Texas mandates 40 hours of law enforcement management and leadership training biannually for police chiefs. To implement this requirement, from October 1997 to August 1999, the Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas held 22 statewide training classes. During the training, we administered a survey on legal liabilities in law enforcement, in which 808 usable surveys were completed. Amassing the largest data set on legal liabilities in law enforcement, this article reports results from that survey and documents the chiefs' perceptions of the prevalence of civil litigation, fear of litigation, type of suits filed by members of the public as well as by their own officers, and issues surrounding settlements, policy and procedure changes, training, indemnification, and lawsuit prevention. The article concludes that nationwide systematic data collection should be undertaken on legal liabilities in law enforcement so the public becomes better informed about this important aspect of police work.

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This article presents a national survey that assesses the policies of correctional institutions regarding staff and inmate exposure to secondary tobacco smoke. Correctional administrators from the 50 states were queried about smoking problems in prisons, focusing on disputes among inmates, among staff, and between staff and inmates. The respondents identified nonsmoking areas in their facilities and listed the various administrative responses used to alleviate the problem. The article compares the opinions of administrators on the impact of a policy that restricts or bans smoking with case studies of institutions that have already banned smoking, and concludes that more research is needed to determine the relative pros and cons of restricting or banning smoking in prisons.

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