Category: Homepage News

Wilson Center Executive Director Appointed Special Master in NC COVID Litigation

Wilson Center Executive Director Thomas Maher has been appointed special master in the North Carolina litigation over the state prison system’s handling of COVID-19. NAACP v. Cooper was filed earlier this year on behalf of several civil rights organizations, including the North Carolina NAACP and ACLU, as well as several incarcerated individuals. The plaintiffs have […]

Swartz: Closing Coverage Gaps to Promote Successful Prison Reentry for Persons with Mental Illness

Dr. Marvin S. Swartz, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke and a faculty member at the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at the Duke School of Law recently wrote a piece for Care4Carolina about a key element of successful reentry programs for individuals with severe mental illness: ongoing […]

Wilson Researchers to Bail Working Group: Durham Jail Population Down after Reforms but we Need Better Data

Researchers from the Wilson Center for Science and Justice have been scraping jail data in Durham in an effort to analyze pretrial policies and practices concerning the use of cash bail. Wilson Center Research Director William E. Crozier, Center Director Brandon L. Garrett, and PhD. candidate Arvind Krishnamurthy wrote “The Transparency of Jail Data,” an […]

Firearms Testimony: Should it be the Smoking Gun?

By Alexi DeLara  In recent decades, researchers, judges, and journalists have raised questions regarding the reliability of a range of widely utilized forensic techniques. This includes, but is not limited to, forensic comparison methods, such as latent fingerprint and firearm comparisons. The article, “Mock Jurors’ Evaluation of Firearm Examiner Testimony Notes,” written by Brandon L. […]

Remembering Roger Hood, a Champion of Justice and International Leader in Criminology

By Brandon Garrett Last night, Roger Hood, a champion of justice and international leader in criminology and in death penalty research, the founder of the Centre of Criminology at Oxford, and the greatest friend and mentor, to myself and countless other scholars, passed away in Oxford. His most recent work examined the death penalty in […]

Wilson Center’s Dr. Marvin Swartz Helps with New Mental Health Crisis App

Dr. Marvin Swartz, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University and part of the Wilson Center’s Behavioral Health Core, served as a consultant for a new My Mental Health Crisis Plan app and SAMHSA’s psychiatric advanced directive (PAD) toolkit. Psychiatric News published an article last week about the app, which provides a […]

Introducing a New Blog Series: Growing Above and Beyond

Editor’s Note: This is the first installment of an occasional series from the Wilson Center’s Michele Easter examining the intersection of nature and agriculture to support recovery, resilience, and community success within justice-involved communities. The logo for this series was created by Pitch Story Lab, the student-run creative agency at Duke University. By Michele Easter I […]