By Graeme R. Newman and Claude AI.

Long before probation became the most widely used criminal sanction in America, leading criminologists, judges, lawyers, social workers, psychiatrists, and probation administrators gathered to answer a fundamental question:

Could offenders be rehabilitated in the community instead of being sent to prison?

Originally published in 1933 as a tribute to pioneering probation leader Herbert C. Parsons, Probation and Criminal Justicebrought together some of the most influential voices in early twentieth-century criminal justice. Their essays explored sentencing, rehabilitation, probation administration, judicial discretion, psychiatric treatment, casework methods, and comparative probation systems in the United States, England, France, Belgium, and Germany.

Nearly a century later, the book reads with surprising relevance. The contributors debated many of the same issues that continue to dominate criminal justice policy today: overcrowded prisons, evidence-based sentencing, risk assessment, officer training, community supervision, recidivism, and the tension between punishment and rehabilitation.

This Mini-Classic edition presents an expertly condensed and accessible version of the original volume, preserving the essential arguments, insights, and debates while making them available to modern readers.

Inside you will discover:

• The origins and early development of probation in America and Europe

• Sheldon Glueck's influential critique of punishment and rehabilitation

• The legal and constitutional issues raised by probation

• How probation officers were selected, trained, and supervised

• Competing views of sentencing from judges and criminologists

• Early psychiatric and social-work approaches to offender treatment

• Comparative probation systems in England, France, Belgium, and Germany

• A modern commentary examining what has and has not changed since 1933

Part historical document, part policy debate, and part blueprint for reform, Probation and Criminal Justice captures a pivotal moment when criminal justice thinkers were struggling to replace purely punitive responses to crime with more individualized and humane approaches.

For students, scholars, practitioners, and anyone interested in the history of corrections and criminal justice reform, this volume offers a fascinating window into ideas that continue to shape probation and community supervision today.

Crime and Justice Mini-Classics bring influential but often overlooked works in criminology, policing, punishment, and criminal justice history back into print in concise, accessible editions for contemporary readers.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.83.

Raymond B. Fosdick. Designed and Edited with an Introduction by Graeme R. Newman and Claude.

A landmark classic in the history of policing, public administration, and criminal justice reform.

When Raymond B. Fosdick published Police Administration in 1921 as part of the renowned Cleveland Foundation Survey of Criminal Justice, he delivered one of the most penetrating examinations ever undertaken of an American police department. More than a century later, his analysis remains remarkably relevant.

Confronted by rising crime and concerns about police effectiveness, Cleveland commissioned an independent investigation of its law enforcement system. Fosdick responded with a rigorous, evidence-based study that compared American policing with the more professionalized police systems of Europe. His conclusions were blunt: crime was not simply the product of social conditions, but also of outdated organization, weak leadership, inadequate training, political interference, and a failure to adapt policing to the demands of the modern city.

This groundbreaking work examines every major aspect of police administration, including:

• Police organization and leadership

• Recruitment, selection, and training of officers

• Promotion and discipline systems

• Patrol operations and crime prevention

• Detective bureau management

• Personnel administration and record keeping

• Accountability, professionalism, and public service

Fosdick's recommendations anticipated many reforms that would shape twentieth-century policing: merit-based advancement, professional training academies, modern management practices, specialized investigative units, and the use of data and performance measurement in public administration.

This new edition includes a substantial introduction by criminologist Graeme R. Newman, placing Fosdick's work in historical context and exploring its continuing significance in contemporary debates over police reform, professionalism, accountability, and governance.

More than a historical document, Police Administration is an essential source for understanding the origins of modern policing and the enduring challenges of managing police organizations in democratic societies.

Ideal for readers interested in:

• Police history

• Criminal justice

• Criminology

• Public administration

• American legal history

• Progressive Era reform

• Law enforcement studies

• Government and public policy

A century after its publication, Fosdick's classic reminds us that effective policing depends not only on laws and officers, but on leadership, organization, and the intelligent administration of justice.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.104.

By Graeme R. Newman and Claude AI.

A landmark investigation into how America's criminal justice system actually worked, and why it often failed.

In 1921, a series of scandals and rising public concern about crime prompted the Cleveland Foundation to commission an unprecedented examination of the administration of justice in Cleveland, Ohio. Directed by two of the most influential legal minds of the twentieth century, Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter, the resulting study became one of the most important reform documents in American criminal justice history.

Originally published in 1922, Criminal Justice in Cleveland was the first comprehensive effort to analyze an entire urban justice system as an interconnected whole. Drawing on detailed investigations of police, prosecutors, courts, corrections, probation, legal education, medical science, and the press, the survey revealed a system plagued by inefficiency, poor record-keeping, fragmented authority, political influence, and a startling lack of accountability.

This modernized edition, edited and introduced by Graeme R. Newman, makes this classic study accessible to today's readers while preserving its most important findings, statistics, and arguments. Readers will discover:

• How police departments operated in major American cities during the early twentieth century
• Why so many criminal cases disappeared before reaching trial
• The hidden influence of politics, public opinion, and newspapers on justice
• Early debates over probation, parole, rehabilitation, and sentencing reform
• The origins of evidence-based criminal justice research
• Reform proposals that continue to resonate more than a century later

Written during the Progressive Era but strikingly relevant today, Criminal Justice in Cleveland demonstrates that many of the challenges confronting modern police, prosecutors, courts, and correctional institutions are far older than most people realize. Its authors recognized that successful reform requires more than replacing individuals; it requires understanding how institutions work, how they fail, and how they can be improved.

Essential reading for students of criminology, criminal justice professionals, legal scholars, historians, policymakers, and anyone interested in the evolution of the American justice system.

More than a century after its publication, this pioneering study remains one of the most insightful examinations ever written of crime, law, and urban justice in America

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.90.

Criminal Justice in Cleveland was one of the most influential studies of the American criminal justice system produced during the Progressive Era. Published by The Cleveland Foundation, the volume brought together leading legal scholars, reformers, and public officials, including Raymond Fosdick, Roscoe Pound, Felix Frankfurter, and others, to examine the administration of justice in Cleveland, Ohio. The work was directed and edited by Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter.

Rather than focusing solely on crime, the study investigated the entire machinery of justice, including police, prosecutors, courts, probation services, corrections, and related public institutions. The authors sought to determine how effectively these agencies worked together, where delays and inefficiencies occurred, and what reforms were needed to create a more fair, efficient, and accountable system of justice.

The survey became a landmark in empirical legal research because it relied on systematic investigation rather than anecdote or political opinion. Its findings helped shape twentieth-century reforms in policing, court administration, criminal procedure, and corrections, making it essential reading for historians, criminologists, legal scholars, and students of public administration.

Today, Criminal Justice in Cleveland remains a classic study of urban criminal justice and a foundational text in the movement to evaluate government institutions through rigorous research and evidence-based reform.

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 Megan Comfort, Jenn Rineer, Elizabeth Tibaduiza, and Monica Sheppard

The “pretrial process” refers to the events that happen between the time that one is suspected by law enforcement of violating the law and the time that charges are dismissed, the case is otherwise resolved, or the trial process begins. During the pretrial period, people are considered innocent under the law. The U.S. Supreme Court1 has stated, “In our society, liberty is the norm, and detention prior to trial or without trial is the carefully limited exception.” The only two constitutionally valid reasons for holding someone in jail during the pretrial period are (1) to prevent flight or (2) to prevent harm to people in the community. Judges make decisions every day about whether to detain or release people going through the pretrial process, as well as about what conditions of release may be needed to help people succeed. Pretrial release assessments are designed to inform their decisions. Unlike assessments that involve a clinician or other professional drawing on their subjective expertise to make a recommendation, actuarial pretrial release assessmentsa rely on mathematical processes. Using large data sets with information about people who previously went through the pretrial process, researchers identify factors related to appearing for court hearings and not being arrested again if released. The researchers then create a sequence of instructions for a computer to follow (called an algorithm) that uses these factors to calculate an estimated likelihood that a person will appear in court and remain arrest free while their case is being resolved. This calculation—referred to as a “score”—is provided to the judge as information to consider when making decisions about pretrial release. A person’s score is also often provided as information to other courtroom actors, such as prosecutors, defense attorneys, and pretrial services officers. When thinking about actuarial pretrial release assessments, it is important to understand the history of the criminal legal system in the United States, which is deeply rooted in the legacy of slavery. Read Race and the Criminal Justice System2 by the Equal Justice Initiative to learn more. No actuarial pretrial release assessment tool or instrument is considered standard. Numerous assessments have been developed, and they vary in terms of the factors and instructions entered in the algorithm. Some use factors that are available through criminal legal system records, such as whether someone has been arrested before or has previously missed a court date. Others include factors like whether someone has a job, is enrolled in a substance use treatment program, or has a place to live. This information is usually obtained by talking with the person who has been arrested. At the time of this writing, pretrial release assessments use algorithms that are created by humans as opposed to ones that are generated by machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI). It is possible that future assessments will rely on AI, which would raise a different set of issues to consider. The use of actuarial pretrial release assessments is growing across the United States. Often, they are an element of broader system change aimed at reducing or eliminating the use of cash bonds, which require people to post money to be released from jail. Judges may consider the actuarial pretrial release assessment score when deciding what conditions of release—for instance, electronic monitoring or mandatory check-ins with pretrial services—are appropriate for a person. In systems that retain money bond as a potential release condition, assessments are sometimes used to inform decisions about bond amounts, but the impact on release is lessened if people remain in jail because they cannot afford to pay their way out. Judges may also use the score as part of their decision about whether to keep someone in jail or release them while their case is pending

APPR Research Brief, April 2024. Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI International, 2024. 5p.

By Harry Annison, Kate Paradine

In this article we sketch a vision that might guide academic and third sector collaboration. We do so by drawing on a project that involved collaboration with a range of stakeholders, in order to stimulate ongoing discussion about how academics and the third sector might work together to seek positive change. Our findings show that there are keenly felt challenges, but also a sense of resilient optimism. A key finding among our stakeholders was a sense that there is an absence of an overarching shared vision, which was experienced by many of our respondents as consequential. Therefore, in the spirit of constructive provocation we set out such a vision, which was collaboratively developed with our respondents: opening a dialogue, rather than providing a conclusive position.

Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, May 2024 (early view)

By Arthur L. Rizer

Over the past 20 years, conservatives have often been at the forefront of criminal justice reform efforts, including to reduce mandatory minimum sentencing, lengthy prison terms, and excessive criminal fines and fees and to improve conditions in prisons and jails. Rejecting the Nixonian “law and order” impulse, criminal justice reform has increasingly become incorporated into the conservative political self-identity. But this has been an elite-driven phenomenon, and it is open to question whether the roots of that political identity are deep enough to withstand the rising salience of crime as a political issue. This review traces how criminal justice reform came to be incorporated into the conservative political identity, raises questions concerning its staying power in the face of rising crime and increasingly strident progressive demands, and proposes some principles that might ground a more lasting conservative commitment to a just, proportionate system of criminal justice.

Annual Review of Criminology, v. 6. 2023, 18pg

By Jue Jiang

This research provides a rare yet much-needed gender perspective on authoritarian legality in China, drawing upon sentencing and punishment for the crime of rape. First, several controversial cases – cases extensively discussed in the media or online – are reviewed to identify the attributes that triggered the controversy. Four categories of cases were selected, based on four sexual relationships embodying various power dynamics between the offender and the victim: public official and citizen/sex worker; husband and wife; adult and child; caregiver and dependent. A search was then made for “like cases” using these attributes as keywords in the China Judgments Online database. Finally, a qualitative analysis of these cases was carried out, in particular of the judicial reasoning provided by the judges, to explore how these controversial cases are handled by the judiciary, and the implications of this on the interplay between gender, sex, sexuality and authoritarian power in the context of authoritarian legality in China. This research argues that the criminal justice system in China embodies and reinforces a particular gendered order and “sex hierarchy,” instrumentalised by the state to maintain its authoritarian power.

The Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy series Law and Authoritarianism. 2023, 69pg

By Kitty Lymperopoulou

 In recent years, there has been considerable policy and academic interest in the existence of ethnic inequalities in the Criminal Justice System. A large body of sentencing research has been dedicated to exploring whether ethnic minority defendants are treated more harshly than similarly situated white defendants. This paper extends this research utilizing Ministry of Justice linked criminal justice datasets and multilevel models to assess the effect of ethnicity and other defendant case and contextual factors on sentencing outcomes in the Crown Court. The analysis shows that legal characteristics such as plea, pre-trial detention, offence type and severity are important factors determining sentencing outcomes although they do not fully explain disparities in these outcomes between ethnic groups. Ethnic disparities in imprisonment persist and, in some cases, become more pronounced after controlling for defendant case and court factors. In contrast, ethnic disparities in sentence length are largely explained by legal factors, and after adjusting for other predictors of sentencing outcomes, observed differences between most (but not all) ethnic minority groups and the white British disappear

 British Journal of Criminology. 2024, 22pg