Yes, today is Halloween, an exciting day for those of us with a sweet tooth. But, along with the treats, comes an irrational fear of your neighbors.

Encouraged by the media, parents will be inspecting candy — and throwing a lot of it out — but it turns out there has never been a case of a child dying from poisoned candy from a stranger.

Want to know more? Wikipedia has an excellent article on the history of the candy tampering myth.

So feel free to relax, and worry about things that are dangerous, like tripping in the dark.

We've added 16 new reports to the research clearinghouse:

• Video Visitation: How Private Companies Push for Visits by Video and Families Pay the Price by Grassroots Leadership; Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, October, 2014
  "Video-only visitation policies strip away that choice; they are simply another outgrowth of the idea that offering services to prisoners and their families can be commercialized." See similar reports about:
  Jails Families
• Prison Visitation Policies: A Fifty State Survey by Chesa Boudin, Trevor Stutz, & Aaron Littman, February, 2014
  "This paper presents a summary of the findings from the first fifty-state survey of prison visitation policies." See similar reports about:
  Prison Procedures Families
• Explaining Dimensions of State-Level Punitiveness in the United States: The Roles of Social, Economic, and Cultural Factors by Baker Institute of Public Policy, August, 2014
  (For incarceration, citizen engagement and property crime have a statistically significant and negative impact on state punitiveness, while the percent of population that is black has a significant and positive effect.) See similar reports about:
  Incarceration Rates Growth Causes Sentencing Policy
• The Crime Beat: Does Quantity Matter? by John Jay College of Criminal Justice Center on Media, Crime and Justice, October, 2014
  "We found that the six papers under review averaged about 78 crime-related stories for the period studied, with the most stories appearing in The Camden Courier-Post (165) and the fewest in the Naperville Sun (26)." See similar reports about:
  Public Opinion
• South Bronx Community Connections Technical Report by John Jay College of Criminal Justice, November, 2013
  "By fall 2013, two years into project implementation, a statistical analysis of SBCC's available data (see Appendix A) found juvenile project participants to be suggestively, but significantly (p value= 0.09), less likely to be re-arrested within a year." See similar reports about:
  Juveniles
• The Unpredictability of Murder: Juvenile Homicide in the Pathways to Desistance Study by Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, October, 2014
  (Results from a rare-events logistic regression that examined the relationship between these five risk factors and their ability to distinguish between the two groups indicate that only lower IQ and a greater exposure to violence were significant.) See similar reports about:
  Juveniles
• Skewed Justice: Citizens United, Television Advertising and State Supreme Court Justices' Decisions in Criminal Cases by Emory Law School; American Constitution Society, October, 2014
  "In a state with 10,000 ads, a doubling of airings is associated on average with an 8 percent increase in justices' voting against a criminal defendant's appeal." See similar reports about:
  Trials Public Opinion
• On the Streets of America: Human Rights Abuses in Ferguson by Amnesty International, October, 2014
  (This briefing outlines some of the human rights concerns witnessed by Amnesty International and recommendations that need to be implemented with regards to the use of lethal force by law enforcement and the policing of protests.) See similar reports about:
  Police and Policing Practices
• ClaimStat Alert by Office of the New York City Comptroller, August, 2014
  (The 37 percent increase in personal injury correctional facility claims activity from FY 2013 to FY 2014 corresponds to a rise in the number of serious allegations of violence at Rikers.) See similar reports about:
  Jails
• Changing Priorities: State Criminal Justice Reforms and Investments in Education by Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, October, 2014
  "Corrections spending is now the third-largest category of spending in most states, behind education and health care." See similar reports about:
  Prison and The Economy
• A Constitutional Default: Services to Criminal Defendants in Pennsylvania by Joint State Government Commission, General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, December, 2011
  (A study of the Commonwealth's indigent defense system concluded that the Supreme Court's mandate of free counsel has been ignored by the General Assembly and is not being fulfilled in Pennsylvania.) See similar reports about:
  Trials
• Probation and Parole in the United States, 2013 by Bureau of Justice Statistics, October, 2014
  (At yearend 2013, an estimated 4,751,400 adults were under community supervision---a decline of about 29,900 offenders from yearend 2012.) See similar reports about:
  Incarceration Rates Growth Causes Prison Procedures
• Officer Involved Shooting Information by Philadelphia Police Department, 2014
  "An officer involved shooting is the discharge of a firearm, whether accidental or intentional, by a police officer, whether on or off duty." See similar reports about:
  Police and Policing Practices
• Implementing Juvenile Justice Reform The Federal Role by National Research Council of the National Academies, 2014
  (OJJDP has not been reauthorized since 2002. Appropriated funding has declined by half in current dollars since 2003-2010, but more importantly the discretion that OJJDP has to use its funding has been sharply compromised.) See similar reports about:
  Juveniles
• Drugs: International Comparators by Home Office, October, 2014
  "We did not in our fact-finding observe any obvious relationship between the toughness of a country's enforcement against drug possession, and levels of drug use in that country." See similar reports about:
  International Incarceration Comparisons Drug Policy
• Are Black Kids Worse? Myths and Facts about Racial Differences in Behavior by Equity Project at Indiana University, 2013
  "Such studies have provided little to no evidence that African American students in the same school or district are engaging in more seriously disruptive behavior that could warrant higher rates of exclusion or punishment." See similar reports about:
  Education Juveniles