By Samantha Richter

A new report from the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law draws on more than a dozen in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated individuals across North Carolina to uncover the real experiences of people returning from prison and where the system falls short.

Based on interviews conducted across urban and rural counties, this report, Bridging the Gap: Aligning Policy with Lived Experience to Strengthen Reentry in North Carolina examines the experience of people navigating the transition from incarceration to community life and makes recommendations to strengthen the process. Each year, approximately 18,000 people return to North Carolina communities from state prisons. While the state has joined the national initiative to improve reentry success through Reentry 2030, participants in this report described reentry as a critical and vulnerable period, where fragmented services and limited planning times can undermine support, creating a gap between available services and what people need to successfully rebuild their lives.

“What we heard consistently is that reentry isn’t a short-term process,” said report author Samantha Richter (A.B. ‘25). “People need support that is personalized, coordinated, and sustained—and they need systems that listen to their experiences and respond to what helps them succeed.”

Key Findings

Five major themes emerged from participant interviews:

1. Reentering community members need personalized, ongoing support: One-size-fits-all services often left participants feeling unsupported, while peer mentors with lived experience were described as especially effective.

2. Location shapes access and opportunity: Urban areas offered more resources, while limited flexibility around release locations sometimes forced individuals back into environments that undermined their stability.

3. System disconnects create difficulty in navigating resources: Even when resources existed, participants often struggled to access them due to confusion, poor communication, or lack of coordination between agencies

4. Timely, attentive, and thorough pre-release planning is critical for success: Participants consistently emphasized that meaningful preparation requires more than the standard 30-day planning window

5. Reentry services must support long-term stability: Participants repeatedly stressed that reentry challenges did not end in the first few weeks, and sustained support was necessary to build long-term stability.

Policy Recommendations

Grounded in participant experiences, the report outlines six priorities for policymakers and practitioners:

1. Increase flexibility in release location

2. Begin pre-release planning earlier and expand its scope

3. Strengthen employment readiness and employer connections

4. Expand targeted housing supports

5. Improve continuity between prison and community-based services

6. Invest in peer support programs led by people with lived experience

By Joshua Hochman

In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that laws prohibiting the carrying of firearmsin sensitive places were presumptively constitutional. Since Bruen, several states and the District of Columbia have defended their sensitive-place laws by analogizing to historical statutes regulating firearms in other places, like schools and government buildings. Many judges, scholars, and litigants appear to have assumed that only statutescan count as evidence of the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. This Note is the first expansive account since Bruen to challenge this assumption. It argues that courts should consider sources of analogical precedent outside of statutory lawmaking when applying the Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence. Taking public transportation as a case study, the Note surveys rules and regulations promulgated by railroad corporations in the nineteenth century and argues that these sources reveal a historical tradition of regulating firearm carriage on public transportation. Bruen permits courts to engage in more nuanced analogical reasoning when dealing with unprecedented concerns or dramatic changes. One such change is the shift in state capacity that has placed sites that were privately or quasi-publicly operated before the twentieth century under public control in the twenty-first century. As in the case of schools, which the Court has already deemed sensitive, a substantial portion of the nation’s transportation infrastructure in the nineteenth century was not entirely publicly owned and operated. For this reason, courts should consider evidence of historical firearm regulations enacted not just by legislatures but by quasi-public or private corporations. This case study instructs that courts and litigants can best honor Bruen’s history-based test by considering all of the nation’s history of firearm regulation.

By Kristof Titeca and Giovanni Salvaggio

This report argues that violence attributed to the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo cannot be understood through a single lens, such as jihadism, but must instead be analysed as a multilayered phenomenon in which ideological, military, political, and economic logics coexist and overlap. While the ADF’s pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State and subsequent financial and ideological links are real and consequential, an exclusive focus on jihadism obscures the group’s deep embeddedness in local and regional political economies of violence. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in eastern Congo and Uganda, the article shows how ADF violence is intertwined with taxation, trade, resource extraction, and local power struggles, and how the ADF label itself has become a franchise used by a wide range of actors to conceal or legitimise violence. It concludes that monocausal readings - including recent attempts to frame ADF violence primarily as sectarian or anti-Christian - flatten a far more complex reality and hinder a proper understanding of the drivers of violence in eastern Congo. The ADF, in other words, is not an exception to the Congolese conflict dynamics, but an extreme and particularly violent crystallisation of it.

By Senzikile Bengu, Harsha Dayal, Gwen Dereymaeker, et al.

Violence in South Africa has an enormous cost on individuals, health and social protection systems, and the economy. There is growing evidence about the substantial return on investment that violence prevention can deliver, and about what works to prevent violence. Now is the time to invest in evidence-based interventions to prevent all forms of violence. This policy brief summarises lessons learnt from research, policy and practice over the past three years. Key findings Violence costs the economy, companies, and health and social systems. There is evidence for a positive return on investments when violence is prevented. This means it is cheaper to fund effective violence prevention than a criminal justice system, which reacts to violent crime. There is a growing body of research and practicebased knowledge of what works to prevent violence in South Africa. There is a strong association between violence and inequality, unemployment, food insecurity and poverty. Parenting and community-based interventions show significant effects on preventing or reducing intimate partner violence and violence against children. With regard to violence against women: The chances of getting justice for a murdered woman are low and decreasing. Police fail to make arrests despite an intimate partner or family member being involved in more than 70% of cases. Experience of trauma and poor mental health increase the chances of women students in higher education institutions being targeted for sexual violence. Circumstances that lead male students to perpetrate violence include abuse during childhood, and cultural norms equating masculinity with dominance over women. Burnout and exhaustion in frontline workers significantly hamper violence prevention efforts