By Micaela M. Alvarado

The author of this theses examines the multifaceted factors that are in play during sentencing in the criminal justice system and to fill a gap in the literature regarding sentencing disparities based on race and sex across types of counties, such as rural or urban counties, and whether those patterns have changed over time. The author lists three reasons for the importance of this research: it helps inform recent sentencing reforms aimed at targeting inequalities in the criminal processing system; filling a research gap on county-by-county variation in sentencing disparities by demographic characteristics; and examining longitudinal trends in sentencing constitutes an important step in better understanding influential factors in judicial decision making. The thesis examines trends over time as it addresses two specific research questions: do individuals from urban counties receive harsher sentences than those from rural counties; and does an offender’s race, sex, and county of residence influence the sentencing severity. Results showed that individuals in rural counties received harsher sentences, and revealed evidence of overall increased punitiveness for both urban and rural counties over the last several years. Results also revealed differences in sentencing outcomes based on race/ethnicity and sex between rural and urban counties; specifically, Black males experienced the most severe punishment in both rural and urban counties as well as receiving the most punitive form of punishment over time. Results also demonstrated that rural counties provided more punitive sentences in general, while urban counties have more offenders. The author suggests that urban counties may, as a result, rely on different punishment options due to limited resources. Analyses revealed more lenient sentences for females across rural and urban counties over time.

Huntsville, TX: Sam Houston State University, 2019. 105p.

By K. Alexander Adams and Youngsung Kim

This paper uses panel data from 1980 to 2018 in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia to examine the relationship between liberalized concealed carry laws, homicide, and firearm homicide. Multivariate regression analysis was conducted with state and time fixed effects. A general-to-specific procedure was also used to reduce the arbitrariness of choosing control variables in the crime equation. Various robustness checks were also employed, including the use of a generalized synthetic control model. The relationship between shall-issue and constitutional carry laws and homicide were statistically insignificant at the 1%, 5%, and even 10% level. The results were robust to multiple alternative model specifications. We find no evidence that looser concealed carry laws pose a significant public health or criminological risk.

Unpublished paper, 2023. 

By Danielle Kaeble, BJS Statistician

This report presents national data on adult offenders under community supervision on probation or parole in 2019. It includes characteristics of the population, such as sex, race or Hispanic origin, and most serious offense. The report details how offenders move onto and off community supervision, such as completing their term of supervision, being incarcerated, absconding, or other unsatisfactory outcomes while in the community. Findings are based on data from BJS’s 2019 Annual Probation Survey, Annual Parole Survey, and Federal Justice Statistics Program.

By Danielle Kaeble, BJS Statistician

This report is the 29th in a series that began in 1981. It includes characteristics of the population such as sex, race or ethnicity, and most serious offense of adult U.S. residents under correctional supervision in the community. The report details how people move onto and off community supervision, such as completing their term of supervision, being incarcerated, absconding, or other unsatisfactory outcomes while in the community. Findings are based on data from BJS’s 2020 Annual Probation Survey, Annual Parole Survey, and Federal Justice Statistics Program.

By Danielle Kaeble, BJS Statistician

This report is the 30th in a series that began in 1981. It includes characteristics of the population such as sex, race or ethnicity, and most serious offense of adult U.S. residents under correctional supervision in the community. The report details how people move onto and off community supervision, such as completing their term of supervision, being incarcerated, absconding, or other unsatisfactory outcomes while in the community.

The keynote speech argues that accurate and uniform data on probation and parole must be used to support and argue correctional policy that advocates the rational use of correctional resources, notably to reduce the use of incarceration and increase the use of community supervision. The keynote panel, conforming to the theme of national criminal justice data, discusses how national data should be used, developing effective user services for criminal justice statistical analysis, and eliciting support for data collection and analysis in an era of budget-cutting. In the workshop reports on State responses to prison overcrowding, an overview is given of the problem, and examples of State responses to the problem are presented for Minnesota and California. The panel presentations on setting priorities for national reporting provide the systems and operation view, a judicial and sentencing view, and a legislative and legal view. Staff, speakers, and participant lists are included.

Intended for parole officials, legislators, and researchers in criminal justice, the report profiles the persons paroled in 1977 in terms of commitment offenses, prior prison commitments, type of sentence, type of admission to prison, amount of time served in prison on current conviction, parole status, and recommitments, as well as demographic variables such as sex, age, racial/ethnic origin, and education. Using these variables, the report describes parolees by four broad sets of characteristics: prison commitment, demographic background, parole entry, and parole status. A discussion of longer term tends in 1973-1977 uniform parole reports data concludes the report. Data sources and tables are presented in the appendixes

By GBD 2019 Police Violence US Subnational Collaborators

The burden of fatal police violence is an urgent public health crisis in the USA. Mounting evidence shows that deaths at the hands of the police disproportionately impact people of certain races and ethnicities, pointing to systemic racism in policing. Recent high-profile killings by police in the USA have prompted calls for more extensive and public data reporting on police violence. This study examines the presence and extent of under-reporting of police violence in US Government-run vital registration data, offers a method for correcting under-reporting in these datasets, and presents revised estimates of deaths due to police violence in the USA.

The Lancet 2021; 398: 1239–55  

By Andrew C. Forrester and Alex Nowrasteh 

The 287(g) program enables local law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration laws. We examine 287(g)’s implementation across multiple counties in North Carolina and identify its impact on local crime rates and police clearance rates using a staggered difference-in-differences research design. Under multiple empirical specifications, we find no evidence to suggest that 287(g) programs had an effect on crime rates in North Carolina counties following their implementation. These results hold for simple measures of program adoption and program intensity. Our findings suggest that 287(g) in North Carolina counties did not meet its intended objective of improving public safety by facilitating the removal of violent offenders.   

Logan, UT: Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University , 2020. 40p.

By Joel A. Capellan; Evan T. Sorg

The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 has facilitated the arrest, detention, and deportation of illegal immigrants by local law enforcement officials by adding 287(g) to the Immigration and Nationality Act; however, there has not been a nationwide examination of the crime reduction benefits of these agreements. Using crime, demographic, and detention data from the 167 counties that applied for 287(g) status from 2005-2010, the authors estimated three cross-lagged panel models to assess the impact on total crime of 287(g) interventions resulting in detention or deportations on total crime, violent crime, and property crime. The study found no evidence that 287(g) arrangements were linked to meaningful crime reduction. Due to the potential adverse consequences from these agreements, this study questions the continued use of such agreements under 287(g).

Glassboro, NJ: Rowan University, 2022. 40p.

By Maxime Ricard and Kouamé Félix Grodji

Africa’s rapidly expanding cities are witnessing unprecedented levels of violent crime and the growing menace of criminal gangs. Exceeding the capacity of police, these dangers pose threats to citizen security, livelihoods, and the governability of urban areas.

• In response to these security crises, community-based security groups are emerging as a form of collaborative policing. While not a substitute for police, these groups can help address rising urban crime. Since they know their neighborhoods, these groups can act as go-betweens for overstretched local police and citizens.

• The most effective vigilance committees recognize that coercive tactics and violent confrontations with youth gangs escalate hostilities and fail to address deeper community problems. This will require tackling systemic factors linked to high crime rates in order to redirect youth gangs and stem urban violence.

• Experience from Abidjan reveals the limits of these vigilance committees in tackling serious crimes as well as the risk that these committees can turn to extrajudicial violence and become a threat themselves. This highlights the importance of close partnerships between vigilance committees and the police if collaborative policing models are to contribute to community security.

• Civil society engagement and community oversight are needed to regulate community-based security groups and ensure that they are not misused by local elites or corrupt police.

Washington, DC: Africa Center for Strategic Studies, 2021. 

By Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary

Serious acquisitive crime (SAC) strikes at the heart of people’s feelings of safety in their homes and communities. It isn’t just a ‘volume crime’. It affects people on a daily basis. And failing to target it damages public confidence in policing. The response to SAC from policing isn’t consistently good enough. Too many offenders remain at liberty and most victims aren’t getting the justice they deserve. Forces are missing opportunities to identify and catch offenders, from the moment a member of the public reports the crime to the point where a case is finalised. Depending on where in England and Wales they live, some victims of SAC are more likely than others to get a thorough investigation from their force. This can’t be justified. This report brings together some of our findings from recent police effectiveness, efficiency and legitimacy (PEEL) and thematic inspections in England and Wales. It shows where forces need to make improvements in the way they tackle SAC, and it reports on the good practice we identified. The onus is on forces to learn from each other. They should consider whether they can apply the positive examples in this report to their own force.  

Birmingham, UK: HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, 2022. 40p.

By Justin T. Pickett. Amanda Graham and Francis T. Cullen 

The mission of policing is “to protect and serve,” but recent events suggest that many Americans, and especially Black Americans, do not feel protected from the police. Understanding police-related fear is important because it may impact civilians’ health, daily lives, and policy attitudes. To examine the prevalence, sources, and consequences of both personal and altruistic fear of the police, we surveyed a nationwide sample (N = 1,150), which included comparable numbers of Black (N = 517) and White (N = 492) respondents. Most White respondents felt safe, but most Black respondents lived in fear of the police killing them and hurting their family members. Approximately half of Black respondents preferred to be robbed or burglarized than to have unprovoked contact with officers. The racial divide in fear was mediated by past experiences with police mistreatment. In turn, fear mediated the effects of race and past mistreatment on support for defunding the police and intentions to have “the talk” with family youths about the need to distrust and avoid officers. The deep American racial divide in police-related fear represents a racially disparate health crisis and a primary obstacle to law enforcement’s capacity to serve all communities equitably.  

Criminology, 60 (2): 291-320, 2022.    

By The Independent Office for Police Conduct

The circumstances in which police officers use Taser is an area of significant public interest. Tasers provide the police and the community with valuable protection in dangerous situations. The police are able to use Tasers as an option to resolve situations, including the threat of serious violence, when they consider the use of the Taser is reasonable and proportionate to the threat they face. Tasers are now available to more police officers than ever before with some police forces committing to providing them to all frontline officers who wish to carry one. Home Office data shows Taser was used in 17,000 incidents in 2017/18, nearly doubling to around 32,000 incidents in 2019/20. In the majority of cases Taser is not discharged – the threat alone can help to resolve an incident. However, some community groups and organisations have repeatedly expressed concerns about the risks associated with Taser use, particularly in the context of deaths and serious injuries, their use against children and vulnerable adults, and the significant racial disparities in Taser usage. As an independent body, our oversight helps to shine a light on issues we see in our investigations and through concerns being raised by community groups and organisations. This report was commissioned following a series of incidents involving Black men and people with mental health concerns in early 2020. We reviewed 101 cases involving Taser use that the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), or our predecessor organisation the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), investigated between 2015 and 2020. This report is not intended to present a fully representative picture of how Tasers are used across England and Wales, because we investigate only the most serious and sensitive cases. However, these cases often have the greatest impact on community confidence and provide invaluable opportunities for learning. It is right that Taser use is closely analysed to ensure the device is being used appropriately and not as a default when other options may be available. Police forces must be able to justify to the public the circumstances in which Taser is deployed, particularly when children and vulnerable people are involved. Forces must also respond to the disproportionate use of Tasers against Black people.  

London: The Independent Office on Police Conduct, 2021.128p.

By Beatriz Magaloni and Luis Rodriguez

How can societies restrain their coercive institutions and transition to a more humane criminal justice system? We argue that two main factors explain why torture can persist as a generalized practice even in democratic societies: weak procedural protections and the militarization of policing, which introduces strategies, equipment and mentality that treats criminal suspects as if they were enemies in wartime. Using a large survey of the Mexican prison population and leveraging the date and place of arrest, this paper provides causal evidence about how these two explanatory variables shape police brutality. Our paper offers a grim picture of the survival of authoritarian policing practices in democracies. It also provides novel evidence of the extent to which the abolition of inquisitorial criminal justice institutions – a remnant of colonial legacies and a common trend in the region – has worked to restrain police brutality.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University, Poverty, Violence and Governance Lab (PoVgov), 2020. 51p.

By Beatriz Magaloni, Vanessa Melo, Jailson de Souza Silva, Eliana Sousa Silva

The goal of this study is to explore themes related to public security using a large-scale, door-to-door survey of roughly 6,300 residents from Cidade de Deus, Providência, Rocinha, Batan, and Maré. Our aim is to generate a more informed debate about the security situation in Rio de Janeiro that gives voice to residents of the city’s favelas. In this survey, we explore favela residents’ patterns of interaction with the police and armed criminal groups, their experiences with victimization, their perceptions of changes in the security climate, as well as their evaluations of the police and the public security situation in their communities

Stanford, CA: Stanford University, Poverty, Violence and Governance Lab (PoVgov), 2017.  81p.

By Beatriz Magaloni, Vanessa Melo, and Gustavo Robles  

We present the first randomized experiment on police body-cameras in a high-violence setting: Brazil. Camera assignment -regardless of whether police turned it on -reduced stop-and-searches and other forms of potentially aggressive interactions with civilians. Cameras also produced a strong de-policing effect, where police wearing cameras were significantly less likely to engage in any form of activity, including responding to requests of help. These changes in police behavior took place even when most officers disobeyed the protocol that required them to turn their cameras on when interacting with civilians. To address this problem, we randomly assigned cameras to supervisors during part of the study. When officers’ supervisors wore a camera, policing activities and camera usage increased. Police surveys, interviews and focus groups strengthen the finding that technological advances can only have a limited impact in so far an organizational culture that perpetuates lack of compliance with internal protocols and violence persists.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University, Poverty, Violence and Governance Lab (PoVgov), Working Paper, 2020. 38p.

By United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling Section 

  The COVID-19 pandemic has affected countries and people globally; it has also exacerbated existing disadvantages, poverty and vulnerabilities. The initial measures to contain the health crisis have not always considered those most vulnerable and affected by violence and exploitation. This report seeks to bring to the forefront the challenges for anti-trafficking during the pandemic and share promising practices and lessons learned in order to prepare for a more inclusive crisis-response in the future, leaving no one behind. In particular, the report explores the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on (1) the scale and characteristics of trafficking in persons; (2) victims of trafficking; and (3) frontline organizations (law enforcement, prosecution services, the judiciary and the protection and reintegration services provided by non-government organizations (NGOs)). The report also examines the different initiatives developed in response to the challenges created by COVID-19 and identifies promising practices.    

Vienna: UNODC, 2021. 90p.

By Shubhangi Agrawal, Tom Kirchmaier and Carmen Villa-Llera

   We analyse how crime trends evolved during the Covid-19 pandemic.  Police have recorded fewer crimes overall during the pandemic, but a larger share of these are serious offences (such as violence). Note: these records exclude cybercrime.  Violent crimes, which have been on the rise since 2014, remain at very high levels and did not decrease because of the pandemic.  Public order offences (incidents in which offenders cause public fear, alarm, or distress) were on the rise pre-pandemic, and the trend has accelerated since Covid began.  Except for online fraud, acquisitive offences - in which criminals obtain a material gain, such as burglary or theft - are now less common than pre-Covid. During national lockdowns, local acquisitive crimes decreased dramatically. Once lockdowns were lifted, the rate remained very low (especially for shoplifting and robbery). This trend is likely to remain, as more people work from home and shop online.  During months of national lockdowns, the number of anti-social behaviour and drug offences went up, but quickly returned to pre-pandemic levels once lockdowns ended.  The pandemic has not decreased crimes uniformly. Some areas (37 per cent) had more crimes in 2021 than during the same period in 2019. Unemployment and lower educational attainment appear to be key characteristics of areas that had higher crimes in 2021.  

London: London School of Economics, Centre for Economic Performance, 2022. 26p.

By The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC)

Restrictions on movement imposed by govern- ments across the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic have had an impact on the trafficking of substandard and falsified medical products. Interpol and the World Customs Organization (WCO) reported that seizures of substandard and falsified medical products, including person- al protective equipment (PPE), increased for the first time in March 2020. The emergence of trafficking in PPE signals a significant shift in organized criminal group behaviour that is directly attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has brought huge demand for medical products such as PPE over a relatively short period of time. It is foreseeable that, with the evolution of COVID-19 and developments in medicinal treatments and/or the repurposing of existing medicines, criminal behaviour will shift from trafficking in PPE to the development and delivery of a COVID-19 vaccine. Furthermore, cyberattacks on critical infrastructure involved in addressing the pandemic are likely to continue in the form of online scams aimed at health procurement authorities. Challenges in pandemic preparedness, ranging from weak regulatory and legal frameworks to the prevention of the manufacturing and trafficking of substandard and falsified products and cyber security shortcomings, were evident before COVID-19, but the pandemic has exacerbated them and it will be difficult to make significant improvements in the immediate short term. The report concludes that crime targeting COVID-19 medical products will become more focused with significantly greater risks to pub- lic health as the containment phase of the pan- demic passes to the treatment and prevention stages.  

Vienna: UNODC, 2020. 31p.