By Kayla Tawa

As mental health concerns and awareness around mental health challenges have increased, policymakers have prioritized mental health policy. Within these conversations, there is a broad recognition that far too often people experiencing mental health challenges encounter the criminal legal system rather than accessing mental health supports. In response, many policymakers have championed policies that aim to divert people experiencing mental health challenges away from prisons and jails and into mental health treatment. However, some of these policies, particularly those involving forced treatment, rely on carceral tactics and replicate incarceration.

Washington, DC:  Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP). 2024, 14pg

By Charles Fain Lehman

Crime, particularly violent crime, is a pressing concern for the American people. The surge in homicide and associated violence in the past three years has made voters skittish and prompted aggressive partisan finger-pointing. This increase has not, however, prompted significant investment in our criminal justice system. Ironically, as this report argues, this increase in violent crime is itself a product of fiscal neglect of that same system over the past decade.

Across a variety of measures, in fact, the American criminal justice system needs an upgrade. Police staffing rates have been dropping since the Great Recession; prisons and jails are increasingly violent; court backlogs keep growing; essential crime data are not collected; and essential criminology research is not conducted. These shortcomings contribute not only to the recent increase in violence but to America’s long-term violence and crime problems, problems that cost us tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

For too long, policymakers at all levels have failed to attend to this problem. Instead, both the political left and right have subsumed criminal justice issues into the larger culture war, fighting over the worst excesses of the police or the horrors of criminal victimization. Rather, they should look to past examples of federal policymaking in which lawmakers have used the power of the purse to dramatically improve the criminal justice system’s capacity to control crime. Doing so again could ameliorate many of the major concerns voiced by both sides in the criminal justice debate.

As such, this report proposes an ambitious, $12-billion, five-year plan to bring the criminal justice system up to date. 

New York: Manhattan Institute. 2023, 33pg

by Carla McDonald-Heffernan and Carmen Robin-D’Cruz

  Children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) are hugely over-represented at all points in the criminal justice system. Evidence suggests that 70–90% of children in the justice system have some form of SEND. Yet the lack of support for their communication needs may make these children’s experiences particularly difficult and the impact of educational disruptions as a result of justice system involvement can be particularly severe. Youth diversion offers many children a pathway out of the criminal justice system. In this informal non-statutory approach, children are offered the chance to partake in a community-based intervention rather than receiving a formal out-of-court disposal or prosecution. Evidence strongly suggests that youth diversion benefits children by reducing their likelihood of coming back into the justice system or getting further entrenched into it. Youth diversion might be particularly beneficial to children with SEND. However, given the range of communication barriers that children with SEND face in navigating the system, they may be less likely to receive diversion, particularly where communication difficulties are misconstrued as behavioural issues. Unequal access to diversion may create further disparity later on in the youth justice system. As part of the Centre for Justice Innovation’s ongoing interest in supporting effective use diversion, this report aims to understand how diversion is working for children with SEND. In order to research this report, we interviewed children with SEND who had received diversion as well as a range of professionals including youth justice service (YJS) practitioners, police officers and solicitors. We also conducted a survey of YJS practitioners. We are conscious that ‘SEND’ is a deficits-focused category that has been criticised for responsibilising children rather than highlighting the system that underserves them, as well as being an all-encompassing label that does not adequately account for differences within it. We have nevertheless chosen to frame our research around ‘SEND’ rather than using other overlapping categories such as ‘neurodivergent’ or ‘additional learning needs’ firstly because this project was in part driven by our response to the Government’s Green Paper, ‘SEND Review: Right support, Right place, Right time’. The fact that SEND is still the prevailing term used in the education sector, by the youth justice service and in joint decision-making panels for youth diversion specifically was also a key consideration.

London: Centre for Justice Innovation, 2024. 39p. 

By Christopher Dowling

Police in Australia are seeing increased reporting of family, domestic and sexual violence, while facing greater pressure to secure positive outcomes for victims. Improvements in the training police receive in responding to this violence have been identified as critical to broader efforts to reduce it. This study reviews published Australian and international research on police training in responding to family, domestic and sexual violence.

The last few decades have seen a significantly expanded focus on family, domestic and sexual violence as part of police training. This, along with several notable training innovations, have underpinned a shift in police training needs from more basic concerns around correct procedure and knowledge of the law, to more advanced concerns including recognising and investigating coercive control and identifying primary aggressors. Overall, police are receptive and responsive to training, but certain types of training, particularly those with strong practical and problem-solving components, hold more promise.

Trends & issues in crime and criminal justice no. 689. 

Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology. 2024. 25p.

by Joe Russo, Samuel Peterson, Michael J. D. Vermeer, Dulani Woods, Brian A. Jackson

The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) is responsible for the custody and care of approximately 159,000 individuals. This responsibility includes safe and secure housing in correctional facilities located across the United States. Equally important is its responsibility to provide programming and support to help ensure that individuals released from federal custody are able to successfully transition from prison to the community and refrain from criminal activity. This transition can be challenging, and, for a variety of reasons, many returning citizens ultimately reengage with the criminal justice system at some point.

Gainful employment has been recognized as a key factor in efforts to reduce recidivism. However, returning citizens who were incarcerated in federal prisons, particularly individuals with limited work histories or who have been out of the labor market for several years, face significant and well-documented barriers to employment. Preparing returning citizens for employment and supporting them through the reentry and employment processes can improve reentry outcomes and strengthen communities.

To explore challenges and opportunities associated with improving employment outcomes among BOP releasees, the National Institute of Justice — supported by the RAND Corporation, in partnership with the University of Denver — hosted a virtual workshop of BOP staff, community-based reentry service providers, researchers, national employers, and other experts. This report summarizes discussion points from the workshop and presents a wide-ranging set of needs identified by workshop participants.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2023. 36p.

By Sara Heller

Because successful human capital interventions often fail to scale or replicate, public investment decisions require understanding how program size, context, and implementation shape program effects. This paper uses two new randomized controlled trials of summer youth employment programs in Chicago and Philadelphia to demonstrate how multiple experiments can help explain replicability and inform the expansion of promising approaches. Even when these programs grow or change models across contexts, participation consistently reduces criminal justice involvement. It may also decrease the need for child protective services and behavioral health treatment. Experimental variation in program model and local provider generates no detectable heterogeneity, suggesting that effects replicate partly because variability in implementation does not matter. There is, however, individual-level heterogeneity that explains differences in effect magnitudes across populations and informs optimal targeting; youth at higher risk of socially costly outcomes experience larger benefits. Identifying more interventions that combine this pattern of treatment heterogeneity with robust replicability could aid efforts to reduce social inequality efficiently.

NBER WORKING PAPER 28705

Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), 2021. 47p.

By Alex Albright, Jeremy A. Cook, James J. Feigenbaum, Laura Kincaide, Jason Long, and Nathan Nunn

  The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre resulted in the looting, burning, and leveling of 35 square blocks of a once-thriving Black neighborhood. Not only did this lead to severe economic loss, but the massacre also sent a warning to Black individuals across the country that similar events were possible in their communities. We examine the economic consequences of the massacre for Black populations in Tulsa and across the United States. We find that for the Black population of Tulsa, in the two decades that followed, the massacre led to declines in home ownership and occupational status. Outside of Tulsa, we find that the massacre also reduced home ownership. These effects were strongest in communities that were more exposed to newspaper coverage of the massacre or communities that, like Tulsa, had high levels of racial segregation. Examining effects after 1940, we find that the direct negative effects of the massacre on the home ownership of Black Tulsans, as well as the spillover effects working through newspaper coverage, persist and actually widen in the second half of the 20th Century.

  NBER Working Paper No. 28985  

Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), 2021. 64p.

By Amelia Stewart, Polly Mackenzie, Alice Dawson

In 2019 the Home Office announced a national campaign to hire 20,000 new police officers to keep our streets safe. 

Move on Upstream has reflected on the state of crime and policing in the UK and argues that such a recruitment drive will do little to tackle Britain’s real crime problems. Specifically, it will do almost nothing to address the fact that, per ONS figures, the majority of crimes in England and Wales are not reported to the police, and only 7% of the crimes that the police record result in a charge or summons.

The report proposes a new approach, one which focuses on prevention in order to reduce crime to levels current police numbers can reasonably deal with. This includes a new, local authority-based crime prevention service to help identify and deter criminal behaviour.

London: Demos, 2022. 32p.

By Jaime Arellano-Bover, Marco De Simoni, Luigi Guiso, Rocco Macchiavello, Domenico J. Marchetti, Mounu Prem

Infiltration of the legal economy by criminal organizations (OCGs) is potentially significant, though how pervasive remains uncertain. Beyond the volume, the motives driving infiltration are of serious policy concern. We introduce a conceptual framework to differentiate between OCGs’ motives for infiltrating legal firms and validate it using new data from the Italian Financial Intelligence Unit. About 2% of Italian firms appear to have links with OCGs, with three primary motives. Firms established by OCGs are predominantly used for criminal activities (functional motive). Medium-sized firms, often infiltrated post-creation, primarily reflect a competitive motive, wherein criminal activities benefit the firm. Lastly, large, well-established firms remain separate from criminal activities and are used for pecuniary and non-pecuniary returns, such as to establish political connections (pure motive). This so far unnoticed motive accounts for a substantial share of OCGs’ infiltration.

CESifo Working Paper No. 11043
CESifo, Munich, 2024

By Daniel Auer, Michaela Slotwinski, Achim Ahrens, Dominik Hangartner, Selina Kurer, Stefanie Kurt, Alois Stutzer

Despite intense policy debates, the relationship between social welfare and refugee crime remains understudied. Taking steps to address this gap, our study focuses on Switzerland, where mobility restrictions on exogenously assigned refugees coincide with cantons’ autonomy in setting social assistance rates. Linking time-varying cantonal benefit rates between 2009 and 2016 to individual-level administrative data, we find that higher social assistance reduces criminal charges, especially for petty crimes and drug offenses. In light of limited (short-run) repercussions for refugees’ labor market participation, our results suggest social assistance can be a cost-effective measure to improve refugee welfare and enhance public safety.

CESifo Working Paper No. 11051 CESifo, Munich, 2024. 

By Yuni Tang, Brenna Kirk, Folawiyo Olanrewaju, Christiaan G. Abildso, Erin L. Winstanley, Christa L. Lilly, Toni M. Rudisill

  Background: A systematic review of the literature was performed to summarize cannabis use among adolescents and young adults during the COVID-19 pandemic. Special focus was given to the prevalence of cannabis use during COVID-19, as well as factors that may explain changes in cannabis consumption patterns. Methods: The protocol of this systematic review was registered. Articles from seven publication databases were searched in January 2022. The inclusion criteria for studies were as follows: 1) published in English; 2) study instruments needed to include items on COVID-19; 3) conducted after January 1st, 2020; 4) published in a peer-reviewed journal, dissertation, or thesis; 5) study population ≤25 years of age; 6) study designs were  limited to observational analytical studies; 7) measured cannabis use. This review excluded other reviews, editorials, and conference abstracts that were not available as full text manuscripts. Independent review, risk of bias assessment, and data abstraction were performed by two authors. Results: Fifteen articles from the United States (n=11) and Canada (n=4) were included in this review. The findings of this review showed that the prevalence of cannabis use during the pandemic among adolescents and young adults were mixed. Some mental health symptoms, including depression and anxiety, were identified as the most commonly reported reasons for increased cannabis use during the pandemic. Conclusions: This review highlights the inconsistencies in the prevalence of cannabis use among adolescents and young adults during the pandemic. Therapeutic interventions for mental health and continued public health surveillance should be conducted to understand the long-term effects of cannabis use among adolescents and young adults.   

Drug and Alcohol Dependence Reports, (2024)

By Kevin J. Strom, Sean E. Wire.

A seminal piece in our understanding of how high-profle cases of police violence can affect communities, Desmond, Papachristos, and Kirk (2016), found that resident calls to the police via 911 significantly declined after the beating of Frank Jude. These effects were especially prevalent in primarily Black neighborhoods. In this study, we used an interrupted time series design to replicate the original results in a different city using a fatal incident of police violence. We also extended the methods of original study by further disaggregating the follow-up effects to include officer-initiated events, which capture more discretionary activity for patrol officers. Our results confirm the original findings, with resident calls to 911 declining in majority-Black neighborhoods after a deadly incident of police violence, signifying a decay in community trust and legitimacy. Importantly, we also fnd  an immediate and striking decline in officer-initiated activity after the same incident in majority-Black neighborhoods. Conversely, White neighborhoods experienced a slight increase. This study reinforces and adds further context to a growing body of research that explains
how incidents of police violence can affect the actions of community residents and the police, including how we conceptualize and measure the concept of “de-policing.

Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI International, 2024. 19p.

By Shawn D. Bushway and Nidhi Kalra2

Employers would prefer not to hire people who will engage in criminal behavior for which the employer incurs costs. In the United States, employers are allowed to use publicly available conviction information to try to predict which candidates are at higher or lower risk of criminal activity. This open-records approach stands in stark contrast to closed-records systems in Europe, where only the government has access to this information and only the government can make determinations about potential employee risk. In this review, we find that (a) US employers’ use of conviction information is not clearly aligned with the risk of future criminal behavior or employer costs, and (b) using such information leads to hiring errors that pose costs to society. Perversely, we find that many of these problems come from government statutes around negligent-hiring lawsuits rather than from inherent preferences on the part of employers. We suggest research that would improve the use of conviction history to predict future criminal risk, and we discuss a hybrid policy for the United States in which the government, not employers, makes the final determination about employee risk. We argue that this approach may result in both better risk predictions and better alignment between employer and societal goals, creating advantages for employers, candidates, and society.

ANNUAL REVIEW OF CRIMINOLOGY Volume 4, 2021

By Shawn D. Bushway

Misperceptions can keep employers from hiring people who have criminal records. A growing body of RAND Corporation research counters some prevailing myths about risks of reoffending and provides hiring managers, policymakers, and citizens facts that support better-informed hiring decisions.

Criminal history background checks can provide hiring managers with important information about a job candidate. That said, employers risk making uninformed decisions that exclude good workers if they do not know which factors in the background check actually help predict an individual’s risk of reoffending. The RAND Corporation’s Resetting the Record body of research presents evidence-based findings that could help employers make better, fact-driven decisions about hiring people with criminal records. Exploring the research cited in this brief and sharing it with hiring managers may help create a triple win: companies get the employees they need, people with records get jobs, and society benefits.

Facts on Hiring People Who Have Criminal Records

People with Convictions Form a Large Part of the Pool of Those Seeking Work

Employers, particularly in times of low unemployment, can have difficulty finding workers to fill jobs. People with criminal records form a surprisingly large part of the population seeking work—almost half the men in the labor pool. Employers who are leery of candidates with conviction histories might be reassured by research that has shown that employers routinely hire people with records who go on to be good employees. In fact, more than 25 percent of workers in the active workforce have at least one prior conviction. The evidence is overwhelming: People with conviction records can be (and are) successful employees.

Findings

• Forty-six percent of 35-year-old men looking for work in 2018 had a conviction for a nontraffic crime as an adult. That proportion varies only slightly by race and ethnicity.

• Among 33-year-old women, the percentage of those looking for work in 2018 who had a conviction for a nontraffic offense was between 2 percent and 16 percent for Black women and between 22 percent and 52 percent for White women.

• Many of the people already working in 2018 had at least one adult conviction for a nontraffic offense (about 25 percent for men).

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2024. 6p.

By Shawn D. Bushway, Dulani Woods, Denis Agniel, David Abramson

mall: businesses whose owners have criminal records are often ineligible for federal assistance programs. One recent high-profile example of a program with such restrictions is the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which was part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. The PPP provided money for payroll, rent, mortgage, and utilities to businesses with fewer than 500 employees.

Initially, companies owned by individuals with felony criminal records were ineligible to receive funds. The restrictions were later eased to expand the number of eligible small businesses. However, the PPP restrictions, in both their strict and relaxed forms, were adopted in the absence of solid information about their effects.

How Many Small Business Owners Have Criminal Histories?

To address this knowledge gap, a RAND team

• estimated the national prevalence of small business owners with criminal records

• estimated how many small business owners, businesses, and employees were potentially affected by the initially strict PPP restrictions and how these numbers changed when the Biden administration eased restrictions

• examined prevalence in two states (Minnesota and North Carolina) to gain a more granular view of effects on particular industry sectors

• compared the state estimates with the estimates developed through the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS).

The analysis presents the first-ever national estimate of U.S. small business owners who have criminal records. The researchers used information from a data-aggregation company that collects and organizes data on business ownership and criminal history records, linking individual criminal records with information about company ownership. To obtain a more granular estimate, researchers used data from a different source to estimate prevalence numbers in two states (Minnesota and North Carolina) and used these data to examine how estimates vary by industry sector.

The national estimates (Table 1) show that 3.8 percent of small business owners have a criminal record. This percentage corresponds to approximately 1.1 million small business owners. More than 1.7 million employees are affiliated with these businesses. Within the group of business owners who have criminal histories, approximately 433,000 have a history of felonies.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2021. 4p.

by Shawn D. Bushway, Brian G. Vegetabile, Nidhi Kalra, Lee Remi, Greg Baumann

Criminal background checks are commonly used in the United States to screen people for various opportunities, including employment. The evaluations operate on a broadly accepted assumption that past behavior is a good predictor of future behavior.

Contrary to popular belief, however, most who enter the criminal justice system ultimately desist from crime. The risk of recidivism declines the longer a person is in the community and does not commit a crime. Eventually, a past criminal record is no longer predictive of future convictions.

However, most background checks do not adequately account for the time someone spends in the community without a new conviction. Not having updated information may skew the risk assessment to make people look riskier than they are, resulting in denied opportunities.

The authors describe how background checks can be improved to include information about time spent in the community, thereby more accurately reflecting risk of recidivism. They suggest that any viable risk-assessment instrument used in background checks should reset the assessment of recidivism risk to the time of the background check and not the time of conviction, as current methods derived from the criminal justice context do. The authors call this the reset principle. If models based on the reset principle are developed into tools that employers and others can use to assess recidivism risk, they may offer a more accurate way to distinguish candidates' risk of recidivism. Thus, they may offer many with criminal histories a way to demonstrate that they should be offered another chance.

Key Findings

• The reset principle states that any viable risk-assessment instrument used in background checks should reset the assessment of recidivism risk to the time of the background check and not the time of conviction, as current methods derived from the criminal justice context do.

• The authors developed a viable recidivism risk-prediction model that adheres to the reset principle based on a large set of criminal justice data from the North Carolina Department of Public Safety.

• Five considerations should guide development of models that adhere to the reset principle: proper definition of the relevant population, use of conviction data, data sets of a sufficient time span, calibration of estimates, and validation of estimates.

• Observations of the large data set showed that the majority of individuals with a conviction do not have a subsequent conviction.

• The North Carolina data showed a person's likelihood of reoffending declines rapidly as more time passes without a conviction.

• The North Carolina data showed that, after a sufficient period without a new conviction, even people initially deemed to be at highest risk for reoffending (such as those with a more extensive criminal background) transition to risk levels that appear similar to those initially at the lowest risk.

Recommendations

• Policymakers should recognize that, over an extended sampling period, most people who get convicted are not reconvicted. This provides a fact base for policymaking that differs from findings by the Bureau of Justice Statistics that articulate that, in a given cohort of people released from prison (e.g., in a given year), most people experience another conviction.

• Updates to the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures can validate a new class of models, such as those that satisfy the reset principle, providing employers a more certain defense to challenges to their employment decisions.

• Policymakers and other decisionmakers should make determinations about risk thresholds that are applied in a particular setting (e.g., an employer deciding how much recidivism risk is appropriate for a given job description) because those thresholds implicate issues of equity and fairness.

• Data quality can limit the development of successful recidivism risk models, and policymakers should consider creating data infrastructure that supports models that adhere to the reset principle.

• Policymakers should understand that exploring and stressing models that adhere to the reset principle for bias will be crucial. Model predictions may reflect the unfair systemic biases in the current criminal justice system.

• Tools that use models that adhere to the reset principle should be developed judiciously and after carefully considering many systemic factors regarding fairness. An adequate assessment of bias should include a comparison to the current state. Even an imperfect tool could provide more opportunities to candidates against whom the current system is biased than the current methods.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2022. 104p.

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

By Samuel W. Buell

Fifteen years after the largest financial scandal and economic crisis in a century, discussion of the problem of corporate crime too often borders on cliché. Endless calls from Congress, the media, the public, many scholars, and even the Justice Department itself, to recommit, over and over, to locking up more managers and executives to deter corporate wrongdoing portray the problem as relatively straightforward and blame legislative and executive failure of will. Through examination of the litigation record from over 100 prosecutions spanning the period from the 2008 financial crisis to the present, this Article presents evidence that relying on individual prosecutions to deter the most significant corporate crimes, especially those involving fraud in the financial sector, is less promising than believed. Structural features of crimes in the largest corporate organizations have made securing individual convictions and imprisonment, especially at senior levels, a chancy project for prosecutors. The Article further argues that its evidence relating both to failure rates and causes of those failures should point policymakers and enforcers beyond hackneyed calls for perp walks and prison and towards deeper thinking about a full suite of preventive tools, especially regulatory design.

Wake Forest Law Review, Vol. 59. 2024, 78pg

By Timothy Cubitt and Anthony Morgan

Risk assessment is a growing feature of law enforcement and an important strategy for identifying high-risk individuals, places and problems. Prediction models must be developed in a transparent way, using robust methods and the best available data. But attention must also be given to implementation. In practice, the data available to law enforcement from police information systems can be limited in their completeness, quality and accessibility. Prediction models need to be tested in as close to real-world settings as possible, including using less than optimal data, before they can be implemented and used. In this paper we replicate a prediction model that was developed in New South Wales to predict high-harm offending among outlaw motorcycle gangs nationally and in other states. We find that, even with a limited pool of data from a national police information system, high-harm offending can be predicted with a relatively high degree of accuracy. However, it was not possible to reproduce the same prediction accuracy achieved in the original model. Model accuracy varied between jurisdictions, as did the power of different predictive factors, highlighting the importance of considering context. There are trade-offs in real-world applications of prediction models and consideration needs to be given to what data can be readily accessed by law enforcement agencies to identify targets for prioritisation.

Research Report No. 30

Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology. 2024. 47p.

By Carina O’Reilly

Neighbourhood or community policing is receiving renewed attention internationally as a means of responding to a perceived legitimacy crisis in police forces globally. However, with budgets still tight in the post-Covid environment, understanding which activities are most effective and efficient in supporting confidence and legitimacy is vital. This article looks at the workings of London’s community-driven ward panel system, chaired by volunteers but administered by the Metropolitan Police. It reports on a study that asked how ward panels contributed to neighbourhood policing; one of very few to explore ward panels as a community policing structure. A series of observations and interviews were carried out as part of a case study of a single London borough. The study found that ward panels contributed in a number of ways, facilitating partnership working, building connections with hard-to-reach communities, and enhancing police accessibility. Significantly, several panels had begun to develop autonomy in identifying and resolving local problems. This article discusses the potential for semi-autonomous community bodies such as ward panels to contribute to the work of community or neighbourhood policing, thereby relieving demand on forces, and weighs up the risks entailed.

Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, Volume 18, 2024, page 010