Hate crime scholars have long argued that the harms of hate crime extend beyond the immediate victim to negatively impact the victim's reference community. However, this assertion is speculative and in need of empirical support. Utilizing focus group data from 15 people who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or pansexual, this pilot study explored the extent to which the harms of anti-LGB hate crime spread beyond the immediate victim to impact nonvictims in the LGB community. The findings suggest that anti-LGB hate violence can have profound and negative effects on the psychological and emotional well-being of nonvictims who are LGB and may result in dramatic behavioral change as well. The findings also indicate that hate violence negatively affected participants' decisions to disclose their sexual orientation to others. On a more positive note, however, awareness of such violence may also mobilize some people within the LGB community.

Disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. are strikingly over-represented in the juvenile justice and adult criminal justice systems. This paper briefly reviews the extent of over-representation attributable primarily to drug offenses and an earlier conceptual framework introduced by Iguchi and colleagues showing how the use of incarceration as a key drug control tool has disproportionately affected the health and well being of racial and ethnic minority communities. We then provide observations from the field that demonstrate how the implementation of a quality assessment approach might be used to mitigate procedural/structural biases that contribute to disparities in minority confinement, and ultimately, to reduce disparities in access to resources and health care.

Although there is considerable research addressing the factors that underlie wrongful conviction, relatively little research investigates attitudes toward wrongful conviction. To contribute to this understudied area, we surveyed first- and third-year Canadian undergraduates in criminal justice and non-criminal-justice majors to determine their attitudes toward differing facets of wrongful conviction. In particular, attitudes toward the frequency of wrongful conviction, the Blackstone ratio, the need to educate criminal justice personnel about factors that contribute to wrongful conviction, and the question of whether wrongful conviction causes individuals to lose faith in the criminal justice system were assessed. In general, participants – especially senior criminal justice students – reported attitudes that were sensitive to issues related to wrongful conviction. The implications of these findings for criminal justice personnel and the literature on wrongful conviction are discussed.

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