Edited by Sylvie Da Lomba

This Special Issue on “Migrants and Human Rights Protections” delves into human rights law’s enduring struggles to extend protections to migrants. The contributions engage with this subject-matter from a wide range of perspectives that bring to the fore both the universal and particular in migrants’ experiences of human rights protection regimes across countries and continents. This Special Issue also reminds of the value of developments in the Global South.

Edited by Georgios Leventakis and M. R. Haberfeld

Despite broad and often varied underlying definitions, a common theme throughout community and neighbourhood policing strategies establishes the need to target improvements in the relationship and level of engagement between the police and the communities they serve. Community policing approaches have long underpinned a desire to move away from reactive policing models towards those which establish a
more proactive philosophy, responsive to the wants and needs of the community. The near ubiquitous proliferation of smartphones and other ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) means they are often seen as a vector through which initiatives of all kinds can instil a culture of proactive engagement with their respective stakeholder communities. This paper builds upon existing research which suggests that technologies for crime prevention should be designed to support communications and problem-solving rather than used simply as a means to disseminate information, unpacking a number of the core concepts that are considered central to participation and effective engagement; social capital, public participation and social and digital inclusion. Moreover, examples of wider initiatives are comparatively discussed, not just those associated with community policing, which target the engagement of communities through the use of technology, and more specifically mobile applications, before reflecting on the empirical evidence and experiences gleaned through the EU H2020 funded ‘UNITY’ project, a project that sought to establish effective strategies for engagement between police and citizen communities.

OR:

Examines the societal implications of community-oriented policing. Explores possibility for improving police-community relations using technology. Presents innovative solutions for policing challenges

Edited by Gemma Davies and Helena Carrapico


This unique open access collection offers an in-depth understanding of UK-EU police and judicial cooperation post-Brexit, an under-explored field.

It considers the legal and political operation of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) and its implications for a wide number of policy areas. As well as critiquing its operation, contributors suggest reforms that would improve police and judicial cooperation between the UK and the EU.

This scholarly discussion is balanced against practical considerations, with short chapters setting out practitioners' perspectives on the TCA. It ends by reflecting on lessons that non-EU countries seeking cooperation with the EU might learn.

Edited By Anja Johansen, Genevieve Lennon, Hartmut Aden, Christian
Mouhanna, Marc Alain, Tobias Singelnstein

This book provides a detailed comparative analysis of Independent Police Complaints Bodies (IPCBs) in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the UK. It explores the distinctive political, cultural, and institutional contexts shaping police accountability arrangements within each country, as well as the transnational dynamics behind the remarkable proliferation of IPCBs over the past three decades, assessing the prospects for future convergence around international standards. Drawing on findings from the international project ‘Police Accountability: Towards International Standards’, the book examines the inherent dilemmas and challenges in the everyday functioning and dynamics of IPCBs.

By Jens Rennstam

Sexuality in the Swedish Police is based on the experiences of lesbian, gay, and bisexual police officers and the author’s observations of police work. Written at the intersection of organizational, gender, and police studies, the book analyses how processes of exclusion and inclusion of LGB sexuality coexist in the Swedish police, how these processes are related to the culture and characteristics of police work, and how police management attempts to create an inclusive organization.

By Robert E. Worden and Sarah J. McLean

In the United States, the exercise of police authority—and the public’s trust that police authority is used properly—is a recurring concern. Contemporary prescriptions for police reform hold that the public would better trust the police and feel a greater obligation to comply and cooperate if police-citizen interactions were marked by higher levels of procedural justice by police.

In this book, Robert E. Worden and Sarah J. McLean argue that the procedural justice model of reform is a mirage. From a distance, procedural justice seemingly offers a relief from strained police-community relations. But a closer look at police organizations and police-citizen interactions shows that the relief offered by such reform is, in fact, illusory.

By The American Immigration Council


In the spring and summer of 2018, the first Trump administration sought to deter migrants from coming to the United States through the cruel practice of separating children from their parents. To do this, they implemented the zero-tolerance policy, which aimed to prosecute all adults who crossed the southern border without inspection. If a family was apprehended, the parents were taken into custody by the Department of Homeland Security, while their children were taken into custody by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In many cases, these kids were sent to shelters thousands of miles away from their parents, without a way to contact them. Later, the government struggled to reunite families, in part because there was no centralized database of where the children had been sent or who their parents were. Years later, some of the nearly 3,000 children taken by the government during the zero-tolerance period had still not been reunited with their parents.

The American Immigration Council and partners filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for records to better understand how the government implemented these separations. After the Council sued to obtain these records, the government began producing them on a monthly basis. In 2020, the Council published a tranche of documents highlighting the harms and trauma to children caused by the separations. After years of continuing litigation, the Council received tens of thousands of additional pages from government documents about this policy.

This site showcases a new subset of the records obtained. It reveals how journalists, attorneys and members of Congress fought to expose this horrific policy and hold the government accountable for the pain and havoc it created. Visitors to this site can review never-before-published government records, read analysis by the Council, and hear celebrated actors read first-person accounts by the journalists, attorneys and Congressmen who fought family separations on the front lines.

By Ariel G. Ruiz Soto

The Trump administration has entered into third-country deportation agreements with 27 countries to date—from Eswatini and Palau to Uzbekistan—sending people to nations where they have no ties, no
language, and in some cases, little to no legal recourse. Yet despite the high foreign policy priority placed by the U.S. government on reaching these agreements, only about 15,000 deportations in 2025 involved third countries, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) estimates.

So, what is driving this policy?

The primary purpose appears less about achieving deportation at scale, given the administration’s goal to carry out 1 million deportations yearly, and more about the strategic use of fear, a new MPI short read argues. Signaling that deportation could mean relocation to a far-off, unfamiliar country with no legal status or protection could increase pressure on unauthorized immigrants to “self-deport” or deter future arrivals, the short read notes.

The analysis maps the four distinct types of agreements now in use, from safe third country agreements to incarceration deals. It examines critical gaps, including the lack of transparency around the agreements, the limited infrastructure of receiving countries, and the limbo deportees face. Courts in the United States and abroad are already weighing in, with the issue expected to end up before the Supreme Court

By Steven Blaakman

The European Union increasingly relies on cooperation with non-EU countries to tackle irregular migration, an issue of increasing political importance. However, sending irregular migrants back to their countries of origin or to a transit country depends on the other country agreeing to accept the migrant's readmission. In the 2000s, the EU started concluding readmission agreements with non-EU countries. From 2016, it started to focus on informal readmission deals. These non-legally binding agreements were easier to conclude, but did not lead to higher readmission rates. There was also less transparency about how they were negotiated and carried out, leading to human rights concerns. The European Parliament called for more transparency and scrutiny on several occasions. In 2025, the European Commission proposed a return regulation in a bid to boost migrant returns. Following the 2015 migration crisis, the EU also pursued non-binding agreements with third countries to prevent irregular migrants from arriving in the EU. This involved the EU offering incentives such as funding and visa liberalisation in exchange for non-EU countries doing more to stop migrants from travelling to the EU. As these are not legally binding, there is a lack of transparency and no clear role for the Parliament to check how these are being implemented. This has also led to concerns over human rights.The EU is updating rules on safe countries of origin and safe third countries to facilitate asylum application processing and setting up return hubs in non-EU countries.The Commission has made cooperation with non-EU countries an important part of its strategy for migration management to 2031 and is proposing extra funding to make this possible in the EU's budget for 2028-2034.

By Valerie Lacarte and Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh

Maine’s immigrant population, though small, is distinct in its origins and characteristics compared to immigrants in other states and the nation at large. Due to a long history of movement across a shared border, Canadians have a notable presence in the state. At the same time, immigrants in Maine come from many parts of the world, and nearly half have lived in the United States for 20 years or more.

With the state working-age population projected to shrink in the coming years, immigrants are poised to play an increasingly important role in the state workforce. And in fact, foreign-born workers already contribute to many key industries in Maine—from health care and manufacturing to agriculture and aquaculture.

This report presents a profile of the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of Maine’s immigrants, based primarily on MPI analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. MPI researchers also interviewed staff of nine immigrant-serving organizations in Maine to better understand the types of services some immigrants need some related to challenges shared with U.S.-born Mainers, while others are more specific to this population.

By Nicholas D. E. Mark,  Abigail Weitzman and Julia Behrman

Heightened partisan rhetoric surrounding immigration, combined with increasingly punitive immigration policies, has the potential to affect how children interact with their social environment, with implications for racially and spatially variegated developmental processes. In this data visualization, the authors use data from the 2009 to 2017 waves of the National Crime Victimization Survey’s School Crime Supplement to show that Hispanic students in Texas reported a significant increase in fear of harm in 2017, a change that was not observed among among non-Hispanic white students in Texas, or among either group in California. Despite increased fear, Hispanic students in Texas did not report corresponding increases in bullying, indicating that their rising fear was attributable to something beyond peer interaction. Together, these findings highlight emergent changes in Hispanic youth’s perceived hostility alongside changes in the surrounding political and legal landscape.

By Abigail Weitzman, Julia Behrman, Marta Ascherio

 In this IMR Methods Note, we spotlight the rise in quantitative data availability, measurements, and scholarly investigations of US immigrant and immigration policies (IIPs). To begin, we offer a detailed account of the quantitative data sources, measures, and analytical strategies that have been developed by scholars studying IIPs over the last two decades. We then highlight this scholarship’s important advances toward identifying IIPs’ intended, unintended, and spillover effects on immigrant and nonimmigrant populations in the United States. To conclude, we discuss ongoing challenges and future opportunities for deepening research on US IIPs and their psychosocial, behavioral, and health implications. Our review illuminates how data on federal immigration enforcement activities, and on federal, state, and municipal immigrant laws have engendered
increasingly sophisticated quantitative studies of the US IIP climate. At the same time, it highlights several dimensions in which existing work stands to be strengthened, including the need for comparisons of newly developed IIP measures and their estimated effects; greater exploration of IIPs’ potentially heterogeneous effects across distinct subpopulations; and more attention to endogeneity, or in other words, the political and demographic processes that give rise to nonrandom variation in how IIPs take shape across space and time.

By Carrie F. Cordero, Heidi Li Feldman, Chimène I. Keitner

This Article offers the first comprehensive assessment of how domestic and international law limits the U.S. government’s ability to separate foreign children from the adults accompanying them when they seek to
enter the United States. As early as March 6, 2017, then Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he was considering separating families at the border as a deterrent to illegal immigration as part of a “zero tolerance” policy whereby the Trump administration intended the strictest enforcement of immigration law against those migrants coming to the U.S. southern border. Kelly did not say upon what legal basis the administration could lawfully separate families at the border as a component of its immigration policies. Whatever the merits of maximal prosecution of adults unlawfully crossing the border, adopting this policy did not convert family separation into a lawful byproduct of the arrest of an adult. To the contrary, domestic and international law militates strongly against the lawfulness of family separation as a tool for immigration deterrence, yielding liability for the state and for individuals who implement family separation in this setting. Both litigation and Congressional action can and should play a role in addressing the Trump administration’s use of family separation and ensuring that it is halted now and not used again, by Trump or any other U.S. President. In the Article, we start with a factual chronology of the Trump Administration’s family separation policy. We then argue for our positions regarding the illegality of the policy and its implementation.

In Part II, we describe the federal government’s recognized authority to enforce immigration laws and ensure border security, on the one hand, and the domestic constitutional framework for protecting the basic rights of migrant parents and children, on the other. In Part III we examine the reach of domestic law, including the common law of torts, for dealing with wrongful family separation in the immigration setting. Part IV reviews international law that protects against this harm. In the Conclusion we propose a range of steps that the U.S. Congress could take to repair at least some of the harm caused by the family separation policy, and to ensure that no future administration contemplates similar action.

By Alessandro Cigno,  Alessandro Gioffré, Annalisa Luporini

We derive the immigration policy that maximizes the residents' expected welfare, taking into account the cost of keeping immigrants out, and the expected benefits of letting immigrants in, under different hypotheses concerning the risk that some of the immigrants' children will become radicalized. We find that a certain amount of immigration is generally optimal. If education directly or indirectly reduces the risk of radicalization, the optimal policy may include also an educational subsidy for the immigrants' children.

Editor: Dennis Rodgers

Through biographical investigations of gang members' life histories, this open access book illustrates the range of causes, motivations, and consequences associated with being a gang member.

Gangs are one of a small number of truly global social phenomena, present across time and space all over the world. Partly as a result of this ubiquity, gangs are inherently revealing social institutions, and can be connected to a range of fundamental human activities, such as the exercise of power, capital accumulation, socialization, identity formation, territorialization, or the articulation of gender relations, amongst others.

At the same time, however, gangs are also frequently associated with an almost pathological form of violence, generally represented as engaging in senseless forms of brutality, and gangsters are popular
global scapegoats. Such representations make it all the more urgent to understand what it is that truly motivates individuals to become gang members, why they undergo particular trajectories, and what the
long-term consequences of gang membership might be.

Through a comparison of thirteen life histories of gang members from twelve different countries around the world, this book offers a nuanced and sensitive overview of the global gang experience. Life histories are ideal lenses through which to explore these issues due to their ability to simultaneously reflect both the uniqueness and the embedded complexity of gang lives, but also their capacity to offer fundamentally relatable portraits that elicit empathy and humanize individuals.

By Gail A. Caputo

In the past two decades, states and the federal government have developed and implemented new correctional options in an attempt to reduce correctional crowding and costs, better manage higher-risk
offenders in the community, reduce crime, and achieve greater fairness and effectiveness in criminal sentencing for adults. These innovations are referred to as intermediate sanctions programs and are the subject of this book. This book provides a simple but comprehensive description of the intermediate sanctions system and meaningful analysis of the individual programs. The book is organized into three parts.

Part I presents to the reader a background and context for understanding the role of intermediate sanctions in the criminal justice system. It explains the history and development of intermediate sanctions, including philosophies of punishment and an overview of sentencing processes. The key issues for evaluating the effectiveness of intermediate sanctions are outlined in Part I. In Part II, each of the seven chapters focuses on a specific intermediate sanction: intensive supervision programs, boot camps, day reporting centers, home confinement with electronic monitoring, monetary penalties, community service, and halfway houses. Each chapter traces the history of the intermediate sanction, provides statistics on its extent and scope, and describes target populations, program characteristics, and research findings. Program examples are a main feature of each chapter. Part III summarizes the research related to intermediate sanctions and provides recommendations for the future.

By Konrad Buczkowski, Paulina Wiktorska

This book presents a synthesis of selected trends in the dynamics and structure of crime in Poland over the past 30 years, in the context of ongoing social transformations in the wider region. The book explores
the impact of the deep systemic transformation of the late 1980s and early 1990s on the phenomenon of crime, its structure and dynamics, and the policy of its control in the following decades. It also examines the impact of changes resulting from the dynamic development of Polish society in the 21st century in the context of global changes towards the emergence of a new form of collective life, a mobile information society based on modern technologies. The focus is primarily on those deviant behaviours that can most obviously be linked to social changes, primarily political, economic, legal, and technological. The work examines disclosed crime figures available in official statistics. It also looks to the future considering the global societal changes caused by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on preliminary observations made in selected
countries, the authors describe associated changes in criminal behaviour and identify some pivotal developments that may influence future trends. The book will be of interest to academics and researchers working in the areas of criminal law, criminology, sociology and criminal policy.

By Simon Egbert, Matthias Leese

This book explores how predictive policing transforms police work. Police departments around the world have started to use data-driven applications to produce crime forecasts and intervene into the future through targeted prevention measures. Based on three years of field research in Germany and Switzerland, this book provides a theoretically sophisticated and empirically detailed account of how the police produce and act upon criminal futures as part of their everyday work practices.

The authors argue that predictive policing must not be analyzed as an isolated technological artifact, but as part of a larger sociotechnical system that is embedded in organizational structures and occupational cultures. The book highlights how, for crime prediction software to come to matter and play a role in more
efficient and targeted police work, several translation processes are needed to align human and nonhuman actors across different divisions of police work.

Police work is a key function for the production and maintenance of public order, but it can also discriminate, exclude, and violate civil liberties and human rights. When criminal futures come into being in the form of algorithmically produced risk estimates, this can have wide-ranging consequences. Building on empirical findings, the book presents a number of practical recommendations for the prudent use of algorithmic analysis tools in police work that will speak to the protection of civil liberties and human rights as much as they will speak to the professional needs of police organizations.

An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, and cultural studies as well as to police practitioners and civil liberties advocates, in addition to all those who are interested in how to implement reasonable forms of data-driven policing

Edited by Simon Holdaway and Paul Rock

First published in 1998. Thinking about criminology draws together the expertise of respected criminologists from the principle contemporary schools of thought. The book aims to provide a clear analysis of the relationship between sociological theory and contemporary empirical criminological research, discussing the ways in which theoretical perspectives have contributed to the understanding of relevant criminal justice institutions, law and policy.

By Thana Ridha and Sylvie Frigon

For over forty years, William Head on Stage (WHoS) has operated as an inmate-run prison theatre, making it one of Canada’s longest-standing prison arts initiatives.

Staging Prison Theatre in Canada: Setting the Spotlight on William Head on Stage delves into the story of WHoS through the voices of the men involved, offering a unique criminological perspective that situates their experiences within the prison context.

The analysis explores how WHoS creates an alternative space within the social and emotional realities of incarceration. By unlocking participants’ capacities, skills, and confidence, the initiative fosters a sense of agency and community both inside the prison and beyond. WHoS becomes a space for transformation, offering men opportunities to re-imagine themselves and build meaningful connections.

This work underscores the broader significance of arts-based initiatives like WHoS, not only within prisons but also in the fields of criminology, theatre, and community engagement. It offers valuable insights for correctional administrators, criminologists, theatre practitioners, scholars, students, and anyone interested in the intersection of art and rehabilitation.