User:Ohmizzoutigers/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Criminal justice reform

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article, due to our class having focused on the justice reform lately. It caught my eye especially when discussing police, prison, and legal aid reform, as that has been a main discussion within the past two weeks of class. It tends to lack when discussion of multi-dimensional components are added to justice reform (i.e. only discussing mental health).

Evaluate the article
The article begins with various ways of detailing minor solutions to combat social justice issues; however, it leaves out huge gaps that depict minorities responding to social justice reforms and their actions that have combatted the issues. Instead, the article goes into depth of how individuals' mental health can deteriorate in prison systems, substitutes for the police system, and identifying issues citizens have to access legal aid. An especially overstates topic comes from the discussion of mental health and prison system reform. In this section, readers are shown detailed blips of the negative effects given by solitary confinement, sanitary issues, and overcrowding. While these issues are very relevant and important to prison reform, there are no other issues outlined in the prison reform structure - missing critical information that describes the brutality and inequality the LGBTQ+ community and people of color face in these structural systems. As well as the prison reform section, the police and legal aid reform sections lack any statistic of brutality, inequality, and representation that is crucial when representing minorities who struggle with these social issues the most. Even though the article's tone is neutral and non-biased, there are definitely heavily overrepresented material in the writing that completely lacks to discuss any impacted minority and their aim at criminal justice reform.

All the sources listed within the article come from a large array of different publications, with the majority being from scholarly articles and journals released through educational or governmental publications. Only one cite comes from an online article; however, the publication is very credible. The only area in the article that does not cite sources is the introduction of "Improving prison conditions" section. In this introduction, claims such as "prison safety is not guaranteed" are not supported with a citation. Although it introduces the idea of reforming prison conditions, it lacks any sources that confirm its overview.

When looking at the Talk page, there is only one discussion possibly updating the page to contain sources addressing mobile crisis units instead of police. It is also apparent that the article is of interest to three WikiProjects: WikiProject Law, WIkiProject Law Enforcement, and WikiProject Human Rights. For each project, the article was ranked C-Class on quality scale and Mid-Important on importance scale. This indicates that there are definitely gaps apparent and a lot of relevant information could be missing. Within its importance scale, the article adds basic information for casual reading but it is not completely needed for the encyclopedia. The single discussion relates to our course by wanting to update irrelevant information; however, it strays from the want of vital information given by brutality and inequality for minorities.