Policy Brief on Adjudication Article

After starting the research in Fall 2020, I am happy to have finally finished the analysis from our adjudication project and formulated a research brief based on our results which can be read here. It took five years to file 66 Freedom of Information Requests for arrest records from 2010-2020 and then analyze 326,719 arrests from the 16 counties where we received data. In total, we filed requests to 40 States’ Attorneys offices, 19 Sheriff's Offices, four with County Clerks offices, two FOIA Officers, and one with a Public Access Bureau. Then, we conducted three cycles of coding analyzing public records (legal search databases, local court documents, and newspapers) related to the case for elements of human trafficking. Our analysis of ‘second generation’ state level human trafficking related cases between 2010-2020 revealed that the majority of the state-level trafficking-related cases in Central Illinois were charged with non-trafficking offenses. We identified twice as many  cases with elements of trafficking than found in the Uniform Crime Report (UCR). The research was presented at the Law and Courts section of the Midwest Political Science Conference in April 2022 and Pi Sigma Alpha National Student Research Conference in February 2024 and is currently under review.

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