North America is currently experiencing an opioid crisis. One proposed solution to combat problems associated with injection drug use is the use of supervised injection facilities. These facilities provide drug users a space to inject pre-obtained drugs without any legal repercussions. Research on these facilities has focused on public health outcomes, and generally found positive results. Far fewer studies have investigated the impact supervised injection facilities have on crime. The current study provides an interrupted time-series analysis on the impact of North America’s only supervised injection facility on crime. Analyses of city wide crime data evidence no impact of the supervised injection facility on crime. Disaggregated analyses indicate a significant decrease in crimes in the district where the supervised injection facility is located. Implications of the findings are discussed.
Despite the numerous differences between boys and girls in the juvenile justice system, there are currently no gender-responsive risk/needs assessments for system-impacted girls, thereby limiting agencies to the use of gender-neutral risk/needs assessments. This article examines commonly used gender-neutral risk/needs assessments and illustrates how these instruments are not truly “neutral.” We argue that predictive validity is not enough to demonstrate effectiveness; these tools can harm and possibly discriminate against girls by placing them in similarly labeled risk categories (i.e., high, medium, low) as boys, despite engaging in less delinquency. This practice of force-fitting girls to assessments primarily developed for boys results in over- and misclassification of girls’ risk and fails to capture their gendered needs and resilience. We see this as an opportunity to reconsider risk assessments altogether for girls and propose a resilience/needs assessment may be better suited to identify girls’ needs and predict future behavior.
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