Police officers stationed at schools are generally known as School Resource Officers (SROs). According to the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO), the formalized organization of SROs began in 1991 although alternative sources predate the existence of SROs by several decades. Irrespective of the history of SROs there is little d...

For months we have been investigating problems associated with troubled youth in the state of Wyoming. Recently we published a series of reports on How to Keep Kids Out of Jail. Within this series is a piece focusing on the presence of School Resource Officers increasingly in schools. An inflammatory news article appeared in the press just before C...

According to juvenile justice advocates such as the ACLU, the School to Prison Pipeline prioritizes incarceration over education due to several factors including failing public schools, zero tolerance policies, increased reliance on police for school discipline, "alternative schools" for disciplinary problem students, court involvement and juvenile...

The juvenile justice system in Wyoming is unique in the country. It would be pleasing to have a juvenile justice system unique due to its stellar qualities, but unfortunately, Wyoming stands alone based on its failure to achieve even the most basic expectations standard in juvenile justice systems in the rest of the country. One of Wyoming's diverg...

I intended this to be an upbeat resource-rich article highlighting success stories, strategies and promising new approaches to keep children out of the juvenile justice system. In the course of researching for this paper I certainly did find some promising trends and programs and I will mention them and explain why they offer exciting possibilities...

Steve Klein and Glenn Woods from Boldrepublic.com discuss civil asset forfeiture in Wyoming and Senate File 14 (2015), which would reform Wyoming law to only allow for forfeiture of property after owners are convicted of a crime. 

In late September I submitted comments to the Wyoming Department of Administration and Information ("A&I") opposing two proposed changes to the State of Wyoming Personnel Rules. My memo discussed two vague and overbroad provisions, one which could lead to unconstitutional abridgements of free speech and the other which unequivocally punished ap...

As Wyoming and other states consider expanding the reach of campaign finance laws to capture "dark money," some consideration of what's happening in Chicago is helpful. Aggressive campaign finance regulations, touted as combatting corruption, allow for easy manipulation of the law. We learned last week that Rahm Emanuel pulled in $400,000 in campai...

In mid-November, Wyoming Attorney General Peter Michael joined an amicus (friend-of-the-court) brief filed in a Maryland case that will soon be heard in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. The case, Kolbe v. O'Malley, challenges a law recently enacted in Maryland that bans numerous semi-automatic rifles in the state and limit...

Our introductory blog on this topic focused on the premises of graduate criminal justice fellow Brice Hamack's recent article in the Wyoming Law Review. It is important to clarify that while Mr. Hamack's general concerns are well founded, Wyoming's juvenile justice system has uniquely entrenched problems unique from and, in many ways, worse than th...