Evaluating the translational impact of criminal justice research on Mississippi appellate court decisions using natural language processing

• In Event: Policy Panel: Enhancing Translational Criminology with Natural Language Processing and Data Science

Abstract

Jones v. Mississippi (2021), a recent case that traversed every level of the appellate court system eventually reaching the Supreme Court, ruled that the sentencing of juvenile offenders to incarceration for life without the possibility of parole was constitutional – upholding the life imprisonment of an offender that was 15 at the time of their offense. The arguments presented in this case are inextricably related, and arguably contravene the life-course research at the very core of criminology. Continuing the development of a framework for empirically assessing the extent which judicial decision-making aligns with current criminological research, we use BERTopic and knowledge graphs to independently summarize Mississippi appellate court opinions and criminal justice abstracts collected via dimensions.ai. We compare knowledge graph structure and topic distributions to identify similarities and differences between the corpora. To identify specific points of overlap, and ascertain which criminal justice theories and studies govern appellate court decisions, we extract highly correlated sentences from each corpus. Ultimately, we evaluate the translational impact of criminal justice research on the Mississippi Court of Appeals, and discuss the importance of translational science to criminology and criminal justice.

Authors

• Thomas Bryan Smith, University of Mississippi

• Mia A. Thomaidou, Rutgers University

• Brian B. Boutwell, University of Mississippi

• Colleen Berryessa, Rutgers University