By the National Research Council

Eyewitness identifications play an important role in the investigation and prosecution of crimes, but they have also led to erroneous convictions. In the fall of 2013, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation called upon the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to assess the state of research on eyewitness identification and, when appropriate, make recommendations. In response to this request, the NAS appointed an ad hoc study committee that we have been privileged to co-chair. The committee’s review analyzed relevant published and unpublished research, external submissions, and presentations made by various experts and interested parties. The research examined fell into two general categories: (1) basic research on vision and memory and (2) applied research directed at the specific problem of eyewitness identification. Basic research has progressed for many decades, is of high quality, and is largely definitive. Research of this category identifies principled and insurmountable limits of vision and memory that inevitably affect eyewitness accounts, bear on conclusions regarding accuracy, and provide a broad foundation for the committee’s recommendations. Through its review, the committee came to recognize that applied eyewitness identification research has identified key variables affecting the accuracy of eyewitness identifications. This research has been instrumental in informing law enforcement, the bar, and the judiciary of the frailties of eyewitness identification testimony. Such past research has appropriately identified the variables that may affect an individual’s ability to make an accurate identification. However, given the complex nature of eyewitness identification, the practical difficulties it poses for experimental research, and the still ongoing evolution of statistical procedures in the field of eyewitness identification research, there remains at the time of this review substantial uncertainty about the effect and the interplay of these variables on eyewitness identification. Nonetheless, a range of practices has been validated by scientific methods and research and represents a starting place for efforts to improve eyewitness identification procedures. In this report, the committee offers recommendations on how law enforcement and the courts may increase the accuracy and utility of eyewitness identifications. In addition, the committee identifies areas for future research and for collaboration between the scientific and law enforcement communities. We are indebted to those who addressed the committee and to those who submitted materials to the committee, and we are particularly indebted to the members of the committee. These individuals devoted untold hours to the review of materials, meetings, conference calls, analyses, and report writing. This report is very much the result of the enormous contributions of an engaged community of scholars and practitioners who reached their findings and recommendations after many vigorous and thoughtful discussions. We also would like to thank the project staff, Karolina Konarzewska, Steven Kendall, Arlene Lee, and Anne-Marie Mazza, and editor Susanna Carey for their dedication to the project and to the work of the committee.

National Research Council. 2014. Identifying the Culprit: Assessing Eyewitness Identification. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

By Holly Rhodes

The Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a workshop in April 2018 to examine how the criminal justice system affects the fundamental status of people as members of society and to consider next steps for research, practice, and policy for the field. Ruth Peterson (Ohio State University), chair of the workshop planning committee, stated that the goal of the workshop was to find common ground to work toward a criminal justice system that avoids social exclusion through consequences “so severe or lasting as to violate one's fundamental status as a member of society.” Instead, she said, the system should reflect the principles of citizenship and social justice with a “fair distribution of rights, resources and opportunities.” Robert Crutchfield (University of Washington), member of the planning committee, added that the workshop was specifically designed to explore the reasons for the disparate experiences of individuals involved with the criminal justice system by race, ethnicity, and gender, the mechanisms that cause them to persist, and what can be done through policy and practice to minimize those differences. Participants—including researchers, policy makers, and advocates for victims and offenders—discussed issues in five areas: the role of criminal justice in social exclusion; patterns of inequality in criminal justice; collateral sanctions of the criminal justice system; special concerns for youth and young adult populations; and next steps for research, policy, and practice.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2018. The Criminal Justice System and Social Exclusion: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender: Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

By Steve Olson and Karen M. Anderson

The United States is home to 4.4 percent of the world’s population, yet it has 21.3 percent of the world’s individuals experiencing incarceration (Walmsley, 2015). Though the total is down from its peak in 2008, in 2016, 1.5 million people were in prison and 630,000 were in jails—a seven-fold increase since the 1970s. The high rate of incarceration in the United States is a major contributor to the nation’s health inequities. African Americans are more than three times as likely to be incarcerated as whites, and incarceration rates are also elevated for Hispanics, Native Americans, and other population groups compared with the general population. In addition, people who are incarcerated differ from the general U.S. population in terms of poverty levels, geographic origins, gender, and a wide range of health indicators. Health equity, then, intersects with incarceration, reentry, and community health. To examine the connection between incarceration and health inequities, the Roundtable on the Promotion of Health Equity held a workshop on June 6, 2018, titled The Effects of Incarceration and Reentry on Community Health and Well-Being. As part of its commitment to hold workshops in parts of the United States that are particularly affected by the issues being discussed, the roundtable held the workshop at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, which has one of the highest rates of incarceration of any major American city. It is important to note that the programs and models that are described in this Proceedings of a Workshop are all Philadelphia based, as this is where the workshop took place. As Antonia Villarruel, Margaret Bond Simon Dean of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and chair of the roundtable, said in her opening remarks, holding the workshop at the University of Pennsylvania “represents the university’s commitment, as well as the school’s commitment, to working with vulnerable populations, health equity, and social justice.” Winston Wong of Kaiser Permanente also emphasized the place-based nature of the roundtable’s work. “We look at people and we look at communities,” he said. “We look at how individuals who are part of the fabric of our communities are impacted. And we look at assets as much as we look at barriers and obstacles.”

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. The Effects of Incarceration and Reentry on Community Health and Well-Being: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

By Committee on the Future of Voting

During the 2016 presidential election, America's election infrastructure was targeted by actors sponsored by the Russian government. Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy examines the challenges arising out of the 2016 federal election, assesses current technology and standards for voting, and recommends steps that the federal government, state and local governments, election administrators, and vendors of voting technology should take to improve the security of election infrastructure. In doing so, the report provides a vision of voting that is more secure, accessible, reliable, and verifiable.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2018. Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

By Richard Rosenfeld and Amanda Grigg

The criminal legal system in the United States has vast reach. Over 75 million American adults have an arrest or criminal record of some kind and 4.3 million remain under community supervision. Over 600,000 people were released from state and federal prisons each year between 2000 and 2019 with the hope that they will successfully reintegrate into their communities. Their success or failure is used as an indicator of our criminal legal system’s effectiveness. Tracking the success of those released from prison can tell us whether the criminal legal system is fulfilling its mission and whether public investments are being put to effective use. The successful reintegration of those released from prison is also often used as an indicator of public safety. In fact, the National Institute of Corrections describes successful reintegration as a “critical aspect of correctional missions to improve public safety.” Nevertheless, while evaluations of success among individuals released from prison affect perceptions of the performance of our institutions and the safety of our communities, our attempts to evaluate success face serious limitations.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. The Limits of Recidivism: Measuring Success After Prison. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

By Bruce Western, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Yamrot Negussie, and Emily Backes

A large research literature has documented substantial racial and ethnic disparities at each stage of the criminal justice process. Black American, Latino, and Native American people have all been found to experience relatively high rates of arrest, pretrial detention, incarceration, and community supervision compared to White people. At the same time, community violence poses a significant risk to health and well-being for disadvantaged communities. Researchers have wrestled with the complex relationship between racial disparities in crime and disparities in criminal justice involvement. Racial inequality can drive disparities in both crime and system involvement; racial differences in criminal victimization, offending, and incarceration can further exacerbate racial inequality in socioeconomic life. In 2020, the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened an expert ad hoc committee to review and assess the scientific evidence on how racial inequalities in criminal justice might be reduced through public policy. The Committee on Reducing Racial Inequalities in the Criminal Justice System was assembled to carry out this study and produce a consensus report. The committee reviewed and synthesized a diverse body of evidence from a variety of disciplines, including criminology, sociology, law, economics, psychology, history, and public policy, and it gathered public testimony from a variety of community participants in the course of three public workshops. Box S-1 includes key definitions and terminology derived from these efforts. This report builds on the work of researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and community representatives who have been working to address racial inequality in the criminal justice system for decades. It was prepared in the contemporary context of a global pandemic, the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black Americans, and subsequent protests against racial injustice. Moreover, gun violence—often concentrated in low-income Black communities—increased sharply in 2020 and 2021, posing an additional threat to racial equity. The current moment is thus marked by opportunity and urgency. The report offers an account of the research evidence that can inform the public conversation and the policy discussion over reducing racial inequality in the criminal justice system and advancing racial equity. Given the complexity and deep historical roots of contemporary racial inequality in the United States, the committee has considered both policy reforms to the criminal justice system and policy reforms that address social, economic, and environmental conditions that give rise to inequalities in crime and justice. Criminal justice reforms that can reduce the scale of police stops and prison admissions, the duration of long sentences, and the duration and intensity of community supervision are likely to produce large absolute reductions in criminal justice involvement in minority communities. However, the criminal justice system does not operate in a vacuum, and reductions of criminal justice inequalities also depend in part on social and economic policy. Criminal justice reform can be buttressed by reducing the socioeconomic disadvantages that disproportionately increase the risks of criminal justice contact among the residents of low-income communities, who are disproportionately Black, Latino, or Native American. Given this context, the report considers both criminal justice reforms and alternative strategies that lie outside the criminal justice system for reducing violence and other crime. The committee also found significant limitations in the available data and research evidence and offers recommendations for their development that might also help in overcoming racial inequality.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice: Science, Practice, and Policy. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press

Facial recognition technology (FRT) is an increasingly prevalent tool for automated identification and identity verification. The use of FRT in a wide and growing variety of contexts has brought into increasing focus both the potential benefits of using FRT and concerns about impacts on equity, privacy, and civil liberties. In 2021, the Department of Homeland Security requested that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine conduct a study that considers current capabilities, future possibilities, societal implications, and governance of FRT. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) joined as a formal sponsor of the study in March 2023.

The National Academies established the Committee on Facial Recognition: Current Capabilities, Future Prospects, and Governance to conduct this study (for biographical information, see Appendix C). The study addresses current use cases; explains how facial recognition technologies operate; and examines the legal, social, and ethical issues implicated by their use. The full statement of task for the committee is shown in Appendix A.

The committee met in person in July 2022 and February 2023 and met virtually 16 times to receive briefings from experts and stakeholders (for a list of presentations, see Appendix B), review relevant reports and technical literature, deliberate, and develop this report.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2024. Facial Recognition Technology: Current Capabilities, Future Prospects, and Governance. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

By The American Immigration Council

This fact sheet explains: • Where fentanyl is smuggled into the United States? • Who is smuggling fentanyl into the United States?

Over the last decade, a surge in the availability and use of synthetic opioids has led to a staggering toll of overdoses in the United States. From 2013 to 2023, the national drug overdose death rate more than doubled, with drug overdose deaths peaking in 2022 at 107,941. 1 Much of this was due to the rise in fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid commonly used for pain management in hospital settings, which was also responsible for 70 percent of overdose deaths in 2023. 2 While overdose deaths have fallen from their record highs,3 the threat posed by synthetic opioids remains — as does the importance of properly understanding how fentanyl enters the United States. Background This fact sheet uses two separate datasets to confirm what has long been reported by law enforcement sources and other researchers: that the majority of fentanyl smuggled across the southern border enters not on the backs of migrants crossing the border on foot, but in the vehicles and on the bodies of U.S. citizens and other lawful entrants seeking admission at land ports of entry.4 Using two separate datasets described below, we confirm roughly four in five people apprehended for smuggling fentanyl into the United States at the southern border between October 2018 and June 2024 were U.S. citizens — the rest were largely individuals with visas, border crossing cards, or other permission to enter the United States lawfully at a port of entry. Despite this reality, many Americans falsely believe that migrants are the ones bringing fentanyl into the country.5 This narrative has been fueled by political rhetoric that seeks to link the issue of migration at the southern border directly with the opioid epidemic.6 However, this data shows conclusively that the two issues are distinct. Migrants are not responsible for the fentanyl epidemic. Rather, there is bipartisan agreement that efforts to reduce the volume of fentanyl smuggled across the southern border should focus primarily on ports of entry,7 where millions of people enter every month. Longstanding weaknesses in port security permit transnational criminal organizations to hide small volumes of the powerful synthetic opioid among other lawful trade and traffic and remain the border’s biggest vulnerability to fentanyl smuggling

By Logan Seacrest

In 2020, while the world battled one pandemic, a different kind of outbreak in St. Louis, Missouri, reached a fever pitch. It had its own transmission vectors and hotspots, spreading from person to person and overwhelming the city’s defenses. As fatalities hit a 50-year peak, the epidemic felt like a permanent, incurable fact of life. But the death and suffering weren’t caused by a novel virus or force of nature—it was something far more intimate and entrenched: lethal violence.

For seven years, St. Louis had among the highest per-capita homicide rate for cities with 250,000 people or more. Yet, against this bloody backdrop, a new story began to unfold. Over the past four years, St. Louis has witnessed a remarkable and sustained decline in murders. By 2023, homicides had dropped to their lowest point in a decade—a staggering 39.1 percent reduction since the peak. Other key indicators like “shots fired” calls and juvenile shooting victims are also trending downward. This turnaround isn’t the result of getting “tough on crime” or deploying the military on the streets; it’s due in large part to a group of people with a shared belief: that violence behaves like a disease—one that can be diagnosed, treated, and even cured.

The backbone of this network is the city’s Office of Violence Prevention (OVP), established in July 2022 as a central hub to coordinate and fund community violence intervention (CVI) strategies. This move marked a critical turning point, transforming what was once a collection of promising but isolated community programs into a unified, city-wide public safety apparatus.

According to Brett DeLaria with OVP, the goal is to “create a truly integrated and strategic approach to violence reduction.” Relying on a combination of street outreach, cognitive behavioral therapy, and focused deterrence, CVI provides a pathway out of violence, inoculating communities at the source of the infection.

While many factors influence urban crime trends, a more granular look at the data from St. Louis provides evidence for CVI’s direct impact. From 2023 to 2024, the specific neighborhoods targeted by the OVP saw a 52 percent decrease in murders and non-negligent manslaughter, significantly outpacing declines seen elsewhere in the city. This data point is critical because it functions as a natural experiment: In locations where the city tried CVI, the results were disproportionately positive.

Just as a compromised immune system makes infection more likely, violence thrives in environments weakened by poverty, housing instability, and generations of segregation and disinvestment. As in any other city, violence in St. Louis isn’t random—it’s highly concentrated. In 2022, over 90 percent of regional homicides happened in either St. Louis County or St. Clair County. Across these jurisdictions, violent crime clusters among hotspots that account for a disproportionate share of the region’s shootings. Just as epidemiologists track a disease to its source, CVI programs identify the specific individuals and locations at highest risk.

While data suggests that the fever of violence may be starting to break, statistics do not necessarily capture the day-to-day reality for many folks in St. Louis. According to a recent poll, a majority of residents still identify gun violence as the region’s most urgent problem, highlighting the gap between reality and perception. Underscoring the fragility of the city’s progress, federal funding for the OVP is set to dry up next year. While the office will continue to be funded by the city, this shift places the onus squarely on local leaders.

The question facing St. Louis is no longer if this approach works, because the evidence confirms it does. The question is whether the city has the political will to continue. For a community so thoroughly brutalized by violence, turning back now would be a form of public health malpractice—a deliberate choice to let the epidemic flare back up.

Washington, DC: R Institute, 2025.

We study the large-scale implementation of a system of specialized domestic violence courts (SDVCs), an innovation in access to justice programs for potential victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) and offenders. Using individual-level administrative data from the universe of civil domestic violence cases in Puerto Rico during the period 2014-2020, we leverage the staggered opening of SDVCs across judicial regions to examine the consequences for victims’ judicial protection and offender recidivism. Access to SDVCs leads to a considerable 8 percentage points increase in the probability that judges issue a protection order and a 1.7 percentage point (15 percent) decrease in victim and offender reappearance rates within one year of the start of the case. Effects are more pronounced for cases in which parties have children in common and in which access to SDVCs is more limited. Linking the case data to administrative and survey data on judges, we show that the priorities of judges assigned to SDVCs play a prominent role in explaining these outcomes.

Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2025. 

By Marisa Ross, Susan Burtner, Andrew Papachristos and IPR

Introduction: Community violence intervention street outreach (CVI-SO) strategies are growing in popularity as non-punitive approaches to solving the public health problem of community gun violence. Evidence on the effectiveness of CVI-SO on rates of violence is mixed and faces challenges due to concerns with documentation and data privacy, intentional selection bias in program design, and variation in participant risk and needs. Effective evaluation requires methods that accurately capture the scope and delivery of services, starting with a greater understanding of the services CVI participants receive and how they vary based on individual characteristics. Methods: This study explores the services that participants received from a coalition of Chicago CVI organizations from 2017–2023. Considering administrative and programmatic data from over 4,000 participants’ nearly 200,000 interactions with providers, the researchers examine patterns in demographics, network-based risk factors, and service provision and dosage. They then use descriptive and latent profile analyses to characterize the “typical” participant in Chicago. Results: Results show that CVI work relies heavily on long-term mentoring relationships. Service patterns show that latent groups exist with varying dosage: higher dosage participants with higher risk for gun violence receive more frequent contacts over longer periods, demonstrating how organizations adjust their approach based on participant needs. Profiles that primarily receive behavioral or social supports-related services also emerge. Conclusions: Findings underscore the need for evaluation frameworks that capture both the strategic variation in service delivery and the multiple pathways through which CVI programs influence participant outcomes.

Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 2025. 36p.

By Susannah N. Tapp, and Emilie J. Coen
This report presents official estimates of nonfatal criminal victimizations reported and not reported to police from BJS’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The report is the 52nd in a series that began in 1973 and includes statistics on nonfatal violent crimes (rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault) and property crimes (burglary or trespassing, motor vehicle theft, and other types of household theft). The report also describes the characteristics of crimes and victims. 

Data collection for the NCVS instrument redesign started in January 2024. In coordination with the U.S. Census Bureau, BJS implemented a split-sample design to concurrently administer the legacy instrument and the redesigned instrument in 2024. This report includes statistics that were produced with data collected from the 2024 legacy instrument. BJS plans to separately release victimization estimates from data collected with the 2024 redesigned instrument at a later date. For more information, see the NCVS instrument redesign.

Concurrently, BJS has updated the NCVS Dashboard (N-DASH) Tool and the NCVS API with 2024 data.

Highlights

• In 2024, 1.45% of persons age 12 or older experienced at least one violent victimization, similar to 2023.

• A larger percentage of persons ages 12 to 17 experienced one or more violent crimes in 2024 (1.95%) than in 2023 (1.45%).

• In 2024, there were 23.3 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older in the United States.

• The rate of violent victimizations reported to police was 11.2 per 1,000 persons age 12 or older in 2024.

U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2025. 37p.

By Vanessa Ann Gunther

In 1769, Spain took action to solidify control over its northern New World territories by establishing a series of missions and presidios in what is now modern California. To populate these remote establishments, the Spanish crown relied on Franciscan priests, whose role it was to convince the Native Californian population to abandon their traditional religious practices and adopt Catholicism. During their tutelage, the Indians of California would be indoctrinated into Spanish society, where they would learn obedience to the church and crown. The legal system of Southern California has been used by Anglo populations as a social and demographic tool to control Native Americans. Following the Mexican-American War and the 1849 Gold Rush, as California property values increased and transportation corridors were established, Native Americans remained a sharply declining presence in many communities, and were likely to be charged with crimes. The sentences they received were lighter than those given to Anglo offenders, indicating that the legal system was used as a means of harassment. Additionally, courts chronicled the decline of the once flourishing native populations with each case of drunkenness, assault, or rape that appeared before the bench. Nineteenth-century American society had little sympathy for the plight of Indians or for the destruction of their culture. Many believed that the Indians of Southern California would fade from history because of their inability to adapt to a changing world. While many aspects of their traditional culture have been irreparably lost, the people of southern California are, nevertheless, attempting to recreate the cultures that were challenged by the influx of Europeans and later Americans to their lands.

East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2006. 

By Figueiredo, João

When the Portuguese arrived at the mouth of the Zaire River in 1483, two vibrant normative regimes came into contact. The European traders, missionaries, and soldiers who followed the first explorers brought a jurisdictional system of government that accepted local uses and customs as biding and a theological understanding of natural law with universalist claims. They encountered complex African societies based on various normative systems, emphasizing arbitration and mediation between corporate groups and protection against evils attributed to preternatural forms of personal agency – what the Portuguese framed as feitiçaria or sorcery. João Figueiredo focuses on the intense cross-cultural translation of normative knowledge in West Central Africa following this initial encounter. He argues it was afforded by an evolving, shared understanding of sorcery and constant renegotiation of the limits and meanings of jurisdiction, the law, and the institutions of slavery.

Köln, Weimar,  Brill, 2025

By Jolanta Zajančkauskienė (Volume editor) Rima Ažubalytė (Volume editor) Fedosiuk Oleg (Volume editor)

This book explores the pursuit of coherence in criminal justice, addressing how criminal laws and practices can become more rational and aligned with human rights principles. It examines key criminal justice principles like legality, proportionality, and presumption of innocence, aiming to adapt them to modern societal and technological challenges. The work highlights the growing influence of international conventions and European courts on national legal systems, emphasizing the need for thoughtful implementation of transnational precedents. While focused on Lithuanian criminal justice, topics like human trafficking, drug possession, and electronic evidence are relevant across Europe, offering insights for legal researchers globally.

Bern: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 2025. 

By Talesh, Shauhin A.

Despite the massive costs associated with data breaches, ransomware, viruses, and cyberattacks, most organizations remain thoroughly unprepared to safeguard consumer data. Over the past two decades, the insurance industry has begun offering cyber insurance to help organizations manage cybersecurity and privacy law compliance, while also offering risk management services as part of their insurance packages. These insurers have thus effectively evolved into de facto regulators—yet at the same time, they have failed to effectively curtail cybersecurity breaches. Drawing from interviews, observations, and extensive content analysis of the cyber insurance industry, this book reveals how cyber insurers’ risk management services convey legitimacy to the public and to insureds but fall short of actually improving data security, rendering them largely symbolic. Speaking directly to broader debates on regulatory delegation to nonstate actors, Shauhin A. Talesh proposes a new institutional theory of insurance to explain how insurers shape the content and meaning of privacy law and cybersecurity compliance, offering policy recommendations for how insurers and governments can work together to improve cybersecurity and foster greater algorithmic justice.

Oakland: University of California Press, 2025. 277p.

Edited by Siddharth Peter de Souza, Julia Wellhausen

Digitalising Courts in Asia: Exploring the Mechanics of Judicial Transformations is a book edited by Siddharth Peter de Souza and Julia Wellhausen, published by Edinburgh University Press in July 2025. It examines the diverse ways courts across Asia are undergoing digital transformation, focusing on the challenges and opportunities this presents for access to justice. The book argues for a "whole of society" approach to digitalization that prioritizes equity and ensures marginalized groups are not left behind. 

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025. 266

Noah Marschner, Christoph Richter, Janine Patz, Axel Salheiser (Hg.)

This international anthology is dedicated to the discourses, agitations and dynamics that have prevented, delayed, and slowed down, or even reversed, necessary transformation steps in global climate protection to this day. The book brings together perspectives from 12 different countries. It pays special attention to the interplay between climate protection policy, climate justice and democratic cohesion.

Weinheim: Campus Verlag, 2024.

By Ye In (Jane) Hwang , Nabila Chowdhury,  Colman O’Driscoll , Stephen Allnutt,  Tony Butler 

This report responds to an urgent need to enhance the management of violence among individuals with psychosis in Australia. It reviews treatment pathways, emphasising community-based care over incarceration. The Mental Health Review Tribunals (MHRTs) play a vital role in treatment oversight for those with psychosis in Australia and worldwide who are at risk of violence, with community treatment orders (CTOs) identified as effective harm prevention strategies. An exploratory study analysed data from 141,302 individuals diagnosed with psychosis in New South Wales from 2001 to 2021, revealing that 26.8 percent had MHRT contact due to violence risk, with 14.2 percent placed on CTOs. Marginalised groups were notably under-represented in MHRT interactions. Findings show higher health service use and offending behaviour among those in contact with the MHRT, highlighting the need for focused research on CTO effectiveness and equitable service access. The report advocates for a multidisciplinary approach between health and justice sectors to improve outcomes for this population.

Report to the Criminology Research Advisory Council Grant: CRG 32/21–22 Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 2025. 40.

By Arie Freiberg

Michael Tonry’s life and work are an exception to American exceptionalism. His lifelong concern with American parochialism and antipathy to its punitiveness, racism, and historical lawlessness have led him to look beyond its borders for explanations of such a dysfunctional sentencing regime and the means of reforming it. This article examines his interest in and contributions to comparative sentencing research and reform, his articulation of fundamental principles of justice, and his vision of an ideal sentencing system. It identifies some future directions for comparative sentencing research by extending his ideas and methods beyond the Global North.

Crim Law Forum 36, 251–268 (2025).