New York, NY, December 20, 2017 —The #MeToo Movement and Special Counsel Robert Mueller have been chosen by readers of The Crime Report as the top Justice Newsmakers of 2017.
Announcing the results of its Seventh annual readers’ poll, The Crime Report said the policy reversals at the Department of Justice, the resistance of sanctuary cities to the Trump Administration’s immigration policies, and sexual misconduct in high places led the list of the Top 10 justice stories of the year.
“Our readers felt this year’s newsmakers rose above the polarized national mood to become profiles in courage,” said TCR Editor Stephen Handelman.
“Mueller’s steady by-the-books probe of Trump campaign connections with Russia in the face of White House resistance burnished his reputation as a critic of government abuses of power,” Handelman added.
“And the thousands of women who flooded social media with stories of long-suppressed trauma suffered at the hands of sexual predators from Hollywood to Main Street transformed our national conversation about sexual misconduct.”
The annual poll is aimed at singling out the individuals, stories and developments that had the greatest impact on criminal justice during the year, and are likely to continue resonating in 2018.
Some 80% of TCR readers who responded to the poll selected the series of policy changes enacted after Attorney General Jeff Sessions took over the Justice Department as the most impactful development of 2017.
Those changes amount to a “slow unraveling of many (though not all) of the justice reform efforts begun during the previous administration,” and include efforts to curtail civil rights reviews of police agencies and remove Obama-era mandates to soften sentencing for nonviolent federal drug offenders.
The efforts “haven’t stopped the national momentum,” said Handelman, noting that many states in fact are pursuing their own reform strategies. “But the federal retreat from the reform debate will have a significant impact.”
The resistance of “Sanctuary Cities” to reporting undocumented immigrants to federal immigration authorities “takes place against a context of rising an immigration crackdown which one reader said underlines the administrations “stubborn refusal to draw distinctions between ‘criminal’ and ‘non-criminal’ immigration violators (and) represents an ideological escalation of crimmigration policy.”
Other stories or developments singled out by TCR readers this year included: the spreading opioid epidemic, the ongoing war of words between the White House and the FBI which threatens to “undermine the effectiveness” of the country’s top law enforcement agency; and the bipartisan justice reforms enacted by Louisiana this year aimed at reducing the state’s current profile as the jurisdiction with the world’s highest incarceration rates.
For the full list of stories and developments please click here.
About John Jay College of Criminal Justice: An international leader in educating for justice, John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York offers a rich liberal arts and professional studies curriculum to upwards of 15,000 undergraduate and graduate students from more than 135 nations. In teaching, scholarship and research, the College approaches justice as an applied art and science in service to society and as an ongoing conversation about fundamental human desires for fairness, equality, and the rule of law. For more information, visit www.jjay.cuny.edu and follow @JohnJayCollege on Twitter.
The Crime Report, published daily by John Jay’s Center on Media, Crime and Justice, is a national online site located at www.thecrimereport.org, that provides analysis, research news and commentary prepared for practitioners, criminologists, journalists and others across the criminal justice community.
The Center on Media, Crime and Justice was established at John Jay College in 2006 as the nation's only practice- and research-oriented think tank devoted to encouraging and developing high-quality reporting on criminal justice, and to promoting better-informed public debate on the complex 21st Century challenges of law enforcement, public security and justice in a globalized urban society. For more information, visit the Center on Media, Crime and Justice website.
