User:Lawrence Leigh/sandbox

{{The Nixon Administration created the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals ("Commission") on October 20, 1971 through the United States Department of Justice's grant making agency to state and local governments, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration.The late sixties and early seventies were years of intense national examination of criminal justice. President Lyndon Johnson created the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. That Commission produced in 1967 a widely publicized report of recommendations to improve the criminal justice system. The Nixon Administration viewed its 1971 Commission as an extension of and a step beyond the mostly general recommendations of the Johnson Administration's work. In 1971, the Commission's mandate was to create specific, verifiable goals and standards for state and local governments to reduce crime and improve criminal justice. The Administrator of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration ("LEAA'), Jerris Leonard, appointed the Republican governor of Delaware, Russell W. Peterson to serve as Chairman of the Commission and Los Angeles County Sheriff, Peter J. Pitchess, to serve as Vice Chairman. The Executive Director of the Commission's staff was Thomas J. Madden and its Deputy Director was Lawrence J. Leigh. Although LEAA selected the members of the Commission and its twelve specialized task forces, it did not direct the Commission's work or its product. The twenty-two Commission members included law enforcement, judicial, community and political leaders from various levels of state and local government. Membership included police chiefs, judges, prosecutors, corrections leaders and private attorneys.  Among the members of the Commission who later had long political careers in the United States Senate were Arlen Spector, District Attorney of Philadelphia, Richard G. Lugar, Mayor of Indianapolis.

In 1973, the Commission finished its work and issued a summary volume, A National Strategy to Reduce Crime, which presented a broad picture of the Commission's work including its crime reduction goals and its most important standards and recommendations. The Commission also presented all its standards and recommendations in five separate volumes entitled Criminal Justice System,, Police, , Courts, Corrections, and Community Crime Prevention. Most of these tended to represent the best professional practices of the time and created little controversy. They included, for example, standards for state-wide criminal justice information systems, recruitment of minorities, community policing, speedy trial processing and treatment and rehabilitation of offenders including juvenile offenders. The Commission also recognized the importance of community organizations and programs outside the formal criminal justice system by issuing standards and recommendations for areas as diverse as citizen volunteers, community drug abuse treatment and physical design of public spaces such as parks and buildings.

Several recommendations did catch the attention of the news media and public. One highly controversial recommendation was that each state should outlaw the private possession of handguns by 1983. Another recommendation was the abolition of plea bargaining, the negotiation of prosecutorial charging and sentencing recommendations in return for guilty pleas. Still another groundbreaking position was the recommendation that most offenders receive a maximum sentence of no more than five years except for career offenders, with no minimum mandatory sentence. These politically charged stands failed to gain widespread support in most jurisdictions. Plea bargaining is still practiced in various forms by federal and state prosecutors. In the years immediately following the 1973 publication of the Commission's reports, most states moved in the opposite direction of the Commission by adopting policies loosening gun restrictions and increasing the severity of sentences for most crimes. However, since 2009 a developing countertrend emerged to reduce the harshness of criminal penalties at both the federal and state levels.

But the Commission's report did have an impact an impact in a number of states on less controversial areas involving professional development and structural reform of police, courts, corrections, prosecutorial, and public defender agencies. These included unification of correctional systems under statewide agencies and state administered and financed judicial, prosecutorial and defender systems as well as the consolidation of small local police departments into larger agencies. Another area in which the Commission's work had an impact was in the promotion of state criminal justice information system standards to maintain criminal history records on offenders, including privacy and security standards. The Commission's report spurred the adoption of a federal regulation governing such systems. . Finally, the Commission's report also contributed to and shaped judicial opinions towards constitutionally and legislatively standards in Supreme Court and lower court decisions. Italic text