By The Maryland Equitable Justice Collaborative

  This report outlines 18 recommendations to address the urgent need for criminal justice reform and reduce racial disparities in Maryland’s prisons and jails. Developed through over a year of research, analysis, and collaboration with experts, service providers, and impacted community members, these recommendations provide clear steps for change. The report summarizes key research, data, and proposed actions to help reduce the overrepresentation of Black people in its criminal legal system.

Maryland’s criminal legal system has decreased in size by almost every measure.  Arrest rate, jail population, prison population, and the number of people on parole and probation2 are all on the decline3 and below the national average. However, these gains obscure a troubling reality: racial disparities within the system remain stark and, in some instances, have worsened.5 Maryland's Black population, which constitutes only 30% of the State's residents, represents a disproportionate segment of those entangled in the criminal legal system. Alarmingly, Black people account for 51% of arrests,6 59% of the jail population,7 71% of the prison population,8 71% of the parole population,9 and 53% of the probation population.10 This persistent racial injustice highlights the urgent need for reform within the system to address these inequities. About MEJC -  MEJC is a joint initiative led by the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) and the Maryland Office of the Public Defender (MOPD) to address the racial disparities in the incarceration of Black people in Maryland prisons and jails. MEJC’s existence is a recognition that Maryland’s decarceration efforts have not reduced the glaring racial disparities in our criminal legal system and that we must abandon the outdated notion that they will. MEJC’s recommendations also acknowledge that the current criminal legal system produces inequitable results for Black people and, without radical change, will continue to do so at alarming rates. Therefore, MEJC has taken a clear-eyed look at current policies, informed by historical and systemic injustices, which directly contribute to the disproportionate outcomes and harm to Black people in Maryland’s criminal legal system. The data and statistical findings in this first annual report reveal much more than numbers; they represent real lives impacted by a system that too often fails our children; disproportionately punishes Black people and other communities of color; and neglects basic human dignity in our prisons and jails. In this report, MEJC, in partnership with policy experts, educators, and community voices, presents clear, urgent recommendations that could reverse these inequities. This is a pivotal moment for Maryland’s criminal legal system. MEJC presents the opportunity to confront these unfair outcomes head-on and build a system that reflects Maryland’s highest values of fairness, community, and opportunity. RECOMMENDATIONS In recognition of the all-encompassing nature of racial disparities in our criminal legal system, MEJC’s recommendations address comprehensive aspects of an impacted person’s experience, from how and why a person first encounters law enforcement to how the system supports or does not support a person’s journey back from incarceration. All recommendations are rooted in data and evidence that clearly demonstrate (1) the inefficiencies or inadequacies of our current policies, (2) the disparate outcomes for Black people because of the status quo, and (3) the efficacy of the recommended solutions.    

Baltimore: Office of the Maryland Attorney General, 2025. 111p.

By Lindsay Bing, Rebecca Goldstein , Helen Ho , Devah Pager, and Bruce Western

  US courts regularly assess fines, fees, and costs against criminal defendants. Courtrelated debt can cause continuing court involvement and incarceration, not because of new crimes, but because of unpaid financial obligations. We conducted an experiment with 606 people found guilty of misdemeanors in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma. Study participants were randomly selected to receive relief from all current and prior fines and fees assessed for criminal charges in the county. Fee relief reduced jail bookings 21 mo after randomization and the effect persisted over 44 mo of follow-up. Although fee relief reduced incarceration, financial sanctions had no effect on indicators of lawbreaking. Instead, the control group (who obtained no relief from fines and fees) were rearrested at significantly higher rates because of open arrest warrants for nonpayment. These results indicate the long-term and criminalizing effects of legal debt, supporting claims that financial sanctions disproportionately harm low-income defendants while contributing little to public safety

PNAS 2024 Vol. 121 No. 51 e2415066121 

by Jens Ludwig and Sendhil Mullainathan

Algorithms (in some form) are already widely used in the criminal justice system. We draw lessons from this experience for what is to come for the rest of society as machine learning diffuses. We find economists and other social scientists have a key role to play in shaping the impact of algorithms, in part through improving the tools used to build them.

JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES VOL. 35, NO. 4, FALL 2021, 26p.

by Will Dobbie and Crystal S. Yang

In this article, we review a growing empirical literature on the effectiveness and fairness of the US pretrial system and discuss its policy implications. Despite the importance of this stage of the criminal legal process, researchers have only recently begun to explore how the pretrial system balances individual rights and public interests. We describe the empirical challenges that have prevented progress in this area and how recent work has made use of new data sources and quasi-experimental approaches to credibly estimate both the individual harms (such as loss of employment or government assistance) and public benefits (such as preventing non-appearance at court and new crimes) of cash bail and pretrial detention. These new data and approaches show that the current pretrial system imposes substantial short- and long-term economic harms on detained defendants in terms of lost earnings and government assistance, while providing little in the way of decreased criminal activity for the public interest. Non-appearances at court do significantly decrease for detained defendants, but the magnitudes cannot justify the economic harms to individuals observed in the data. A second set of studies shows that that the costs of cash bail and pretrial detention are disproportionately borne by Black and Hispanic individuals, giving rise to large and unfair racial differences in cash bail and detention that cannot be explained by underlying differences in pretrial misconduct risk. We then turn to policy implications and describe areas of future work that would enable a deeper understanding of what drives these undesirable outcomes.

Journal of Economic Perspectives 35 (4): 49–70. 2021.

By Jay Gormley, Gabrielle Watson, Gavin Dingwall, Jade Mouton, Jonathan Bild and Julian Roberts

Firearms offences are statistically rare yet in light of their potential for harm cause considerable public concern. The offences vary greatly in terms of their nature and possible sentences. As a result, the sentencing exercise is often complex. Courts must weigh the harm caused, intended, or which was reasonably foreseeable, as well as the culpability of the individual offender. Quantifying the harm caused can be particularly challenging where a firearms offence does not have an identifiable victim as firearms offences are inherently potentially harmful. An additional complexity arises in a small number of serious gun crimes which carry a mandatory minimum sentence. When sentencing these offences, the court must also consider whether exceptional circumstances may justify the imposition of a sentence which falls below the statutory minimum. This report examines research and sentencing guidance relating to firearms offences. These offences include a range of crimes varying in seriousness, although most create a risk of serious harm or death. We conducted a literature review of the social and socio-legal databases to uncover relevant publications for the period 2000-2024. As will be seen, most of the scholarship in the area focuses on restricting access to firearms rather than punishing offenders convicted of firearms offences. Within the more restricted domain of sentencing, the majority of publications address mandatory sentencing as a response to gun crime. Most Western nations have introduced mandatory minimum sentences of imprisonment for the more serious forms of gun crime. The project also conducted a review of the public opinion literature to seek any research exploring public knowledge of, and attitudes towards, sentencing for firearms offences. Understanding public opinion is recognised as a relevant consideration by sentencing commissions and councils around the world. 3. With respect to guidance, England and Wales is the only relevant comparator jurisdiction. While gun crime is a near-universal problem, differences in the definition of offences – and laws around gun ownership – makes it inappropriate to compare sentencing guidance or trends with the United States. Canada, Australia and New Zealand are more comparable countries, but none of these operate formal sentencing guidelines. Many of the firearms offences in Scotland also exist in England and Wales and stem from the same UK legislation. In addition, courts in England and Wales and Scotland also employ sentencing guidelines. These follow a similar step by step approach (albeit with important differences). For these reasons, we restrict our comparisons to England and Wales. Contents of the Volume Chapter 1 Firearms Offences: This chapter identifies the offences under consideration, including statistics on the prevalence of the offences, and summarises the current legal framework for sentencing these offences. Chapter 2 Firearms Offenders and Associated Offences: This chapter explores the connection between firearms offences and other violent crime. It addresses the way that the assessment of risk interacts with sentencing for firearms offences and the indicators of further or more serious offending (such as homicide). Finally, it discusses the background of offenders and the intersection between minority ethnic backgrounds and sentencing for firearms offences. Chapter 3 Sentencing Guidance for Firearms Offences: This chapter reviews the principles and purposes of the sentencing of firearms offences and also discusses the sentencing guidelines for firearms offences issued by the Sentencing Council for England and Wales. Chapter 4 Research on Sentencing Responses to Firearms Offences: The final chapter summarises findings from research on the sentencing of firearms offences. The chapter also discusses the limited research exploring public attitudes to sentencing offenders convicted of firearms offences.

Edinburgh: Scottish Sentencing Council, 2025. 65p.

Chairman, Rt. Hon. David Gauke

This review of sentencing is tasked with a comprehensive re-evaluation of the sentencing framework in England and Wales, to ensure we are never again in a position where the country has more prisoners than prison places. This report – Part 1 of the Independent Sentencing Review’s conclusions – outlines the prison population challenge in figures, provides an explanation of why and how we got here, and advocates for an approach rooted in all statutory principles of sentencing and public service reform. Chapter one of this report examines trends in custody and the capacity pressures faced by HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS), which have brought the system dangerously close to collapse. At the end of 2024, over 85,000 individuals were held in the adult prison estate; these numbers undeniably exceed the population the system is designed to accommodate. The total prison population has grown by over 40,000 people since 1993, with adults sentenced for indictable offences now serving longer sentences. England and Wales also have one of the highest prison population rates in Western Europe. The probation service is similarly stretched: by September 2024, 240,497 individuals were under probation supervision, over 100,000 more than in 1993. Prison demand is expected to grow by an average of 3,000 people a year– the equivalent of building two large prisons per year. Without further government action, the prison population could reach up to 112,300 prisoners by November 2032.8 Chapter two summarises the drivers behind the increase in the use and length of custody. It concludes that the increase in the prison and probation population is not the consequence of a considered strategy as the most effective measure to reduce crime. Nor can it be explained by rising crime levels. In fact, latest estimates from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) showed there has been an overall general decline in incidents of headline crime since 2017. The increase has been the result of many decisions made by successive governments and a “tough on crime” narrative that has focused primarily on punishment – understood as incarceration and longer sentences – on occasion responding to embedded misunderstandings about sentencing and high-profile individual cases. In tandem, there has been an underinvestment in probation and other alternatives that can provide rehabilitation and reduce reoffending. Chapter three outlines the need for change, and advocates for a system rooted in all the current statutory principles of sentencing. The emphasis on longer-term imprisonment has placed significant strain on the system, forcing successive governments to adopt costly and high-risk emergency measures. These have attempted to both increase short-term capacity (often in ways which are expensive and risky) and reduce demand by expediting the release of prisoners, such as the measures we saw in the autumn of 2024 when prisoners were released 40 per cent (as opposed to 50 per cent) of the way through their sentence. This incoherent approach also comes at a fiscal cost: new prison programmes are estimated to cost between £9.4 billion and £10.1 billion.10 The piecemeal and unstrategic manner in which sentence lengths have increased in recent decades has meant that there has been insufficient consideration of all of the statutory aims of sentencing: punishment, crime reduction, reform and rehabilitation, public protection and reparation. Punishment is an important aim for the criminal justice system and prison plays a vital role in delivering punishment. But too often decision making has been based on an approach that punishment is all that matters, and that the only form of punishment that counts is imprisonment.

Rather than approach sentencing policy based on the evidence of what is likely to be most effective in reducing crime and reducing reoffending, too often the knee-jerk response has been to increase sentence lengths as a demonstration of government action.

London: Miniarey od Juarixw2025. 65p.

By  Julian Adler, Jethro Antoine, Kush R. Varshney

It is hard to know where we stand in the timeline of AI implementation in the criminal legal space. Part of the challenge is that the criminal legal “system” is in reality a multiverse of federal, state, and local jurisdictions.[1] More problematic still is the sheer ubiquity of AI and related technologies. “I think the most important thing people don't know is that tech is now working at mega scale,” observes Eric Schmidt, the former chairman and CEO of Google, cautioning—via the title of a recent Oscar-winning film—that tech is “everything everywhere all at once.”[2] What we do know is that AI is already in use in the criminal legal realm and, given the human propensity to reach for technological solutions to social problems, its further adoption is almost certainly unstoppable.[3] So how best to navigate the current moment of AI implementation? “We need a clear line in the sand: ‘these use-cases are OK, these are not,’” urges Sara Friedman of The Council of State Governments Justice Center. “The criminal legal system deprives people of their liberty. It shouldn’t be using AI to do this. There is a line when you are responsible for people’s lives; there are things you shouldn’t do.” 

New York: Center for Court Innovation, 2025. 9p.

By Lama Hassoun Ayoub, Adelle Fontanet, Suvi Hynynen Lambson, Noel Altaha, Desiree Fox, Ann Miller, Alisha Morrison, and Lina Villegas

  Decisions about what to do with people coming through the criminal court system can have long-lasting impacts on those individuals’ well-being and public safety more broadly. Will putting them in jail make things better or worse? Will offering them services help address some of the underlying issues that brought them to court in the first place? Given the complexity of these decisions, criminal justice practitioners have increasingly relied on risk assessments to help them systematically make these determinations. But assessments used in one context do not always translate well to other contexts. In particular, tribal courts—courts operated by Indian tribes under laws and procedures that the Tribe has enacted (Jones, 2000)—have found these assessments lacking and not always appropriate for their unique context and population. Because of this, there has been a desire among tribal practitioners to develop their own risk assessment tools or ensure appropriate validation of existing tools within their tribal contexts or with tribal populations. This report summarizes the first steps that the Center for Court Innovation and the Tribal Defenders of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have taken to build knowledge and lay the groundwork for advancing risk-need assessment, data management, and technological capacity in tribal courts. Chapter 1 introduces the need for a tribal-specific assessment and provides a detailed description of the tribal-researcher partnership that was created to deepen our collective understanding around these neglected topics and building the capacities needed to embark on future projects, including validation of new or existing risk-need assessments. Chapter 2 summarizes the findings from a survey of tribal courts intended to understand existing assessment practices and technology needs--key information that would help serve as the foundation for any future work on this subject. Chapter 3 concludes with recommendations for next steps for the development, validation, and implementation of an appropriate risk assessment tool to be used in tribal courts.  

  New York: Center for Court Innovation, 2021. 37p.  

By Jordan Conan and Jeffrey Sharlein

Infants and toddlers (aged 0-3) are overrepresented in the child welfare system and are more likely than older children to be removed from their original caregiver and placed in out-of-home care. Implementation of our Strong Starts Court Initiative in a New York City courtroom led to a decrease in removal rate for program-eligible subject children from their original caregiver and was associated with an increase in children residing with that caregiver a year later. This program seeks to support families of children aged 0-3 through direct services, judicial and attorney education, and a more collaborative court process.

The findings from this study complement results from an earlier evaluation that showed a decrease in subsequent child welfare court episodes for Strong Starts participants. Together, these studies paint a picture of an intervention that improves outcomes at both the individual case and courtroom levels—creating more stability for children, improving family court outcomes for their respondent caregivers, and preserving attachment relationships.

New York: Center for Court Innovation, 29p.

By Julian Adler, Jethro Antoine, Laith Al-Saadoon 

There was but one passing reference to “core values” over the course of a recent U.S. Senate Judiciary hearing on artificial intelligence [AI] in criminal investigations and prosecutions.[1] This is typical. Even in spaces like the criminal legal system, where the specters of racial injustice and inhumanity loom so large, the technological sublimity of AI can be awfully distracting. People have long looked to technology to duck the hard problem of values. “[W]e have tended to believe that if we just had more information, we could make better policy,” observes University of Nevada’s Lynda Walsh in Scientists as Prophets. “But no matter how much data we could lay hands to—even if it were LaPlace’s Demon itself—values would still stand in the way.”[2] If anything is clear about advanced AI, it is that there is much we don’t know and even more that we can’t begin to predict. Consider that the “generative AI” we have witnessed over the past 18 months—AI which produces autonomous human-impersonating content—was largely unforeseen. It’s now being attributed to AI’s “emergent abilities.”[3] Across sectors, most observers acknowledge that AI is a game-changing technology. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority is illustrative: using AI, it now processes “a peak volume of 600 billion transactions every day to detect potential abuses,” making the regulator “one of the largest data processors in the world.”[4] Tell  ingly, many of the people closest to the leading edges of AI development are sounding the loudest alarms about its capabilities. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” warned the Center for AI Safety in 2023.[5] AI has the potential to supercharge, not mitigate, the uglier sides of humanity, much like, as one journalist puts it, “a fun-house-style… mirror magnifying biases and stripping out the context from which their information comes.”[6] Advanced AI is “not just another technology,” contends Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. It is not “another tool that will add incrementally to human capabilities.”[7] Echoing countless dystopian projections of the future, the Center for AI Safety predicts AI systems will likely “become harder to control” than previous forms of technology; among other disquieting scenarios, these systems could “drift from their original goals” and “optimize flawed objectives.”[8] 

New York: Center for Court Innovation, 2024. 8p.

By Sruthi Naraharisetti

In the wake of several high-profile systemic failures of justice for Black people in the last decade, there have been widespread demands for change against pervasive racial inequities throughout the criminal legal system. These failures include the killings by law enforcement1 of Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor; the excessive use of confinement and untimely deaths of Sandra Bland and Kalief Browder; and the determination of the wrongful convictions of the Central Park 5. While much of the public discourse has focused on how law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, and correctional officers perpetuate racial biases, far less attention has been on how public defense attorneys do, as well. Recently, scholars have started examining how race affects legal representation in public defense. The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees the right to counsel in criminal cases and the Supreme Court has held that the government will provide a lawyer if a person cannot afford it. Each decision point of a public defense lawyer’s assistance is vulnerable to racial bias and the potential for long-lasting harm to clients. Despite calls from the American Bar Association's Standards for the Defense Function4 for defense counsel to be proactive in detecting, investigating, and eliminating improper biases, with particular attention towards historically persistent biases like race, achieving this standard has proven difficult. Often operating with limited time, resources, and information, public defense attorneys must make critical decisions relating to bail requests, case investigations, social service needs, plea negotiations, and trial strategies, among others. Recognizing the pivotal role that public defense attorneys play in addressing racial disparities that their clients face, our exploratory study seeks to create a basis of understanding for how attorneys consider race when working with clients, conceptualize their role in addressing racial inequity, and experience the impact of their own racial/ethnic identities in the workplace. By shedding light on these issues, we hope to encourage public defense attorneys to reflect on and discuss how racial bias within their field perpetuates systemic harm, ultimately paving the way for improvement in racial equity across the field. 

New York: Center for Court Innovation, 2024. 14p.

By Daniel Ades Center for Justice Innovation Jessica Kay 

3,026 New Yorkers lost their lives as a result of a drug overdose in 2022, a 12% increase from the prior year and the highest number since reporting began in 2000. This increase in overdose deaths was evident across all five boroughs, and it expanded inequities based on race, age, income, and geography.[1] Throughout the process of conducting quarterly meetings, the RxStat[2] Overdose Fatality Review Committee (OFR) realized that many individuals who fatally overdosed in New York City had previous contact with the criminal justice system. A brief review of the 20 OFR cases examined since June 2021 indicated that only one of them had no recorded criminal justice interaction.[3] According to the New York State Office of Addiction Services and Supports (OASAS), persons with criminal justice involvement account for 47% of all treatment admissions to OASAS-certified programs.[4] However, for the reasons discussed below, criminal courts are not always the optimal setting for individuals struggling with problem drug use to access treatment services. Ideally, preventive community-based treatment providers would intervene in an individual’s problem drug use before the related behavior leads to criminal court involvement. Even so, given the reality of increased overdose deaths and the prevalence of problem substance use among individuals caught up in the criminal justice system, there was a clear need to explore the role of the courts in responding to individuals with substance use issues and preventing overdose fatalities. On September 19, 2023, RxStat and the Center for Justice Innovation facilitated Substance Use, Overdose Prevention, and the Courts: A Citywide Collaboration at New York Law School to address issues related to this epidemic of overdose fatalities. The all-day event[5] focused on the role of the courts as an intercept point in addressing substance use disorder and preventing fatal overdoses, with an emphasis on communication among stakeholders in the criminal justice system, across boroughs, and between the many disciplines and agencies reflected in the event’s participants. Indeed, a primary inspiration for the event was bringing together the court-based perspectives with those of clinical and public health professionals to deepen the dialogue and establish connections between participants who struggle daily with the same issues but may not be aware of each other’s challenges. This report not only documents the differing viewpoints and major themes from the day, highlights critical questions raised, and summarizes innovative approaches being employed throughout the city—it is also intended to serve as a catalyst for continued dialogue between participants and make recommendations for court stakeholders to consider in trying to expand the number of individuals who could access potentially life-saving treatment as a result of their court involvement  

New York: Center for Court Innovation, 2024. 20p.  

By Brittany R. Davis, Rebecca Thomforde Hauser, Heaven Berhane, Gene Johnson, Saloni Sethi, Bea Hanson, Devin Deane, and Karolin Betances

Many responses to intimate partner violence (IPV), especially work to engage those who have caused harm through IPV have remained relatively unchanged over the past few decades despite the widespread, long-lasting, and devastating impact IPV continues to have on communities. Engaging people who cause harm is a crucial part of supporting survivors, fostering healthy relationships and communities, and ending violence. In response to a need to develop more effective programming, New York City implemented a comprehensive citywide approach to people who cause harm, developing multiple programming options for people who cause harm both within and outside of the criminal legal system. This concept paper outlines these programs and proposes several practice implications for the field. 

New York: Center for Court Innovation, 2024. 24p...

By Samantha Plummer, Timothy Ittner, Angie Monreal, Jasmin Sandelson, Bruce Western

Data from a unique survey of court- involved New Yorkers collected during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 provides evidence for a cycle of disadvantage involving penal control, material hardship, and health risk. We find evidence of chaotic jail conditions from March to May 2020 in the early phase of the pandemic, and high levels of housing and food insecurity, and joblessness for those leaving jail or with current criminal cases. The highest levels of material hardship—measured by housing insecurity, unemployment, shelter stays, and poor self- reported health—were experienced by those with mental illness and substance use problems who had been incarcerated

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Volume 9, Issue 3, May 2023, pp. 232-251 pages

By Sara K. Rankin

The criminalization of homelessness refers to the enactment and enforcement of laws and policies that punish unsheltered people for surviving in public space, even when those individuals have no reasonable alternative. The constitutional and civil rights issues stemming from criminally charging unsheltered people for public survival are clear, albeit not uncontested. But cities often skirt legal challenges to criminalization by pursuing means other than criminal charges to punish homelessness. Many cities “civilly criminalize” homelessness through civil enforcement, which extends from infractions or fines to “invisible persecution,” such as the persistent policing and surveilling of unsheltered people. While courts, legislatures, and advocates largely focus on criminal charges, those punishments are just the tip of the criminalization iceberg: civil enforcement is arguably more extensive and damaging. However, courts and legislatures largely do not protect people experiencing homelessness from civil criminalization. This Article argues for greater attention to the devastating impact of civil punishments, drawing from other critiques that expose how civil tools punish poor and vulnerable people. It also examines how punishment operates outside of both criminal charges and civil sanctions, severely penalizing unsheltered people and requiring reform.

Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review [Vol. 56 , 2021. 46p.

By Abel Rodriguez

Increasingly, U.S. immigration law and policy perpetuate death. As more people become displaced globally, death provides a measurable indicator of the level of racialized violence inflicted on migrants of color. Because of Clinton-era policies continued today, deaths at the border have reached unprecedented rates, with more than two migrant deaths per day. A record 853 border crossers died last year, and the deadliest known transporting incident took place in June 2022, with fifty-one lives lost. In addition, widespread neglect continues to cause loss of life in immigration detention, immigration enforcement agents kill migrants with virtual impunity, and immigration law ensures courts routinely order people deported to their deaths. As these preventable deaths persist, particularly among migrants of color, the Supreme Court has all but foreclosed causes of action against individual federal agents for wrongful death. It has done so most notably in its recent 2022 decision Egbert v. Boule, further limiting judicial remedies for constitutional violations and sanctioning use of force as a routine function of immigration enforcement.

This Article provides a novel perspective on law enforcement and race. It is the first to provide a comprehensive examination of lethal immigration enforcement, arguing that racialized policy rationales, impunity instituted by courts, and prevailing political paradigms have coalesced to render migrants of color expendable. Therefore, the enforcement system must be reimagined. While scholars have begun to analyze the immigration system in terms of “slow death,” or harms that occur over time, a holistic view of “spectacular deaths,” those readily perceived, is lacking. After mapping how the immigration enforcement system takes migrant lives, this Article interrogates the policy rationales for lethal enforcement in light of largely unexamined data, finding that anti-Blackness drives punitive immigration detention and the perceived dangerousness of Latinx migrants fuels lethal border policies. It then turns to an analysis of wrongful death actions and recent Supreme Court doctrine, poised to impede remedies for excessive force in courts further and escalate racialized violence against noncitizens. Ultimately, given the urgency of addressing rising migrant mortality, it calls for a paradigm shift beyond liberal reforms to end lethal enforcement and its racial subordination.

CORNELL LAW REVIEW [Vol. 109:465, 2024, 71p

By Michael Kagan

In theory, the Department of Homeland Security bears the burden of proof  when it seeks to deport a person from the United States. But the government rarely has to meet it. 

This Article presents original data from live observation in Immigration Court, documenting that almost all respondents in deportation proceedings admit and concede the charges against them, even when they have attorneys, without getting anything in return from the government. 

Focusing especially on the role of immigrant defense lawyers, the Article explores why this is happening. 

It critiques the legal standards of proof used in Immigration Court, while also exploring normative ambiguities about the role of 

immigration lawyers in deportation proceedings. Together, these factors are effectively depriving many immigrants of the vigorous legal defense that they deserve.  

UC IRVINE LAW REVIEW [Vol. 14:163 2024, 49p.

By Tasseli McKay and William A. “Sandy” Darity Jr.

Social scientists continue to declare that mass incarceration, a defining social force of the last half century, is on its way out. Lifetime risks of imprisonment are indeed in decline, as are absolute and relative imprisonment risks for Black Americans. But whether we consider mass incarceration to be over, or even on its way out, depends a great deal on what we believe mass incarceration is and what it does.

Scholarship on the “collateral consequences” of mass incarceration, leaving concerns with political etiology to political scientists, is curiously absent a broader concept of how such consequences function. Even as the field rigorously documents the vast social, political, economic, and health fallout of mass incarceration, it remains largely agnostic on a central theoretical concern: Do we conceive of mass incarceration as a policy mistake with negative consequences for us all, or as a well-running engine of racial stratification that has enriched some Americans at others' expense? How we answer this question, or do not, has tremendous implications for how we study the harms of mass incarceration and what policy moves we deem capable of confronting it.

Scholarship on mass incarceration's consequences is often introduced with reference to racial inequality. Such scholarship has identified an array of mechanisms by which mass incarceration appears to contribute to racial stratification, particularly through a longstanding line of inquiry on the disproportionate impact of incarceration-related constraints on Black men's workforce participation, income, and wealth. Yet most such research frames these phenomena as an unfortunate artifact of racially disproportionate criminal legal system contact, rather than situatingthe impetus and functioning of the criminal legal system within a broader theory of structural racial inequality.

Critiquing the failure to engage questions of structural racism in empirical research on mass incarceration's consequences, two of the field's preeminent scholars argue,

While most studies that explore the consequences of mass incarceration for American families are motivated by racial inequality within the carceral system--rightfully so, given the massive racial disparities in incarceration rates and criminal justice involvement--the work often fails to engage this important issue in meaningful ways .... We neither interrogate why we see racial disparities in mass incarceration nor do we investigate why we might see racial disparities in outcomes due to mass incarceration.

Indeed, with important exceptions, collateral consequences research inventories the implications of mass punishment for individuals, neighborhoods, and nations rather than examining how a racially targeted punishment system functions within a broader set of national and subnational institutions that systematically privilege whiteness. Further, the possibility that mass incarceration produces systematic benefits, in addition to or even as an impetus for its systematic harms, receives very limited scholarly attention. Such research, if it aims to confront racial injustice, must “move beyond description of racial inequality [and] think critically about how our society's raced institutions interact with one another to stratify the experiences of American families”.

Toward that end, the current review applies the theory of stratification economics to consider whether and how the broad criminalization and intensive punishment of Black Americans have advanced or advantaged their White contemporaries. First, the review briefly revisits key theoretical perspectives on the consequences of mass incarceration and proposes stratification economics as a meta-theoretical framework for understanding the production and functioning of those consequences. Next, it applies stratification economics to available social scientific evidence on the consequences of mass incarceration, analyzing the implications of that evidence for the relative standing of White Americans. Finally, the review advances an agenda for future research and policy capable of confronting and redressing the ill-gotten gains of mass incarceration.

20 Annual Review of Law and Social Science 309 (2024), 22p.

By Tashayla Sierra-Kadaya Borden

xisting literature does little to address the unique victimization of Black women in the law. Studies looking through a racial lens may ignore Black women by failing to address gender. Alternatively, gender analysis may center around issues specific to white women. White feminist scholars promote carceral feminism, a “neoliberal law-and-order agenda pursued by a coalition of secular anti-prostitution feminists and white evangelicals.” Carceral Feminism focuses on white womanhood and harms marginalized communities, actively pushing Black women into prison. To address this, Black feminist scholars have developed key theories to understand Black women's experiences. One such scholar, Moya Bailey, coined the term misogynoir to describe “the uniquely co-constitutive racialized and sexist violence that befalls Black women as a result of their simultaneous and interlocking oppression at the intersection of racial and gender marginalization.” Misogynoir operates as a form of implicit or explicit bias that informs how and why the state views Black women as dual victims and victimizers.

In 2019, the New York State Legislature passed the DVSJA. The DVSJA amended New York's existing Penal Law § 60.12 and created Criminal Procedure Law § 440.47 to provide resentencing for currently incarcerated individuals. This statute permits a judge to change a domestic violence survivor's initial sentence if the abuse was a “significant contributing factor” to the crime. The DVSJA is the first legislation of its kind in the United States. Advocates and survivors promoted this statute to decriminalize trauma and help individuals who commit crime while suffering abuse. Other states have enacted similar laws, but Black women still face lingering issues that exacerbate coercive abuse, racism, and gendered violence.

This Note examines the impact of New York's revolutionary DVSJA on Black woman survivorship while proposing solutions and improvements for other states aiming to replicate the statute. Part I summarizes the DSVJA and contextualizes the case law that preceded its passing. Part II describes the unique impact of domestic violence on Black women, the challenges of qualifying for relief under the statute, and the limitations of resentencing. Lastly, Part III offers noncarceral solutions that replace sentencing and help Black women share their experiences as abuse survivors.

144 Columbia Law Review 2065 (2024), 40p.

By Andrew Howard

Almost every county in the United States elects its chief Prosecutor, but the chief Public Defender, if there is one, is generally an appointed position. In four states, however, some or all of the Public Defender offices have elected leaders. Although prosecutorial elections have been heavily studied and criticized, relatively little attention has been paid to the elections of their counterparts. This Note sheds light on how Public Defender elections impact a criminal justice ecosystem. A series of interviews with elected Public Defenders reveal these elections can enhance the independence and stature of the position. Additionally, the interviews and additional research rebut the primary criticism of these elections: that voters may elect someone who wanted to work against indigent defendants. There are simply very few examples relative to the many counties that have these elections. These qualitative findings are supported in part by further quantitative analyses. First, this Note found a correlation of increased Public Defense experience amongst the state judiciary in jurisdictions where there the chief Public Defender is elected. Second, this Note found a correlation between these elections and increased salary parity between Public Defenders and Prosecutors in the same state.

Accordingly, this Note argues that some counties should explore making their chief Public Defender an elected position. While far from a panacea for the many issues facing the American criminal justice system, these elections could help enhance the quality of indigent defense where implemented.

Columbia Human Rights Law Review, 2020, 40p.