By Audrey Macklin

Enlisting states of origin or transit to prevent exit from their own territory has become a tool of extraterritorial migration control for industrialised liberal democratic states. This article first explores the practical erosion of the right to leave any country since the demise of communism, focusing on arrangements between EU member states and select African states of origin or transit. I then document the legitimating function performed by the anti-smuggling and search and rescue regimes in effacing the human right to leave. I conclude by situating exit restrictions in a wider European project of promoting, building and supporting border infrastructure in the name of development and capacity building in select African countries. This permits reflection on what the contemporary use of exit restrictions signifies for the equation of border control and sovereignty.

International Migration, June 2025

By Angeli Romero and Oliver Fisher

This report provides a Blueprint for how to build better visa structures and migration systems. This approach was developed by drawing on the struggles and needs of migrant workers themselves, to build a framework that can work concretely in a variety of contexts.

Vulnerability is not intrinsic to migration; vulnerability is constructed. This can be through factors such as governmental agenda, bureaucratic processes, legislation or reform.

Immigration policies and systems create risks and vulnerabilities to exploitation through complex processes, ineffective safeguards, and restrictive visa conditions imposed on migrant workers. We need to deconstruct the policies that create these risks, and redesign them to enable migrant workers to access rights and enjoy decent standards of work and living conditions.

Policy-makers, employers, sponsors, unions and others can take this framework and apply it, to help bring about a safer, fairer visa structure and migration system into practice.

  London: Focus on Labour Exploitation (FLEX). 2025. 32p.

By Ruth Vollmer, Clara Schmitz-Pranghe

This article analyses the interactions between inequalities and reintegration assistance, looking at the examples of Serbia and Kosovo. It proposes an approach for examining the reintegration assistance practices of frontline providers by (a) viewing them through the lens of street-level bureaucracy acting mainly on behalf of the returning state and (b) as locally situated agents within the networks of their own distributive relations and embodying their own social positioning. Street-level implementers play an active role in shaping outreach, effectiveness, and sustainability of reintegration assistance, not always in the intended ways. This article traces their navigation of institutional, organisational, and relational contexts, internalised social norms, and perceptions of social divisions, as well as the micro-dynamics of asymmetrical interactions during service delivery. It finds that strategies applied by street-level assistance providers have ambivalent but rather minor effects on pre-existing inequalities. Even though they often naturalise prevalent social divisions, the interactions and allocation of assistance are determined more by their practical experiences, availability and type of support, as well as general programme design and working conditions. The inability to bridge the mismatch between available support and needs can even endorse inequality-normalising perceptions.

International MigrationVolume 63, Issue 4

August 2025

By Sara Giunti, Andrea Guariso, Mariapia Mendola, Irene Solmone 

In advanced economies, increasing population diversity often fuels hostile attitudes toward immigrants and political polarization. We study a short educational program for highschool students aimed at promoting cultural diversity and improving attitudes toward immigration through active learning. To identify the impact of the program, we designed a randomized controlled trial involving 4,500 students from 252 classes across 40 schools in northern Italy. The program led to more positive attitudes and behaviors toward immigrants, especially in more mixed classes. In terms of mechanisms, the intervention reduced students’ misperception and changed their perceived norms toward immigration, while it had no impact on implicit bias, empathy, or social contacts. Our findings suggest that anti-immigrant attitudes are primarily driven by sociotropic concerns rather than individual intergroup experience, and that educational programs combining critical thinking with cross-group discussion can correct them. 

  IZA DP No. 17978

Bonn:  IZA – Institute of Labor Economics , 2025. 71p.

By Josh Rovner

  Incarceration disparities between Tribal and white youth have increased over the past decade. As of 2023, the most recent year for which data are available, Tribal youth were 3.8 times as likely to be placed in juvenile facilities (i.e., detained or committed) as their white peers. The disparity is now at an all-time high, based on data that starts in 1997. Juvenile facilities held 29,314 youth as of October 2023. This includes placement in one of our nation’s 1,277 detention centers, residential treatment centers, group homes, and youth prisons.2 These numbers do not include the 437 people under age 18 in adult prisons at year-end 2022 or the estimated ,000 people under 18 in adult jails at midyear 2023.3• Nationally, the youth placement rate was 87 per 100,000 youth. • Tribal youth were placed at a rate of 199 per 100,000, compared to the white youth rate of 52 per 100,000. Among the 17 states with a population of at least 5,000 Tribal youth between ages 10 and 17, a cutoff that allows for meaningful comparisons, Tribal youth were at least twice as likely to be in custody than white youth in 10 states.

By Josh Rovner

  Following decades-long declines, incarceration disparities between Latino youth and their white peers recently increased. As of 2023, the most recent year for which data are available, Latino youth were 25% more likely to be placed (i.e., detained or committed) in juvenile facilities as their white peers. Juvenile facilities held 29,314 youth as of October 2023. This includes placement in one of our nation’s 1,277 detention centers, residential treatment centers, group homes, and youth prisons. These numbers do not include the 437 people under age 18 in adult prisons at year-end 2022 or the estimated 2,000 people under 18 in adult jails at midyear 2023. • Nationally, the youth placement rate was 87 per 100,000 youth. • Latino youth were placed at a rate of 65 per 100,000, compared to the white youth rate of 52 per 100,000. Among the 48 states and the District of Columbia with a population of at least 5,000 Latino youth between ages 10 and 17, a cutoff that allows for meaningful comparisons, Latino youth were at least twice as likely to be in custody than white youth in 11 states.

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project 2025. 3p.

By Josh Rovner

  Incarceration disparities between Black and white youth have remained stubbornly high over the past decade. As of 2023, the most recent data, Black youth were 5.6 times as likely to be placed (i.e., detained or committed) in juvenile facilities as their white peers. The disparity is now at an all-time high, based on data that starts in 1997. Juvenile facilities held 29,314 youth as of October 2023. This includes placement in one of our nation’s 1,277 detention centers, residential treatment centers, group homes, and youth prisons. These numbers do not include the 437 people under age 18 in adult prisons at year-end 2022 or the estimated 2,000 people under 18 in adult jails at midyear 2023. • Nationally, the youth placement rate was 87 per 100,000 youth. • Black youth were placed at a rate of 293 per 100,000, compared to the white youth rate of 52 per 100,000. • 46% of youth in placement were Black, even though Black youth comprised only 15% of all youth across the United States. In all states with a population of at least 5,000 Black youth between ages 10 and 17, a cutoff that allows for meaningful comparisons, Black youth were at least 2.5 as likely to be in custody than white youth. 

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2025. 3p.

By Min Xie, Preeti Chauhan, Michael Rempel, and Jeremy Travis 

This study relies on data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and presents trends from 1996 to 2022 in crime victimization, rates at which victims report crimes to the police, confidence in the police, and victims’ use of services in New York City. This is one of two studies falling under the umbrella of the Crossroads Project. Its goal is to trace New York City’s trends in crime victimization, enforcement, incarceration, and racial disparities from the 1990s to the early 2020s in the hopes that empirical data over a long timeframe might provide a much-needed perspective capable of informing future policy. Both of the two resulting reports and a joint executive summary may be found at the project landing page. What is the NCVS, and why is it important for studying crime? Crime data for cities and communities across the country relies primarily on criminal complaints reported to local police agencies. The many crimes that victims never report to law enforcement are omitted. However, by collecting data directly from crime victims, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) can provide estimates of both reported and unreported crime. The NCVS is the world’s largest and oldest national victimization survey (Xie, Lynch, & Lauritsen, 2025). It has provided information on the criminal victimization of the U.S. household population for over 50 years (1973 to present). It surveys persons aged 12 years or older from a nationally representative sample of U.S. households randomly selected from a stratified multistage cluster sampling design, with the goal of getting an accurate and representative count of crime victimization in the United States (Cantor, 2025). The U.S. Census Bureau administers the interviews for the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). The primary information from the NCVS includes nonfatal violent crimes (rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault) and household property crimes (i.e., burglary, motor vehicle theft, and other types of theft), both reported and not reported to the police. Therefore, the estimates for nonfatal violence crimes are by persons, and the estimates for property crimes are by households. The NCVS data is an important complement to the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Summary program and the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). The UCR and NIBRS databases, which rely on crimes reported to the police, are often used to follow crime trends by policymakers, journalists, and the general public, and to guide public safety decision making. But nationwide, the NCVS shows that more than 50% of crimes are NOT reported to the police (Xie, Ortiz Solis, & Chauhan, 2024). This is known as the dark figure of crime and shows that relying on police-recorded crimes provides an incomplete picture of crime trends (Lynch & Addington, 2007). The NCVS also provides critical information such as why the crime was not reported to the police. Much information in the NCVS is not available from the UCR summary program or NIBRS, such as the circumstances of crimes based on the victims’ descriptions, the consequences of the victimizations, the victims’ responses to victimization, and their interaction with the criminal justice or victim service systems or lack thereof. These data are critical to policymakers as they think of responses to crime and how to enhance public safety.  

New York: Data Collaborative for Justice, at John Jay College, 2025. 18p.   

By Luc Leboeuf

The article addresses the consequences of the externalisation of EU border policies on the legal and institutional dynamics that govern those policies. Drawing on the analysis of legal and policy documents and interviews, which were conducted with expert public servants among EU institutions and in one EU member state (Belgium), the article argues that EU border policies are increasingly governed by ‘regimes of invisibility’—which mainly involve expert public servants who cooperate with their counterparts in informal settings and through informal agreements. The article shows how the emergence of those ‘regimes of invisibility’ is deeply connected with the mainstreaming of migration through all components of the EU foreign policy. This leads to broader use of the tools from the foreign policy toolbox, which often rely on informal forms of cooperation, as well as to greater involvement of institutional actors beyond officials within interior ministries, such as diplomats. The article further makes an initial attempt to unpack these ‘regimes of invisibility’ by showing their underlying institutional tensions and dynamics. Therefore, it discusses how public servants, with different institutional background and knowledge, conflict and cooperate in shaping EU relations with third countries in the field.

International Migration, Volume 63, Issue 5Sep 2025

By Sharon Dolovich

This Article is the first scholarly work to identify and describe the experience of sleep deprivation in prison—an experience that, although an inherent feature of prison life, has gone almost entirely unnoticed even by those legal scholars, advocates, and policymakers committed to ensuring humane carceral conditions. Drawing on original data from interviews with people who served time in prisons all over the country, it maps the multiple overlapping conditions that routinely prevent the incarcerated from getting anything close to adequate sleep. Sleep is a basic human need, as fundamental to human survival and adequate human functioning as access to food, water, and shelter. Yet this Article’s findings are unambiguous: chronic sleep deprivation is an intrinsic part of prison life, as constitutive of the carceral penalty as are crowded conditions, grossly inadequate medical care, inedible food, and the ongoing risk of physical and sexual assault. After providing a brief overview of the sleep science, the findings of which make plain the physical and psychological damage caused by insufficient sleep, the Article provides a rich sociological account of the experience of trying to sleep in prison. Drawing on the accounts of interview subjects, it identifies ten distinct causes of sleep deprivation inside: five concrete conditions (fiercely uncomfortable beds, hunger, extremes of heat and cold, noise, and excessive light) and five “meta-conditions” (fear of violence, trauma, poverty, overly intrusive rules enforcement, and daily humiliation). This Article then considers some of the normative implications of the phenomenon explored here, including what the reality of sleep deprivation in prison means for our understanding of prisons and of carceral punishment, the prospects for Eighth Amendment conditions claims grounded in sleep deprivation, and the policy challenges likely to confront efforts to address this problem.

 96 S.Cal.L. Rev. 95, UCLA School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 26-06

New South Wales. Legislative Assembly Committee on Law and Safety

An interim report for the inquiry into measures to combat right-wing extremism in New South Wales. The report considers the Crimes and Summary Offences Amendment Bill 2025 and puts forward some considerations for Parliament when debating the Bill. The Bill was introduced on 19 November 2025, following a neo-Nazi protest outside Parliament House on 8 November 2025. The event was widely condemned.

The protest shows the current laws have been failing to prevent right-wing extremists from mobilising and recruiting. Legislative change is required to address the worrying rise of right-wing extremism.

The Crimes and Summary Offences Amendment Bill 2025 is an important step in combatting right-wing extremism. The Committee has considered the Bill in the context of a broader inquiry into measures to combat right-wing extremism in New South Wales. 

The Committee strongly supports the Bill as a key measure to combat right-wing extremism in New South Wales. At the same time, the Committee acknowledges the risk of constitutional challenge to any law that may restrict the implied freedom of political communication.

Parliament of New South Wales, 2026. 21p.

By Michael Rempel, Olive Lu, & Sarah Monaghan

In January 2020, New York’s landmark bail reform law went into effect. This report provides a definitive examination of how bail reform reshaped the pretrial landscape after five full years of implementation. Covering all regions of the state, and drawing on court data from 2018 to 2024 (spanning pre- and post-reform timeframes), the report examines bail reform’s impact on:

• Pretrial Decision-Making at Arraignment: Rates of release on recognizance, supervised release, bail, and pretrial detention; and estimated numbers of cases not resulting in pretrial detention due to changing practices under bail reform.

• Affordability of Bail: For cases that continue to be assigned bail, median bail amounts, bail posting rates, and judges’ use of “alternative” payment methods (partially secured bonds and unsecured bonds) that legislators intended to ease people’s ability to pay.

• Racial and Ethnic Disparities: Disparities among Black, Hispanic, and white people in judges’ rates of continuing to set bail or remand people directly to jail.

• Three Rounds of Bail Amendments: Effects of amendments respectively put into effect in July 2020, May 2022, and June 2023 (entailing a first-ever analysis of the 2022 and 2023 amendments).

New York: Data Collaborative for Justice, 2026. 47p.

By Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722, is a powerful and evocative account of the Great Plague that devastated London in 1665. Though written decades after the event, the narrative is presented as the firsthand observations of “H.F.,” a saddler living in the city, and blends historical fact with fictional storytelling. Defoe, who was a child during the outbreak, drew upon official records, personal testimonies, and his own journalistic instincts to reconstruct the atmosphere of a city under siege by disease.

The plague of 1665 was the last major outbreak of bubonic plague in England, killing an estimated 100,000 people—nearly a quarter of London’s population at the time. It was part of the Second Pandemic, a series of plague outbreaks that began with the Black Death in the 14th century and continued into the 18th. The disease spread rapidly through crowded urban areas, exacerbated by poor sanitation, limited medical knowledge, and ineffective containment measures. The government imposed quarantines, marked infected houses with red crosses, and employed “watchmen” to enforce isolation, while mass graves and plague pits became grim symbols of the crisis.

Defoe’s narrative captures the fear, confusion, and moral dilemmas faced by Londoners during this time. He details the breakdown of social order, the flight of the wealthy, the suffering of the poor, and the varied responses of clergy, physicians, and common citizens. The book is not only a historical document but also a reflection on human behavior in the face of catastrophe. Its themes of resilience, public health, and social responsibility remain strikingly relevant, offering timeless insights into how societies confront pandemics.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2025. 202p.

By Rabindranath Tagor

Rabindranath Tagore’s Nationalism is a profound and prophetic critique of the nationalist fervor that swept across the world in the early 20th century. First published in 1917, the book is a collection of essays based on Tagore’s lectures in Japan and the United States, where he examined the rise of nationalism and its impact on societies, particularly in the West and in colonial India. As a poet, philosopher, and humanist, Tagore viewed nationalism not merely as a political movement but as a force with the potential to both unite and divide humanity.
Tagore’s Sādhanā is not just a philosophical text—it is a guide for living with awareness, compassion, and harmony. In today’s fast-paced, often disconnected world, his message of spiritual realization, unity, and love remains as vital as ever. Whether through mindfulness, environmental consciousness, or a deeper appreciation of human relationships, *Sādhanā* offers timeless wisdom for navigating the complexities of modern life. Tagore’s vision challenges us to look beyond material success and societal divisions, urging us to embrace a life of inner fulfillment, interconnectedness, and profound respect for all forms of life. By revisiting *Sādhanā* in the context of contemporary challenges, we find a powerful and enduring message that calls us to rediscover the deeper truths of existence and live with greater purpose and harmony.

Read-Me.Org Inc. NY. Phila. Australia. 2025.