By Anhony Wayne Fontes

This article explores the making of carceral citizenship in Guatemala through an ethnographic analysis of la talacha – informal prison taxation schemes. Taxation is a key technology of citizenship. Tax enforcement mechanisms, the distribution of tax burdens, citizens’ willingness to pay, and their expectations of what they should get in return all make taxation an essential lens through which to understand state formation and citizens’ perceptions of and relations with one another. In Guatemala, where organized crime competes with and subsumes state institutions in ways that profoundly impact everyone, the state is only one of many entities claiming the right to tax, at turns competing and colluding with its underworld. These blurred dynamics are hyper-distilled in the country’s prison system, where state-prisoner networks tax the imprisoned population in the name of collective survival and elite profits. Based on extended ethnographic fieldwork behind bars, I show how la talacha sets the terms of carceral citizenship by organizing prisoner-state co-governance, reifying the prison’s socioeconomic hierarchies, and shaping inmates' relationships with the world beyond the prison. 

EUROPEAN REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN STUDIES No. 116 (2023): July-December, pp. 105-123

By Alia Nahra, David Knight and Bruce Western

High US incarceration rates in the 1990s and early 2000s produced large cohorts of men and women who left prison and returned, disproportionately, to low-income communities of color. Called reentry, the transition from prison to community is a process of social integration where formerly incarcerated people establish, with variable success, a foundation of material security, and connections to major social institutions such as the family and the labor market. This literature review summarizes research on reentry, examining its demographic dimensions, the legal and policy environment, and research on families, housing, health, incomes, and criminal desistance. The review indicates that criminalization and punishment in the reentry process stymie social integration, while support from family and social policy is socially integrative. Research also indicates large racial inequalities where, besides the racial disparity in incarceration, the severity of incarceration and the obstacles to social integration are greater for Black men and women leaving prison

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 11(3): 174–229.

By Hedwig Lee, Alexandra Gibbons, Garrett Baker and Christopher Wildeman

Twenty-five years ago, Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett (1999) provided the seed of what would come to be a novel area of inquiry: the consequences of the carceral state for inequality. In this article, we review in four stages the last twenty-five years of research on the fallout from criminal justice system contact. In the first stage, we describe the contours of the carceral state to highlight how prevalent each level of criminal justice contact is today relative to earlier historical eras and to each other and how unequally distributed these levels of criminal justice contact are by race, ethnicity, and class. In the second stage, we consider the questions often left unaddressed in prior work, including our own prior work: why might we expect racial differences in the effects of criminal justice contact, and are there racial differences in the effects of criminal justice contact? In the third stage, we provide a discussion of the datasets and methods used to consider these relationships. In the fourth stage, we consider the direct and vicarious effects of contact with the police, experiencing prison or jail incarceration, and being placed on community supervision using evidence spanning several disciplines. By providing a review that is exhaustive in terms of levels of criminal justice contact, limitations of data and methods, and the existence of race-specific effects, we offer a comprehensive description of the state of scientific research on the scope and scale of criminal justice contact and its collateral consequences for inequality in the United States. 

” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 11(3): 174–229.

By Sara Wakefield and Kristin Turney

A “carceral state” represents a critical definitional contrast to the more commonly invoked frames of “mass incarceration” or “mass criminalization.” Mass criminalization scholarship is typically focused on the most proximate causes and consequences of growth in the size of the criminal legal system. In contrast, conceptualizing mass incarceration as merely the most visible feature of a broader carceral state expands the analytical landscape but results in significant tradeoffs. In this article, we engage narratives of the development of carceral states, noting that they resist simple or widely agreed-upon definitions, and vary with respect to how they engage crime, race and racism, politics and the political economy, and the importation of carceral logics to seemingly unrelated institutions. We conclude by reflecting on what can be gained by understanding the United States as a carceral state, rather than simply a nation with persistently high crime and punishment rates. 

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 11(3): 136–73.

By Shawn Bushway, Andrew Jordan, Derek Neal and Steven Raphael

We construct a framework that defines optimal outcomes in criminal courts, and we use this framework to interpret and organize the existing literature on racial disparities in pretrial detention, sentencing, and community corrections outcomes. Existing research indicates that some actors within courts and within the agencies that implement the sentences that courts impose make decisions that are contaminated by racial animus or racially biased assessments of the recidivism risks posed by some offenders. However, the most important sources of racial disparities in case outcomes are numerous practices, regulations, and laws that are too punitive—that is, their social costs are likely greater than any derived social benefits. Since minorities, especially Blacks, face arrest at much higher rates than Whites, they bear large disparate impacts from such policies.

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 11(3): 86–135.2025. 

By Robert J. Sampson

Racial disparities in contact with the criminal justice system remain a pressing concern for both scholars and the public, yet debate persists about how best to explain and reduce them. The articles in this special issue advance our understanding by evaluating research on racial bias in law enforcement, criminal justice processing, and incarceration. I highlight three unifying themes: the significance of time and place, especially how social change shapes racial inequalities; the connection between crime, criminal justice contact, and punishment, emphasizing social processes that influence both criminal behavior and legal outcomes; and structural racial inequalities that extend beyond individual bias and accumulate throughout people’s lives. Drawing from this conceptual framework and the issue’s comprehensive reviews, I outline a future research agenda to better understand—and potentially reduce—racial inequalities in criminal justice.

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 11(3): 1–21.

By Armando N. Meier, Jonathan Levav, Stephan Meier, Liora G. Avnaim:

Does early release decrease or increase the probability that ex-convicts will return to prison? We exploit unique data from Israeli courts, where appearance before the judge throughout the day has an arbitrary component. We first show that judges more often deny parole requests of prisoners appearing further from the judges' last break. We then use this arbitrary variation in early releases and find that early releases reduce the propensity of prisoners to return to prison. Robustness checks suggest that later and earlier cases are largely comparable and that potential selection is unlikely to explain the results.

IZA DP No. 18076 Bonn: IZA – Institute of Labor Economics, 2025. 107p.

By Ingrid V. Eagly and Joanna C. Schwartz

We are in the midst of a critically important moment in police reform. National and local attention is fixed on how to reduce the number of people killed and injured by the police. One approach—which has been recognized for decades to reduce police killings—is to limit police power to use force. This Article is the first to uncover how an often-overlooked private company, Lexipol LLC, has become one of the most powerful voices pushing against reform of use-of-force standards. Founded in 2003, Lexipol now writes police policies and trainings for over one-fifth of American law enforcement agencies. As this Article documents, Lexipol has refused to incorporate common reform proposals into the policies it writes for its subscribers, including a use-of-force matrix, policies requiring de-escalation, or bright-line rules prohibiting chokeholds and shooting into cars. Lexipol has also taken an active advocacy role in opposition to proposed reforms of police use-of-force standards, pushing, instead, for departments to hew closely to Graham v. Connor’s “objectively reasonable” standard. Finally, when use-of-force reforms have been enacted, Lexipol has attempted to minimize their impact. Local governments, police departments, and insurers have long viewed Lexipol as a critically important partner in keeping policies lawful and up to date. This Article makes clear that they should take a closer look. Lexipol’s aggressive efforts to retain wide officer discretion to use force may ultimately expose officers and agencies to liability instead of shielding them from it. It is time for advocacy groups seeking policing improvements to train their sights on Lexipol. Unless and until Lexipol changes its approach, the company should be viewed as a barrier to reform.
 
Indiana Law Journal: Vol. 97: Iss. 1, Article 1. 2022.

By Kerri Raissian, Jennifer Necci Dineens

Insurance companies may be in a unique position to mitigate firearm-related deaths, injuries, and other harms in the United States. Insurers have played a prominent role in helping reduce injury and death in at least two other significant areas: automotive accidents and swimming pool drownings. In those cases, insurance firms were able to make meaningful societal change simply by compelling their customers to wear seatbelts and put fences around their pools. Firearms may be more difficult for insurance companies to detect than automobiles or swimming pools. For example, firearm owners are not required to declare their firearms (nor are we advocating for this), and so an insurer may not have accurate information regarding the presence of firearms. However, insurance companies face similar knowledge gaps with other behaviors, too (e.g., smoking or past drug-use behaviors). Insurance companies have a history of innovating with regard to risky behaviors to limit risk, and in many ways, firearms are no different. 

The National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation estimates gun injury had an economic cost of $557 billion in 2022.1 Meanwhile, there is mounting evidence that measures like secure storage and safety counseling significantly improve firearm safety in a cost-effective manner. So, why have insurance firms declined to act? It appears the insurance markets do not believe the proper incentives exist to bring about voluntary, preventive action. Yet if they did act, the societal benefits would likely outweigh the costs. Given this potential cost-benefit calculation, legislators, regulators, and insurance industry leaders should explore interventions to spur safety innovation. The range of actions could include: 

• Conducting research to better understand how firearms relate to insurer damages and the potential to mitigate those risks 

• Voluntarily encouraging policyholders to consider options such as secure storage or safety counseling 

• Taking legislative and regulatory steps to encourage or subsidize voluntary innovations and improve incentive structures 

• Potentially imposing mandates 

This paper explores the different types of firearm-related harms in America and the various opportunities and mechanisms by which insurance markets could potentially work to reduce those harms.

Washington, DC: Niskanen Center, 2025. 13p.

By Paige E. Vaughn, Gregory A. Huber

New technologies allow unprecedented public visibility of routine police–civilian interactions, but we know little about how the public wants the police to behave during them. We examine public evaluations about preferred punishment and fair treatment using vignette experiments that randomize multiple features of police–civilian interactions. These causal estimates reveal that for the mass public, officer race does not affect public attitudes, while participant demeanor, markers of threat, and civilian race do. Police–civilian interactions are evaluated through a lens of reciprocity: Hostile officers are judged as less fair, while hostile and armed civilians are viewed as deserving of harsher punishment. When civilians remain polite and threat is low, there is little support for punitive outcomes, but poor civilian behavior warrants more punitive state action. Moreover, people prefer more punishment for White compared with Black civilians, as well as in interactions with White officers and civilians compared with those in which both parties are Black. Interactions with a White officer and a Black civilian are judged as less fair, as are the fairness of assigned punishments in them. Finally, views about fairness are not equivalent to views about appropriate sanctions. These results provide critical evidence about public attitudes regarding police punishment and fairness in order maintenance.

Criminology, Volume 63, Issue 2 May 2025 Pages 330-381

By Iman Said

In 2020, the United States was gripped by three parallel social movements: an outrush of support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement after the murder of George Floyd, discontent regarding state-mandated lockdowns to mitigate the coronavirus-19 pandemic, and allegations of voter fraud after the November elections. Together, these movements generated a historic spike in protest activity that garnered significant attention, leading some to argue that the police had behaved disparately at protests associated with BLM compared with the other two. A dense literature in the early 2000s developed protest policing theories that pointed to policing culture or to racial threat theory to account for variation in police behavior, but how these theories account for protest policing during 2020 is unclear. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data and methods from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data set, I first examine allegations of racial discrimination in police behavior at protests. Then, I explore how on-the-ground interactions between police and protestors account for any seeming disparity. I demonstrate distinct patterns of police behavior shaped by different protestor behaviors across these social movements, as well as racial animus. These findings extend and clarify current theories of protest policing.

Criminology, Volume 63, Issue 2 May 2025 Pages 303-329

By Kiseong Kuen

In recent years, efforts to reduce police resistance to evidence-based policing (EBP) have gained increasing attention. Simultaneously, amid a global crisis of police legitimacy, scholarly interest in police self-legitimacy has grown. Using survey data from police officers in South Korea, this study examines the role of police self-legitimacy in reducing resistance to EBP, as well as its mediating role in the relationship between organizational factors and resistance. The findings reveal a significant negative association between self-legitimacy and resistance to EBP. Moreover, self-legitimacy mediates the relationship between organizational factors, specifically cynicism toward organizational change and supervisor support, and resistance. These results suggest that police agencies aiming to reduce resistance to EBP should implement strategies that enhance officers’ confidence in their authority. This can be achieved by fostering a positive organizational climate, including reducing officers’ skepticism about the agency’s capacity for positive change and ensuring supportive supervision and recognition.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR, 201X, Vol. XX, No. X, Month 2025, 1–19  

By Kathrin Hartmann & Georg Wenzelburger

Algorithms are increasingly used in different domains of public policy. They help humans to profile unemployed, support administrations to detect tax fraud and give recidivism risk scores that judges or criminal justice managers take into account when they make bail decisions. In recent years, critics have increasingly pointed to ethical challenges of these tools and emphasized problems of discrimination, opaqueness or accountability, and computer scientists have proposed technical solutions to these issues. In contrast to these important debates, the literature on how these tools are implemented in the actual everyday decision-making process has remained cursory. This is problematic because the consequences of ADM systems are at least as dependent on the implementation in an actual decision-making context as on their technical features. In this study, we show how the introduction of risk assessment tools in the criminal justice sector on the local level in the USA has deeply transformed the decision-making process. We argue that this is mainly due to the fact that the evidence generated by the algorithm introduces a notion of statistical prediction to a situation which was dominated by fundamental uncertainty about the outcome before. While this expectation is supported by the case study evidence, the possibility to shift blame to the algorithm does seem much less important to the criminal justice actors.

Policy Sci 54, 269–287 (2021)

By Sarah Waite & Alexandria Bradley 

Why read this evidence review? This evidence review provides an in-depth look at women’s problem solving courts (WPSC) which are endorsed by the Sentencing Review as an important component in preventing the unnecessary incarceration of women. Dr Sarah Waite and Dr Alexandria Bradley review the evidence base – to which they are significant contributors –and cover a number of key issues: • The broader context of problem-solving courts internationally and in the UK? • The evolution and current state of WPSC in the UK • The critical success factors for the design and delivery of WPSC which support women, to help them to address their needs and move away from the criminal justice system. The review contains much concrete advice on best practice for voluntary sector organisations looking to get involved in WPSC. 

Suffolk, UK: Clinks, 2025.  12p.

By Emily Rogers.  Katie Holihen, et al.

Homelessness is a growing crisis in America, increasing by 12% between 2022 and 2023 alone. While there are a range of ideas about how to address this issue, in many places across the country, law enforcement officers are still typically the default first responders to these kinds of community concerns. This publication details how communities can strategically plan for and assess their law enforcement homelessness response efforts, using a shared vision, a logic model, and regular assessments to determine if the response is achieving its intended goals. It also discusses the importance of expanding the knowledge base of law enforcement practices and strategies to establish a set of national standards for effective and successful homelessness responses.

New York: The Council of State Governments Justice Center, 2025. 29p.

By Christian Cochran

Emerging technologies, especially artificial intelligence (AI), are rapidly transforming law enforcement operations. These advancements offer numerous benefits, such as enhanced efficiency, improved public safety, and cost-saving measures for agencies. AI technologies, like predictive policing and facial recognition, hold promises for reducing crime rates and improving investigative efficiency. Yet, significant ethical dilemmas and privacy issues arise from their use, in turn necessitating careful policymaking and oversight. Various case studies illustrate both positive and negative outcomes of AI applications in law enforcement, emphasizing the need for transparency and community involvement. To manage the use of these emerging technologies effectively, state legislatures should explore policy changes and regulatory frameworks. Recommendations include promoting transparency, ensuring oversight, and establishing acceptable use standards. Involving community stakeholders in discussions about AI deployment is also advocated to build trust and accountability between law enforcement and the public. Challenges posed by AI technologies include balancing innovation with presumed privacy. Important United States Supreme Court cases shape the legal landscape regarding privacy expectations and technology use by law enforcement. Additionally, concerns about how the increasing volume of data collected by AI systems is used and protected lead to calls for stricter data privacy laws. While AI offers significant opportunities for improving law enforcement practices, it is crucial to address the accompanying ethical, legal, and privacy challenges. A balanced approach that promotes innovation while safeguarding citizens’ rights and fostering public trust in law enforcement practices is essential to ensuring the right-sized proper implementation of the technology.

Austin, TX Texas Public Policy Foundation and Right on Crime, Right on Crime, 2025. 28p.

By Scott Peyton

The probation and parole division is tasked with collecting monies ordered by courts and/or dictated by Louisiana statute. Collection practices should focus on victim restitution with less emphasis placed on the collection of monies that have little bearing on public safety.

KEY POINTS

• Community supervision is costly, often for reasons unrelated to supervision or the offense committed.

• The ability to pay determination as recommended by the Justice Reinvestment Initiative reforms has been delayed for nearly five years.

• Community supervision should focus on the collection of victim restitution over other legal financial obligations.

• The 10% collection fee that is added to victim restitution should be eliminated to allow for increased monies to victims.

Austin, TX: Right On Crime, 2023, 12p,

By Scott Peyton

The entry points for community supervision in Louisiana are complex and diverse and are the result of years of legislative and policy changes.

KEY POINTS:

• A thorough review of the Probation and Parole budget is recommended to identify opportunities for increased efficiency and to maintain the effectiveness and impact of community supervision. 

• The Louisiana legislature should review and update current Louisiana Department of Corrections policies concerning Earned Compliance Credits to conform with American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model legislation. 

• To ensure consistency across the state, and to assess the effectiveness of the violation/revocation process, probation and parole should report quarterly revocation data by district office and officer.

• Special and general conditions of supervision should only include conditions directly related to public safety and should be tailored to the specific needs of the probationer. 

• Expand and fund partnerships with non-profit organizations.

Austin, TX: Right On Crime, 2024. 28p.

By Ross Jackson and Nikki Pressley

“Human trafficking survivors in the State of Texas deserve justice. Existing legal protections for victims is inadequate. Amending the existing definition of duress in Texas statute will enable victims to escape unjust prosecution, better steward state resources, and hold true perpetrators accountable.”

KEY POINTS

• Many victims of human trafficking are prosecuted for crimes occurred while under the control of their trafficker.  

• Texas’ current definition of duress fails to protect victims of human trafficking from prosecution by disallowing relevant histories of abuse to be used as an affirmative defense.  

• Texas should amend the definition of duress to bring justice to both offenders and victims.

Austin, TX: Right On Crime, 2024. 12p.

By Ross Jackson, Nikki Pressley

The incarceration of parents has devastating effects on the family unit, especially on health, education, employment, and quality of life outcomes for children. Texas should enact mitigation laws that redirect parents who commit non-violent, non-serious crimes to diversionary programs that keep them at home with their children while serving their sentence.

KEY POINTS

• Incarceration has particularly devastating consequences for children of imprisoned parents, as it harms their mental health and affects their academic performance, employment opportunities, and overall quality of life.

• Many states, including Tennessee, Missouri, Illinois, Oregon, and Washington, have attempted to keep individuals with children closer to their families by enacting caregiver diversion and mitigation laws.

• By enacting mitigation legislation, Texas can keep families together, reduce recidivism, and better steward taxpayer dollars.

Austin TX: Right On Crime, 2024. 12p.