By David E. Spencer, Herard von Santos, and Juan Carlos Morales

Gangs have existed for many decades in El Salvador. They did not receive a lot of attention until the 1990s. The gangs prior to the 1990s were more like the stereotypical gangs that people usually think of: misguided youth, mostly involved in petty crime and solicitation. They were not considered a very serious threat to personal or national security at that time. These gangs called themselves by a variety of names, but by the 1980s people were calling them “maras” as a general term for all gangs. The word “mara” is a Salvadoran slang word which means group of friends or gang in the sense that it refers to a tight knit group of buddies that frequently socialize together. If you are out socializing with your friends and your wife calls you to ask where you are, the answer is that I am here with “la mara” meaning I am here with my group of pals, the guys that one plays poker with or drinks a few beers or any other similar typical male social activity. The word is still used in this way, even though it has developed an increasingly negative connotation due to its association with the extremely violent criminal gangs. This is important because there has been a lot of speculation about the meaning of the word that in the authors’ opinion is improbable and counterproductive.

Washington, DC: William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, 2009. 120p.

By Michael Rempel, Krystal Rodriguez, Tyler Nims, Joanna Weill, Zachary Katznelson and Madison Volpe

New York City has embarked on a far-reaching effort to shutter its notorious Rikers Island jail complex. The effort hinges on safely reducing the number of people in city jails—an achievable goal that demands policy changes at a number of levels. This report lays out a roadmap for safely limiting the use of jail in the years ahead, as a new set of elected policymakers will be tasked with bringing to fruition the end of Rikers. The good news is that New York City will be building on decades of successful reforms that have already driven down both crime and incarceration. Yet challenges lie ahead. The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by a tragic increase in shootings in our city and nationwide. Nationwide protests prompted by the killings of Black Americans by police have highlighted vast racial disparities in who is arrested and incarcerated. Perennial problems at Rikers are growing worse, including intolerable conditions and unacceptably high levels of violence. New Yorkers demand, and deserve, to live in safe communities. Efforts to reduce incarceration must be accompanied by meaningful efforts to prevent crime. But importantly, the available data contradict the notion that justice reforms are linked to the recent rise in shootings.

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  As the trends of the past three decades indicate, more jail does not equal more safety. To the contrary, an emerging body of research indicates that the overuse of jail, while temporarily incapacitating people, can actually lead to more criminal activity and risks undermining the health of individuals, families, and entire neighborhoods. Those who go into jail with challenges— substance use, mental health concerns, joblessness, unstable housing, etc.—tend to come out with those challenges worsened. Jail also comes at tremendous financial cost: incarcerating one person on Rikers for a year costs a staggering $447,000.2 The strategies for reducing incarceration in this report draw on existing and original research and interviews with more than 60 criminal justice officials, practitioners, service providers, and advocates. We estimate that, once implemented, the strategies proposed here could safely reduce the jail population to between 2,700 and 3,150 people. Delivering on the promise of these strategies, and achieving the projected reductions in jail, will depend on political will, robust implementation, and ongoing monitoring to track progress.

New York: Independent Commission on NYC Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform and Center for Court Innovation, 2021. 91p.

By Independent Commission on NYC Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform

In April 2017, our Commission called for deep changes to the criminal justice system in New York City, including the permanent closure of the dysfunctional jail complex on Rikers Island. Today, we are closer than ever to that goal. A HISTORIC OPPORTUNITY TO CLOSE RIKERS The administration’s current plan parallels, in important respects, the blueprint that our Commission put forward two-and-a-half years ago. It would reduce New York City’s eleven operating jails to four, cut the number of jail beds from 14,000 to fewer than 4,000, and reduce the number of people in jail to 3,300 or fewer. Rebuilding existing jails in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens, and establishing a new jail in the Bronx to replace the current jail boat docked off of Hunts Point, will improve safety and conditions for incarcerated people and correction officers. This smaller, borough-based system would mean that people in jail would be closer to their families, services, lawyers, and courts. This will speed cases, boost chances for re-entry, and reduce recidivism. Final designs must include robust input from all stakeholders, including nearby residents, formerly incarcerated people, and advocates.

New York: Independent Commission on NYC Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform: 2019. 16p.

By Elizabeth Glazer and Michael Jacobson

In our first special report, public safety veterans Elizabeth Glazer and Michael Jacobson provide a detailed, data-grounded roadmap to close Rikers Island that would simultaneously:

Increase safety inside and outside the city’s jails;

Cut operating costs and invest more in communities;

Shrink the jail population to approximately 2,200; and

Limit the criminal justice system’s footprint.

In the face of the humanitarian crises on Rikers, now in public view everyday, we show how paying attention and reducing the population can provide both immediate relief and a long-term solution.

New York: The City, 2022.

By Lucija Sokanović

New forms of criminal fraud are constantly emerging and their incidence is increasing. This book provides in-depth analyses of whether, and how exactly, criminal law perceives and adapts to these developments. The main focus of the study are the relevant normative and criminological questions regarding fraud, fraud in economic transactions, subsidy fraud, computer and electoral fraud, and some other forms of fraudulent behaviour. From a comparative perspective, it becomes apparent that a specific group of statutory offences is scattered throughout the criminal codes of Croatia, Germany, Austria and Switzerland and also the neighbouring countries in the Balkan region, all of which fit the same pattern and reveal the same core features of fraud. Criminal law addresses them in the same manner, hence a fraud-related criminal law can be identified. This should be of help for developing and applying adequate measures for effective detection and prosecution of this type of offences. Standardization of legal protection against fraud is reflected upon as an instrument that represents the dynamics of the transition and integration of European countries and the globalization of the economy, with their growing intensity of economic cross-border transactions.

Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2020. 298p.

By Mary T. Phillips

A decade-long research project examining the bail system in New York City has recently been completed by the New York City Criminal Justice Agency, Inc. (CJA). The research was conceived in the context of CJA’s mission of reducing unnecessary pretrial detention, and it continued in the midst of a national debate about the role of bail and the commercial bail bond industry in the criminal justice system. With the publication in 2011 of the last of a series of reports from this research, it is now time to take stock of what we have learned, and to consider how the findings might inform the ongoing public discussion. This final report of the bail project synthesizes the major findings, with the dual objective of making the research results more accessible by gathering them together in one place, while also introducing a level of clarity that is difficult to achieve when disparate findings are viewed only as separate pieces. The bail research began in 2002 with a pilot project to determine the feasibility of collecting data from courtroom observations that would be of use in examining the factors that enter into judges’ decisions to release or set bail for defendants at arraignment. The first published report from that study appeared in 2004. Findings from each phase of the research raised further questions, leading us to expand the study to investigate the part played by the prosecutor in the judge’s bail decision, the role of commercial bonds in bail release, the association between release type and failure to appear (FTA), and the effects of pretrial detention on case outcomes. All together, eight full reports and seven Research Briefs were published between 2004 and 2011 presenting the results of the bail project. They are listed together in a separate section at the beginning of the References, and all are available on CJA’s website at www.nycja.org/research/research.htm.

New York; New York City Criminal Justice Agency, 2012. 171p.

By Krystal Rodriguez and Michael Rempel

On April 1, 2019, New York State passed a series of reforms intended to promote fairness and due process throughout the criminal justice system. A new bail reform law eliminates money bail and pretrial detention for nearly all misdemeanor and nonviolent felony defendants. Described in a separate publication, 1 this law requires drastic changes in bail practices, sharply curtailing the overreliance on money bail and pretrial detention that has disproportionately impacted lower-income communities and communities of color. The Center for Court Innovation estimates that bail reform will result in a minimum 43 percent reduction in New York City’s pretrial jail population. In response to the victim advocacy community and in consideration of the unique social and legal issues involved in cases of domestic violence, the new law contains several specific provisions intended to protect domestic violence victims. This document focuses on these components of bail reform and includes hard data indicating how cases involving domestic violence allegations might be affected in New York City.

New York: Center for Court Innovation, 2019. 9p.

By Michael Rempel and Krystal Rodriguez

On April 1, 2019, New York State passed sweeping criminal justice reform legislation that eliminates money bail and pretrial detention for nearly all misdemeanor and nonviolent felony defendants; requires prosecutors to disclose their evidence to the defense earlier in case proceedings; promotes speedy trial rights; and reduces the maximum length of a jail sentence for people convicted of a misdemeanor from one year to 364 days (avoiding deportation exposure for many immigrants convicted of minor crimes). This document reviews the major components of the first of these changes, bail reform, and includes data indicating the scope of its potential impact in New York City. On any given day in early 2019, more than 22,000 New Yorkers were incarcerated in a local jail—about 8,000 in New York City and 14,000 in the rest of the state. As is the case in local jails across the country, more than six in ten of these individuals were held pretrial, prior to a conviction, usually stemming from an inability to afford money bail. The stakes for how bail reform impacts this pretrial population are especially high in New York City, given the city’s efforts to close the jail complex on Rikers Island. Bail reform, along with the other reform measures, is scheduled to go into effect on January 1, 2020.

New York: Center for Court Innovation, 2020. 13p.

By Michael Rempel and Krystal Rodriguez

On April 1, 2019, New York State passed sweeping restrictions to the use of money bail and pretrial detention, ruling out their use for nearly all misdemeanor and nonviolent felony charges. The reforms also established a new presumption of release for all cases—with conditions when deemed necessary. Even when bail and pretrial detention remain legally permissible, the reforms limited their use to cases when a judge finds them to be the least restrictive condition necessary to assure court attendance. Bail reform went into effect January 1, 2020, and, with close to nine out of 10 cases made ineligible for bail,1 contributed to a 40 percent decline in New York City’s pretrial jail population. Elsewhere in the state, the impacts were even slightly larger. The reforms were then amended April 3, 2020, with an effective date at the outset of July for the modified statute. The 2020 amendments include: (1) an expanded list of charges and situations, especially involving nonviolent felonies, in which judges may again set money bail or remand people to pretrial detention; (2) more options for ordering non-monetary release conditions (including mandated treatment, maintaining employment or educational involvement, and conditions related to the protection of domestic violence victims); and (3) new public reporting requirements to document pretrial decision-making and outcomes on an ongoing basis across the state. Our analysis suggests that, when compared to the original reforms passed in 2019, the amendments will produce a 16 percent relative increase in the use of money bail and pretrial detention among New York City criminal cases and a 16 percent increase in the pretrial jail population. Similar effects are likely across the rest of the state.

New York: Center for Court Innovation, 2020. 224p.

By The Civic Federation

In preparation for the elimination of cash bail beginning in January 2023, the Illinois Supreme Court Pretrial Practices Implementation Task Force set out to measure the financial impact this policy change will have on counties throughout the State of Illinois, as well as on circuit court clerks who will no longer retain up to 10% of bond deposits as bond processing fees. In a first of-its-kind comprehensive analysis, this report provides information about bond payments collected and disbursed in criminal cases based on data from 96 of the 102 counties in Illinois. The primary purpose of the analysis was to identify how much money counties across Illinois collect and process annually in bond payments, and how circuit court clerks distribute those bond amounts. The report focuses on the amount of bond payments applied, which are payments processed and disbursed at the conclusion of a criminal case, as opposed to bond payments collected at the time of pretrial release. Bond payments are applied to a variety of purposes at the conclusion of a criminal case, including fines, fees, assessments, court costs, restitution, and refunds to the person who paid the bond.

Chicago: Civil Federation, 2022. 37p.

By Bernadette Rabuy and Daniel Kopf

In addition to the 1.6 million people incarcerated in federal and state prisons, there are more than 600,000 people locked up in more than 3,000 local jails throughout the U.S. Over 70 percent of these people in local jails are being held pretrial — meaning they have not yet been convicted of a crime and are legally presumed innocent.

One reason that the unconvicted population in the U.S. is so large is because our country largely has a system of money bail, in which the constitutional principle of innocent until proven guilty only really applies to the well off. With money bail, a defendant is required to pay a certain amount of money as a pledged guarantee that they will attend future court hearings. If the defendant is unable to come up with the money either personally or through a commercial bail bondsman, they can be incarcerated from their arrest until their case is resolved or dismissed in court.

Northampton, MA: Prison Policy Institute, 2016. 22p.

By Scott M. Stringer, Office of the New York City Comptroller

A basic principle of the American justice system is that all people are innocent until proven guilty, and that defendants should not be unnecessarily punished or detained before a finding of guilt. However, the bail system in New York City subjects tens of thousands of people each year to punitive personal and financial costs prior to conviction (or exoneration). In general, after a person is arrested and charged with a crime in New York City, they appear in court and face a judge, who decides whether to release the accused, set bail, or hold the person in custody. In many cases, judges in New York City release the defendant on a simple promise to appear for their next court date. However, when a judge decides to impose money bail conditions, the defendant is likely to spend at least some time in jail – often for the sole reason that they do not have the money needed to post bail immediately and must raise it from friends and family, or must navigate the slow, inefficient commercial bail system. At a time when the City is focused on reducing the jail population in order to close the correctional facilities on Rikers Island, ending a system that results in the unnecessary, unproductive, and expensive detention of people prior to a conviction must be prioritized.

New York: New York City Comptroller, 2018. 43p.

Edited by Mikkel Jarle Christensen, Kjersti Lohne and Magnus Hörnqvist

This book critically investigates Nordic criminal justice as a global role model. Not taking this role for granted, the chapters of the book analyse how Nordic approaches to criminal justice were folded into global contexts, and how patterns of promotion were built around perceptions that these approaches also had a particular value for other criminal justice systems. Specific actors, both internal and external to the region itself, have branded Nordic criminal justice as a form of ‘penal exceptionalism’ associated with human rights, universalistic welfare and social cohesion. The book shows how building and using the brand of Nordic criminal justice allowed stakeholders to champion specific forms of crime control across a variety of criminal justice areas in both domestic and international settings. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of criminal justice, international law and justice, Nordic and Scandinavian studies, and more widely to the social sciences and humanities.

London; New York: Routledge, 2023. 201p.

By Durrel Douglas

Every year, hundreds of thousands of eligible incarcerated voters are unable to cast their ballot due to misinformation, institutional bureaucracy and de-prioritization among government officials. This advocacy brief highlights strategies to improve ballot access for incarcerated people who are legally eligible to vote.

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2022. 6p.

By Wendy Sawyer

This report examines a frequently overlooked part of the dysfunctional money bail system in the United States.

The image of the bail bondsman who brings fugitives to justice is a familiar and powerful one; unfortunately, it’s more fiction than fact. In this report, we explain why the central tenet of the industry — that “it provides a public service at no cost to the taxpayer” — is a lie that the industry uses to defend its profitable position in the American criminal legal system. In reality, bail bond companies and their deep-pocketed insurance underwriters are almost always able to avoid accountability when they fail to do their one job — to ensure their clients’ appearance in court. The result? They get richer, defendants get poorer, and local law enforcement does their job for them, returning defendants to court on the taxpayer’s dime.

When their clients do not appear in court, bail companies are supposed to fulfill their obligations and pay the “forfeited” bail bonds. But journalists and local government officials around the country have independently discovered that their particular city or county is owed thousands or even millions from bond agents for unpaid bail bonds that have been ordered forfeit. Many of these jurisdictions have yet to put together that this is not simply a local problem, but a systemic problem with commercial money bail — and one that has been intentionally created by the bail industry to protect its profits.

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  This report brings together evidence from jurisdictions around the country, as well as from previous research, to show that the system is dysfunctional by design, benefitting the commercial bail bond industry far more than its clients or the public. Every bail company’s primary goal is to maximize their own returns, and paying a client’s bond when he or she fails to appear in court runs contrary to that goal. As this report shows, bail companies will not pay forfeitures unless they are forced, and forcing these well-resourced companies to pay what they owe costs counties a great deal of time and money — especially when the bail industry continues to lobby for and defend the legal loopholes that allow them to avoid accountability.

Northampton, MA: Prison Policy Institute, 2022.

Edited by Andrew Ashworth and Martin Wasik

The Oxford Monographs on Criminal Law and Justice series covers all aspects of criminal law and procedure including criminal evidence. The scope of the series is wide, encompassing both practical and theoretical works.

This volume is a thematic collection of essays on sentencing theory by leading writers. The essays consider several issues affecting the discipline including the underlying justifications for the imposition of punishment by the State, areas of sentencing policy that have given rise to particular difficulty, such as the sentencing of drug offenders, the rationale for discounting sentences for multiple offenders, the existence of special sentencing for young offenders, and cases where the injury done to the victim is of a different magnitude from what might have been expected, and includes various questions about the unequal impact on offenders of different sentencing measures.

This volume is dedicated to Professor Andrew von Hirsch, whose continuing work on sentencing theory provided the stimulus for the collection.

Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998. 310p.

By Andrew Von Hirsch

In examining the conflict between the just desserts and selective incapacitation theories of sentencing, this book argues that an ethical sentence must be proportional and just, requiring that any incapacitation strategy in sentencing should focus on crime categories rather than particular offenders.

After reviewing the evolution of the debate surrounding the two sentencing strategies -- one which focuses on past crimes and the other which addresses the risk of future crimes -- the discussion turns to the use of sentencing guidelines, which are favored by both dessert and incapacitation proponents, but for different purposes. An analysis of the just desserts theory then explains why and how punishments should be proportionate to the severity of crimes already committed. Also considered are the gauging of crime seriousness, the weighting of current and previous convictions, and the fixing of starting points when constructing a penalty scale. The critique of selective incapacitation sentencing reviews recent research on career criminals and demonstrates limitations in predicting serious criminality. Moral objections to sentencing offenders primarily for their expected future crimes are noted. The book concludes that the only way to meet the standard of proportionality and justice is to sentence offenders by crime categories rather than by predictions of future criminality for particular offenders. The appendixes discuss false positives in predicting criminality and Minnesota's sentencing guidelines. A subject index and a 200-item bibliography are provided.

Piscataway, NJ; Rutgers University Press, 230. 1985

By Roger Grimshaw

Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) has memorably been described by a former Supreme Court Judge, Lord Brown, as “the greatest single stain on our criminal justice system”.

The present report explores some of the main reasons for that assessment. It is a compilation and review of the available evidence about the psychological impacts of the sentence, covering:

Pre-existing conditions affecting many subjected to the IPP sentence

Feelings of uncertainty and helplessness the sentence provokes

The psychological obstacle course those subject to the IPP sentence are expected to negotiate

The long-term effects of the sentence

The persistence of anxiety, even following release and resettlement

London: Center for Crime and Justice Studies, 2022. 36p.

By Human Impact Partners

Around 482,000 people in the US are incarcerated before they have even been convicted of the charges against them — and 90% remain incarcerated simply because they can’t afford to pay the bail amount set for them.

While money bail is theoretically meant to ensure that people return to court for their trial, research in places that have already ended the practice of setting money bail shows that 9 out of 10 people still return to court on their own.

Because of the inequitable application of policies that criminalize activities associated with poverty and other forms of marginalization, pretrial incarceration disproportionately impacts people who are historically and structurally marginalized. People who are undocumented also face particular harm due to the interconnected nature of the systems of incarceration and immigration enforcement.

Oakland, CA: Human Impact Partners, 2020. 52p.

By Elizabeth Berger and Kent S. Scheidegger

In response to increasing concerns about jail and prison overcrowding, many officials and legislatures across the U.S. have undertaken different efforts aimed at reducing the prison population, such as reduced sentence lengths and early release of prisoners. Thus, there is currently a high degree of public interest regarding how these changes in policy might affect recidivism rates of released offenders. When considering the research on the relationship between incarceration and recidivism, many studies compare custodial with non-custodial sentences on recidivism, while fewer examine the impact of varying incarceration lengths on recidivism. This article provides a review of the research on the latter. While some findings suggest that longer sentences may provide additional deterrent benefit in the aggregate, this effect is not always consistent or strong. In addition, many of the studies had null effects, while none of the studies suggested a strong aggregate-level criminogenic effect. Overall, the literature on the impact of incarceration on recidivism is admittedly limited by important methodological considerations, resulting in inconsistency of findings across studies. In addition, it appears that deterrent effects of incarceration may vary slightly for different offenders. Ultimately, the effect of incarceration length on recidivism appears too heterogenous to be able to draw universal conclusions. We argue that a deepened understanding of the causal mechanisms at play is needed to reliably and accurately inform policy.

San Francisco: Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, 2021. 36p.