Continuing Education and Professional Training

Restorative and Transformative Community Safety

April 21, 2023

Implementing restorative and transformative principles and practices to heal community trauma and increase community safety and security.

The annual Seattle University Crime & Justice Research Center Online Continuing Education event featured topics of interest for professionals, students, faculty, and the public in a conversation about implementing restorative and transformative principles and practices for community safety.

The event was hosted virtually and you can watch the video here.

Black in Blue: Lessons on Leadership, Breaking Barriers, and Racial Reconciliation

May 23, 4 p.m., Stuart T. Rolfe Community Room

Carmen Best, former Seattle Police Chief, talked about her new book. Sponsored by the SU Crime and Justice Research Center.

Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment

Using Theory, Research, and Activism to End Systemic Racism in the Criminal Legal System

Professor Angela J. Davis and contributing authors

An Online Continuing Education Event hosted on April 8, 2022

Agenda, speaker bios, and videos available here.

The event included a keynote presentation by Professor Davis with panel presentations by authors whose work appears in the book: Professor Kristin Henning, Blume Professor of Law and Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at Georgetown Law, Ronald Wright, Associate Dean for Research and Academic Programs and Needham Yancey Gulley Professor of Criminal Law at West Forest Law, Renée Hutchins, Dean and Professor of Law at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law, Roger A. Fairfax, Jr., Dean and Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law, Katheryn Russell-Brown, Levin, Mabie & Levin Professor of Law and Director of the Race and Crime Center for Justice at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, Tracey L. Meares, Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law and co-Founding Faculty Director of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School, Marc Mauer, Senior Advisor and former Director of The Sentencing Project, and Jin Hee Lee, Senior Deputy Director of Litigation and Director of Strategic Initiatives at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The authors discussed their chapters in Policing the Black Man, their current work, and how their work informs policy and practice in the criminal legal system.

Incarceration Without Conviction

Featuring Mikaela Rabinowitz

Online Continuing Education Event hosted February 2, 2022

The author discussed her book, which addresses an understudied fairness flaw in the criminal justice system. On any given day, approximately 500,000 Americans are in pretrial detention in the US, held in local jails not because they are considered a flight or public safety risk, but because they are poor and cannot afford bail or a bail bond. Over the course of a year, millions of Americans cycle through local jails, most there for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. These individuals are disproportionately Black and poor.

Roots of Injustice: The Structural Sources of America’s Penal State

Featuring Dr. David Garland

Online Continuing Educaton Event hosted March 5, 2021

David Garland is the author of Punishment and Modern Society, The Culture of Control, The Peculiar Institution. In this talk, Professor Garland explained the distinctive social structures that underpin both of these historical moments, showing how America’s political economy and welfare state generate criminal violence and related social problems while limiting the range of policy responses available to deal with them. America’s exceptional levels of violence and racialized penal control are shown to be two sides of the same social condition: deep inequality and a lack of social solidarity. Welfare state institutions, when they are universalistic and egalitarian, supply these vital social bonds. They provide citizens with security, they form interests in common, they build mutual trust, and they promote the “public interest” – in contrast to meritocracy and competitive markets which do precisely the opposite. By repeatedly choosing the market over the social state, America’s elites have enriched themselves while simultaneously reinforcing insecurity, inequality, resentments, and mutual distrust. The result is a nation able to embrace mass incarceration because millions of its own citizens are, in fact, distrusted and despised by majority sentiment.

Watch the videos and learn more here.

The Death Penalty in the Age of Data, Science, and Abolition

Social Media and Crime

June 1, 2018, 8:30-4:30 p.m.

Student Center, Room 130

Annual all-day continuing education event focusing on social media and crime. Dr. Mary Ellen O’Toole and Dr. Ray Surrete. examine the role of social media in crime with focus on performance crime, copycat crime, the use of social media by domestic and international terrorists, and other topics.

Fair and Impartial Criminal Justice Practice: A Science Based Approach

April 30, 2017, 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m.

Student Center, Room 160

Featuring Dr. Lorie Fridell, Police Executive Research Director and author of Producing Bias-Free Policing: A Science-Based Approach. Opportunity to network with fellow students and criminal justice professionals, while earning eight hours of continuing education credit. Breakfast and lunch are provided.

4th Annual Criminal Justice Leadership Institute: Building Internal Research

August 12, 2016; 8:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.

Seattle University, Student Center 210

Large justice agencies may have the luxury of having their own full-time research/ analysis unit that can be tasked with administrative analyses, but there are many more mid-sized and smaller justice agencies that still have questions about whether they are doing works, or whether it is working as intended. How can we build the internal research capacity of these mid-sized and smaller agencies so that they can answer these important questions?