By CTEC Staff

Local government officials experience increasingly high rates of threats and harassment, while lacking guidance about which threats amount to constitutionally protected political speech and which threats may justify legal action. This executive summary provides a brief overview of the two requirements for speech to constitute a “true threat,” at which point it is no longer protected by the First Amendment. The remainder of the document contains a detailed summary of these requirements, including case citations, and examples of relevant cases.

A threat may merit legal action when:

1. It is a threat to commit an act of unlawful violence, and 

2. The speaker or writer acts with reckless disregard, i.e., “the speaker is aware that others could regard his statements as threatening violence and delivers them anyway.”

First criteria: threat to commit unlawful violence

• An explicit threat to commit an act that is both illegal and violent is likely sufficient.

• Symbolic speech such as cross burning may be sufficient, but it depends on the context and the history of the use of such symbols.

Second criteria: speaker intent

• Courts have extensively debated the intent requirement, and future Supreme Court cases may alter the standard.

• Currently, the standard is recklessness: The speaker must have acted with reckless disregard for the threatening nature of their speech.

• The speaker must have been “aware that others could understand their statements as threatening violence, and delivers them anyway.”

• “Political hyperbole” does not lose constitutional protection (see below for example).

• A speaker does not have to intend to carry the threat out.

• Threatening speech that does not show sufficient intent can still be removed from public spaces such as social media platforms, public forums, etc.

• Indirect threats may be sufficient to qualify as true threats.

• Speech that does not qualify as a criminal threat under state statutes may still be sufficient to justify civil action such as protective orders against individuals, or other civil remedies such as civil assault claims.

This document is not intended to provide guidance as to what kinds of threats are credible, i.e., likely to be acted on by the speaker or their allies and therefore deserving of law enforcement scrutiny. Threats that fall outside the boundaries of “true threats” under the First Amendment may still warrant law enforcement attention and should be reported. Threats should quickly be reported to allow the relevant law enforcement agency to determine whether it meets the threshold for further action, especially if an individual is concerned about personal safety. Reporting subthreshold or edge-case threats also allows law enforcement to track and evaluate cumulative behavior, provide context for other actions, and allow for investigation of the speaker’s mental state. For guidance on threat assessment, please see resources in footnote, as featured in the PDF upload.

Monterey CA:  Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism, Middlebury Institute of International Studies.   2024. 8p.

ByPenelope Gibbs

The criminal justice system is in crying need of more efficiency but there is little space to be innovative. So what’s not to like about a process which has revolutionised the magistrates’ court? The single justice procedure, introduced ten years ago, makes summary justice far speedier and cheaper. It needs fewer court staff and judges than a traditional open court hearing, and defendants can plead guilty and submit mitigation online. A case can be processed within weeks rather than months. Transform Justice has followed the progress of the single justice procedure (SJP) since its launch in England and Wales in 2015. We have written many articles about it, briefed journalists and made it the subject of our first ever podcast episode, but never brought our evidence together. In this report we acknowledge the potential benefits of the SJP but also express our deep concerns about the justice it delivers. Just as in the case of the Post Office Scandal, the victims are organisations and companies who are trying to protect their revenue or ensure behavioral compliance. They are both victim and prosecutor, which may cloud their objectivity in decision-making. It is in the interests of any prosecutor to produce the minimum of evidence to get a conviction and to have as few people as possible contest the charge. The SJP fits the bill. Most offences are strict liability so prosecutors don’t have to prove the suspect intended to commit a crime, nor do they need to prove their prosecution is for the public benefit (partly because no-one ever challenges them to do so). So prosecution is relatively easy. Getting convictions is easy too, because most people don’t respond to their prosecution under SJP and are convicted in their absence. A tiny minority of defendants plead not guilty. No data is available on what proportion are acquitted. Procedural justice is defined as the fairness of processes used by those in positions of authority to reach specific outcomes or decisions. This report measures the SJP against that test and finds it wanting. Many people who transgress are willing to make amends. But SJP defendants also need to know what their rights are and how to exercise them, and most don’t. So far, no-one (apart from some journalists) has been that interested in finding out about their experience and amplifying their voice. But change is coming. We hope that procedural justice and fair trial rights will be at the heart of SJP reform.

London: Transform Justice, 2025. 36p.

By Mika Hagerlid, Görel Granström

Twenty years ago, the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention presented a report that highlighted serious problems with regard to identifying, investigating, and sentencing ofenders for hate crimes. The same problems have also been described in international research from several other countries. Since then, several measures have been taken to remedy these problems, but it remains unknown whether these measures have been successful. The aim of the present study is therefore to trace developments over time, using Sweden as a case study, and to evaluate the extent to which the problems identifed earlier have been remedied. The results show that the problems identifed by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention still remain despite a continuous process of reform. Theoretical links and parallels to international research are discussed throughout the article.

European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research (2025) 31:193–210

By JUSTICE, Chair of the Committee George Lubega

The term ‘Behavioural Control Orders’ refers to a group of legal Orders that are imposed upon an individual via a civil court process or by an executive authority. They aim to address particular behaviours deemed to be objectionable. Sometimes the behaviours targeted constitute crimes in their own right; at other times the Orders are designed to tackle behaviour that falls below the criminal threshold. They do so by imposing restrictive conditions or requirements upon the person subject to them. These include conditions prohibiting association, being present within a particular geographical area, accessing the internet and can include electronic monitoring. Although Orders are imposed via a civil process and usually upon civil standards of evidence, breaching a condition within an Order is a criminal offence. There are an increasing number of Behavioural Control Orders (“Orders”) on the statute books of England and Wales, and their scope and availability appear to be ever-widening. Originally created to fill a gap present within the criminal law, e.g., the difficulty of prosecuting individual instances of football hooliganism, they have rapidly expanded to new areas and now cover behaviour which is, in and of itself, a criminal offence – punishable via the criminal law. For example, Orders now exist to address anti-social behaviour, protests, drug use, knife possession, gang-crime, stalking, and sexual offending, among other matters. Some Orders can differ in terms of who they protect (a specific individual, the public at large, or even a particular place); who may seek or impose an Order; whether an Order can be made on complaint, on conviction, or both; whether they can be imposed on children, or on adults only; the types of conditions and requirements that they can impose; what outcome the Order is intended to achieve and, accordingly, the legal test to be applied (including the standard of proof). The reasons for the variations is unclear and, in any event, has caused confusion across the country. This, in turn, has resulted in inconsistency in the ways in which Orders are used, and the protections afforded to victims. Surprisingly, despite their proliferation and the serious subject matter which they address, Behavioural Control Orders have never been the subject of any systematic, government-led review. It is not clear how the effectiveness of Orders should be measured, nor what ‘success’ should look like. Very little attention has been paid to whether the Behavioural Control Order ‘model’, works. The Working Party has sought to shed light on this question by examining the extent to which Orders are effective for victims, fair, accessible, proportionate, and rights compliant. Overarching Concerns Notwithstanding the variations between Orders, the Working Party identified a number of common, overarching concerns. Orders are often conceived of as a solution to complex social problems. They seek to prevent harms, protect vulnerable individuals, and offer rehabilitation to those accused of committing unwanted conduct. Whilst the policy papers accompanying their introduction stress that they are not intended to be punitive, their duration, the breadth of conditions they impose and the punishment for breach means that in practice, they are often perceived and experienced as such. Moreover, rather than diverting individuals out of the criminal justice system, the Working Party heard criticisms that Orders draw people, especially children, further intro the criminal justice system (owing to the possibility of criminal sanctions for breach). The bar for what conduct may be prohibited by an Order is very low in practice. For example, some Orders have been imposed on individuals as a result of them “closing the door too loudly" and impose conditions which prohibit “sitting on a pavement” or “wearing a bikini in the garden”. Arguably, such prohibitions are reflective of a loss of perspective on what degree of behaviour should properly be controlled by the State, and thereafter criminalised. At the same time, it risks diverting attention away from those really responsible for causing harm. On the other hand, some forms of Order can be said to criminalise individuals ‘by the back door’, by overlapping with existing criminal offences. Procedures for obtaining Orders generally do not require the rigour that proving a criminal charge does, with the tests to be applied often much broader than the wording of a statutory offence. Although proceedings for breach (as a separate offence) are brought before a criminal court, the conduct amounting to a breach may in fact be much less serious than the nature of the Order implies. Despite this, most contributors agreed that in certain circumstances, and when used appropriately, Orders could be useful tools in protecting victims from harm. This is especially true where used to protect a particular person, in the context of harms generally constituted by escalating or cumulative conduct. For example, Orders such as Stalking Protection Orders are effective, provided enforcement bodies apply for them. And Non-Molestation Orders can provide relief to victims of domestic abuse, as long as breaches are followed up and provided that victims are applying for them – not because the police have failed to help them - but because it is their preference to take action themselves. Nonetheless, more planning and consultation is required at the legislative phase, to ensure Orders are capable of achieving their aims, and enforcement bodies are set up to use them effectively. Little is currently done to assess how Orders will work in practice, and the views of interested parties, including experts and victims, and organisations working with offenders, are not meaningfully considered, nor their concerns adequately addressed. A consequence of this is that Orders can be performative in nature. The Working Party heard criticisms that Orders often reflect a “knee-jerk reaction” to high-profile issues, treating the symptom rather than the cause. It is doubtful whether a legal Order alone, can ever have a significant impact on reducing harm without the State taking responsibility for tackling the causes: inequality, poverty, inadequate housing, education and an under-resourced mental health service. Even where Orders have been found to be effective in providing relief to victims – as with Stalking Protection Orders, Non-Molestation Orders and Sexual Harm Prevention Orders - the failure to make resources available for training, enforcement and data sharing – mean that they are often deemed “a missed opportunity” and are not used widely enough. Moreover, whilst Behavioural Control Orders are meant to provide access to interventions, programmes and positive diversions – a lack of resources and available services often mean that this cannot take place. Without proper accreditation, there is also a risk that certain types of ‘perpetrator programme’ or diversionary schemes can cause further harm (continued)

London: JUSTICE, 2025. 144p.

By Tara Wheeler, Research Associate, Julia Bergeron-Smith, Clare Murray, Margaret Gormley   

Assessing Protection from Abuse Orders in Maine is the result of the Maine Statistical Analysis Center (SAC) and the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence (MCEDV) seeking and securing funding from the Bureau of Justice Statistics for an 18-month research project to scan and analyze a year’s worth of final protection from abuse (PFA) orders and generate a first-of-its-kind dataset for Maine.Although the Maine Judicial Branch’s electronic case management system collects some data about the relief that is ordered by the court, certain details are not available through this system and can only be accessed through a manual review of each physical case file—a labor-intensive but essential undertaking to evaluate outcomes and assess current practices. Maine SAC researchers carried out this work by travelling over 3,400 miles to 25 district courts statewide, where they reviewed thousands of 2023 case files in which a final order had been issued. Ultimately, researchers generated a dataset of 2,079 cases, which accounts for 91% of all 2023 PFA cases in which a final order was issued.Key findings from the study included that the majority of final 2023 PFA orders were filed against an intimate partner (77%), were for exactly 24 months (66%), and were determined by agreement (59%), meaning the plaintiff and defendant agreed upon the provisions contained in the final order before a court hearing.Additional findings include:Across the state, the vast majority of firearm relinquishment orders specify law enforcement as the receiving party. Final orders determined by agreement of both parties are less likely to include firearm relinquishment provisions than orders determined by a judge. Firearm relinquishment is also influenced by court region. Custody provisions were closely associated with parties agreeing to the terms of an order prior to the final hearing. Paragraphs It is further ordered and P. Limits to the defendant’s rights of contact are frequently being used to address reliefs that appear elsewhere on the form.While the order data does not explain the reasons behind the disparities by order determination type and by court region, the findings provide a strong foundation for further research and to inform ongoing policy discussions.Andrea Mancuso, Public Policy Director at MCEDV, spoke to the effect this report will have in Maine: “This report is an incredibly valuable resource for policymakers as well as advocates who are working hand in hand with survivors to access Maine’s civil justice system across Maine every day. This data will help us over the next several years in the work to ensure that the protections and support available to respond to the needs of survivors in Maine’s protection from abuse statute can be functionally accessed by them.

Portland: Maine Statistical Analysis Center, University of Southern Maine, 2025. 29p

By Daniel S. Harawa

The saying goes, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When it comes to the Supreme Court’s criminal jurisprudence and its relationship to racial (in)equity, progressive scholars often focus on the tartness of the lemons. In particular, they have studied how the Court often ignores race in its criminal decisions, a move that in turn reifies a racially subordinating criminalization system.

However, the Court has recently issued a series of decisions addressing racism in the criminal legal system: Buck v. Davis, Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado, Timbs v. Indiana, Flowers v. Mississippi, and Ramos v. Louisiana. On their face, the cases teach that history matters. Government actors who discriminate must be held to account. Accepted institutional practices can no longer perpetuate racism. And courts must assume an active role in addressing the racism endemic to the criminal legal system. At least tonally, these cases are a marked shift for the notoriously post-racial Roberts Court.

But if you dig a little deeper, it is clear that the cases have severe shortcomings. The cases reflect that the Court acknowledges only the most egregious examples of racism, and it fails to see the invidious ways race taints the criminal legal system. The cases also demonstrate the Court’s failure to connect past racial practices with present racial disparities, a failure that in turn paints a false picture of discontinuity of the past from the present. When viewed critically, these seemingly race-aware cases fall neatly in line with the post-racial critiques of the Roberts Court. From a racial justice perspective, the cases could be viewed as lemons.

Even so, this Article attempts to make lemonade. The Article shifts the narrative about the Court’s criminal jurisprudence by arguing that these recent cases can be helpful tools in the fight for racial justice. This Article asserts that the cases can be deployed not only to make specific antiracist legal arguments, but also to push for policy changes and to encourage more open discussions about racism in the criminal legal system. In the end, the Article urges a reclaiming of the case law to help unwind the corrosive relationship between race, crime, and punishment in America. This intervention is necessary now, for the millions of Black and Brown people shuffled through the system each year.

California Law Review, Article Volume 110 June 2022

By Andreas E. Feldmann and Juan Pablo Luna

Across Latin America, societies are confronting the rise of novel orders in which state officials and political authorities share power with criminal organizations. Criminal governance (i.e., the creation of rules regulating behavior by criminal entities often with the collaboration of state actors), as these arrangements have come to be known, poses significant challenges for democracy and the rule of law and often threatens peoples enjoyment of fundamental rights. This article reviews the literature on state-criminal relations in Latin America by critically discussing conceptual and methodological issues. In so doing, it looks at three extant literatures that have contributed to enhancing our grasp of alternative forms of governance: studies on violence, works on stateness and the rule of law, and the literature on criminal governance. This article posits that those literatures have done a commendable job in describing and conceptualizing emerging forms of governance that deviate from traditional views. However, we also argue that these bodies of work operate in silos with little integration and display methodological biases and theoretical blind spots that weaken their overall analytical power. We also point out that much more work is needed to assess these new orders consequences for existing political regimes and state institutions. In the conclusion, we propose concrete steps to strengthen research and foster a more integrated agenda and suggest future investigative avenues.

Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2022. 48:441–61 

By Sarah Anegg, Daniela Doerfler, Wolfgang Bicker, Serena Paola Gonzalez Barias, Florian Heinzl, Jakob Schwazer, Sabine Eder, Ksenia Krögler-Halpern, Christine Sam, and Karin Windsperger 

Drug-Facilitated Crimes (DFCs) involve criminal offenses where the victim's intoxicated state plays a central role. The substances used, often central nervous system depressants, are challenging to detect, leading to a high rate of undiagnosed cases. As a result, DFCs remain a form of violence that is weakly characterized. This cross-sectional study analyzed 1104 violence-related cases presented to the Children and Victim Protection Center (CAVPC) at a tertiary hospital. Of these, 12.2 % were suspected to be DFCs between 2014 and 2019, while 38.5 % were suspected to be DFCs between 2020 and 2023 (p < 0.001). This suggests a 544 % increase in the volume of DFC-related cases between the two time periods. Victims were predominantly female (86.4 %) and aged 20–30 years, though a concurrent rise in male victims, from 3.5 % in 2014–2019–15.1 % in 2020–2023 was also observed (p = 0.01). Perpetrators were primarily male (96.2 %), acted alone, and were known to the victim in 51.9 % of the cases. The crimes, which predominantly occurred in private settings between 2014 and 2019, increasingly took place in public spaces between 2020 and 2023 (p = 0.01), where alcohol was present, and peaked on weekends (especially Saturdays) and during late-night and early-morning hours. Most victims exhibited signs of amnesia (91.8 %) and physical injuries (58.4 %). Alarmingly, only 38.5 % of victims sought help within 12 h, significantly reducing the chances of detecting certain substances. Cannabinoids, cocaine, diphenhydramine, paracetamol and lidocaine were the most commonly identified substances in blood and urine. These findings highlight the urgent need for action, including implementing preventive measures, raising awareness, and reducing stigma – an approach that could help address the growing global public health concern of DFCs.

Forensic Science International Volume 374, September 2025, 112552

By Kristin Finklea

In policy discussions around drug trafficking and elevated overdose deaths related to illicit opioids and other drugs, some observers have looked to the tools border officials have in place to help detect and stop the flow of illicit drugs into the United States. More specifically, attention has turned to the use of nonintrusive inspection (NII) equipment to scan commercial and private vehicles crossing into the country for illicit drugs and other contraband.  
Congressional Research Service; September 2025. 3p.

By Sunita Patel

During the tenure of President Barack Obama, scholars and advocates viewed the best route for federal court review of police practices to be consent decrees negotiated between municipal police departments and the Special Litigation Section in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ) pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 14141.1 DOJ fact-finding reports and settlements, like the one in Ferguson, Missouri, exposed egregious practices and sought a culture shift by decrees in police departments across the country. The DOJ Process sometimes also bolstered mobilization to achieve police reform already underway outside the court. Today, the current Administration has taken an official position against using 28 U.S.C. § 14141 authority in favor of potentially unconstitutional exercises of police discretion. Although the federal executive branch is no longer a driving force behind police reform litigation, the institution of policing is no less harmful to Black and Brown communities. Thus, the questions motivating this Article are: “What can legal advocates do now? How can communities and their lawyers mobilize within the legal process?” Without the DOJ’s involvement, injured communities interested in court intervention may turn to section 1983 impact litigation, and what legal scholarship terms public law, public interest, or structural reform litigation. Rather than seek monetary damages against particular officers for abusive conduct against individual plaintiffs, structural reform litigation seeks redress from police departments and municipalities for their law enforcement practices and policies. Its goal is to achieve an injunction against, or change in the policies or practices of, a governmental entity. These are cases typically brought as class actions. Legal scholars have pointed to conservative judicial appointments and Supreme Court doctrine as causes for the shrinking of liberal structural reform litigation. Scholars’ views range from “[t]he courthouse door is closed,” to “procedure and doctrine make it really difficult to obtain substantive review of civil rights and constitutional harms”.

104 Minnesota Law Review 2257 (2020), 

By Sunita Patel

Scholars and activists are urging a move away from policing and towards more care-based approaches to social problems and public safety. These debates contest the conventional wisdom about the role and scope of policing and call for shifting resources to systems of care, including medical, mental health, and social work. While scholars and activists in favor of reducing society’s reliance on police recognize the co-constitutive relationship between policing and care work, they have not sufficiently grappled with the explicit overlapping mechanisms of carcerality. Surveillance and criminal enforcement permeate medical centers delivering care to low-income patients. Using numerous government records related to the U.S. Veterans Affairs Police Force (VAPF), this Article describes how the VAPF criminalizes low-income and sometimes Black or Latinx veterans with disabilities stemming from U.S military service. These populations are among the most medically vulnerable populations in the United States. It argues that care workers and health institutions become dependent on police to address harm and safety, and proposes alternatives grounded in anticarceral care to reduce reliance on police. In doing so, this Article shows just how difficult it will be to remove police from institutions because it requires rethinking care, not only policing. At the same time, this thick descriptive account provides a guide for how to reduce society’s reliance on police in institutional contexts. This Article assesses the multiple intersections between U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) healthcare and embedded policing as a metaphorical healthcare policing web. Part I maps the process of assimilating policing into the VA, providing a primer on the agency and its patients. It explains the convergence of order maintenance, disability management, and workplace safety regulations that built the embedded policing infrastructure in place today. Part II explains how police influence clinical decisions and the care environment through Disruptive Behavior Committees, criminal enforcement, and workplace threat assessments, thereby altering the institutional culture. Part III draws lessons from the VA and proposes a list of potential solutions, adopting an abolitionist ethic for decoupling care from policing and embedded police from institutions

UCLA Law Review, Vol. 69, 2022,

By Sunita Patel

Policing has become a permanent fixture within other institutions and occurs in more ways and places than are often recognized. For race-class subjugated communities, this means policing has inserted itself into every facet of life, from education and health care to mass transit and housing. Police serve as instruments of control in many spaces and connect the bureaucratic management of safety inside formal institutions of care, learning, and public services. Police connect these safety services to ordinary street policing and wellness checks in the home.This Article provides a framework for analyzing policing within institutional settings. I examine K–12 schools, emergency departments, mass transit, veterans health care, public housing, and universities and colleges. This Article describes six features of transinstitutional policing. The first three — red flagging, street policing, and wellness checks — show how policing the public relies upon police presence within formal institutions. The second three — networked information, bureaucratic conflict and cooperation, and vulnerable privacy — tie surveillance of the public to transinstitutional policing. This framework highlights the susceptibility of institutions to the logics of policing and the ways policing undermines noncarceral and socially valuable institutional goals. This Article frames an emerging literature as a transinstitutional approach of studying policing across and between multiple institutional domains. Examining policing through a transinstitutional lens offers a deeper understanding of the corrosive influence of policing on spaces of learning, care, and public services. The punitive and carceral aspects of these settings become amplified and more visible when the institution of policing takes hold. The features analyzed here have made it easy for police leaders and bureaucratic administrators of these institutions to resist police reform, even though the locations I study are places where advocates and institutional clientele contest policing and broader carceral control. Part I provides a continuum of embedded policing and explains why I focused on these particular institutions. Parts II and III provide the six-feature framework. Part IV offers an analysis of how we got here and draws out lessons learned to further understand transinstitutional policing.

By Alison Siegler & William Admussen 

For decades, it was virtually impossible for a criminal defendant to challenge racial discrimination by the police or prosecutors. This was because in United States v. Armstrong, 517 U.S. 456 (1996), the Supreme Court set an insurmountable standard for obtaining discovery in support of a selective prosecution claim. Equating the roles of prosecutors and law enforcement officers, lower courts applied this same standard to claims alleging racial discrimination by the police. This high standard led courts to deny discovery and stifle potentially meritorious claims. Recently, criminal defendants have initiated a wave of challenges to “fake stash house” operations, in which federal law enforcement agencies like the ATF and the DEA approach people—overwhelmingly people of color—and induce them to rob a nonexistent drug stash house. Defense attorneys have argued that these practices constitute racially selective law enforcement and that Armstrong’s strict standard should not apply to the police. Three federal courts of appeals responded by recognizing that the differences between prosecutors and law enforcement officers merit lowering the discovery standard for defendants alleging racial discrimination by the police. This Article is the first to describe and defend this important development in equal protection jurisprudence. We argue that other courts should similarly craft a lower discovery standard.

Recognizing that federal courts hear only a fraction of race discrimination claims, this Article embraces the spirit of federalism and proposes an innovative state-level solution: a state court rule lowering the insuperable discovery standard to which most states still cling. This Article draws on a recent Washington state court rule aimed at preventing racial discrimination in jury selection to propose that state courts adopt a similar rule setting a new discovery standard for racially selective law enforcement claims. Such a rule would ensure that state-level equal protection claims are not blocked at the discovery stage, thus enabling courts to adjudicate those claims on the merits.

115 Northwestern University Law Review 987 (2021)

By David Olson, Don Stemen, and Patrick Griffin

Illinois is a mostly urban state. It’s also, of course, a mostly rural state—it all depends on what you’re counting.

Our statewide evaluation of the Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA) attempts to capture and document the law’s implementation and impact across Illinois. Of course, the changes the law brings, abolishing cash bail and imposing broad new restrictions on pretrial detention, are being implemented at the county level, and as evaluators we recognize that every individual county is unique. But if we’re going to provide a comprehensive and accurate picture of the way the new law is working throughout Illinois, we have to find efficient ways to combine counties for purposes of analysis. One useful way is to group them broadly into 20 urban counties—mostly clustered into the upper right-hand corner of the map but distributed here and there across Illinois—and 82 rural counties that encompass most of the state’s geographic area. Both are “Illinois.” Both need to be taken into account.Because so much of criminal justice case volume is generated in Illinois’ urban areas, where close to 90% of the population resides, state-level statistics necessarily describe urban, not rural realities. 

For some purposes, statewide “grand totals” are useful. But relying solely on them to assess the impact of the PFA in Illinois means overlooking or distorting what isgoing in mostof the state’s courthouses, jails and communities. That’s why real understanding of the law’s effects requires that we recognize and document county-level variations—and particularly the ways that individual rural counties’ PFA experiences may differ, both from one another and from typical urban experiences.

This research brief, exploring rural/urban differences in PFA implementation and impact so far, summarizes and expands on a presentation by the Center for Criminal Justice at the American Society of Criminology Annual Conference in November 2024. It is based primarily on information from three sources:

• Data provided by the newly launched Office of Statewide Pretrial Services (OSPS), concerning pretrial case-handling, assessment, and outcomes in the 78 counties (6 urban and 72 rural) in which the agency operates. (Note that the urban county data we analyzed did not include Cook County, which is not served by OSPS. We will be issuing a separate report in 2025 describing what we're learning about Cook County's experience with the PFA.)

• Jail population data from jails across the state, as reported to the Jail and Detention Standards Unit of the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC).

• Insights gleaned from 21 confidential interviews conducted with judges, prosecutors, defenders, and other criminal justice stakeholders in a range of rural counties, both before and after the PFA took effect statewide.

Chicago: Loyola University at Chicago, Center for Criminal Justice, 2024. 13p.

By David Olsen, Patrick Griffin, Lucy Einstein, Molly Halladay-Glynn, and Bella Lira ·

During the early 1990s, violent crime in the United States reached its highest levels since the Federal Bureau of Investigation started keeping records.

One significant policy response at the federal level was the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994—popularly known as the “1994 Crime Bill”—which expanded funding for law enforcement, stiffened federal penalties for violent crimes, banned assault weapons, and made a host of other changes aimed at addressing and reducing violence. One of the most consequential components of the Crime Bill established the Violent Offender Incarceration and Truth-in-Sentencing (VOI/TIS) Incentive Formula Grants Program, which not only provided massive federal funding for new and expanded state prison construction, but set aside much of it for states that toughened up and reformed their criminal sentencing laws by adopting “Truth in Sentencing.”

Truth in Sentencing (TIS) laws mandate that those sentenced to prison for certain serious crimes actually remain imprisoned for all or a substantial portion of the court-specified sentence, no matter what early release or “good time credit” mechanisms might otherwise be employed to promote good discipline and encourage rehabilitative efforts in prison.

Illinois was one of many states that responded to the new federal funding incentives set up by the Crime Bill, enacting TIS legislation and eventually receiving a total of $124 million through the VOI/TIS grant program from 1996 through 2001.  Illinois’ original TIS scheme required that 100% of a court-imposed sentence be served following conviction for First Degree Murder, 85% for a range of other serious offenses, and 85% for specified offenses when they result in great bodily harm. TIS in Illinois was expanded to cover other offenses in 2005, 2007, and 2010.

The Legacy of Truth-In-Sentencing in Illinois

The dramatic wave of violent crime that prompted the original 1994 Crime Bill receded long ago, but the effects of the incentives created by the Crime Bill remain to this day. Many of these lasting effects were documented in a 2009 Loyola University analysis of the first ten years of Truth in Sentencing, which found among other things that TIS had greatly increased the time required to be served in prison under court-imposed sentences but did not have any significant influence on the extent and nature of disciplinary incidents in Illinois’ prisons. In fact, people subject to TIS had patterns of disciplinary infractions similar to those not subject to TIS. 

Now a new study conducted by the Center for Criminal Justice at Loyola, analyzing Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) data through December 31, 2024, updates and expands on the 2009 report, illuminating the ways that a quarter of a century of TIS has profoundly shaped the current population of Illinois prisons.

Chicago: Loyola University, Center for Criminal Justice, 2025. 11p,

By Paul Cassell and Richard Fuwles

Cassell, Paul and Fowles, Richard, "Does Bail Reform Increase Crime? An Empirical Assessment of the Public Safety Implications of Bail Reform in Cook County, Illinois" (2020). 

Recently bail reform issues have been in the news across the country, as concerns about fair treatment of defendants and possible public safety risks from expanding pretrial release have collided. These issues involve important empirical questions, including whether releasing more defendants before trial leads to additional crimes. An opportunity to investigate this public safety issue has developed in Chicago, our nation’s third largest city. There, the Office of the Chief Judge of the Cook County Courts adopted new bail reform measures in September 2017 and reviewed them empirically in May 2019. Cook County’s Bail Reform Study concluded that the new procedures had released many more defendants before trial without any concomitant increase in crime. This article disputes the Study’s conclusions. This article explains that, contrary to the Study’s assertions, the new changes to pretrial release procedures appear to have led to a substantial increase in crimes committed by pretrial releasees in Cook County. Properly measured and estimated, after more generous release procedures were put in place, the number of released defendants charged with committing new crimes increased by 45%. And, more concerning, the number of pretrial releasees charged with committing new violent crimes increased by an estimated 33%. In addition, as reported by the Chicago Tribune, the Study’s data appears to undercount the number of releasees charged with new violent crimes; and a substantial number of aggravated domestic violence prosecutions prosecutors dropped after the changes, presumably because batterers were able to more frequently obtain release and intimidate their victims into not pursuing charges. These public safety concerns call into question whether the bail “reform” measures implemented in Cook County were cost-beneficial. And because Cook County’s procedures are state-of-the-art and track those being implemented in many parts of the country, Cook County’s experience suggests that other jurisdictions may similarly be suffering increases in crime due to bail reform.

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship. 2929,

By Dennis D. Hirsch,  Jared Ott, Angie Westover-Munoz, and Chris Yaluma

Federal and state criminal justice systems use algorithmic risk assessment tools extensively. Much of the existing scholarship on this topic engages in normative and technical analyses of these tools, or seeks to identify best practices for tool design and use. Far less work has been done on how courts and other criminal justice actors perceive and utilize these tools on the ground. This is an important gap. Judges’ and other criminal justice actors’ attitudes towards, and implementation of, algorithmic risk assessment tools profoundly affect how these tools impact defendants, incarceration rates, and the broader criminal justice system. Those who would understand, and potentially seek to improve, the courts’ use of these tools would benefit from more information on how judges actually think about and employ them. This article begins to fill in this picture. The authors surveyed Ohio Courts of Common Pleas judges and staff, and interviewed judges and other key stakeholders, to learn how they view and use algorithmic risk assessment tools. The article describes how Ohio Common Pleas Courts implement algorithmic risk assessment tools and how judges view and utilize the tools and the risk scores they generate. It then compares Ohio practice in this area to the best practices identified in the literature and, on this basis, recommends how the Ohio Courts of Common Pleas—and, by implication, other state and federal court systems—can better align their use of algorithmic risk assessment tools with core criminal justice values.

Legal Studies Research Paper No. 939, 2925

Brandon L. Garrett,  Sandra Guerra Thompson,  Dottie Carmichael,  David Shil & Songman Kang

The highest volume of cases in the U.S. criminal system are misdemeanors, and every day, hundreds of thousands of people are detained pretrial in such low-level cases. In policy and in politics, pretrial rules have swung between a focus on protecting constitutional rights and the public safety dangers posed by releasing arrestees. The Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Salerno sought to promote a balance between protecting individual due process rights and public safety interests. A central constitutional and pressing policy question is what trade-off exists between pretrial liberty and reoffending. The highest profile jurisdiction to examine that question is Harris County, Texas, the third largest county in the United States, which has implemented the largest-scale and farthest reaching constitutional remedies in a misdemeanor bail system. In 2019, after years of federal litigation and a preliminary injunction finding pervasive constitutional violations, Harris County entered a Consent Decree requiring comprehensive reform. This Article describes the constitutional remedies this novel Consent Decree set out and the implementation of those remedies. This Article also addresses the central question of bail: whether pretrial release comes at a cost to public safety.

We find that the constitutional rights protections of the Consent Decree appear largely successful in that people are now promptly freed in misdemeanor cases without the requirement that they pay cash bail. More surprising, perhaps, we find that public safety has also powerfully benefited. We describe a steady decline in the numbers of both misdemeanor arrests and rearrests. Few could have predicted with any certainty what the results of this large-scale bail reform would be. The result suggests there is no necessary trade-off between constitutional rights and public safety. These findings have powerful implications for rethinking the structure and application of the Salerno balancing test and for jurisdictions considering wholesale bail reform.

By Emily Ryo, Ian Peacock, Weston Ley, and Christopher Levesque

 Whether and to what extent racial minorities experience harsher treatment or face worse outcomes in court are questions of fundamental importance for any justice system. Questions of racial inequality are especially salient in the context of removal proceedings that are triggered by immigrants’ criminal history. Many individuals in crime-based removal proceedings are immigrants of color who face a host of legal disadvantages that are tantamount to double penalties for the same crime for which they have already been punished through the criminal justice system. This Article offers, for the first time, systematic empirical analyses of crime-based removal proceedings decided between 1998 and 2023 in U.S. immigration courts. Our analyses produced three key findings. First, our results show that double penalties for immigrants in crime-based removal proceedings are large and growing. Second, there are significant racial disparities in the rate at which immigrants are released from detention and the rate at which they are ordered removed from the United States. Specifically, Hispanic immigrants with drug-related charges and Black immigrants with domestic violence or firearms charges face significantly worse outcomes than their counterparts. Third, non-white immigrants fare better when their presiding judges are of the same, rather than different, race. For white immigrants, however, they generally fare better than non-white immigrants regardless of the presiding judges’ race, and this white favoritism is more pronounced among some non-white judges than white judges. These findings have important implications for scholarship on the continuing salience of race and ethnicity in criminal and civil proceedings despite facially race-neutral laws, as well as policymaking aimed at advancing racial equality in our justice system. 

Minnesota Law Review, v. 109, 2025

By David Abrams and  Priyanka Goonetilleke

Each year, millions of Americans rely on public defenders to fulfill their Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Despite being the linchpin of the criminal justice system, public defense remains both underfunded and understudied. This article provides empirical analysis to contribute to a critical question: How should public defender systems be structured? Criminal justice advocates, scholars, and the American Bar Association strongly favor vertical representation in public defense. Under this model, a single public defender represents a defendant throughout their case, from initial appearance through sentencing. The alternative approach—horizontal representation—operates like an assembly line: Different attorneys handle each stage of a case, from preliminary hearings to pretrial conferences to trials. The preference for vertical representation stems from the intuitive belief that continuity of representation improves outcomes for defendants. However, no prior empirical work has tested this assumption. Using a natural experiment created by the Defender Association of Philadelphia’s transition from a fully horizontal representation system to a partially vertical one, we find no evidence that increasing attorney continuity improves defendant outcomes. These findings have significant implications for how public defender offices should allocate their scarce resources. While vertical representation is considered by many as the ideal, our results cast doubt on whether the additional resources and logistical challenges relative to horizontal representation are justified, given the current reality of underfunded public defense. As jurisdictions nationwide grapple with a chronic lack of resources for public defense, this article provides crucial empirical evidence to inform decisions about how best to uphold defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

New York University Law Review No. 5 (forthcoming), Northwestern Law & Econ Research Paper No. 25-05, Northwestern Public Law Research Paper No. 25-22, U of Penn, Inst for Law & Econ Research Paper No. 25-10,