Research Results Presentation: Recall The Criminal Justice ✓ Solved

Presentation of Research Results: Recall the criminal justice

Presentation of Research Results: Recall the criminal justice research topic you chose in Week 1 (deaths of individuals while in the custody of law enforcement officials in the past 10 years). Imagine an audience of criminal justice professionals and community members with varying levels of understanding of statistics and the criminal justice system. First, describe an obstacle you could encounter when presenting quantitative information to this audience. Next, explain what information and/or statistics you would present to help the audience understand the importance of the topic, including measures such as number of deaths, trends over time, demographic breakdowns (sex, age, race), causes of death (self-inflicted, medical, or suspicious), and locations (jail, prison, patrol car). Describe the visual displays you would use (timeline bar graphs, compressed frequency displays), and explain how these visuals would convey your findings. Finally, discuss practical challenges to conducting and presenting this research, such as data availability, data accuracy, and funding, and propose strategies to address these challenges and ensure the audience gains a thorough understanding.

Paper For Above Instructions

Overview and Audience

This presentation addresses deaths of individuals in law enforcement custody in the past decade. The intended audience combines criminal justice professionals (police, corrections officials, policymakers) and community members who may lack formal statistical training. The goal is to communicate why the phenomenon matters, what the data show, and what policy and practice implications follow.

Primary Obstacle: Diverse Statistical Literacy and Emotional Salience

The chief obstacle in presenting quantitative findings on custodial deaths is the combination of widely varying statistical literacy among audience members and the emotional and political sensitivity of the subject. Community members may interpret raw counts or rates as indictments of specific agencies without appreciating denominators, trends, or confounders, while practitioners may focus narrowly on measurement limitations or exceptions (BJS, 2019). Emotional reactions can amplify misinterpretation: graphical choices that seem neutral to analysts (e.g., non-normalized bar charts) can appear misleading or manipulative to others, eroding trust (Human Rights Watch, 2018).

Key Information and Statistics to Present

To give the audience a clear, balanced understanding I would present a layered set of measures:

• Counts and rates: annual counts of custodial deaths and rates per 100,000 detained persons to account for population changes (BJS, 2019).
• Trends over time: a 10-year time series showing increases, decreases, or stability in both counts and rates (CDC, 2017).
• Demographic breakdowns: age, sex, and race/ethnicity distributions to highlight disparities (Kinner et al., 2018).
• Cause-of-death categories: self-inflicted (suicide), medical/natural causes, accidental, and suspicious/homicidal—using standardized categories and noting coding methods (Fazel & Benning, 2009).
• Location and context: deaths by setting (jail, prison, police vehicle, during arrest) and time since admission/arrest (immediate vs. within days) (NIJ, 2016).
• Comparative metrics: comparisons to community mortality rates and to similar jurisdictions to contextualize severity (BJS, 2019).

Visualizations and Rationale

Visuals would be designed for progressive disclosure—simple summaries for general audience members with optional deeper views for experts.

• Timeline bar graphs: an annotated, color-coded bar/line hybrid showing annual counts and normalized rates. Bars present counts while an overlay line presents rates per 100,000; annotations call out key policy or data-collection changes to prevent misattribution of spikes (BJS, 2019).
• Compressed frequency displays: small-multiple charts or stacked bar charts breaking down deaths by sex, age group, race, cause, and location. These enable side-by-side comparison while keeping each panel simple (Tufte-style clarity) (NCBI, 2013).
• Heat maps and choropleths: to show geographic clustering at county or state level, highlighting hotspots while cautioning about small-number instability (CDC, 2017).
• Case timelines and vignettes: anonymized case timelines illustrating typical pathways (arrest → detention → medical deterioration) to connect data to lived experience and reduce abstraction (Human Rights Watch, 2018).

Communication Strategies to Ensure Understanding

To bridge statistical literacy gaps and build trust, I would use the following techniques:

• Define terms and units up front: clearly explain “rate per 100,000,” categories of cause, and scope (who is included/excluded) (BJS, 2019).
• Layered presentation: begin with plain-language key takeaways and one simple visual, then offer deeper slides and appendices for experts (Amnesty International, 2015).
• Use narratives with data: brief anonymized case stories humanize statistics and anchor abstract measures to people’s experiences (Human Rights Watch, 2018).
• Interactive Q&A and handouts: provide one-page summaries, glossaries, and links to data sources so audience members can inspect methods (NIJ, 2016).
• Transparency about limitations: explicitly state gaps, data quality issues, and analytic choices to preempt distrust and facilitate constructive dialogue (CDC, 2017).

Practical Challenges: Data Availability, Accuracy, and Funding

Key practical barriers include incomplete or inconsistent reporting across jurisdictions, differences in cause-of-death classification, underreporting of custody-related deaths, and limited resources for comprehensive data collection (BJS, 2019; ACLU, 2020). Funding constraints impede travel to archives, FOIA requests, autopsy procurements, and building databases.

Strategies to mitigate these challenges:

• Triangulate sources: combine official mortality programs (DCRP), medical examiner data, media reports, and NGO tallies to improve completeness (BJS, 2019; Human Rights Watch, 2018).
• Standardize coding: adopt and disclose a consistent protocol for cause and location coding, including inter-rater checks (Fazel & Benning, 2009).
• Partner with universities and nonprofits: collaborate for grant applications, student research support, and institutional review board oversight to lower costs and increase credibility (NIJ, 2016).
• Pursue funding streams: federal research grants, foundations focused on criminal justice reform, and crowd-funding for specific database-building tasks (ACLU, 2020).
• Open methods and data: publish codebooks, analysis scripts, and de-identified datasets where legally permissible to increase reproducibility and invite external validation (CDC, 2017).

Policy and Practice Implications

Clear presentation of robust trends and disparities can inform targeted interventions: improved intake medical screening, suicide prevention protocols, body-worn-camera policies, training in de-escalation, and transparent death-review boards. By combining clear statistics, humane case narratives, and transparent methods, presentations can motivate evidence-based policy changes without sensationalizing individual tragedies (Amnesty International, 2015).

Conclusion

Presenting data on custodial deaths requires careful attention to audience literacy, emotional context, and data limitations. Use normalized rates, simple annotated visuals, layered content, transparent methods, and collaborative funding approaches to ensure the audience understands both the magnitude and the human impact of the issue. Clear communication empowers stakeholders to pursue targeted reforms and improved reporting systems to reduce future deaths in custody.

References

• Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). (2019). Mortality in Correctional Institutions, 2001–2016. U.S. Department of Justice. (BJS, 2019)
• Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). Deaths in Custody Reporting Program (DCRP). U.S. Department of Justice. (BJS, DCRP)
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (2017). Reports on mortality and causes of death in custody. (CDC, 2017)
• National Institute of Justice (NIJ). (2016). Preventing deaths in custody: research and practice guidance. (NIJ, 2016)
• Human Rights Watch. (2018). When Cops Kill: Police Use of Force in the United States. (Human Rights Watch, 2018)
• Amnesty International. (2015). Use of Force and Accountability: Deaths in Custody. (Amnesty International, 2015)
• American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). (2020). Deaths in Custody and Police Accountability Resources. (ACLU, 2020)
• Kinner, S. A., et al. (2018). Mortality among people recently released from prisons: a systematic review and meta-analysis. The Lancet Public Health. (Kinner et al., 2018)
• Fazel, S., & Benning, R. (2009). Suicide in prisoners: a systematic review of risk factors. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. (Fazel & Benning, 2009)
• National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). (2013). Methods for presenting health and forensic data: best practices and visualization. (NCBI, 2013)