By Ruth Armstrong and Shona Minson

  In this report, Drs Ruth Armstrong and Shona Minson explore the development and evaluation of women’s problem-solving courts (WPSC) in the UK and internationally. Drawing on a detailed review of existing literature, evaluations, and court observations, alongside interviews with practitioners and participants, the report examines how these courts address the unique challenges faced by women in the criminal justice system. It highlights the aspects of problem-solving courts that contribute to their effectiveness, many of which reflect principles of systemic thinking, even if not explicitly designed as systems change initiatives. This executive summary draws out the lessons from this report to consider: 1. The criminal justice problems WPSC aim to address. 2. The approaches these courts take to problem-solving. 3. What makes these approaches effective, according to current evaluations? 4. What further research and practice developments are needed to enhance outcomes and mitigate challenges. The review of WPSC literature offers insights into how justice systems can better serve all populations by addressing systemic inequities and focusing on holistic, relational approaches.  

London: Clinks, 2025. 32p.

By Rachel Monaghan and Bianca Slocombe 

  : Few studies have examined the sentencing outcomes of individuals convicted of terrorism or violent extremism-related offences in the United Kingdom (UK). Home Office data can tell us the number of persons arrested for terrorist-related activity and subsequent outcomes, such as charges and convictions by legislation, but this data does not provide a complete picture of the prosecution landscape for extremist actors in the UK. This is due in part to the existence of three distinct legal jurisdictions (England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland) and also to differences in the types of data collected and counting practices in operation. Moreover, the official data available publicly are only summary statistics, with no separate data for Scotland. This article addresses this research gap in our knowledge of the prosecution landscape for extremist actors in the UK by utilising data from an original dataset compiled by the research team from open sources on the sentencing outcomes of individuals (n=809) convicted of terrorism, terrorism-related, and violent extremism offences over a 21- year period (April 2001-March 2022). The analysis of this dataset has allowed us to test a range of hypotheses in relation to not only motivation but also offence type, gender, age, co-defendants and having multiple counts (i.e. facing multiple charges). Limitations of the study are also discussed.  

Perspectives on Terrorism, Volume XVIII, Issue 4 December 2024  

By CFE Research and Revolving Doors

  Intensive Supervision Courts (ISCs) are a problem-solving approach that diverts offenders with complex needs away from short custodial sentences and into enhanced communitybased sentences which aim to address underlying issues linked to offending. The ISC pilot is testing a model of community sentence management between probation and the courts, for certain individuals who receive a high-end Community Order (CO), or Suspended Sentence Order (SSO). Orders managed under the ISC comprise both rehabilitative and punitive measures, are delivered by a multi-agency team and are overseen by a single judge who can apply incentives to reward engagement and sanction those who are non-compliant. Key partners include the judiciary, court staff, probation, treatment providers, police, local authority, and women’s services. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) fund the pilot; most of the funding is allocated to dedicated ISC probation resource, the addition of a court co-ordinator role, and a dedicated “privilege and enabler” fund to support and recognise compliance. Privileges are intended to be flexible and creative in order to be individualised to the person on the ISC. The pilot currently comprises two substance misuse (SM) courts in Liverpool and Teesside Crown Courts, and a women’s ISC in Birmingham Magistrates’ Court, and is set to run between June 2023 and December 2024. A third SM court operating in Bristol Crown Court launched in June 2024 after this report was written. This is the interim report of an independent process evaluation of the pilot. It covers the implementation period of the pilot covering elements of best practice, challenges and early findings. It draws on evidence gathered through a survey of pilot staff and stakeholders, in-depth interviews with staff, stakeholders, and individuals on the ISC, observations of ISCs and related activities, and analysis of monitoring data.   

London: Ministry of Justice, 2025. 90p.

By Maximilien Roche  

  This paper provides an analysis of national laws relevant to whistle-blowers in the public sector across 67 ILO Member States. It studies each national law through a selection of indicators derived from reference frameworks and guidance by inter-governmental organizations (e.g. UNODC, OECD) and global civil society organizations (e.g. Transparency International, the International Bar Association). It aims at drawing a picture of each studied member state’s approach to specific questions such as which public sector employees should benefit from a statutory whistle-blower protection, under which conditions and what such protection entails. The study concludes by observing that although enacting national laws protecting whistle-blowers is a relatively recent trend, such laws present a broad diversity of approaches which contrasts with the relative consistency of institutional recommendations.  

  ILO Working Paper 135, Geneva: International Labour Organization (ILO), 2025. 65p.

By The International Labour Organization (ILO)

X Executive summary Access to labour justice is out of reach for most migrant workers who experience human and labour rights violations. The intersection of a migrant worker’s immigration status with their employment causes heightened vulnerability and an increased likelihood that a migrant worker will not be able to seek or obtain justice for the labour violations they have suffered. This can happen because of formal exclusion from labour protection or practical difficulties in accessing labour complaints mechanisms. The International Labour Organization (ILO) has long recognized the fundamental role that access to labour justice plays in protecting the rights of workers, including migrant workers. Access to labour justice is a key principle in many international labour standards, notably those on migrant workers. Furthermore, access to justice is embedded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the international human rights treaties and is recognized by the United Nations as integral to the delivery of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), including economic growth and the commitment to leave no one behind. The difficulties that migrant workers experience in accessing justice in the country of employment, including the impossibility for workers to remain in the country of employment to pursue complaints upon leaving an abusive employer, have led to increased attention on cross-border or transnational access to justice for migrant workers. In the context of this report, cross-border or transnational access to justice includes a worker’s ability to file a claim or continue with a claim in the country of employment after a worker has left (either back to their country of origin or to a third country) or to file a claim in the country of origin (for example, against the recruitment agency) for violations that have occurred or are occurring in the country of employment. Trade unions, civil society organizations and lawyers are currently assisting migrant workers with cross-border claims on an ad-hoc basis. In addition to this ad-hoc support, transnational organizations with a presence in more than one country and with a specific mandate to support migrant workers, lodge cross-border claims, operate in several migration corridors. These organizations have developed innovative models to provide legal representation and assistance to migrant workers through partnerships in the country of origin and country of employment. They have also conducted strategic litigation in response to the legal and procedural issues that prevent migrant workers from seeking justice from abroad, including by launching test cases to expand and leverage.

Geneva: ILO, 2024. 74p.  

by Carmen Robin-D’Cruz, Stephen Whitehead, Bami Jolaoso, and Lucy Slade

Women represent a relatively small proportion of people who commit crimes in England and Wales, and they tend to commit less-serious crimes and pose a lower risk of harm to the public than men.1 2 In 2021 they accounted for only 14% of those arrested and 5% of those in prison.3 However, women who offend can also be some of the most vulnerable in society. As the 2018 Ministry of Justice Female Offender Strategy notes, “Many experience chaotic lifestyles involving substance misuse, mental health problems, homelessness, and offending behaviour – these are often the product of a life of abuse and trauma.”4 Moreover, we know that criminalising women can make it harder for them to access routes out of the issues driving their offending, creating barriers to them finding or maintaining employment and accommodation and pushing them towards crisis. This is why pre-court diversion, which seeks to offer a swift and meaningful response to offending while reducing or avoiding harmful criminal justice system involvement,5 has been recognised as crucial for this cohort. As Baroness Corston observed in her landmark review of women in the justice system, women are different from men in terms of both the factors that cause them to offend and their paths to desistence.6 This means that, to effectively meet women’s needs – and to reduce the number of women entering the criminal justice system, which is the first priority of the Female Offender Strategy7 – a gender-specific approach to pre-court diversion for women is essential. This briefing aims to support practitioners seeking to develop or improve gender-specific pre-court diversion schemes. It will: • Lay out the policy landscape around women’s diversion; • Outline the evidence on why diversion is especially important for women, including: i) the need for a gender-specific approach given women’s distinct offending patterns and needs, ii) effective practice for working with women who offend and iii) outcomes from existing schemes; • Provide a case study of a current successful diversion scheme tailored for women; and • Distil this into overarching best practice principles for pre-court diversion for women. 

London: Centre for Court Innovation, 2025. 13p.  

By Naomi Delap and Liz Hogarth,

Our justice system, designed for men, is not working for women. Our prisons are full of trauma: over 60 per cent of women in prison have experienced domestic violence and more than half have experienced abuse as a child. Our prisons are bad at rehabilitating and deterring women from further offending; instead, they actively harm them and their children. Racially minoritised women are further disadvantaged: overrepresented at every point in the system and more likely than white women to be remanded and receive a sentence in the Crown Court. The human and financial cost of the system’s failure is significant.

The Labour government has announced a bold approach to respond to these issues. The creation of a Women’s Justice Board and its new strategy will, it is stated, reduce the number of women in prison and tackle the root causes of women’s offending by driving early intervention, diversion and alternatives to custody. If these outcomes are achieved, there will be less crime and fewer victims; and women, their families and their communities will benefit.

This new direction is a cause for celebration. If the initiative is to work, however, it is imperative we learn from the lessons of the past in order to avoid making the same mistakes; and look to other models for solutions in order to deliver, finally, a justice system that works for women.

London; Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, 2025. 24p.

By Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, Maria Jung, Firdaous Sbaï, Andrew S. Wilton, and Fiona Kouyoumdjian

Racially disaggregated incarceration data are an important indicator of population health and well-being, but are lacking in the Canadian context. We aimed to describe incarceration rates and proportions of Black people who experienced incarceration in Ontario, Canada during 2010 using population-based data. We used correctional administrative data for all 45,956 men and 6,357 women released from provincial correctional facilities in Ontario in 2010, including self-reported race data. Using 2006 Ontario Census data on the population size for race and age categories, we calculated and compared incarceration rates and proportions of the population experiencing incarceration by age, sex, and race groups using chi-square tests. In this first Canadian study presenting detailed incarceration rates by race, we found substantial over-representation of Black men in provincial correctional facilities in Ontario. We also found that a large proportion of Black men experience incarceration. In addition to further research, evidence-based action is needed to prevent exposure to criminogenic factors for Black people and to address the inequitable treatment of Black people within the criminal justice system.

Race and JusticeVolume 13, Issue 4, October 2023, Pages 530-54

By Barbara O'Brien & Catherine M. Grosso,

Race has long had a pernicious role in how juries are assembled in the United States. Racism—intentional, implicit, and structural—has produced disparities in how jury venires are selected, whom the court excuses for cause, and how lawyers exercise their peremptory strikes. We are, however, at a moment of reform in the United States. We see courts, legislatures, and citizens looking for opportunities to make our criminal legal system fairer.1 One aspect of the system receiving attention is jury selection, specifically race discrimination in the selection process.2 Efforts to counter discrimination range in scope from creating commissions to study the issue, to implementing rules to address Batson’s shortcomings, to outright abolishing the use of peremptory strikes.3 Much of the research on racial discrimination in jury selection has focused on lawyers, particularly their use of peremptory strikes. But the process that produces racial disparities involves multiple steps and players. Judges, in particular, play a vital role in ensuring that voir dire is conducted in a way that produces a diverse and competent jury. Fortunately, significant research on best practices in jury selection provides practical guidance to judges overseeing the jury selection process. To demonstrate how these best practices play out in the real world, this article examines two high-profile cases in light of what researchers have learned about maximizing the effectiveness of voir dire and, in particular, minimizing racial bias in jury selection. We take advantage of the live broadcasting of jury selection in two notorious cases during these times of crises and change to look closely at ways courts can mitigate racial bias in jury selection and, in the process, further the educational and information-gathering objectives of voir dire.5 In Part I, we review the research on practices that can enhance the effectiveness of voir dire and counter racial bias in jury selection, with a particular focus on the role of judges and on recent efforts to reform jury selection in several states. In doing so, we broaden the focus beyond how lawyers’ behavior in exercising peremptory strikes contributes to racial discrimination to the role of judges. In Part II, we present a brief overview of the main actors, as well as the legal and social context for our two cases: the prosecution of Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis for killing George Floyd, and the prosecution of Travis McMichael, Greg McMichael, and William Bryan in Georgia for killing Ahmaud Arbery. In Part III, we draw on that research to examine the jury selection processes in the Chauvin and McMichael/Bryan cases. We compare the processes by which those juries were selected and the judges’ approaches to voir dire by identifying attributes or initiatives that render voir dire more or less effective.

98 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 111 (2024), 25p.

By The Council on Criminal Justice

As cities across the nation grapple with effective responses to increases in violent crime, a task force co-chaired by former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and former U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy today released a report outlining a comprehensive approach for the use of lengthy prison sentences in the United States.

The report, How Long is Long Enough?, presents 14 recommendations to enhance judicial discretion in sentencing, promote individual and system accountability, reduce racial and ethnic disparities, better serve victims of crime, and increase public safety. Defining long sentences as prison terms of 10 years or longer, the panel’s proposals include:

Shifting savings from reductions in the use of long prison sentences to programs that prevent violence and address the trauma it causes individuals, families, and communities (Recommendation 1).

Allowing judges to consider all relevant facts and circumstances when imposing a long sentence, and requiring that sentencing enhancements based on criminal history are driven by individualized assessments of risk and other factors (Recommendations 6 and 8)

Providing selective “second look” sentence review opportunities and expanding access to sentence-reduction credits (Recommendations 11 and 12)

Focusing penalties in drug cases on a person’s role in a trafficking organization, rather than the amount of drug involved, (Recommendation 7)

Reducing recidivism by providing behavioral health services and other rehabilitative living conditions and opportunities in prison (Recommendations 3 and 13)

Strengthening services for all crime victims and survivors by enforcing victims’ rights, removing barriers to services, and creating restorative justice opportunities (Recommendations 2, 4, and 9)

“Some may wonder, why would we even discuss the nation’s use of long prison sentences now, amid a rise in homicide rates and legitimate public concern about public safety? Because this is exactly the time to examine what will actually make our communities safer and our system more just,” Yates and Gowdy said in a joint statement accompanying the report. “When crime rates increase, so do calls for stiffer sentencing, often without regard to the effectiveness or fairness of those sentences. Criminal justice policy should be based on facts and evidence, not rhetoric and emotion, and we should be laser-focused on strategies that make the most effective use of our limited resources.”

The report is the product of a year-long analysis by the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) Task Force on Long Sentences, which includes 16 members representing a broad range of experience and perspectives, from crime victims and survivors to formerly incarcerated people, prosecutors, defense attorneys, law enforcement, courts, and corrections. The panel examined the effects of long sentences on the criminal justice system and the populations it serves, including victims as well as people in prison, their families, and correctional staff.

Drawing on sentencing data and research, including a series of reports prepared for the Task Force, the sweeping recommendations offer a comprehensive blueprint for action on a complex and polarizing topic. According to an updated analysis by CCJ, 63% of people in state prison in 2020 were serving a sentence of 10 or more years, up from 46% in 2005, a shift due largely to a decline in people serving shorter terms. During the same period, the gap between Black and White people receiving long terms widened, from half a percentage point to 4 percentage points. Though murder defendants were the most likely to receive a long sentence, drug offenses accounted for the largest share (20%) of those admitted to prison to serve 10 or more years.

“Our nation’s reliance on long sentences as a response to violence requires us to wrestle with highly challenging questions about the relationship between crime, punishment, and public safety,” Task Force Director John Maki said. “Through their painstaking deliberations, our members rose to the challenge and produced a set of recommendations that recognize our need to advance public safety while respecting the humanity of those most affected by long prison terms.”

Washington DC: Council on Criminal Justice, 2023. 39p.

By The Center for Justice Innovation

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

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

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

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

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

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

New York: MDRC, 2024. 9p.

By Karin D. Martin

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

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

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

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

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

By Beth Karp

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

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

By Erin Jacobs Valentine, Sarah Picard

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

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

The analysis found that:

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

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

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

New York: MDRC, 2023. 77p.

By Chloe Anderson Golub, Erin Jacobs Valentine, Daron Holman

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

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

The analysis found that:

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

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

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

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

New York: MDRC, 2023. 51p.

Edited by Morgan Currie, Jeremy Knox and Callum McGregor

Data Justice and the Right to the City engages with theories of social justice and data-driven urbanism. It explores the intersecting concerns of data justice - both the harms and civic possibilities of the datafied society – and the right to the city - a call to redress the uneven distribution of resources and rights in urban contexts. These concerns are addressed through a variety of topics: digital social services, as cities use data and algorithms to administer to citizens; education, as data-driven practices transform learning and higher education; labour, as platforms create new precarities and risks for workers; and activists who seek to make creative and political interventions into these developments. This edited collection proposes frameworks for understanding the effects of data-driven technologies at the municipal scale and offers strategies for intervention by both scholars and citizens.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. 386p.

By David Grant

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

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

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

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

Cham: Springer Nature, 2024. 456p.

By Ashley N. Muchow, Agustina Laurito

In 2012, Chicago closed half of its public mental health clinics, which provide services to those in need regardless of their insurance status or ability to pay. Critics of the closures argued that they would result in service shortages and divert untreated patients to the criminal justice system. We explore this claim by examining whether and to what extent the closures increased criminal justice contact. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we compare arrests and mental health transports in block groups located within a half mile of clinics that closed to those equi-distant from clinics that remained open. While we find evidence that police-initiated mental health transports increased following the closures, we do not observe similar changes in arrests.

Policy implications

Chicago's mental health clinic closures remain a contentious issue to this day. Our results suggest that the shuttered clinics were meeting a need that, when left unmet, created conditions for mental health emergencies. While the closures do not appear to have routed untreated patients to the county jail, they increased police contact and, subsequently, transportation to less specialized emergency care facilities. Our findings demonstrate the need to strengthen health care access, crisis prevention, and the mental health safety net to preclude police from acting as mental health responders of last resort.

Criminology & Public Policy Volume 24, Issue 1 Feb 2025