert in mental health law, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship winner. Saks lives with schizophrenia and has written about her experience with the illness in her award-winning best-selling autobiography, The Center Cannot Hold, published by Hyperion Books in 2007. She is also a cancer survivor.
Chesa Boudin is an American lawyer who served as the 29th District Attorney of San Francisco from January 8, 2020, to July 8, 2022. He is a member of the Democratic Party.
Sarah Stillman is an American professor, staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist focusing on immigration policy, the criminal justice system, and the impacts of climate change on workers. Stillman won a National Magazine Award in 2012 for her reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan and again in 2019 for her article in The New Yorker on deportation as a death sentence. She won a 2012 George Polk Award for her reporting on the high-risk use of young people as confidential informants in the war on drugs, and a second Polk Award in 2021 for coverage of migrant workers and climate change. She also won the 2012 Hillman Prize. In 2016, she was named a MacArthur Fellow. She won a 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for her coverage inThe New Yorker about troubling injustices in felony murder prosecutions in the U.S.
Sarah Deer is a Native American lawyer, and a professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies and Public Affairs and Administration at the University of Kansas. She was a 2014 MacArthur fellow and has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2019.
Margaret D. Stock is an American politician, immigration attorney, and retired Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army Reserve. She is a recognized expert on immigration law as it applies to U.S. military personnel and veterans.
Jonathan A. Rapping is an American criminal defense attorney, founder and president of Gideon's Promise, professor of law at Atlanta's John Marshall Law School, and visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School. Rapping received the MacArthur "Genius" Award in 2014.
Criminal justice reform seeks to address structural issues in criminal justice systems such as racial profiling, police brutality, overcriminalization, mass incarceration, and recidivism. Reforms can take place at any point where the criminal justice system intervenes in citizens’ lives, including lawmaking, policing, sentencing and incarceration. Criminal justice reform can also address the collateral consequences of conviction, including disenfranchisement or lack of access to housing or employment, that may restrict the rights of individuals with criminal records.
Kimberly M. Foxx is an American politician, who is currently the State's Attorney for Cook County, Illinois. She manages the second largest prosecutor's office in the United States, consisting of approximately 700 attorneys and 1,100 employees. In 2016, she won the Democratic nomination for State's Attorney against incumbent Anita Alvarez and went on to win the general election. She was re-elected in 2020. In 2023, she announced that she would not run for re-election in 2024.
Lewis Jeffrey Liman is an American lawyer and jurist serving as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Jennifer Lynn Eberhardt is an American social psychologist who is currently a professor in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. Eberhardt has been responsible for major contributions on investigating the consequences of the psychological association between race and crime through methods such as field studies and laboratory studies. She has also contributed to research on unconscious bias, including demonstrating how racial imagery and judgment affect culture and society within the domain of social justice. The results from her work have contributed to training law enforcement officers and state agencies to better their judgments through implicit bias training. She has also provided directions for future research in this domain and brought attention to mistreatment in communities due to biases.
Sujatha Baliga is an American attorney and restorative justice practitioner who won the MacArthur Fellowship in 2019.
Decarceration in the United States involves government policies and community campaigns aimed at reducing the number of people held in custody or custodial supervision. Decarceration, the opposite of incarceration, also entails reducing the rate of imprisonment at the federal, state and municipal level. As of 2019, the US was home to 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners. Until the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. possessed the world's highest incarceration rate: 655 inmates for every 100,000 people, enough inmates to equal the populations of Philadelphia or Houston. The COVID-19 pandemic has reinvigorated the discussion surrounding decarceration as the spread of the virus poses a threat to the health of those incarcerated in prisons and detention centers where the ability to properly socially distance is limited. As a result of the push for decarceration in the wake of the pandemic, as of 2022, the incarceration rate in the United States declined to 505 per 100,000, resulting in the United States no longer having the highest incarceration rate in the world, but still remaining in the top five.
Laurie Robinson is an American scholar and public servant who has held multiple positions across government, academia, and the nonprofit sector. Robinson's most notable roles include serving as Assistant Attorney General in charge of the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs under former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and co-chairing Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing. She also served on the congressionally created Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections and on an independent commission that explored the potential closure of New York City's Rikers Island jail complex. Most recently, Robinson served as founding Chair of the Board of Directors of the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan policy and research organization.
