By The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP)

This study investigates the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy of “civilizational struggle” (jihad) in Western society, with a specific focus on the United States. By analyzing primary documents, including the “Explanatory Memorandum” (1991) and “The Project” (1982), along with comparative historical analysis, it traces the development of the Brotherhood’s doctrine of tamkeen (institutional entrenchment) from its theoretical roots in early twentieth-century Egypt to its more advanced practical application in the United States. The study identifies and thoroughly analyzes four strategic domains of influence: policy impact through government entryism and coalition-building; manipulation of the legal framework via lawfare and the redefinition of core concepts; institutional infiltration across educational and civil society organizations; and the establishment of narrative control through media influence and discourse shaping. Multiple detailed case studies within each domain show how Brotherhoodaligned groups have executed these strategies across different countries and historical periods. The analysis in this study, supported by extensive documentary evidence and organizational network assessments, demonstrates that the Muslim Brotherhood’s long-term strategy is a deliberate, multigenerational effort that closely aligns with its founders’ vision of gradually transforming Western society from within, primarily through nonviolent means. Ideologically speaking, it is also fundamentally opposed to Western democratic values and governance systems. This study offers an important assessment of the key strategic objectives of Islamist extremism and ideological entryism within democratic systems by the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as the intersection of Islamist extremism with religious identity politics that exploit democratic principles, multicultural respect for diversity, and transnational movements in an era of globalization and information warfare. The study concludes with an assessment of the challenges faced by policymakers, security professionals, and civil society leaders who aim to protect democratic values while respecting religious freedoms. In a nutshell, it states that effective responses need to balance security concerns with civil liberties, differentiate between genuine religious practice and ideological extremism, and create more sophisticated frameworks for understanding and addressing radical Islamism.

By Joshua Rovner

Youth arrests and incarceration increased dramatically in the closing decades of the 20th century but have fallen sharply since. Public opinion often wrongly assumes that crime (and incarceration) is perpetually increasing. In fact, the 21st century has seen significant declines in both youth arrests and incarceration. Despite positive movement on important indicators, far too many youth—disproportionately youth of color—are incarcerated. Nevertheless, between 2000 and 2023, the number of youth held in juvenile justice facilities, adult prisons, and adult jails fell from 120,200 to 31,800—a 74% decline.

By Leah Ouellet, Daphne M. Brydon, Laura S. Abrams, Jeffrey T. Ward, Dylan B. Jackson, Rebecca Turner, J. Z. Bennett, Reese Howard, Ashley Xu

Miller v. Alabama and Montgomery v. Louisiana restricted states’ ability to impose life without parole for youth under age 18 (henceforth JLWOP). Since Miller, 46 pieces of legislation across 34 states and the District of Columbia have altered JLWOP sentencing policies. The current study provides the first comprehensive and scientific review of this legislation. Using policy surveillance as a methodological guide, we found that a majority of statutes (N = 28) ban JLWOP sentencing, above and beyond the Supreme Court's requirement. Many statutes also extended sentencing reforms and post-conviction relief eligibility to other types of sentencing beyond JLWOP. However, all but one statute still allows either JLWOP or life with parole as a sentencing option for minors convicted of homicide crimes and requires between 15 and 40 years, at minimum, to be served before being eligible for release. Grounding our analysis in institutional theory, we argue that the relative punitivity of the JLWOP reforms enacted was associated with measures of JLWOP institutionalization across states (i.e., pre-Miller JLWOP population and pre-Miller sentencing schema), suggesting that states where JLWOP was more routinely used were more resistant to policy reform.

Policy Implications

The current study provides implications for future decarceration efforts. Findings suggest that state legislatures are willing to enact post-conviction relief measures (e.g., judicial review or “second look” measures) for individuals convicted of violent crimes to address over-incarceration, deviating from previous decarceration efforts focused on non-violent, low-level offenses. In spite of the promising window for juvenile justice reform that Miller provided, however, these reforms have taken a relatively modest, incremental approach toward altering extreme youth sentencing practices in the United States. Policy makers and advocates seeking to promote sentencing reform efforts should factor in how highly institutionalized a sentencing practice is in each state, as this might inform effective strategies for policy change.

By Mia Savicevic and Ethan Miner

This report is a focused look at the growing use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) by law enforcement agencies across Iowa—a surveillance tool that poses serious risks to Iowans’ privacy and civil liberties. ALPRs are not speed cameras. They are not “red light” cameras. Instead, they are cameras used along roadways throughout Iowa that quickly take thousands of snapshots of license plates as vehicles drive by. That information can then be fed into a network of nationally shared databases that has too few privacy protections and is subject to abuse. More details about ALPRs generally can be found on the ACLU of Iowa website. Unlike other traffic cameras, ALPRs aren’t activated because you violated a law. They record you and every other person who drives by, simply to build a database of vehicle information. ALPRs can take hundreds of photos in a matter of minutes. And unlike ordinary surveillance cameras, where data is either not shared or shared in a more limited manner, the main purpose of ALPRs is to feed this information into a database. To investigate how this technology is being used, the ACLU of Iowa engaged the Technology Law Clinic at the University of Iowa College of Law to conduct independent research on the use of ALPRs in Iowa. We sent open records requests to a broad cross-section of 48 law enforcement agencies across the state, to larger towns, to smaller communities, and to Iowa’s college towns. The study was not comprehensive of all ALPRs in Iowa. Of the 48 agencies that were selected, 5 did not respond to our records request before publication: the Des Moines Police Department, the Clinton Police Department, the Fayette Police Department, the Fremont Police Department, and the Mills Police Department.While researching this project, the clinic also identified agencies (see Appendix D) that have accessed other Iowa cities’ or counties’ ALPR databases, whether they have their own ALPRs or not.

Technology Law Clinic at the University of Iowa College of Law and ACLU of Iowa, 2025. 63p.

By Devon W. Carbado 

This Article employs the Law Review’s Discourse symposium on my book, Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment, as a starting point to foreground and elaborate on an idea that I reference in that text: police power abolition. The Article begins by describing the central insight that motivates Unreasonable—namely, that simply limiting the frequency with which the police interact with Black people could save Black lives. If the police have fewer opportunities to stop and question Black people, they have fewer opportunities to kill us. That observation led me to think about the range of structural forces that facilitate contact between Black people and the police. Fourth Amendment law is one such force. From pedestrian checks, to traffic stops, to stops and frisks, to searches and seizures at the border, Fourth Amendment law permits the police to interact with and enact violence against Black people on the thinnest, most unreasonable of suspicions. The Article does not reprise precisely how Fourth Amendment law performs that racially subordinating work. For that, you will have to read Unreasonable and the broader body of work on which the book is based. Instead, the Article summarizes the core arguments Unreasonable propounds, links them to what I call “police power abolition,” and explains how police power abolition can provide an entry into and render more legible broader discourses about abolition. Throughout the Article, I draw on and react to the generous and generative review essays that participants in this symposium have written about the book. In the context of doing so, I explain why, notwithstanding the limitations of law as space for antiracist interventions, the legal terrain should remain a critical (though not the only or most important) site for advancing

racial justice.

UCLA School of Law, Public Law Research Paper Forthcoming

69 Pages Posted: 20 Nov 2025

By Arthur MacDonald.

The narrative in Volume 1 asks many pointed questions: What does it mean to be “abnormal”? Who decides? And how have these judgments shaped modern science, education, and criminal justice?

First published in 1893, Arthur MacDonald’s Abnormal Man is one of the earliest American attempts to systematically study human difference through the emerging tools of psychology, anthropology, and criminology. Drawing on international research—from European criminal anthropology to American child-study movements—MacDonald sought to classify the physical, mental, and moral traits considered “aberrant” in his era. His work reflects the hopes and anxieties of a society confronting rapid industrialization, immigration, social change, and new scientific approaches to crime and mental health.

To the modern reader, Abnormal Man reveals both the ambition and the pitfalls of nineteenth-century science. Its pages contain pioneering observations about child development, deviance, and social responsibility, alongside early theories—now discredited—about heredity, physiognomy, and race. What emerges is a vivid and sometimes unsettling portrait of a culture striving to understand human variation without the benefit of modern psychology or ethical safeguards.

The Read-Me.org edition Volume 1 presents Abnormal Man as both a historical artifact and a gateway to critical reflection. It illustrates how scientific thought evolves, how cultural bias can shape research, and how early debates about abnormality laid the groundwork for contemporary approaches to mental health, special education, criminology, and social policy. To make such work, much of it controversial then as it is today, minimally believable, requires extensive documentation. The voluminous Bibliography of Abnormal Man reproduced here in Volume 2, contains all that Macdnald referred to within his detailed exposition. To some, his arguments may seem unsupported, or lacking in evidence. But he left no stone untuned as this amazing bibliographical documentation of all relative contemporary research

A foundational text at the crossroads of science and society, Abnormal Man invites readers to explore the origins of modern debates about deviance, diversity, and the boundaries of the “normal.”

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2025. 240p.

By Arthur MacDonald. Introduction by Graeme R. Newman

What does it mean to be “abnormal”? Who decides? And how have these judgments shaped modern science, education, and criminal justice?

First published in 1893, Arthur MacDonald’s Abnormal Man is one of the earliest American attempts to systematically study human difference through the emerging tools of psychology, anthropology, and criminology. Drawing on international research—from European criminal anthropology to American child-study movements—MacDonald sought to classify the physical, mental, and moral traits considered “aberrant” in his era. His work reflects the hopes and anxieties of a society confronting rapid industrialization, immigration, social change, and new scientific approaches to crime and mental health.

To the modern reader, Abnormal Man reveals both the ambition and the pitfalls of nineteenth-century science. Its pages contain pioneering observations about child development, deviance, and social responsibility, alongside early theories—now discredited—about heredity, physiognomy, and race. What emerges is a vivid and sometimes unsettling portrait of a culture striving to understand human variation without the benefit of modern psychology or ethical safeguards.

This new Read-Me.org edition presents Abnormal Man as both a historical artifact and a gateway to critical reflection. It illustrates how scientific thought evolves, how cultural bias can shape research, and how early debates about abnormality laid the groundwork for contemporary approaches to mental health, special education, criminology, and social policy.

A foundational text at the crossroads of science and society, Abnormal Man invites readers to explore the origins of modern debates about deviance, diversity, and the boundaries of the “normal.”

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2025. p.193.

By Mahesh Nalla and Graeme Newman

When the first edition of A Primer in Private Security was published, its principal purpose was to demonstrate that private policing was not a mere auxiliary to public law enforcement but a robust and rapidly growing institution with its own organizational forms, priorities, and traditions. At that time, the Hallcrest Report had just confirmed that private security personnel outnumbered public police officers in the United States, a landmark finding that set the tone for debates about the privatization of policing .

Nearly four decades later, the central argument remains as relevant as ever, but the field itself has changed dramatically. Private security is now not only a supplement to public policing but a global, technologically sophisticated industry involved in nearly every sector of modern life. While we think that the original book still remains relevant to security today, we suggest in this preface that the reader approach the content from the point of view of four major perspectives that dominate security  (the word “private” seems old fashioned and less appropriate given that what is public and what is private have become incredibly and interwoven largely as a result of media, especially social media). 

The four perspectives are:

1.     the domestic sphere of home and family,

2.     the economic sphere of business,

3.     the public sphere of local and state government, and

4.     the international sphere of global security and climate-related risk.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2025. 183p.

by Lindsey Price Jackson

This guide on Risk-Need-Responsivity: Response Recommendations for Community Courts provides best practices for court practitioners in alignment with evidence-based RNR findings, including advice on incentives and sanctions and a response matrix template.

Also included with this publication is the Center for Justice Innovation's free, non-proprietary RNR tool, the Criminal Court Assessment Tool (CCAT), available in both English and Spanish. Use of an RNR tool is often legislated for community justice programs or required by grant funding. The CCAT is available as an option for use in court-based programs in alignment with local requirements. Please contact the Center for a short, free training before using the CCAT. We also strongly recommend locally validating the tool on your jurisdiction’s population before implementing.

New York: Center for Justice Innovation. 2024, 16pg