The
most recent issue of the Alaska Justice Forum features articles on school resource officers (SROs); methamphetamine prevention efforts; and a recent 9th Circuit ruling on felon disenfranchisement.
The 8-page issue includes the following articles:
This articles provides a history of School Resource Officers (SROs)
— certified, sworn police officers who are employed by a local police
agency but are assigned to work in local schools — and presents results
of public perceptions of SROs in Anchorage School District schools based
on questions in the 2009 Anchorage Community Survey.
A description of efforts nationally and in Alaska to combat the use
of methamphetamines, with particular focuse on the work of the
Alaska Meth Education (AME) Project,
which collaborates with local governments — including the Municipality
of Anchorage, Kenai Peninsula Borough, Matanuska-Susitna Borough,
Fairbanks North Star Borough, and the City and Borough of Juneau — to
educate youth and the general public about the dangers of meth use.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit stood alone among the circuits in holding, in
Farrakhan v. Gregoire,
that state law denying felons the right to vote is a violation of
section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, where discrimination in the state’s
criminal justice system results in race-based denial of the vote. Now an
en banc order by the 9th Circuit has vacated that decision, which was
discussed in a
previous Forum article. Implications of this decision are discussed.
