By Kyra Hanemaaijer, Nadine Ketel, Olivier Marie 

When decision-makers overemphasize salient features under limited attention, biased decisions can result in settings in which decisions should be unbiased. We exploit a sudden shock in the salience of individuals of Moroccan descent in the Netherlands to test the vulnerability of decisions of various actors in the Dutch criminal justice system to biases. Using high-quality data on decisions made from arrest through appeal in the Dutch CJS, we find that the sentence length of individuals of Moroccan descent convicted of a crime increased by 79% after the shock. Heterogeneity analyses indicate that more-experienced judges mitigate this effect. Finally, we find suggestive evidence of longer-term costs for defendants of Moroccan descent in that their labor income drops by 40% over the four years following their judgment of conviction. 

Bonn:  IZA – Institute of Labor Economics, 2024, 54p.

By Johanna Lacoe, Brett Fischer & Steven Raphael 

Objectives

Low-income individuals facing criminal charges experience disproportionately high rates of pretrial detention and conviction. We study a pilot program in Santa Clara County, CA that aims to address this inequity by providing access to public defenders immediately following arrest.

Methods

The Santa Clara Public Defender agreed to provide pilot services one day per week, rotating the intervention day across weeks. Individuals booked on an intervention day were eligible for early legal representation, while individuals booked on control days received public defender services as usual. The study leverages the rotating treatment day to compare pretrial release and case outcomes between eligible individuals booked on treatment days and eligible individuals booked on control days.

Results

Pilot program participants were 28 percentage points more likely to secure pretrial release, and 36 percentage points more likely to see their cases dismissed, relative to comparable individuals who generally first meet with their public defender at arraignment.

Conclusions

Providing prompt access to legal representation could improve release and case outcomes for low-income individuals and the efficacy of public defense.

Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 2024.

By Christopher Uggen, Ryan Larson, Sarah Shannon, Robert Stewart and Molly Hauf

  Laws in 48 U.S. states ban people with felony convictions from voting. In 2024, an estimated 4 million Americans, representing 1.7% of the voting-age population, will be ineligible to vote due to these laws, many of which date back to the post-Reconstruction era. In this historic election year, questions persist about the stability of democratic institutions, election fairness, and voter suppression in marginalized communities. The systematic exclusion of millions with felony convictions should be front and center in these debates.

This report updates and expands upon a quarter century of work chronicling the scope and distribution of felony disenfranchisement in the United States.1 As in 2022, we present national and state estimates of the number and percentage of people disenfranchised due to felony convictions, as well as the number and percentage of the Black and Latino populations impacted. This year, we also present state-level data on the degree of disenfranchisement among men and women. Although these and other estimates must be interpreted with caution, the numbers presented here represent our best assessment of the state of U.S. felony disenfranchisement as of the November 2024 election. Among the report’s key findings: • An estimated 4 million people are disenfranchised due to a felony conviction, a figure that has declined by 31% since 2016, as more states enacted policies to curtail this practice and state prison, probation, and parole populations declined. Previous research finds there were an estimated 1.2 million people disenfranchised in 1976, 3.3 million in 1996, 4.6 million in 2000, 5.1 million in 2004, 5.7 million in 2010, 5.9 million in 2016, 4.9 million in 2020, and 4.4 million in 2022.2 • One out of 59 adult citizens – 1.7% of the total U.S. voting eligible population – is disenfranchised due to a current or previous felony conviction. • Seven out of 10 people disenfranchised are living in their communities, having fully completed their sentences or remaining supervised while on felony probation or parole. • In two states – Florida and Tennessee – more than 6% of the adult population, one of every 17 adults, is disenfranchised. • Florida remains the nation’s disenfranchisement leader in absolute numbers, with over 961,000 people currently banned from voting, often because they cannot afford to pay court-ordered monetary sanctions. An estimated 730,000 Floridians who have completed their sentences remain disenfranchised, despite a 2018 ballot referendum that promised to restore their voting rights. • One in 22 African Americans of voting age is disenfranchised, a rate more than triple that of non-African Americans. Among the adult African American population, 4.5% is disenfranchised compared to 1.3% of the adult non-African American population. In 15 states, 5% or more of the African American adult population is banned from voting due to a felony conviction. • More than one in 10 African American adults is disenfranchised in five states – Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, South Dakota, and Tennessee. • Although data on ethnicity in correctional populations are unevenly reported and undercounted in some states, a conservative estimate is that at least 495,000 Latino Americans or 1.5% of the voting eligible population are disenfranchised. • Based on available correctional data that records an individual’s sex, approximately 764,000 women are disenfranchised, comprising about 0.6% of the female voting eligible population and approximately one-fifth of the total disenfranchised population.3 We estimate that approximately 3.2 million men or 2.7% of the male voting eligible population is disenfranchised, consistent with the overrepresentation of men in the criminal legal system.   

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2024. 40p.

By Christoph Feldhaus, Lukas Reinhardt, Matthias Sutter:

In a democracy, it is essential that citizens accept rules and laws, regardless of which party is in power. We study why citizens in polarized societies resist rules implemented by political opponents. This may be due to the rules' specific content, but also because of a general preference against being restricted by political opponents. We develop a method to measure the latter channel. In our experiment with almost 1,300 supporters and opponents of Donald Trump, we show that polarization undermines rule-following behavior significantly, independent of the rules' content. Subjects perceive the intentions behind (identical) rules as much more malevolent if they were imposed by a political opponent rather than a political ally.

Bonn:  IZA – Institute of Labor Economics, 2024. 36p.

By Michael Jensen,  Sean Doody, and Elena Akers

To date, very little research has examined the specific challenges that individuals with ties to extremism face when reintegrating into their communities after arrest or incarceration. This has produced significant gaps in the scholarship on extremism, including a lack of data on terrorist recidivism from which to devise effective post-release supervision and support strategies. The implications of this knowledge gap extend beyond the halls of academia to matters of national security. Indeed, the United States is currently seeing an unprecedented surge in the number of individuals being released from custody due to their involvement in extremism. Without a robust research literature dedicated to this population, probation officers and service providers are without the scientific knowledge they need to help formerly incarcerated individuals achieve reintegration success. This project sought to address these challenges by focusing on three primary research objectives: 1. Build on existing NIJ-funded research to provide criminal justice professionals empirical data and rigorous analysis on the characteristics of U.S. extremists, their risks for recidivism, and their needs for reintegration success. 2. Gather evidence from in-depth interviews of pretrial services and probation officers, service providers, and system-involved individuals to understand the keys to successful reintegration. 3. Identify the training and education needs of pretrial services and probation officers to help them more effectively support the cases of formerly incarcerated individuals with links to extremism. Our mixed methods approach leveraged: (1) an extension to the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) dataset designed to estimate instances of both ideological and non-ideological recidivism amongst system-involved individuals with ties to extremism; (2) interviews with pretrial services and probation officers, service providers, and  system-involved individuals to understand the needs and challenges this population faces during disengagement and reintegration; and (3) a survey of probation officers to identify the training and education they need to better support their releasees. We summarize our results below. Recidivism • We analyzed more than 1,800 cases of individuals who spent time incarcerated or on probation for committing extremist crimes from 1990-2022 and found an overall recidivism rate of 18.1%. • This rate is significantly higher than previous estimates, but lower than most estimates of recidivism among individuals who commit more typical crimes. • Recidivism rates were more than twice as high for the individuals in our data who were prosecuted by state or local authorities (26.4%) compared to those who were prosecuted in federal courts (13.1%). • Among individuals who recidivated, 59.2% committed new extremist crimes, 27.9% committed non-ideologically motivated crimes, and 12.9% committed both. • Our detection of a higher overall recidivism rate than previous estimates is due to the inclusion of individuals linked to domestic terrorist groups and movements in our analysis. • We find an exceptionally low rate of recidivism among individuals who committed crimes linked to their support of, or involvement in, international jihadism (7.7%), but a notably higher (19.8%) recidivism rate among individuals involved in domestic extremism. • Individuals motivated by their opposition to abortion reoffended at the highest rate (44.2%) in our data, followed by individuals motivated by environmental and animal rights concerns (27.3%). White supremacists and those with anti-government beliefs—the largest subsamples within our data—had recidivism rates of 18.9% and 16.1%, respectively. • The most important risk factor associated with recidivism is the presence of a criminal record prior to an individual radicalizing to their first extremist offense. For instance, individuals with a pre-radicalization history of violent crime were more than two times as likely to recidivate than individuals without a criminal record prior to radicalization (31.3% vs. 14.6%). • Co-offending, extremist group membership, a family history of extremism, and past trauma are associated with committing new ideologically motivated crimes. • Protective factors like being married, older, or having children did not significantly reduce the likelihood of recidivism in our data. Disengagement from Extremism • Past incarceration is a significant obstacle to disengagement from extremism and tends to co-occur with related exit barriers, such as low social mobility, low educational attainment, unstable work histories, substance use disorder, and mental illness. • The presence of a family member or romantic partner involved in extremism can be a barrier to disengagement as well. When present, this obstacle tends to co-occur with identity-related barriers, like social prestige and financial dependency on an extremist group or movement. • Individuals who spent time in prison, but who did not have family members or romantic partners with ties to extremism, were more likely to disengage when they accessed support services like mental health counseling and substance use treatment and were able to find stable employment. • Individuals who had extremist family members or romantic partners, but who did not experience confinement, disengaged when they became disillusioned with their ideology and severed personal relationships with extremists. • When individuals had both family histories of extremism and periods of incarceration, they were significantly less likely to disengage from extremism. These subjects faced a complex set of psychological, emotional, economic, and social barriers to disengagement that were challenging to overcome. Challenges to Successful Reintegration • System-involved individuals face difficult obstacles to securing basic needs, like housing, employment, and financial security, due to their criminal records and the social stigma associated with their involvement in extremism. • Severing anti-social relationships is an important part of successful reintegration, but it can be socially isolating, emotionally taxing, and traumatizing for system-involved individuals. Moreover, system-involved individuals often find it hard to establish new pro-social relationships upon release. • Mental health concerns and trauma are common experiences among system-involved individuals, as is difficulty accessing needed care. • Substance use, while not unique to extremism, can be a challenge among system-involved individuals after their release from custody. While some individuals may develop substance use disorders prior to entering prison, others describe turning to substances upon release as a form of self-medication and emotional coping. • Stigma is a constant challenge facing system-involved individuals with links to extremism. Beyond undermining individuals’ ability to find gainful employment and housing, social stigma also causes psychological distress due to public skepticism about the individuals’ ability to genuinely disengage from extremism. Case Management, Monitoring and Support Services for Successful Reintegration • Currently, there is no systematic process for identifying and triaging cases of extremism among the federally incarcerated population. Some probation officers reported the use of inconsistent heuristics and strategies to identify potential cases. Other officers reported that their districts do not flag cases with a nexus to extremism. • Probation officers do not always have well-established relationships with other law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI, that may be monitoring the individuals under their care. This can lead to a lack of information sharing and an inability for officers to adequately assess risk.  (CONTINUED)   

College Park, MD: National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), University of Maryland 2024. 111p.

By The Death Penalty Information Center

It is a common assumption that the federal death penalty is reserved only for the most serious crimes against the country, like terrorism, that have a unique federal interest. However, an expansion of the federal death penalty in the 1990s added more than 60 crimes that carried a potential death sentence. The cases the federal government decides to pursue are rarely “exceptional” compared to the cases tried at the state level. Federal defendants also share many of the same characteristics as state court defendants: they are often poor, traumatized, mentally impaired, and disproportionately people of color. This report documents the use of the federal death penalty from its earliest beginnings through the modern day. Like many state-level capital punishment systems, the federal death penalty has been used in a racially biased manner, a conclusion that the many historical examples and data in this report confirm. The federal death penalty was a tool historically used by the government to intimidate and subjugate people of color, particularly Black and Native American communities. Today, the most active death-sentencing federal jurisdictions were once the nation’s leaders of extra-judicial lynchings, a through line of connection that links the past to the present and raises serious questions about the future use of the federal death penalty.  

Death Penalty Information Center, 2024. 36p.

By Frank R. Baumgartner 

I have compiled data from the FBI Supplemental Homicide Reports from 1976 through 2019 (the last data currently available) on homicides in Florida and in Duval County, and information about all death sentences imposed in those two jurisdictions since the modern system of capital punishment was created in Florida 1973. This consists of a record of 1,103 death sentences imposed state-wide and 112 in Duval County. The corresponding numbers of homicide offenders are 20,831 (state-wide) and 1,742 (Duval County). I have used this data to calculate rates of death sentences per 100 homicides, in Florida and in Duval County, by race of offender, race of victim, gender of offender, and gender of victim. This report begins by describing the race and gender information I collected and how often it was missing. It next presents a detailed table to document the figures used to calculate the rates of death sentences per 100 homicides in Florida and Duval. My narrative analysis of these tables follows, after which I give a similar analysis limited to those cases in Florida resulting in execution. As will be seen, I ultimately conclude that neither death sentences nor executions are applied in an equal manner; they are instead driven powerfully by the race and gender of the victim, with the highest rates of death sentencing and executions, both in Florida and Duval County, reserved for black offenders who kill white victims, and highest of all for black men who kill white women.  

Washington, DC: American Civil Liberties Union, 2023. 42p.

By Tim Lyman, Frank R. Baumgartner, and Glenn L. Pierce 

Out of 6,512 homicides from 1976 through 2014, we review the outcomes of 1,822 capitally charged homicide cases across eight judicial districts in Louisiana. In most cases, capital charges were reduced; but in 385 cases, the state sought death to the final stage of the prosecution. In 107 cases, a death sentence was imposed. We analyze these outcomes, looking at legally relevant factors, as well as legally irrelevant ones, in determining final capital charges and death sentences. Legally relevant factors include the number of victims as well as various statutory aggravating circumstances (e.g., victims under 12 or over 64, simultaneous felony circumstances, the type of weapon, and the relationship between the victim and offender). Legally irrelevant factors include the judicial district and the race and gender of the offenders and victims, respectively. Many legally relevant factors have powerful impacts: the number of victims, certain felony circumstances, child victims, and elderly victims are all associated with higher rates of final capital charging or death sentencing. But we also show that factors that appear legally irrelevant in theory have powerful effects; rates of capital prosecution and death sentencing are substantially different based on the race of the victim and the combined races of the offenders and the victims, for example. We found only modest differences across the eight judicial districts we studied, but especially significant differences in rates of final capital charges and death sentences in cases that involved white victims, particularly white females. No demographic combination was as likely to see a final capital charge or a death sentence as those cases with a black male offender and a white female victim, which were more than five times as likely to lead to a final capital charge or a death sentence, compared to the much more frequent crimes involving black offenders and black victims. These findings come after a review of the bivariate relations as well as a series of multivariate logistic regressions. The Louisiana death penalty system is heavily weighted by a tendency to seek the harshest penalties in those cases with white female victims. Our powerful and consistent findings of racial and gender-based disparities hold in a multivariate analysis and are inconsistent with the equal protection of the law or any common understanding of equality or justice. 

SUL Rev., 2021

By  Michael Woody, Tyrone Walker, and Joel Castón

Jurisdictions throughout the country have been exploring new approaches to the treatment and care of emerging adults in recent years. In 2018, the Department of Corrections launched the YME Unit in partnership with three individuals who served time in the federal system as emerging adults. Joel Castón, Micheal Woody, and Tyrone Walker acted as mentors for emerging adults in the DOC care. This brief is the story of the unit’s implementation, development, impact, and future.

Washington, DC: Justice Policy Institute, 2020. 21p.

By the Justice Policy Institute

Over the last 20 years, elected officials and juvenile justice system stakeholders have changed policies and practices to create a more developmentally appropriate youth justice system, resulting in a reduction of the number of confined youth by 60 percent since the 1990s and reducing the number of youth automatically prosecuted as adults by 56 percent since 2007. This change in course is largely the result of policies that restrict the use of secure detention facilities and limit prosecution of youth in the adult court system. These trends in declining youth incarceration rates, while positive, have primarily focused on youth involved in nonviolent offenses. Moreover, despite a significant decline in the overall use of confinement, racial disparity in the juvenile justice system has worsened in many jurisdictions. This is due, in large part, to the fact that too many jurisdictions still rely on confinement and transfer to the adult system for youth who engage in violence. The research clearly shows that youth are best served in the least restrictive setting, regardless of underlying offense type. However, state practices frequently do not follow these lessons, turning to secure settings and transfer to the adult criminal justice system when other interventions would be more effective at addressing the underlying cause of the behavior and delivering a better public safety return on investment. Instead, these punitive practices worsen racial disparities, saddle youth with the collateral consequences of a criminal record if they are
prosecuted in the adult criminal justice system, and contribute to recidivism.

Washington, DC: Justice Policy Institute, 2020. 24p.

Edited by Maria Eugenia Trombini · Elizangela Valarini · Vanessa Elias de Oliveira · Markus Pohlmann

This open access book examines the interplay between public and private sectors in Latin America's biggest market. It is the result of the binational research project “Organizational Crime and Systemic Corruption in Brazil” funded by the DFG and FAPESP (2018-2023). Its contributions analyze anti-corruption, political finance, and how for-profit organizations manage illegality.

Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2024. 293p. 

By Lauren B. Edelman, and Jessica Cabrera

With the rise of the #MeToo movement, there has been a groundswell of attention to sex-based harassment. Organizations have pressured high-level personnel accused of harassment to resign or fired them outright, and they have created or revised their anti-harassment policies, complaint procedures, and training programs. This article reviews social science and legal scholarship on sex-based harassment, focusing on definitions and understandings of sexual (and sex-based) harassment, statistics on its prevalence, the consequences of harassment both for those who are subjected to it and for organizations, and explanations for why sex-based harassment persists. We then discuss the various steps that organizations have taken to reduce sex-based harassment and the social science literature on the effectiveness of those steps. We conclude that many organizational policies prevent liability more than they prevent harassment, in part because courts often fail to distinguish between meaningful compliance and the merely symbolic policies and procedures that do little to protect employees from harassment

Annual Review of Law and Social Science Vol. 16:361-383 Vol. 16:361-383 

By Luc Altmann, Mariane Piccinin Barbieri and Sophia Kilroy 

This policy paper presents a step-by-step assessment to help countries implement the OECD Recommendation on Access to Justice and People-Centred Justice Systems. The paper draws on the United Kingdom's model for measuring access to His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service. It is designed to help policymakers adapt this assessment model to their specific contexts and provides guidance on using data to identify and address barriers to court services. With a focus on people-centred justice, it includes good practices and country examples for using data to realise equal access to justice for all.

OECD Public Governance Policy Papers, No. 60, OECD Publishing

By Sarah Esther Lageson

This review analyzes criminal record stigma and surveillance through the concept of digital punishment: the collection and widespread dissemination of personally identifiable data by the American criminal legal system and subsequent private actors. The analysis is organized into three parts: a descriptive account of the technological, legal, and social factors that have created mass criminal record data; a theoretical framework for understanding digital criminal records through stigma and surveillance theories; and an argument that contemporary criminal records constitute digital punishment, with emphasis placed on how digital records are disordered, commodified, and biased. I close by raising policy-relevant questions about the widespread disclosure and use of criminal legal system data for extralegal purposes.

Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2022. 5:67–90

By Ben Grunwald

We know that criminal defendants who plead guilty receive lower sentences than those convicted at trial, but there’s widespread disagreement about why. One camp of scholars believes this plea-trial differential represents a deeply troubling and coercive penalty; a second believes it’s merely a freedom-enhancing discount; and a third denies any meaningful distinction between the two at all. One reason for this disagreement is theoretical—it’s not at all clear what these concepts mean. Another is empirical—in the absence of precise conceptual definitions, we lack relevant data because scholars don’t know what to look for when searching for evidence of penalties and discounts in the real world. This Article seeks to bring greater theoretical and empirical clarity to the debate. To that end, I propose a theoretical definition of plea discounts and trial penalties. Applying this framework to the existing literature, I argue that there is strong theoretical and anecdotal evidence of trial penalties but little systematic empirical evidence. Nearly all of the statistical research has only studied the plea-trial differential; because both discounts and penalties are equally consistent with the existence of such a differential, the literature cannot distinguish between them. To develop a robust statistical test of the discount and penalty theories, we need to look elsewhere—where they make different predictions about prosecutorial behavior. Contrary to the views of the third camp of scholars—who maintain that’s impossible—I show that discounts and penalties are only indistinguishable if we assume litigation costs and acquittal probabilities are static. But they aren’t. They change all the time, and as a result, the discount and penalty theories diverge from each other, predicting different prosecutorial behavior. I argue that this theoretical insight might be used to develop an empirical test to help assess the prevalence and intensity of discounts and penalties in criminal court.

 37 Ga. St. U. L. Rev. 261 (2021).

By James Osborne

This paper explores the intersection of federalism and legal forgiveness mechanisms in the United States, emphasizing the role of the Tenth Amendment in safeguarding state autonomy. It examines how executive and legislative mechanisms, such as pardons, commutations, set-asides, and expungements, have evolved from their common law origins into modern legal practices. While executive clemency remains a crucial tool, legislative actions have also significantly shaped state-level forgiveness processes. By analyzing the balance between federal and state authority, the paper argues that states maintain the right to define and manage their mechanisms of legal forgiveness, reflecting the enduring principles of mercy, justice, and rehabilitation.

By Barry Friedman & Danielle Keats Citron

Working hand-in-hand with the private sector, largely in a regulatory vacuum, policing agencies at the federal, state, and local levels are acquiring and using vast reservoirs of personal data. They are doing so indiscriminately, which is to say without any reason to suspect the individuals whose data they are collecting are acting unlawfully. And they are doing it in bulk. People are unlikely to want this personal information shared with anyone, let alone law enforcement. And yet today, private companies are helping law enforcement gather it by the terabyte. On all of us. Our thesis is straightforward: the unregulated collection of this data must cease, at least until basic rule-of-law requisites are met. Any collection must be authorized by democratically accountable bodies. It must be transparent. It must be based on clear proof of efficacy (that a legitimate purpose actually is being served). There must be protections that minimize or avoid harms to individuals and society. And, of course, there must be judicial review of whether indiscriminate bulk data collection is constitutional, either at all or with regard to specific programs. The basis for this thesis is a first-of-its-kind review of instances, from the dawn of the Information Age, in which Congress acted on these very issues. Much of that history involves indiscriminate collection of data on Americans for reasons of national and domestic security, because national security represents the outer bounds of what law enforcement and intelligence agencies are permitted to do, and much of what is done in the name of national security is inappropriate for domestic policing. Yet, in incident after incident, Congress made clear that indiscriminate bulk collection of Americans’ data is unacceptable, unlawful, and of dubious constitutionality. To the extent that such collection was permitted at all, Congress demanded the very requisites specified above. Today’s indiscriminate bulk surveillance by federal, state, and local policing agencies violates virtually all of these congressionally established norms. It should cease, at least until the rule-of-law requisites are met. 

Virginia Law Review [Vol. 110:1351 2024.

By David Hyman | Mohammad H. Rahmati

Crime doesn’t pay. Or does it? We study the role of expectations regarding sanctions and the likelihood of detection on whether people obey the law. We examine how expectations influence whether people obey the law and conduct simulations of various enforcement counter-factuals. We find the average assessment of the likelihood of detection is quite accurate, but those who (mistakenly) believe the probability is lower than it is are much more likely to break the law. Further, expectations with regard to the likely consequences of getting caught are also heterogeneous. In our simulations, perceived fines have little impact on willingness to break the law, but a higher perceived likelihood of apprehension has an appreciable impact. Because marginal respondents are pivotal in the rate of law-breaking, debiasing expectations among the whole population has little impact.

Unpublished paper, 2024.

By Rita E. Kuckertz

This study examines the impact of Mexico’s 2008 criminal justice reform on the practice of utilizing torture and mistreatment to extract criminal confessions. Complaint data submitted to the National Commission on Human Rights (Comisión Nacional de Derecho Humanos, CNDH) and detainee survey data compiled by the National Institute for Statistics and Geography (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, INEGI) were employed to assess if the use of torture and mistreatment by judicial sector operators had decreased (1) in states with advanced levels of reform implementation and (2) in judicial districts that had already implemented the reform. The author also examined the incidence of forced confessions before and after the reform’s implementation at the judicial district level. The author hypothesized that decreases in torture, mistreatment, and forced confessions would be observed in each of these cases. Basic correlation and regression tests were employed to assess the geographic hypothesis, while two chi-square tests for independence were utilized for judicial district data. The results of these analyses demonstrate evidence rejecting the null hypothesis in each instance, suggesting that the reform can indeed be credited for small but meaningful reductions in torture, mistreatment, and forced confessions in Mexico. The author argues that reforms must be accompanied by further action to address the pervasive use of torture and mistreatment in Mexico

San Diego: Justice in Mexico Department of Political Science & International Relations University of San Diego 2020. 51p.

By Kisha Bird, Caitlin Dawkins, and Lisa Johnson

Too many young people cycle in and out of prison, jails, and detention centers and face probation and parole conditions that keep them locked out of opportunity. These interactions with the criminal justice system demand the need for both equitable practices and programs that support second chances and large-scale investments in decarceration. They also require critical analysis and undoing of historical policies that manifest in an unequal and unjust criminal justice system. From Surviving to Thriving: Supporting Transformation, Reentry and Connections to Employment for Young Adults, from FHI 360 and CLASP, offers practical programmatic solutions that support second chances for young people and raise policy and systems considerations to address equity, collateral consequences, and opportunity. The report features insights of best practices from nine communities that are part of the Compass Rose Collaborative (CRC). Launched in 2017, the CRC began as a three-year program funded by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL). The CRC connects young adults ages 18-24 who have had contact with the juvenile justice or criminal justice system to employment, education pathways, and supportive services across nine communities. Policymakers and practitioners can use this analysis to increase equity and access to jobs and education for young people in need of another chance and in navigating the converging fields of workforce development, education, and criminal justice. Ultimately, the lessons shared here can offer a variety of stakeholders, including public agencies and employers, a roadmap to better understand strategies to support dismantling structural barriers and implementing strategies that support young adults on a journey of transformation and connectedness.

Washington, DC: CLASP, 2020. 28p.