Northeastern University
360 Huntington Avenue
400 Churchill Hall
Boston, MA 02115

617.373.4678 (phone)
617.373.8998 (fax)

irj@neu.edu

CURRENT PROJECTS

IRJ and the Rhode Island Justice Commission announce the release of The Rhode Island Traffic Stop Statistics 2004-2005 Final Report
The Institute on Race and Justice has released the final report for Rhode Island Traffic Stop Statistics 2004-2005. The Rhode Island Racial Profiling Prevention Act of 2004 required police to prohibit the practice of racial profiling and ordered all municipal local law enforcement agencies and the State Police to collect demographic data on all routine traffic stops from October 1, 2004 through September 30, 2005. The data collected during this year were transmitted to the Rhode Island Justice Commission for the purpose of an external study of all traffic stop statistics. The present report provides a comprehensive analysis of the 288,483 traffic stops made in Rhode Island during the study period. The executive summary, final report and technical report can be found at http://www.rijustice.ri.gov/sac/stats.htm: Traffic Stop Data.

The W.E.B Dubois Fellowship

The Contextual Significance of Federal Courtroom Workgroup, Racial Diversity to Criminal Case Outcomes.
Led by co-principal investigators Dr. Geoff Ward (Asst. Professor, Criminal Justice) and Dr. Amy Farrell (Assoc. Director, IRJ) and funded by the W.E.B. DuBois Fellowship of the National Institute of Justice, this project examines the impact of federal court workgroup racial diversity to criminal case outcomes.

The Project has two components. First, Drs. Ward and Farrell are gathering and analyzing statistical data on the demographics of federal court workgroups – consisting of judges, court clerks, federal prosecutors, federal public defenders, and federal probation officers – and other characteristics of 90 federal districts, to assess how variable levels of workgroup diversity relate to district-level differences in case outcomes, using a sample of more than 9,000 criminal cases. To facilitate interpretation of this court contextual affect, the study includes qualitative interviews with workgroup members in several federal courts, exploring their perceptions and experiences regarding the substantive and symbolic significance of workgroup diversity to the organization of decision-making generally, and racial equity in sentencing especially.

The project will provide a foundation for a broader Institute on Race and Justice initiative on the significance of ethnoracial diversity in criminal justice administration to the deliberation and application of justice.