By Emily Ryo, Ian Peacock, Weston Ley, and Christopher Levesque

 Whether and to what extent racial minorities experience harsher treatment or face worse outcomes in court are questions of fundamental importance for any justice system. Questions of racial inequality are especially salient in the context of removal proceedings that are triggered by immigrants’ criminal history. Many individuals in crime-based removal proceedings are immigrants of color who face a host of legal disadvantages that are tantamount to double penalties for the same crime for which they have already been punished through the criminal justice system. This Article offers, for the first time, systematic empirical analyses of crime-based removal proceedings decided between 1998 and 2023 in U.S. immigration courts. Our analyses produced three key findings. First, our results show that double penalties for immigrants in crime-based removal proceedings are large and growing. Second, there are significant racial disparities in the rate at which immigrants are released from detention and the rate at which they are ordered removed from the United States. Specifically, Hispanic immigrants with drug-related charges and Black immigrants with domestic violence or firearms charges face significantly worse outcomes than their counterparts. Third, non-white immigrants fare better when their presiding judges are of the same, rather than different, race. For white immigrants, however, they generally fare better than non-white immigrants regardless of the presiding judges’ race, and this white favoritism is more pronounced among some non-white judges than white judges. These findings have important implications for scholarship on the continuing salience of race and ethnicity in criminal and civil proceedings despite facially race-neutral laws, as well as policymaking aimed at advancing racial equality in our justice system. 

Minnesota Law Review, v. 109, 2025

By David Abrams and  Priyanka Goonetilleke

Each year, millions of Americans rely on public defenders to fulfill their Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Despite being the linchpin of the criminal justice system, public defense remains both underfunded and understudied. This article provides empirical analysis to contribute to a critical question: How should public defender systems be structured? Criminal justice advocates, scholars, and the American Bar Association strongly favor vertical representation in public defense. Under this model, a single public defender represents a defendant throughout their case, from initial appearance through sentencing. The alternative approach—horizontal representation—operates like an assembly line: Different attorneys handle each stage of a case, from preliminary hearings to pretrial conferences to trials. The preference for vertical representation stems from the intuitive belief that continuity of representation improves outcomes for defendants. However, no prior empirical work has tested this assumption. Using a natural experiment created by the Defender Association of Philadelphia’s transition from a fully horizontal representation system to a partially vertical one, we find no evidence that increasing attorney continuity improves defendant outcomes. These findings have significant implications for how public defender offices should allocate their scarce resources. While vertical representation is considered by many as the ideal, our results cast doubt on whether the additional resources and logistical challenges relative to horizontal representation are justified, given the current reality of underfunded public defense. As jurisdictions nationwide grapple with a chronic lack of resources for public defense, this article provides crucial empirical evidence to inform decisions about how best to uphold defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

New York University Law Review No. 5 (forthcoming), Northwestern Law & Econ Research Paper No. 25-05, Northwestern Public Law Research Paper No. 25-22, U of Penn, Inst for Law & Econ Research Paper No. 25-10, 

By Stacy Caplow

Everyone agrees: Immigration law is in crisis.  One aspect of immigration law is particularly intransigent: the impact of a criminal conviction on lawful permanent residents [LPRs]. In combination, immigration statutes and case law construct an almost inescapable box for LPRs whose movements, security, and liberty are threatened the moment they step into a criminal court. A conviction can prevent international travel, thwart naturalization, mandate detention and, worst of all, result in deportation. A conviction might cause problems at a port of entry, at a USCIS service center, at a prison or, most alarmingly, after an ICE knock on the front door years after the conviction and even the completion of the sentence. While the immigration consequences of a conviction are hydra-headed, the focus of this paper will be on LPRs facing removal who stand to lose “all that makes life worth living.”[1]

Sometimes the removal process moves on an express track—a predestined outcome with no possible relief. The more fortunate LPR may be able to delay, and a few may even avoid deportation, but all pay a steep fare of time, anxiety, uncertainty and often a loss of freedom. However long the trip or wherever its final destination, in many cases it is difficult or even impossible to justify the painful journey which may cause long term disruption, or ultimate exile from family, employment and community.

Scholars, legislators, and advocates have focused on the unfairness of many harsh immigration laws, but the search for solutions is frustrating given the unlikelihood of statutory changes at the federal level, particularly for noncitizens impacted by the criminal legal system. There have been many proposals and recommendations as well as a few notable initiatives, but these steps offer either imperfect or deficient protections for LPRs.

If federal law is intractable, what can give?  This paper argues that state legislative initiatives provide opportunities to loosen the stranglehold of federal immigration law.  Some states already have passed laws designed specifically to help immigrants avoid immigration consequences. These efforts to safeguard Lawful Permanent Residents from deportation could be adopted more widely or expanded to provide even more protections for any noncitizens caught in the criminal legal system.

 Brooklyn Law School, Legal Studies Paper No. 793, 

By Scott L. Cummings

This Article examines the development and rapid innovation of the autocratic legal playbook in America: the strategic blueprint used to destroy democracy through law. It argues that this playbook, with roots in autocratizing countries abroad, is now being implemented with brutal efficiency in the United States through the unprecedented abuse of executive power. The Article analyzes how autocracy has taken hold of the world’s oldest democracy with such velocity and examines what it means for the future of democracy around the world. It begins by defining the autocratic legal playbook as the roadmap for using law to undermine democratic guardrails that keep the executive within constitutional limits. The Article traces the evolution of the American playbook from Hungary’s autocratic transformation after 2010, to President Trump’s failed effort to overturn the 2020 election, to Project 2025, to the Trump 2.0 strategy of “flooding the zone” with executive orders. The Article’s central contribution is to reveal the operating principles and tactical innovations of the American playbook—premised on the subversion of truth and the conflation of legitimate policy change with illegitimate democratic attacks—while demonstrating how these principles are being systematically mobilized to target and disable key independent institutions that check executive power: government legal offices, law firms and the bar, courts, administrative agencies, universities, civil society, and the media. Because the core of autocratic legalism is creating the appearance of legality to justify attacks on the rule of law, the Article pays special attention to the legal profession, showing how actions against lawyers and courts are designed to achieve the ultimate autocratic objective: controlling the authority to define law. The Article concludes by considering how to “reverse engineer” the playbook, drawing on critical lessons from how democracies have died, and been resuscitated, in other countries to outline steps for saving American democracy in this watershed moment—before it is too late.

UCLA Law Review, Forthcoming, UCLA School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 25-31, 

By Everytown Research & Policy

In October 2022, William Hale and Frank Allison drove alongside each other on US Highway 1 in Hialeah, Florida. A traffic dispute grew more dangerous as both men began driving erratically. When Hale threw a water bottle at the other car, Allison retaliated with a gun, firing a shot that hit Hale’s 5-year-old daughter. In response, Hale fired all of the bullets in his handgun, striking Allison’s 14-year-old daughter. Though both men were initially charged with attempted murder, prosecutors dropped the charges against the man who fired first. Under Florida’s so-called “Stand Your Ground” legal defense law, the thrown water bottle justified responding with deadly force, leading to a child being shot.1 In the end, with two girls wounded in a road rage tragedy, the man who started the shootout was protected by a distortion of self-defense that allows people to shoot first and ask questions later.

New York: Everytown Research and Policy, 2025. 9p.

By Thomas James Vaughan Williams, Calli Tzani & Maria Ioannou

There has been a noticeable rise in the number of mass shootings occurring in the US over the last decade with these attacks often being committed by a lone actor. This article aims to explore this, focusing on the time suspension between when the lone actor acquires their firearm and when they commit their attack. The cases involved all occurred in the US and all perpetrators obtained their firearms legally. The results found that, on average, lone actors obtained their firearms 54 days before they committed their mass shooting. Implications, limitations and future research are discussed in detail.

Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 1–9

By David Benjamin Joyce 

On October 25, 2023, Robert Card executed 18 civilians in mass shootings at Just-In-Time Recreation and Schemengees Bar and Grille Restaurant in Lewiston, Maine. Three months before the rampage, Card spent 14 days in a New York psychiatric hospital. His violent tendencies were known to family members, the Army Reserves, and law enforcement officials in Maine. Despite the warning signs, Card never faced a firearm prohibition. He maintained control of a high-powered Ruger SFAR rifle, which he turned on victims ranging in age from 14 to 76. The Lewiston tragedy brought renewed focus on Maine’s risk-based firearm removal statute. Phase One of this dissertation examines barriers and facilitators to use of Maine’s statute from the perspective of law enforcement officers, prosecutors, medical providers, and researchers in Maine. Phase Two of this dissertation reviews risk-based restriction statutes in three comparison states – Connecticut, Maryland, and Vermont – and examines implementation outcomes. Semi-structured interviews with stakeholders form the basis for the qualitative data in this study. The responses led to identification of key barriers and facilitators to effective implementation of risk-based firearm statutes. From these emerging themes, this dissertation offers eight recommendations to improve Maine’s risk-based firearm removal program. A plan for change is presented using an adaption of the Overseas Development Institute’s RAPID approach. The plan for change includes recommendations for legislative modification by the Maine legislature and implementation strategies to be employed by local stakeholder groups. Although no policy can eliminate the risk of gun violence, adoption of the recommendations in this dissertation will reduce the risk that the tragic events of October 25, 2023, repeat in the State of Maine.

Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2024. 140p.

By Elizabeth J. Davis, and Jennifer Karberg, Brittni Lambing, Ronald Frandsen, and Joseph Durso

This report presents statistics on the number of applications for background checks for firearm transfers and permits received by the FBI and state and local checking agencies in 2021 and on the number and percentage of applications that were denied. It also describes the types of permits or checks used by each state, the number of denials issued by these agencies, and the reasons for denial. The report is the 19th in a series produced by BJS. 

Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2025. 29p.

By Rose Kim, Elizabeth Wagner, Paul Nestadt, Nandita Somayaji, Josh Horwitz, and Cassandra Crifasi

46,728 people died from gun violence in the U.S. in 2023. Each day, an average of 128 people died from gun violence—one death every 11 minutes. Disturbingly, gun suicides reached an all-time high in both the total number of deaths and the overallrate. Overall, firearms remained the leading cause of death for young people 1 to 17 for the past four years, accounting for more deaths thancar crashes, overdoses, or cancers. In 2023, there were 2,566 gun deaths among young people including 118 from ages 1–4, 116 from ages 5–9, 530 from ages 10–14, and 1,802 from ages 15–17. While firearms are the leading cause of death overall for young people ages 1 to 17, they are among the leading causes, but not always the top cause, for some individual youth age groups. Gun suicides have accounted for the majority of all gun deaths each year since 1995. Gun suicides have increased in the last three years, while gun homicides have declined. In this year’s report, we examined the rise of gun suicides, their disproportionate impact on vulnerable populations, and policy recommendations to address the gun suicide epidemic. For more information on public health interventions, please see the companion piece to this report, From Crisis to Action: Public Health Recommendations for Firearm Suicide Prevention. While the burden of gun violence in the U.S. remains high, there are evidence-based, equitable solutions to save lives. These solutions are supported by most people, including gun owners. Despite this broad support, many policymakers have been unwilling to heed the evidence and enact policies that will save lives. Each year, it is our missionto provide policymakers and the public accurate and up-to-date data on gun fatalities and illustrate the enormous toll gun violence has on our country.This report is an update to GunViolence in the United States 2022: Examining the Burden Among Children and Teens. It uses firearm mortality data listed on death certificates that are provided to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and made available through the CDC WONDER Underlying Cause of Death database.The finalized data for 2023 was made available in January 2025. The lag in data availability makes it challenging to understand the burden of gun violence in real time; however, understanding the magnitude of this issue, even with the time lag, is essential to inform public health interventions to reduce violence.   

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins Center for Suicide Prevention. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.2025. 24p.

 By Maria‑Paz Sandoval , Maria de Almeida Vau , John Solaas and Luano Rodrigues

This systematic review explores the impact of deepfakes on the criminal justice system. Deepfakes, a sophisticated form of AI-generated synthetic media, have raised concerns due to their potential to compromise the integrity of evidence and judicial processes. The review aims to assess the extent of this threat, guided by a research question: (1) What threats do deepfakes pose to the criminal justice system?The review was conducted using databases such as Web of Science, ProQuest, Scopus, and Google Scholar, focusing on publications from 2021 to 2022. Search terms were optimised for sensitivity and specificity, and articles were chosen based on criteria including relevance to deepfake threats and deepfake detection research. The meth‑ odology included rigorous screening processes using tools like Zotero and Rayyan.ai, with an emphasis on inter-rater reliability to ensure objective selection of studies. Results The search initially identified 1355 articles, with 1200 articles screened for eligibility after duplicates were removed. For the threat of deepfakes to the criminal justice system, 110 studies were selected for full-text review, and 44 were included in the final analysis. Key fndings include identification of primary crime categories linked to deepfakes, such as pornography, fraud, and information manipulation, alongside challenges like trust erosion in institutions and evidence falsification issues. Conclusions Deepfakes significantly threaten the criminal justice system, highlighting the necessity for advanced detection methods. These fndings underscore the importance of continued research and development in deep‑ fake detection technologies and strategies for legal safeguards and broader implications on policy, national security, and democratic processes.

Crime Science, (2024) 13:41

By Min Su & Christian Buerger

The political budget cycle theory has extensively documented how politicians manipulate policies during election years to gain an electoral advantage. This paper focuses on county sheriffs, crucial but often neglected local officials and investigates their opportunistic political behavior during elections. Using a panel data set covering 57 California county governments over four election cycles, we find compelling evidence of traffic enforcement policy manipulation by county sheriffs during election years. Specifically, a county’s per capitat traffic fines revenue is 9% lower in the election than in nonelection years. The magnitude of the political cycle intensifies when an election is competitive. Our findings contribute to the political budget cycle theory and provide timely insights into the ongoing debate surrounding law enforcement reform and local governments’ increasing reliance on fines and fees revenue.

American Journal of Political Science Volume 69, Issue 1, 2024

By Brett Hollenbeck, Poet Larsen, and Davide Proserpio

Following a 2018 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, 38 states have legalized sports gambling. We study how this policy has impacted consumer financial health using a large and comprehensive dataset on consumer financial outcomes. We use data from the University of California Consumer Credit Panel, containing credit rating agency data for a representative sample of roughly 7 million U.S. consumers. We exploit the staggered rollout of legal sports betting across U.S. states and evaluate two treatment effects: the presence of any legal sports betting in a state and the specific presence of online or mobile access to betting. Our main finding is that overall consumers' financial health is modestly deteriorating as the average credit score in states that legalize sports gambling decreases by roughly 0.3%. The decline in credit score is associated with changes in indicators of excessive debt. We find a substantial increase in average bankruptcy rates, debt sent to collections, use of debt consolidation loans, and auto loan delinquencies. We also find that financial institutions respond to the reduced creditworthiness of consumers by restricting access to credit. These results are substantially stronger for states that allow online sports gambling compared to states that restrict access to in-person betting. Together, these results indicate that the ease of access to sports gambling is harming consumer financial health by increasing their level of debt. 

Unpublished Paper, 2024.

By Jason Eligh   

Globally, support for drug policy reform has grown over the past 10 years. Even as the drug prohibition consensus-keepers in Vienna have voted for yet another 10-year extension to their still unsuccessful 20- year strategy for global drug control at the March 2019 Commission on Narcotic Drugs High Level Review meeting, a reform movement among global member states has been gaining credibility and strength. The United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Drugs (UNGASS) meeting of member states in New York in 2016 was a soft watershed moment in the history of global drug policy. It was significant in its revelation that the global consensus on drug prohibition that had existed for 55 years now appears to be an openly fractured and vulnerable accord, one that was – and continues to be in a state of flux. UNGASS 2016 demonstrated that political space had opened for regional and national reflections on the nature of illicit drugs and countries’ domestic responses. By extension, the fragmenting of global drug policy’s ‘Vienna Consensus’ has also provided an opportunity for Africa. The continent could unify and play a leading role in shaping and implementing a new international drug policy approach. Such an approach could be grounded in the human rights, health and social development objectives of its continental Agenda 2030 goal of sustainable development, within the wider context of its Agenda 2063 goal of ‘an integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa’.1 The purpose of this report is to reflect on the changing drug policy environment in Africa, particularly in the period leading up to and after the seminal UNGASS 2016 meeting of member states. It also examines the politics of continental drug policy prohibition and reform in the context of the growing global movement to embrace drug policy alternatives to the once universal approach of strict prohibition. Observations and recommendations are made regarding incorporating drug policy reform in the context of achieving developmental success with respect to the continental Agenda 2030 and Agenda 2063 goals  

ENACT (ENACT is implemented by the Institute for Security Studies in partnership with INTERPOL and the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.)2019. 76p.

By Dave Bewley-Taylor, Tom Blickman, and Martin Jelsma 

Cannabis has long been a substance drawing much attention within the international drug control regime, a system currently based upon the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. Today the regime landscape is changing. Faced with particular challenges and democratic decisions, a number of jurisdictions are moving beyond merely tolerant approaches to the possession of cannabis for personal use to legally regulating markets for the drug. In November 2012 voters within the U.S. states of Colorado and Washington passed ballot initiatives to tax and regulate cannabis cultivation, distribution and consumption for non-medical purposes. Just over a year later, Uruguay legislated state regulation of the entire chain of the domestic cannabis market for medical, industrial and recreational use. These policy shifts go well beyond the permitted prohibitive boundaries of the UN drug control conventions. They represent a break with an historical trajectory founded on dubious science and political imperatives. And they have thrown the global regime into a state of crisis, as this report will argue. This publication is a joint effort of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam and the Global Drug Policy Observatory at Swansea University. Research has been going on in various stages for about two years, and interim results were presented at the Seventh Annual Conference of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy at the Universidad de los Andes, in Bogotá, in May 2013 and further discussed in an expert seminar on cannabis regulation in October 2013 in Amsterdam. Many academics, government officials and experts from NGOs and international agencies have provided useful comments on earlier drafts, but needless to say the end result is the sole responsibility of the authors. This final report will be first presented at the 57th session of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) in Vienna, 13-21 March 2014  

Amsterdam: Transnational Institute / Global Drug Policy Observatory, 
March 2014, 88p.

By Sheldon Glueck (Author), Graeme Newman (Introduction)

Sheldon Glueck’s Probation and Criminal Justice (1931), a collection of papers from world wide experts, stands as one of the earliest systematic examinations of probation within the American penal system. Published at a time when probation was still consolidating its place as a regularized judicial practice, the book sought both to describe the institution as it existed and to evaluate its possibilities as a rational and humane alternative to imprisonment. Glueck, already well known as a criminologist and later famed for his longitudinal studies on criminal careers, approached probation with the same empirical rigor and critical balance that defined his scholarship.
The work provides a historical account of probation’s origins, tracing its roots to the nineteenth-century innovations of John Augustus in Boston, and situates its emergence within the broader reform movements of the Progressive Era. By the early 1930s, probation had spread widely across American jurisdictions, yet it lacked the uniformity, resources, and professional standards necessary for consistent success. Glueck’s central argument was therefore twofold: probation held genuine promise as an instrument of rehabilitation and social reintegration, but its potential could only be realized through careful administration, adequately trained personnel, and an honest reckoning with its limitations.
To read Probation and Criminal Justice today is to encounter both a historical document and a surprisingly contemporary critique. The themes Glueck emphasized—the professionalization of probation officers, the dangers of excessive caseloads, the necessity of balancing rehabilitation with accountability—are still at the heart of debates over community supervision. The persistence of these concerns is a testament both to the enduring complexity of probation as a penal tool and to the prescience of Glueck’s analysis.
In this sense, the book is more than a relic of early twentieth-century criminology. It is a reminder that penal reform, however well intentioned, remains fragile unless supported by adequate resources, clear objectives, and sustained public commitment. Probation has advanced since Glueck’s time in terms of reach, sophistication, and legitimacy, yet the paradoxes he identified continue to shape its practice.
For scholars, practitioners, and students of criminal justice, this volume offers not only a window into the early years of probation but also a mirror reflecting ongoing challenges in community-based corrections. Glueck’s careful and critical study thus retains its relevance: a classic text that still speaks to the unfinished project of building a fair, effective, and humane system of criminal justice.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2025. 211 p.

Narrating Law across CivilizationsBy Hiroaki Terada

This open access book explores how China had already established political and economic dualisms—political by the Common Era and economic by the 10th century—long before the West developed its dualism of state and society in the 17th and 18th centuries. In traditional China, social relations were shaped through market-like contractual means, with land freely traded and disputes resolved in state courts. Yet, the nature of ownership, contracts, and trials differed profoundly from modern Western practices. This book tackles two key themes. First, it provides a detailed analysis of rights, laws, and trials in Qing China, covering family law, land law, court systems, and statutory law. Second, it reinterprets traditional Chinese legal concepts independently of modern Western frameworks, offering a fresh perspective on legal history. By situating Traditional Chinese Law within the broader context of Traditional Western Law and Modern Law, the book presents a groundbreaking model for comparative legal history. Written by a renowned legal historian, this well-grounded and profound work ingeniously integrates legal historical research with theoretical analysis. Through insightful interpretations utilizing Qing legal documents, it represents a significant contribution to the study of legal history in recent years. This book is of interest to historians, legal scholars, sociologists, and sinologists, offering valuable insights into the unique characteristics of the traditional Chinese legal order.

Singapore: Springer Nature, 2025. 360p.

By  Anne-Marie McAlinden, Marie Keenan, James Gallen

This book critically examines justice responses to non-recent institutional abuses across the island of Ireland, comprising Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland within an international context, drawing on insights from interdisciplinary literature (eg law, political science, history, sociology, criminology, and social policy) and extensive primary research. Utilising the island of Ireland, North and South, as its primary case study, it comparatively examines the dominant forms of justice responses to non-recent institutional abuses, including prosecutions and civil litigation, inquiries, redress, and apologies in both Anglophone and non-Anglophone countries. Drawing on the literature related to restorative justice, transitional justice, and transformative justice, the book advances a re-imagined hybrid approach to justice which draws on conventional and innovative justice approaches and seeks to bridge the accountability gap between seeking and achieving justice for non-recent institutional abuses. The critical analysis of justice responses is set against the complexities of the legal, historical, cultural, institutional, and political realities of addressing non-recent institutional abuses. In including the voices of multiple key stakeholders and their experiences of justice processes—victim/survivors as well as church and state actors—in a unique project, it considers how we might reframe discourses on accountability and responsibility, improve justice processes at the level of praxis, and increase engagement between victim/survivors and institutional actors in order to better address the complexities of non-recent institutional abuses and improve justice processes and outcomes.

Oxford, UK: New York: Oxford University Press, 2025. 422p.

By Tomas Salem

This book offers a unique look into the world of policing and the frontline of Brazil’s war on drugs. It analyzes the tensions produced by attempts to modernize Rio de Janeiro’s public security policies. Since the return of democracy in 1985, Rio's police forces have waged war against armed drug gangs based in the city’s favelas, casting the people who live in these communities as internal enemies. In preparation for the Olympics in 2016, the police sought to ‘pacify’ the favelas and their populations through the establishment of Pacifying Police Units (UPPs) in many of the city’s favela communities. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with the police, this book follows officers across the institutional hierarchy in their daily activities, on patrol, and during training. Tracing the genealogies of contemporary forms of policing-as-warfare through the notion of ‘colonial war’ and ‘cultural war’, it highlights the material and ideational dimensions of war as a cosmological force that shapes Brazilian social relations, subjectivities, landscapes, economies, and politics. It draws on the Deleuzian notion of ‘war machine and state dynamics’ to show how practices of elimination co-exist with attempts to transform favela territories and their people and analyzes the link between the moral universe of policing and right-wing populism in Brazil. Through rich and nuanced ethnography, it offers a critical perspective on militarized policing and 21st century forms of authoritarianism.

Cham:; Springer Nature, 2024. 330p

By Phoebe Donnelly, Sabrina Karim, DeAnne Roark, and Muhibbur Rahman

Sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) by UN peacekeepers continues to undermine the organization’s legitimacy and effectiveness. While training on SEA is required for all UN personnel deploying to UN peace operations, there is little data available on how effective these trainings are. This paper presents the first quantitative analysis of SEA training’s effectiveness, using original survey data from more than 4,000 uniformed personnel in ten countries.

The analysis reveals that SEA training has a significant positive impact on attitudes and knowledge about SEA. Personnel who completed pre-deployment SEA training were substantially more likely to recognize that SEA would violate their national policy, to consider SEA to be serious, and to express willingness to report SEA. The analysis also found that UN deployment increases the likelihood that personnel will receive various gender-related trainings beyond SEA. However, despite pre-deployment SEA training being mandatory, a significant proportion of deployed peacekeepers reported never receiving this training.

Although the quantitative analysis shows positive links between SEA training and views on SEA and reporting, the paper also explores limitations in current approaches to SEA training. Interviews and workshops with training experts underscored the need for SEA trainings to contextualize and apply the material rather than focus on prescriptive instruction. SEA training also needs to focus on behavioral and cultural change rather than mere policy compliance. The paper concludes that while current SEA training shows measurable positive effects on attitudes and knowledge, improvements in delivery methods and enforcement of training requirements are necessary to maximize this training’s effectiveness and create lasting institutional change.

New York: International Peace Institute, 2025. 16p.

By The HM Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate (UK)

2.1. HM Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate (HMCPSI) last inspected the quality and standard of legal decision making in Rape and Serious Sexual Offences (RASSO) casework in 2021-22 when conducting our baseline Area inspection programme. A composite report, summarising the themes, was published in September 20231 which found that pre-charge reviews in RASSO cases required improvement as our file examination showed that Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) Areas met the standard for the quality of case analysis in their pre-charge decision reviews in just over half. 2.2. Prior to that we had conducted a joint inspection with His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS), considering the response, decision-making and effectiveness of the police and CPS at every stage of a rape case2. Before that, we published a report in 2019 that specifically focused on rape cases3. 2.3. There has been a long-standing concern regarding rape prosecutions and convictions. A stark drop in the number of rape cases referred by the police to the CPS and the volume of rape cases being charged led to recognition that significant work was needed to radically change and reverse this decline. 2.4. The CPS and police have made the investigation and prosecution of rape cases a strategic priority and there is an ongoing drive to improve the handling of this important and sensitive area of casework. Adult rape flagged4 caseloads have continued to increase nationally. The volume of live adult rape caseloads (charged cases) in the second quarter of 2024-25 (July to September 2024) was 3,813, compared to 3,263 for the second quarter of 2023-24 (July to September 2023). This is a 16.8% increase. 2.5. Our business plan for 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025 included a thematic inspection of the CPS to assess the quality of legal decision making in rape cases and compliance with casework standards and expectations following the roll out of the national operating model (NOM) for the prosecution of adult rape cases. 2.6. We focused this inspection on the quality of early advice and pre-charge decision casework in adult rape cases following implementation of elements of the CPS adult rape NOM designed to improve the consistency and quality of decision making at this early stage of the prosecution process. 2.7. We intend to carry out further inspections of other aspects of rape casework following implementation of the NOM. These inspections are included in our 2025-26 Business Plan5 and will include an examination and assessment of the service and support provided by the CPS to victims of rape, and an assessment of casework quality, progression and trial readiness for rape cases that have proceeded beyond the pre-charge decision stage. 2.8. We recognise the importance of capturing the voice of rape victims when considering and assessing the CPS’s approach and handling of rape prosecutions. However, because we have focused this inspection on the early advice and pre-charge stage, it is difficult to assess this aspect of victim experience in isolation. Given our proposed approach to carrying out a series of inspections focused on specific aspects of the prosecution process, we intend to engage with victims and third sector groups in our planned inspection around the quality of service and support offered to victims of rape so that we can explore their experiences of the impact of the NOM in more detail throughout the prosecution process. 2.9. The CPS, at both a national strategic level and at an Area level, is working hard to drive improvement in the quality of rape casework. It has committed, and continues to commit, to this sensitive area of work by strengthening its partnership with the police to improve communication, by providing ongoing training and new guidance for its prosecutors to reflect changes in the law and assist them in understanding the complexities of rape and by increasing the scrutiny of decision-making in rape cases. 2.10. We found Area staff working on adult rape cases (and other serious sexual offences) are committed, passionate and enthusiastic about improving performance and are striving to build strong cases to achieve the best possible outcome for victims. However, there was an acceptance amongst many we spoke to that a degree of inexperience across the cadre of prosecutors within RASSO units, and the competing demands and high caseloads, sometimes meant that the quality of work at the early advice and pre-charge decision stage suffered as prosecutors struggled to devote the time required to each case. 2.11. We found that the closer working relationships that have formed and developed between local RASSO prosecutors and police investigators following implementation of the NOM has been positive, with some encouraging aspects to the quality of decision making in the early stages of adult rape casework. However, we also found aspects that require further work to ensure that strong cases are being built from the outset and that these sensitive and often evidentially challenging cases are given the best possible chance of achieving a successful outcome.     

HMCPSI Publication No. CP001 - 1325  2025. 136p.