By Susan McMahon

The competence to stand trial system is a “slow-moving tsunami” that has grown exponentially in recent years, capturing far more people than jurisdictions have the capacity to handle. As a result, individuals who are possibly incompetent become trapped in pretrial competence purgatory, often detained in jail for months or even years. The harms of this system can be tragic. Competence detainees have died by suicide, starvation, and beatings. They are placed in solitary confinement, experience neglect and abuse, and deteriorate mentally and physically while confined. Often, these individuals are accused of misdemeanors. Often, they go through the competence process only to be returned to court and released without any connection to long-term support.

Scholars have long advocated for changes to this process. But even the most ambitious of these reforms will only shift outcomes at the margins. As long as the competence system remains in place, it will be overused, and it will continue to cause massive harms, both in dollars wasted and in human suffering.

This Article is the first to propose a more fundamental change: barring misdemeanor defendants from even entering the competence process. If a court finds a bona fide doubt as to an individual’s competence, that person would instead have the charges against them dismissed and would be transferred to treatment outside of the criminal system. This shift reduces the harms of the current competence system and shrinks its footprint, decreasing delays and freeing up funds that could be better spent elsewhere.

At the same time, this approach recognizes that the criminal legal system simply does not work for individuals with mental disabilities. Rather than tinker with its mechanics or create exceptions for this population, a better solution, exemplified by this proposal, is to abandon that system altogether in favor of non-carceral models.

. UC Irvine School of Law Research Paper No. 2024, 53p.

By Mark A. Motivans

This report provides national statistics on the federal response to crime for fiscal year 2023 and some statistics on changes over time. It describes case processing in the federal criminal justice system, including investigations by U.S. attorneys, prosecutions and declinations, convictions and acquittals, sentencing, probation and supervised release, and imprisonment. It also includes a new section detailing the federal criminal justice system’s response to immigration violations. This is the 37th report in an annual series based on data from BJS’s Federal Justice Statistics Program, which began in 1979. 

Highlights

During fiscal year (FY) 2023, 94,411 suspects were arrested by federal law enforcement and booked by the U.S. Marshals Service, a 3% decrease from 96,857 in FY 2022. 

Of the 25,110 Drug Enforcement Administration arrests in FY 2023, the most common type of drug involved was methamphetamine (7,381 arrests), followed by other opioids (6,688 arrests), which includes fentanyl. 

The median number of days from the receipt of an investigation to the decision by a U.S. attorney to prosecute or decline a matter was 61 days in FY 2023, similar to FY 2022. 

U.S. attorneys prosecuted 61% of suspects in matters concluded in FY 2023. The percentage of suspects prosecuted was highest in immigration (70%), drug offenses (70%), and weapons offenses (68%).

Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs,  Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2025. 37p.

By the United States Sentencing Commission

  This is the twenty-ninth edition of the United States Sentencing Commission’s Sourcebook of Federal Sentencing Statistics. This Sourcebook contains descriptive statistics on the application of the federal sentencing guidelines and provides selected district, circuit, and national sentencing data. The volume covers fiscal year 2024 (October 1, 2023, through September 30, 2024, hereinafter “2024”). This Sourcebook, together with the 2024 Annual Report, constitutes the annual report referenced in 28 U.S.C. § 997, as well as the analysis, recommendations, and accounting to Congress referenced in 28 U.S.C. § 994(w)(3). The Commission received documentation on 61,678 federal felony and Class A misdemeanor cases involving individuals sentenced in fiscal year 2024.1 The Commission coded and edited information from the sentencing documents in these cases into its comprehensive, computerized data collection system. The Commission first released sentencing data in its 1988 Annual Report and reported this data annually until 1996. That year, the Commission compiled sentencing data into a new publication, the Sourcebook of Federal Sentencing Statistics. In 2019, the Sourcebook edition reporting fiscal year 2018 data was substantially revised and expanded. Existing tables were revised to reflect current sentencing practices. Many figures were updated to make them easier to understand and were presented in color while others were removed and the data on them presented in new ways. Additional analyses regarding drug and immigration crimes were added, and new sections on firearms and economic offenses were included. Trend analyses were added to each of the major sections to show how sentencing patterns had changed over the last ten years. The section on Sentenced Organizations was also expanded. Finally, Appendix B, which provides sentencing data for each judicial district, was completely redesigned to reflect current sentencing practices. Beginning with that 2018 Sourcebook, the Commission made important methodological changes in the way the data was presented. Principal among them was the way cases were assigned to a “type of crime” (previously called offense type). Beginning with fiscal year 2018 data, the guideline (or guidelines) that the court applied in determining the sentence determines the crime type category to which a case is assigned. Also, the names of some of the crime type categories were revised and some outdated categories were removed from the tables and figures. Another important methodological change was that sentences were capped at 470 months for all analyses. Additionally, cases involving the production of child pornography were reassigned to the sexual abuse crime type. Previously, these cases were assigned to the child pornography offense type in the Sourcebook. Finally, beginning with the 2018 Sourcebook, the methodology used to analyze the sentence imposed relative to the sentencing range for the case as determined under the Commission’s Guidelines Manual was substantially revised. Sentences now are grouped into two broad categories: Sentences Under the Guidelines Manual and Variances. The former category comprises all cases in which the sentence imposed was within the applicable guideline range or, if outside the range, where the court cited one or more of the departure reasons in the Guidelines Manual as a basis for  the sentence. Variance cases are those in which the sentence was outside the guideline range (either above or below) and where the court did not cite any guideline reason for the sentence. Data for important subgroups within these two categories are also reported. Because of these methodological changes, direct comparisons between data for Sourcebooks from fiscal year 2018 and later years cannot always be made to data reported in the Sourcebooks for years before fiscal year 2018. This year, the Commission has made substantial revisions to the section on sentencing appeals. Beginning with 2024 data, the Commission is no longer collecting information about the guideline forming the basis for reversal or remand in sentencing appeals, or the reasonableness issues appealed in cases where the original sentence was reversed or remanded. Tables providing that information have been removed from the 2024 Sourcebook. Also beginning with 2024 data, the Commission has changed the way it categorizes appeals cases in which a brief was submitted by counsel for the defendant pursuant to the Supreme Court decision in Anders v. California, 386 U.S. 738 (1967). Previously, “Anders Brief” cases were reported as a type of appeal. Beginning with the 2024 data, the Commission has sought to determine the type of appeal involved in an Anders Brief case (e.g., an appeal of the sentence only) and, when that information was available, has classified the case accordingly. Cases in which an Anders brief was filed, but where the sentencing documentation did not indicate the type of appeal, now are classified as “Unknown” types of appeals and are excluded from the data reported on Figure A and the remaining tables. Also, this year the Commission is providing new information in the sentencing appeals section. New Figure A-2 reports additional information on the type of sentence that was appealed. Sentences are classified into three categories: appeals of the original sentence, appeals of an order deciding a motion for a resentencing or other modification of sentence, and appeals of a revocation of probation or supervised release. In appeals of an order deciding a motion for a resentencing or other modification of sentence, the Commission reports the basis asserted in the motion. Additionally, while the Commission has always reported the disposition of sentencing appeals of the original sentence on Table A-2, the Commission now is reporting information on the disposition of post-sentencing motion appeals on Table A-2A. New Figure A-3 provides information about the type of crime involved in appeals of original sentences. While this data was previously available on another table, and continues to be reported on Table A-5, new Figure A-3 presents this information graphically. New Table A-6 reports data on the position of the sentence relative to the guideline range in original sentencing appeals, using the Commission’s standard classifications found on Table 29 of the Sourcebook for original sentences. Finally, the numbers and titles of the remaining tables in the section were revised for clarity.   

Washington, DC: USSC, 2025. 201p.

By Octavian Simu, Paul McGorrery, Melanie Hull

This report to the Victorian Government makes 12 recommendations for reform to the sentencing of occupational health and safety (OHS) offences in Victoria. The recommendations are grouped in relation to victims and other affected persons, changes in sentencing practices, and fine payment and distribution.

Key findings

People injured in workplace incidents, people exposed to risks in workplaces, and the families of deceased workers are not always able to fully and meaningfully participate in sentencing proceedings for OHS offences.

Currently, sentencing practices for OHS offences are not aligned with community expectations, are not aligned with recent changes to penalties in the model work health and safety laws (‘model laws’), are not consistent with sentencing practices in other regulatory contexts, and are not capable of adequately achieving the purposes of sentencing.

Every year, there is almost $2.5 million in unpaid court fines for OHS offences.

State of Victoria, Sentencing Advisory Council, 2025, 218p.

By Roger Bootle, David Spencer, Ben Sweetman and James Vitali 

Securing the safety of the public is the foremost duty of government. But we are witnessing acute growth in a range of highly visible crimes. This is undermining the very legitimacy of the British state. • Police recorded shoplifting is up 51% relative to 2015 and is at its highest level in 20 years. Police recorded robberies and knife crime offences are up 64% and 89% respectively over the same period. Public order offences are up 192%. The cost of fraud in the benefits system has increased almost eightfold since 2006. • These areas of acute growth in criminal incidents are obscured by the aggregate downward trend in crime since 1995 reported by the Crime Survey of England and Wales. Although this is a reputable source, it excludes many types of serious crime. • Alongside rising crime rates, the criminal justice system is failing. Prisons have reached capacity, and thousands are being released early as a result. As of September 2024, there were 73,105 outstanding crown court cases, 31,000 of which have been outstanding for over 6 months, both numbers being the highest ever. The ratio of police personnel to the population is down 12% from 2010. • The proliferation of crime is an evil in and of itself. But it also significantly diminishes the prosperity of the British people. Crime has direct costs - the damage to, or loss of, property, the cost of insurance, medical bills, the cost of funding the criminal justice system etc. • But some of the greatest costs imposed by crime are indirect and hard-to-measure. They relate to the behavioural changes undertaken by individuals and businesses in response to the expectation of crime. • Order and the rule of law are necessary prerequisites for prosperity. They generate confidence that contracts will be upheld, property will not be stolen or damaged, and that individuals and businesses will enjoy the proceeds of their labour and industry, rather than being deprived of it by criminals. And the converse is true too; when the rule of law is breached with impunity, economic activity suffers. • In the context of increased crime, both businesses and individuals try to protect themselves by undertaking various preventative measures and taking out insurance. But this also drives up their  costs and thereby diminishes the living standards of law-abiding people. • Crime thus harms the profitability of businesses and they will tend to pass on the increase in their costs to their customers. • Moreover, the prevalence of crime and the apparent toleration of it corrode the bonds that hold a society together, damaging the trust in other people and institutions which is essential to the functioning of free markets. In undermining a sense of security, it also increases societal risk aversion. • We believe the tangible costs of crime in the UK to amount to almost £170 bn per annum, or about 6.5% of GDP. Of these costs, about £38bn are inflicted on businesses, £31bn on the public sector, and about £63bn against individuals. • But this is an incomplete estimate of the total costs, because it fails to account for the intangible effects on behaviour that derive from the fear of crime. Although these effects are extremely difficult to estimate, they are probably very large. Incorporating them would probably push the total costs of crime to over £250bn, or 10% of GDP. • Fortunately, the cost of crime to society is a problem with a clear solution. We must ditch the permissive paradigm that dominates our present approach to crime, and shift the balance in policymaking back towards the interests of the law-abiding majority. We lay out here a series of measures that could substantially reduce the prevalence of crime and hence its cost to society. • Our policy proposals are based around five key themes: delivering a dramatic expansion of the prison estate; taking back the streets; promoting smarter policing; and reforming sentencing and our courts system – and providing more funding while demanding more accountability. • Much of this programme can be delivered without any increase in funding. It will yield a return for little or no cost. The organisation of policing needs to be radically restructured to focus on the deterrence of crime and the catching of criminals. There needs to be a clear-out of senior members of the prison service and the Ministry of Justice. • Over and above this, however, there is a need for more funding. More resources need to be ploughed into the police and justice system to permit the recruitment of more police officers and staff, build more prisons and improve the functioning of the courts. • It may seem paradoxical that a programme to reduce the incidence of crime and its costs to society should include spending more public money. But this extra money can bring a significant return to society and a stronger economy. It should be regarded as a form of public investment. • Nevertheless, in these straitened times there is no scope to increase overall government spending financed by borrowing, and the burden of taxation is surely at the limits of what the economy can bear. • Meanwhile, given the global threats faced by the United Kingdom, the defence of the realm requires more funding. This must come at the top of the list of priorities. • So any increase in funding to finance our proposals must come from reductions in other sorts of public spending. While this paper does not seek to lay out in detail what other sorts of spending ought to be cut, with government spending as a share of GDP at a post-war high, there is ample scope for savings. Civil service manning levels, the benefits bill, overseas aid and the regime for uprating pensions will all have to be reviewed. • There are two reasons why our proposals should rank highly in the list of spending priorities alongside the need to spend more money on defence. First, by reducing the cost of crime and bringing about a stronger economy, our proposals will eventually enable the provision of more resources for other spending – including defence. • Second, the external threat to the United Kingdom is no longer purely from conventional warfare. It is hybrid and includes the sponsorship of terrorism, cyber warfare, attacks on critical infrastructure, and campaigns to widen divisions in our society – all activities which undermine the public’s confidence in the nation’s security at home. Maintaining a strong criminal justice system is fundamental to British interests and countering the threats to the nation which originate both at home and abroad. • If we are to take a less permissive approach to policing, we need to put more people behind bars. And to do this, we recommend the construction of 43,000 additional prison places and the phasing out of prison over-crowding by building a further 10,000 prison cells. • Police forces need to take control of the streets and give them back to the law-abiding majority, returning to a version of neighbourhood policing which has community orderliness and security at its heart. • Policing needs to be smarter, both tactically and strategically, making better use of technology. And it needs to neutralise the threat posed by hyper prolific offenders – the 9% of criminals who commit over half of all crime. • There also needs to be a major increase in prison sentences for the most serious crimes. The simple fact is that in our society, the chances of being caught are very low and if and when a criminal is caught and convicted the punishment is often laughably lenient. • This means that for those individuals inclined this way, crime pays. The system needs to be radically redesigned so that it doesn’t.  

London: Policiy Exchange, 2025. 91p.

By The Center for Justice Innovation

In May 2024, the New York State Unified Court System, with the Center for Justice Innovation (the Center), and in partnership with the Office of the Governor of the State of New York, launched the Family Justice Initiative: Court and Community Collaboration (FJI or the Initiative). Building on the reports and analyses that have documented statewide challenges across all case types in Family Court to date, the Initiative seeks to forge a fair, equitable, and sustainable path forward for the Court and its system partners to better serve all New Yorkers. The Initiative is solutions-focused, prioritizes areas for improvement, identifies promising programs, and explores new ideas to strengthen families, reduce unnecessary system involvement, and break intergenerational cycles of trauma. The Center’s role is to support a strategic planning process to develop a broad vision for what makes an effective family-serving system, as well as a comprehensive plan to support that vision. The goal for the initial phase was to begin to develop a shared vision and objectives for the Initiative and identify concrete solutions ready for immediate implementation. This report lays out the values and goals articulated by Initiative partners to date, and the specific recommendations that emerged from extensive discussions facilitated across New York State in the first phase of the project. It also provides a preview of the next phase of work, which will include the development of working groups to pursue longer-term areas for improvement while continuing to identify concrete opportunities for investment along the way.   

New York: Center for Justice Innovation, 2025. 31p.

By Sarah Picard, Leah Nelson, Rae Walker, Ellie Wilson

Every year, courts across the United States impose millions of dollars in fines, fees, and restitution charges on people adjudicated guilty of traffic violations, misdemeanors, and felonies. In theory, these assessments are intended to punish and deter unlawful behavior and compensate victims for financial losses incurred as the result of a crime. Despite their near ubiquitous use in criminal legal systems throughout the country, there is surprisingly little evidence that these financial penalties and assessments, collectively known as legal financial obligations (LFOs), deter criminal conduct, enhance public safety, or result in victims being compensated for their losses. In fact, some analyses indicate excessive fines and fees can have detrimental effects, eroding community trust in law enforcement, exacerbating hardships faced by individuals and families, undermining public safety and court legitimacy, and saddling community members with debt many will never be able to pay.

The Jefferson County Equitable Fines and Fees (JEFF) Project—a research–practice partnership among MDRC, the Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the Tenth Judicial Circuit Court of Alabama—uses five years of longitudinal, case-level data and qualitative research to explore how Alabama’s fines and fees system plays out in Jefferson County, Alabama. This brief presents early results from analysis of the quantitative data collected. 

The preliminary findings highlight inequities in how LFOs are assessed and distributed and the inefficacy of LFOs as a revenue source. Analyses showed that indigent individuals across all charges were assessed higher financial penalties and paid less toward their debt than those who could afford private representation. In addition, across groups, most people did not satisfy their balances over the five-year period, and many incurred a “restitution recovery fee” due to missed payments. Furthermore, the research depicts a system in which restitution often goes unpaid because of the state’s priority disbursement schedule, which compensates law enforcement agencies that collect debt before funding victim restitution

New York: MDRC, 2024. 9p.

By Karin D. Martin

The core of the access-to-justice problem is widespread unmet civil legal needs coupled with general disuse of the civil legal system. This Essay posits that monetary sanctions are an important contributing factor to the problem of access to justice. First, monetary sanctions and the unpaid criminal legal debt they produce are engines of “legal hybridity” in people’s lives in a way that impedes access to justice by generating unmet legal needs. They conflate the criminal and civil legal systems in many people’s lives, thereby reducing access to recourse in either system. Second, by subverting the principles of proportionality, specificity, and finality, monetary sanctions structurally deprive people of just solutions and condition them to not expect justice from legal institutions

widespread disuse of the civil legal system to help solve civil legal problems lies at the core. Regardless of whether the crisis is conceptualized as people having insufficient legal assistance, legal information, or access to civil courts, a through line is the failure of people to make use of the benefits ostensibly available to them through the civil legal system. Here, “access to justice” is conceived of in terms of widespread unmet legal needs with an accompanying paucity of just solutions. Theories about the source of this deficit of just resolutions for people with civil legal problems include lack of legal knowledge and knowhow, underfunded courts, and too few lawyers.cal and structural aspects of monetary sanctions, explained in detail below, this Essay argues that it is time to include monetary sanctions as a contributing factor to the problem of access to justice.

Monetary sanctions are the fines, fees, surcharges, restitution, or any other financial liability imposed in the criminal legal system. Three factors make it easy to overlook the role of these sanctions in the access-to-justice problem: (1) Monetary sanctions originate in the criminal legal system; (2) Some people can pay them without difficulty; and (3) They are a less severe sanction than incarceration. Nevertheless, the ubiquity of monetary sanctions and the unpaid criminal legal debt they produce are engines of “legal hybridity” in people’s lives in a way that harms access to justice by giving rise to unmet legal needs. Specifically, this legal hybridity amplifies the potential for extraction in both the criminal and civil legal systems and hinders the potential for resolution in each. Further, monetary sanctions are structured in a way that violates key principles of justice, which inhibits the pursuit of just solutions. This Essay thus argues that failing to consider the role of monetary sanctions in the access-to-justice crisis will stymie efforts to solve it.

This Essay proceeds as follows. Part I explores how monetary sanctions conflate the criminal and civil legal systems in many people’s lives, thereby reducing access to recourse in either. The idea of legal hybridity is offered as a way to conceptualize this phenomenon. While both the criminal and civil legal systems ostensibly offer remedies for all manner of problems, legal hybridity highlights how they also both have the capacity to be extractive—of time, of money, of property, and of liberty. Monetary sanctions should be a point of focus because they often tilt the balance toward extraction, rather than toward recourse. Part II discusses how monetary sanctions undermine central tenets of justice: proportionality, finality, and specificity in punishment. By subverting these principles, monetary sanctions structurally deprive people of just solutions and condition them to not expect justice from legal institutions. Although these principles are typically of concern in the criminal legal setting, the aforementioned legal hybridity underscores the need to consider them more broadly, particularly in the domain of monetary sanctions.

Stanford Law Review Online , Vol. 75, June 2023, 15p.

By Beth Karp

Several widely used criminal risk assessment instruments factor a defendant’s abstract beliefs, peer associations, and family relationships into their risk scores. The inclusion of those factors is empirically unsound and raises profound ethical and constitutional questions. This Article is the first instance of legal scholarship on criminal risk assessment to (a) conduct an in-depth review of risk assessment questionnaires, scoresheets, and reports, and (b) analyze the First and Fourteenth Amendment implications of attitude and associational factors. Additionally, this Article challenges existing scholarship by critiquing widely accepted but dubious empirical justifications for the inclusion of attitude and associational items. The items are only weakly correlated with recidivism, have not been shown to be causal, and have in fact been shown to decrease the predictive validity of risk assessment instruments. Quantification of attitudes and associations should cease unless and until it is done in a way that is empirically sound, more useful than narrative reports, and consistent with the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

Stanford Law Review, Vol. 75, 2023, 99p.

By Erin Jacobs Valentine, Sarah Picard

Jurisdictions across the United States are implementing reforms to their pretrial systems to reduce the number of people who are held in pretrial detention—that is, who remain incarcerated in jail while they await the adjudication of their cases. As part of this effort, many jurisdictions are moving away from money bail as a primary means to encourage people to return for future court dates, and are instead implementing pretrial supervision, which requires clients to meet regularly with supervision staff members. Jurisdictions often attempt to match the intensity or frequency of supervision with a client’s assessed risk of failing to appear in court or being rearrested, for example by requiring more intensive supervision for clients who are assessed as being at a high risk. However, while different levels of pretrial supervision impose different burdens and costs on both jurisdictions and people awaiting the resolutions of their cases, there has been little systematic research into how they differ in their effectiveness in improving court appearance and arrest outcomes.

This report contributes new evidence in this area using retrospective data from cases initiated between January 2017 and June 2019 in two jurisdictions: one populous, urban metropolitan area in the western United States and a sparsely populated, rural county from the same region. The research team employed a regression discontinuity design, comparing the outcomes of people whose risk scores were just below and just above the cutoff for a level of supervision. They did so for four supervision levels: (1) no supervision, (2) low-intensity supervision that involved only check-ins with supervision staff members after court hearings, (3) medium-intensity supervision that also required one in-person meeting a month with a supervision staff member, and (4) high-intensity supervision that required three in-person meetings per month. The analysis uses a noninferiority approach, which tests whether the less intensive form of supervision is at least as effective as (that is, no worse than) the more intensive form.

The analysis found that:

Overall, lower-intensity supervision was as effective as higher-intensity supervision in helping clients to appear in court and avoid new arrests. When comparing each level of supervision with the next level in intensity, assignment to less intensive supervision led to similar outcomes as assignment to more intensive supervision.

Risk scores were strongly correlated with rearrest rates and modestly correlated with court appearance rates. Unsurprisingly, people with higher risk scores were more likely to be rearrested, and somewhat less likely to make scheduled court appearances. However, higher-intensity supervision did not mitigate this effect.

Overall, the analysis found no evidence that requiring people to meet more intensive pretrial supervision requirements improves outcomes. These findings suggest that policymakers should consider other strategies to encourage people to appear in court and avoid arrest, especially since supervision has costs, including monetary costs to jurisdictions and time and travel costs to clients. It is possible, for example, that strategies that involve service connections rather than supervision could be more effective. At the same time, the results indicate that more research on the use of pretrial supervision is needed. Because the regression discontinuity design of this study focuses on cases at particular risk levels—those near the cutoff risk scores that determine supervision intensity—it is possible that the results would differ for cases with other risk levels. For example, high-intensity supervision could have effects among very high-risk cases, a question that this analysis was not designed to address. Given that prior research suggests that both service and supervision resources are most effective when reserved for higher-risk and -need cases, studies focusing solely on outcomes among this group could be of great benefit to the field.

New York: MDRC, 2023. 77p.

By Chloe Anderson Golub, Erin Jacobs Valentine, Daron Holman

As more jurisdictions across the country are seeking to reduce their jail populations, many view electronic monitoring (EM, the use of an electronic device to monitor a person’s movement and location) and sobriety monitoring (regular drug and alcohol testing) as potential alternatives to pretrial detention. In theory, the added layer of supervision that these special conditions provide should encourage people to appear for court dates and avoid activities that could lead to new arrests. Yet most studies of the effectiveness of special conditions have faced methodological limitations and have yielded mixed findings. Furthermore, special conditions such as electronic monitoring and sobriety monitoring carry significant costs—both personal and monetary—for those being monitored and for jurisdictions.

This report contributes cross-jurisdiction evidence on the effects of these special conditions of release using retrospective data from cases initiated between January 2017 and June 2019 in four diverse jurisdictions across the United States: one small and rural, one medium-sized, and two large and urban jurisdictions. The MDRC research team employed a propensity score matching design to test the effectiveness of EM and sobriety monitoring in maintaining clients’ court appearance rates and helping them avoid arrest. This method allowed the team to compare court appearance and pretrial rearrest outcomes for individuals released with special conditions with those of statistically comparable individuals who were released without special conditions. The analysis uses a noninferiority approach, which tests whether release without special conditions is at least as effective as (that is, no worse than) release with a special condition.

The analysis found that:

Being released on EM or sobriety monitoring did not significantly improve court appearance rates. The analyses found that the special conditions and non–special conditions groups had similar pretrial court appearance rates. These results were consistent across jurisdictions.

Being released on electronic monitoring did not significantly increase the percentage of people who avoided a new arrest during the pretrial period. In fact, the analysis found that the EM group had a higher pretrial rearrest rate than the non-EM group, a result that was consistent across the two jurisdictions in that analysis. While the factors causing the results are not definitively known, the difference may be a supervision effect: people may be more likely to be arrested if their actions are more closely monitored, compared with others who are less closely monitored. Alternatively, the result may reflect unmeasured differences between the EM and non-EM groups that could not be controlled for in the analysis.

Being released on sobriety monitoring did not significantly improve the percentage of people who avoided a new arrest, but there was variation in this effect among jurisdictions. In two of the four jurisdictions studied, people who were assigned to sobriety monitoring were more likely to avoid new arrests, while in the other two, the result was the opposite.

These findings warrant cautious reflection among policymakers and practitioners on the extent of current electronic and sobriety monitoring use, particularly considering their high personal and financial costs to those directly affected and to jurisdictions. The exploratory findings also highlight a need for additional cross-site studies—in particular, those that employ more rigorous experimental methods—on the effectiveness of special conditions at the pretrial stage. Given the site variation in findings, particularly for sobriety monitoring, more research is also needed to delineate the populations that would benefit from special conditions from those who would not benefit and to illuminate the policies and practices that are associated with the greatest success.

New York: MDRC, 2023. 51p.

By David Grant

Political systems across much of the West are now subject to populist disruption, which often takes an anti-Constitutional form. This interdisciplinary book argues that the current analysis of anti-Constitutional populism, while often astute, is focused far too narrowly. It is held here that due to an obscured complex of dynamics that has shaped the history of the West since its inception and which remains active today, we do not understand the present. This complex not only explains the current disruptions across the fields of contemporary religion, politics, economics and emerging artificial intelligence but also how these disruptions derive each from originary sources. This work thereby explains not only the manner in which this complex has functioned across historical time but also why it is that its inherent, unresolvable flaws have triggered the shifts between these key fields as well as the intractability of these present disruptions. It is this flawed complex of factors that has led to current conflicts about abortion reform, political populism, the failure of neoliberalism and the imminent quantum shift in generative artificial intelligence. It is argued that in this, law is heavily implicated, especially at the constitutional level. Presenting a forensic examination of the root causes of all these disruptions, the study provides a toolbox of ideas with which to confront these challenges.

London; New York: Routledge, 2025. 274p.

Edited by Henrique Sousa Antunes • Pedro Miguel Freitas • Arlindo L. Oliveira • Clara Martins Pereira • Elsa Vaz de Sequeira • Luís Barreto Xavier

This open access book presents an interdisciplinary, multi-authored, edited collection of chapters on Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) and the Law. AI technology has come to play a central role in the modern data economy. Through a combination of increased computing power, the growing availability of data and the advancement of algorithms, AI has now become an umbrella term for some of the most transformational technological breakthroughs of this age. The importance of AI stems from both the opportunities that it offers and the challenges that it entails. While AI applications hold the promise of economic growth and efficiency gains, they also create significant risks and uncertainty. The potential and perils of AI have thus come to dominate modern discussions of technology and ethics – and although AI was initially allowed to largely develop without guidelines or rules, few would deny that the law is set to play a fundamental role in shaping the future of AI. As the debate over AI is far from over, the need for rigorous analysis has never been greater. This book thus brings together contributors from different fields and backgrounds to explore how the law might provide answers to some of the most pressing questions raised by AI. An outcome of the Católica Research Centre for the Future of Law and its interdisciplinary working group on Law and Artificial Intelligence, it includes contributions by leading scholars in the fields of technology, ethics and the law.

Cham: Springer Nature, 2024. 456p.

By Tyson Singh Kelsall and Jasmine Veark and Molly Beatrice a d

This commentary explores a recent shift in British Columbia's drug policy under a novel drug “decriminalization” framework. We focus on the province's move toward "recriminalization" under this framework. In short, recriminalization was a shift in BC's drug decriminalization framework to only apply in private residences, and be removed from essentially all outdoor spaces. This policy change was completed through an agreement with the federal government amid a public health emergency. Since 2016, BC has faced a severe crisis of drug-related overdoses and poisonings, driven by a toxic and unregulated drug supply compounded by prohibitionist policies. Expert recommendations for increasing access to a regulated drug supply have repeatedly dismissed as solutions by the governing BC New Democratic Party, opting instead for measures that do not undercut the toxic drug supply. We examine the sociolegal context of the BC government decision to recriminalize drug use in 2024, including attempts to criminalize recent drug use and police suspicion of substance use. These drug law reforms, understood here as forms of biopolitical violence, reflect a broader trend of using drug policies as tools for social and spatial regulation. By analyzing the sociolegal implications of these policies, the commentary situates the BC government's actions within a framework of sanctioned biopolitical massacre, highlighting the tension between purported decriminalization efforts and the actual enforcement strategies that perpetuate harm and exclusion. This examination underscores the complex interplay between drug policy, public health crises, and state power in the context of systemic colonial and racialized control that may be adaptable to other regions considering drug law reform.

International Journal of Drug Policy

Volume 136, February 2025, 104688

By BRANDON L. GARRETT, ERIC TUCKER & NICHOLAS SCURICH

Firearms violence results in hundreds of thousands of criminal investigations each year. To try to identify a culprit, firearms examiners seek to link fired shell casings or bullets from crime scene evidence to a particular firearm. The underlying assumption is that firearms impart unique marks on bullets and cartridge cases, and that trained examiners can identify these marks to determine which were fired by the same gun. For over a hundred years, firearms examiners have testified that they can conclusively identify the source of a bullet or cartridge case. In recent years, however, research scientists have called into question the validity and reliability of such testimony. Judges largely did not view such testimony with increased skepticism after the Supreme Court set out standards for screening expert evidence in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Instead, the surge in judicial rulings came more than a decade later, particularly after reports by scientists shed light on limitations of the evidence. In this Article, we detail over a century of case law and examine how judges have engaged with the changing practice and scientific understanding of firearms comparison evidence. We first describe how judges initially viewed firearms comparison evidence skeptically and hought jurors capable of making firearms comparisons themselves— without an expert. Next, judges embraced the testimony of experts who offered more specific and aggressive claims, and the work spread nationally. Finally, we explore the modern era of firearms case law and research. Judges increasingly express skepticism and adopt a range of approaches to limit in-court testimony by firearms examiners. In December 2023, Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence was amended, for the first time in over twenty years, specifically due to the Rules Committee’s concern with the quality of federal rulings regarding forensic evidence, as well as the failure to engage with the ways that forensic experts express conclusions in court. There is perhaps no area in which judges, especially federal judges, have been more active than in the area of firearms evidence. Thus, the judging of firearms evidence has central significance for the direction that scientific evidence gatekeeping may take under the revised Rule 702 in federal, and then state courts. We conclude by examining lessons regarding the gradual judicial shift toward a more scientific approach. The more-than-a-century-long arc of judicial review of firearms evidence in the United States suggests that, over time, scientific research can displace tradition and precedent to improve the quality of justice.

97 S. Cal. L. Rev. 101, 2024.

By Roland Neil, and Michael Zanger-Tishler

There is great concern about algorithmic racial bias in the risk assessment instruments (RAIs) used in the criminal legal system. When testing for algorithmic bias, most research effectively uses arrest data as an unbiased measure of criminal offending, which collides with longstanding concerns that arrest is a biased proxy of offending. Given the centrality of arrest data in RAIs, racial differences in how arrest proxies offending may be a key pathway through which RAIs become biased. In this review, we evaluate the extensive body of research on racial differences in arrest as a measure of crime. Furthermore, we detail several ways that racial bias in arrest records could create algorithmic bias, although little research has attempted to measure the degree of algorithmic bias generated by using racially biased arrest records. We provide a roadmap to assist future research in understanding the impact of biased arrest records on RAIs.

Annual Review of Criminology, Vol. 8:97-119 January 2025)

By Christine Reynolds, et al.

On July 1, 2014, changes proposed to Indiana’s Criminal Code were officially implemented, affecting the criminal justice system. The Indiana Criminal Justice Institute (ICJI) is statutorily obligated to monitor and evaluate the impact of the criminal code reform, reporting results to state legislators on an annual basis. Findings from the Evaluation of Indiana’s Criminal Code Reform reports1 suggest that local criminal justice professionals are concerned with the lessened severity of sentences associated with drug crimes. They suggest that this reduction in severity may have increased recidivism, perpetuating the revolving door of the justice system, and is negatively impacting an offender’s ability to recover from substance use disorder—a commonly identified association with a drug offense. In an effort to operationalize changes in severity of sentencing, this report compares drug conviction data from nine Indiana counties from a period in time before the reform to a like period after the changes set in. Results indicate that dealing and possession convictions increased, where dealing of marijuana and possession of methamphetamine had the starkest increases. Findings also displayed that felons and misdemeanants alike are being convicted differently than offenders under the legacy code. There was a 50% decrease in both dealing and possession offenses’ advisory sentence. In addition, while jail is the most common sentence placement across both time periods, alternative sentencing is utilized far more often than pre-reform, indicating that penalties for drug crimes have generally decreased. This work adds to literature concerning the effects of the criminal code reform in Indiana, and may lay the groundwork for further analysis, such as the reform’s impacts on recidivism and offender rehabilitation.

Indianapolis: Indiana Criminal Justice Institute, 2020. 26p.

By Grant Duwe and Valerie Clark

Using a sample of nearly 2,100 people incarcerated in Minnesota’s prison system, this study examined the concurrent and predictive validity of a needs and responsivity assessment system. For concurrent validity, we evaluated the relationship between the 13 needs and responsivity domains with assessed recidivism risk levels. For predictive validity, we analyzed the association between the domains and recidivism for a subsample that had been released from prison prior to 2023. The hypothesized needs domains—anti-social thinking, anti-social peers, education, employment, substance use disorder, housing/homelessness, and family/domestic—were significantly associated with assessed and observed recidivism, while most of the hypothesized responsivity domains—mental health, religiosity, motivation and learning style—were not. The results suggest self-identity is a distinct criminogenic need. Gender and racial/ethnic differences for concurrent and predictive validity were relatively minimal across the 13 domains.

St. Paul: Minnesota Department of Corrections, 2023. 33p.

By Michael Palmieri and Valerie Clark

Across the United States, a significant proportion of people in jails and prisons suffer from some form of substance use disorder. In recent years, opioids have become a concern as the country has entered an epidemic in which opioid overdoses occur with relative frequency. Given that drugs have a significant impact on all aspects of crime, some jails and prisons in the U.S. have started implementing medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) programs to, one, save lives, but also help address one criminogenic need associated with criminal behavior. This study used a retrospective quasi-experimental design to generate a comparison group (357 incarcerated persons) to a group of individuals who received treatment for opioid use disorder (357). Using competing risks models, results provide evidence that MOUD does reduce recidivism among those who have received it. Results also suggest that when paired with traditional substance use disorder treatment, MOUD can have a somewhat higher magnitude of effect. These results suggest that the use of MOUD should be expanded across the U.S.

St. Paul: Minnesota Department of Corrections, 2024. 35p.

By Australia. Parliament. Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade

Detailing the inquiry into Australia’s advocacy efforts against the death penalty, this report finds that Australia’s advocacy strategies must be reevaluated and revamped in order to be effective in a contemporary human rights environment.

The inquiry reviewed progress since the committee's 2016 report on the same issue, taking into consideration the current global landscape and challenges to abolition. It examines Australia's strategy for abolition, international cooperation, and engagement with civil society, finding that Australia has a role to play globally in advocating for the abolition of the death penalty through every avenue possible.

Recommendations

The Australian Government continues to advocate for the abolition of the death penalty in all retentionist countries through bilateral, multilateral and regional forums, and with a particular focus on the Asia-Pacific region.

In addition to advocating for abolition, the Australian Government should advocate for a reduction in the categories of crimes that carry the death penalty in retentionist countries and for discretion in sentencing.

Provide an annual statement against the death penalty, to be delivered in Parliament and across multiple platforms.

Consider the development of a strategy for domestic education and awareness raising.

Consider providing adequate funding for civil society organisations to more accurately gather data on trends and current areas of concern regarding the use of the death penalty.

The Attorney-General’s Department should consult Capital Punishment Justice Project to ensure the competency and qualifications of the local lawyers engaged to represent Australian nationals in capital cases.

The Australian Government should undertake annual reviews of the mechanisms and operations of the Australian Federal Police’s Sensitive Investigations Oversight Board.

Canberra: Australia. Parliament. Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade2025.