By JOHN KELLNER & ERIK GAMM

Colorado could spare itself a reputational headache and hefty fines if it were to invest in criminal incompetency restoration, but it would need to cut mental health operating costs to make the effort worthwhile. When criminal defendants are declared incompetent, they may also be declared “restorable,” meaning they could, with counseling and mental healthcare, restore a level of mental capacity that could carry culpability. The backlog of criminal defendants waiting for mental health services has risen in the last year, as has the length of time they need to wait for an available bed. In the meantime, high-visibility cases have highlighted a pervasive problem in Colorado relating to incompetency to stand trial. This situation has been created over the last five years. In March 2019, the Colorado Department of Human Services (CDHS) resolved an eight-year federal lawsuit regarding excessive wait times for courtordered competency services. The settlement, filed as a consent decree, required CDHS to expand community-based services, speed up inpatient admissions, and provide treatment for people in jail awaiting competency services. CDHS faces up to $12 million annually in fines if it fails to meet new service deadlines. The agreement comes after years of rising demand: since 2000, inpatient competency evaluation orders increased nearly 600%, and restoration service orders rose more than 1,200%. Disability Law Colorado reopened the lawsuit after CDHS failed to meet previous settlement deadlines. In subsequent years, the backlog has not only ceased to disappear but grown. The state of Colorado has not paid the fine threshold each year but has in some, an outlay that has added to the state’s deficit. In the meantime, judges have less discretion regarding when to release accused criminals who are mentally incompetent back into the public to await restoration.

KEY FINDINGS • Since 2000, inpatient competency evaluation orders increased nearly 600%, and restoration service orders rose more than 1,200%. • As of June 2025, there are 368 Colorado inmates on the wait list to receive court-mandated competency restoration. • There are 673 total beds reserved for incompetency restoration treatment. They are always occupied, creating a wait list referred to as the state’s “backlog.” • Over the last year, 930 inmates have been referred for restoration and have spent, or will spend, an average near 110 days each on the wait list. • The Colorado Department of Human Services (CDHS) pays a fine between $100 and $500 per day for keeping an inmate ordered to undergo competency restoration waitlisted for longer than 28 days. In Fiscal Year 24, CDHS paid $12 million, which is the cap under the consent decree. • If the consent decree had not included a cap, the fines would have cost $65.2 million. • To bring wait times below 28 days, the state would need to add 209 new beds. These resources would save the state $12 million (plus annual adjustments to the cap) per year by eliminating the fines and $11.9 million per year by reducing the amount of time that inmates spend in public facilities while on the wait list. • HB22-1303 budgeted $6.2 million per year to staff and operate 16 new beds at the Colorado Mental Health Hospital in Fort Logan. At $388,279 per bed, 209 new beds would require $81.2 million of additional state spending per year. • State accreditation standards require that mental institutions dedicate about 3.7 FTE of staff to each restoration bed; this requirement alone generates 74% of the total cost per unit. • Inpatient restoration is almost seven times more expensive than incarceration, which costs just $58,000 per inmate annually. • In total, the state would face an annual cost of $57.2 million to comply with the 2019 consent decree.

Greenwood Village, CO: Common Sense Institute, 2025. 13p.

By Oliver Rollins, Julien Larregue, and Hannah Pullen-Blasnik

Technologies play a central role in decision-making processes within criminal legal systems, creating what we call technologies of criminalization. These tools are based on the idea of calculated truths about future riskiness, but they often reinforce structural biases that underlie the concept of criminality. Their development and use demonstrate efforts to define the abstract criminal: a notion that embodies the presumed natural realities and discoverable aspects of criminality believed to be objectively discoverable and statistically predictable. This perspective neglects the socially constructed nature of criminality and the impact of human biases in the design and implementation of these technologies. Three interlinked processes drive their adoption: quantification, prediction, and pathologization. By examining neuroscientific, genomic, and algorithmic technologies, we critically assess their social impacts and the risks of exacerbating social inequalities under the facade of technical neutrality. Finally, we emphasize the increasing involvement of private industries in criminalization processes.

Annu. Rev. Law Soc. Sci. 2025. 21:469–87

 By Benjamin van Rooij, Malouke E. Kuiper, and Alex R. Piquero

Punishment plays a major function in preventing crime. Punishment can potentially shape criminal conduct through at least 13 different mechanisms: 5 have a positive effect, reducing crime, and 8 have a negative effect, stimulating offending. This article explains what these 13 potential effects of punishment are and how they have been theorized. It further reviews the body of available empirical evidence for each of these mechanisms. It finds that for many mechanisms there is mixed and inconclusive evidence with major methodological challenges. The article further analyzes the conditions under which punishment affects crime, including the type of crime, offender, and underlying causes and correlates of crime. It also explores the time frames through which punishment affects crime, as well as the ways in which different behavioral effects of punishment interact. The conclusion develops ideas about how this body of empirical work can come to shape criminal justice practice.

Annu. Rev. Law Soc. Sci. 2025. 21:509–26

By The  European Crime Prevention Network

This paper summarises the findings from an expert meeting on youth recruitment into organised crime held in Brussels on 26 and 27 March 2024. In this meeting, co-organised by EMPACT Cocaine, Cannabis, and Heroin (OA 7.1) and the EUCPN, twenty-one experts, representing 15 EU Member States, the European Commission, and the European Crime Prevention Network, shared the latest insights on the growing problem of youth recruitment into organised crime, the multifaceted risk factors contributing to youth involvement in organised crime, and opportunities for prevention. This report highlights key insights relevant for intervention frameworks and actionable recommendations. 

Cf. European Crime Prevention Network,2025. 16p.

By R. Evan Ellis

The security environment in Mexico is characterized by a dangerous fragmentation of and competition among criminal groups that pushed the nation’s homicide rate to a record high of 22.5 per 100,000 in 2017, a 27.5 percent increase over the prior year.1 The nation, whose security and prosperity strongly impacts the United States through geographic proximity and associated flows of people, money, and goods (both licit and illicit), is at a critical juncture in its fight against transnational organized crime. Since Mexican President Felipe Calderón launched the “war against the cartels” in December 2006 with the deployment of the Mexican army into the state of Michoacán, the nation’s security forces have taken down the leaders of multiple powerful criminal groups and debilitated their organizations.2 In the process, the Mexican military, police, and other security institutions have evolved their institutional structures, modified both their strategy and their doctrine, and strengthened their ability to combat transnational organized crime. Yet as with the experience of the United States in combatting terrorist groups in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mexico’s fight against the cartels, both despite and because of its successes, has created a more chaotic criminal landscape, with both a higher level of violence and a broader range of criminality. Complicating Mexico’s security challenge is the disposition of the Trump administration to act aggressively against illegal immigration from Mexico (among other countries) into the United States, along with U.S. renegotiation and possible abandonment of the North American Free Trade Agreement. These actions increase stressors on Mexico, including the prospect of expanded deportations of immigrants to Mexico, the loss of remittance income, and impeded access by Mexican producers to the U.S. market. The Trump administration’s actions, magnified by rhetoric that many Mexicans perceive as an insult to their country and people, have combined with Mexican frustration over the persistence of violence and corruption to create the real prospect that leftist populist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador could win the July 2018 presidential election, potentially taking Mexico on a course of more distant political relations and decreased security cooperation with the United States and expanded engagement with extra-hemispheric rivals of the United States such as Russia and China.

Army University Press, 2019. 12p.

By IGARAPÉ INSTITUTE | THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION | TRUSTLAW |

Environmental and natural resource-related crimes represent the third-largest illicit economy in the world in terms of the volume of money involved, ranking behind only drug trafficking and human trafficking. These are offenses that affect nature and threaten the planet’s sustainability, such as illegal logging, illicit crops, unauthorized agricultural expansion, illegal gold mining, and wildlife trafficking. These crimes are characterized by the insertion of illegally obtained natural resources into the formal economy — a process known as environmental asset laundering — which is estimated to move between US$110 and US$281 billion per year. Given the diversity and complexity of the strategies used to conceal the illicit origin of these resources, anti-money laundering systems often face challenges in identifying the dynamics of environmental crime. This report analyzes how the legislation of six Amazon Basin countries — Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela — defines environmental crimes and whether the entities required to report suspicious transactions to their national Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) are adequately structured to address these crimes. It is through the action of these reporting entities that the asset laundering enforcement system — including law enforcement agencies and public prosecutors — is activated. In general, legal frameworks follow two models: one that links asset laundering to a predefined set of criminal offenses (the so-called “predicate offenses”) and another that recognizes laundering of resources from any offense (“all-crimes model”). The study is divided into two parts. The first examines whether the activities and professions most closely associated with the supply chains vulnerable to environmental and natural resource-related crimes in the Amazon are subject to mandatory suspicious transactions reporting. The second part assesses the application of anti-money laundering laws and asset recovery mechanisms. It also investigates whether national legal frameworks recognize money laundering as a crime associated with these offenses and whether they provide effective instruments for asset recovery in the context of such illicit activities. IGARAPÉ INSTITUTE | THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION | TRUSTLAW | 2025. 39p.

By Ailie Rennie In partnership with the Building Futures programme

This report forms part of the Prison Reform Trust’s Building Futures programme, funded by the National Lottery Community Fund, that since 2020 has been exploring the experiences of people serving longterm prison sentences. The programme has defined its long-term cohort to include men who spend 10 or more years in prison and women who spent eight years or more. This report is based on in-depth interviews with 20 people who have been released from prison and returned to the community after serving long-term prison sentences. This report aims to: • Understand more about the experience of release, re-entry, and resettlement for those who serve the longest periods in custody, including the challenges they face and their experiences of being on licence or under supervision. • Explore the availability of pre- and post-release support and assistance offered to people released from long prison sentences, highlighting both evidence of good practice and identifying areas for improvement. • Develop insights and ideas that will inform policy and practice through-the-gate in line with the Prison Reform Trust’s vision of a just, humane, and effective penal system. The report and its context Despite the common understanding that most prisoners – even those who are serving long-term and indeterminate periods of imprisonment – will eventually be released back into the community, there is currently very little known about the experiences of release for such individuals. We know strikingly little about the process of release itself as it exists in England and Wales, the challenges it presents, and the ways in which people begin to create a life for themselves after having spent many years separated from the outside world. Similarly, we know very little about what support might be available to assist people on their re-entry journeys or how the challenges they face might change over time. Given the increasing number of people subject to long-term sentences, the likely subsequent rise in people being released from them, and the staggeringly high current rate of recall, this is problematic as we may be failing to understand the unique re-entry needs of this population and providing insufficient support, setting them up to fail. The need to understand individuals’ experiences of release from long sentences is also particularly relevant given policy changes that have occurred in recent years wherein release and progression to open conditions have been severely curtailed. In 2022, for example, the then justice secretary Dominic Raab introduced controversial changes that limited the transfer of indeterminate prisoners from closed to open conditions and introduced new ministerial powers to refuse the release of the ‘highestrisk prisoners’. In effect, these procedural changes sought to keep a greater number of individuals imprisoned for longer by making it harder for specific types of prisoners to be released. Despite the reversal of Dominic Raab’s policy changes by Alex Chalk in 2023, many long-term and indeterminately sentenced prisoners are still denied the opportunity to access open prisons and progress towards release. For example, in 2024, more than 100 indeterminate prisoners were blocked from moving to open conditions by justice secretary Shabana Mahmood, despite their transfers being approved by the Parole Board.1 Without the opportunity to access the benefits of open conditions, including release on temporary licence, and to demonstrate how they have lowered their risk, more people serving long-term and indeterminate sentences are likely to stay in prison for longer beyond the expiry of their tariff, further increasing pressures on the prison population. The importance of these changes, for the purposes of this report, is to highlight the achievements of those who were granted release within this context, including participants in this study. Whilst most of the participants were released before these policy changes came into effect, just under half were released – or rereleased – in accordance with these frameworks. Those who were released prior to this, however, also experienced a series of policy changes both prior to and post-release which impacted their progress, including the declining use of release on temporary licence, Transforming Rehabilitation, and the increased length of supervision from four to 10 years. As the entire Building Futures programme has sought to demonstrate, being sentenced to and progressing through long-term imprisonment is a tumultuous process of navigating complex – and often contradictory – policy changes without knowing when they could change again. The intention of this report is to detail how the ‘rollercoaster’ of policy changes also impact the release and resettlement processes, continuing long after an individual exits the prison gates

London: Prison Reform Trust, 2025. 84p.

By Kiril Sharapov, Heather Komenda

This article examines the vulnerability of Ukrainian refugees to trafficking, abuse and exploitation in Poland and Romania following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Drawing on survey data from the International Organization for Migration's Displacement Tracking Matrix and qualitative interviews with key informants, the study applies a multi-level, intersectional framework to assess personal, situational and contextual dimensions of vulnerability. It introduces a ‘continuum of vulnerability’ model, recognising that risks are dynamic, relational and shaped by structural inequalities. Quantitative analysis identifies financial insecurity, age and discrimination as key predictors of harm, whereas qualitative findings highlight the impact of conditional protection regimes, housing insecurity and healthcare barriers. Although few trafficking cases were officially identified, the findings suggest that a well-funded and coordinated rights-based response helped mitigate risks. The article argues that such protection frameworks must remain in place for as long as necessary and that vulnerability should be continuously monitored across all three dimensions.

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International Migration
Volume 63, Issue 5

September 2025

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 Charis E. Kubrin

The main objective of the project is to improve understanding of the immigration-crime relationship by addressing several important areas of inquiry. These areas of inquiry represent key omissions in the literature that merit attention. For example, next to no research has examined the robustness of the immigration-crime relationship across a substantially large and diverse range of neighborhoods across the U.S., which reflect different immigration contexts and histories. At the same time, with few exceptions, research largely lumps all immigrants together and neglects important differences across groups, whether by immigrant status or demographic or socio-economic background. Finally, little is known about how the immigration-crime relationship may be context dependent, and how immigration-related policies and practices may condition the immigration-crime relationship. Using data from a variety of sources over many years (2000-2016), we conduct a series of analyses that refine and advance our understanding of the immigration-crime relationship. These analyses address a variety of research questions including: How robust is the immigration-crime relationship? What are the appropriate ways to capture varied effects of immigrant groups on neighborhood crime rates? Does citizenship status matter? How do levels of assimilation impact how immigration and crime are associated? Which immigrant groups have crime reducing effects in neighborhoods? Which have crime enhancing effects? Another set of analyses consider the extent to which the broader city-context of reception as well as immigration-related policies and practices condition the immigration-crime relationship. These analyses address research questions including: Which city-level characteristics matter most for impacting the neighborhood immigration-crime relationship? How does immigration enforcement condition the relationship between immigration and crime? Do “sanctuary cities” attract crime-prone immigrants, reducing public safety overall? To achieve these goals and begin to answer these research questions, we collected, cleaned and merged data from many sources including crime data from police departments, public use Census and American Community Survey data, restricted data from the Census Data Center at UC Irvine, historical business data from Reference USA, and TRACFed data, among others. After considerable effort, we collected data for a sample of 415 cities in 2020 with at least 10,000 population, a sample of 480 cities in 2010, a sample of 168 cities in 2000, a subset of 310 cities with longitudinal data in 2010 and 2018, and a subset of 139 cities with longitudinal data in 2000 and 2010. No comparable neighborhood crime data set that covers such a large and diverse range of contexts currently exists.  (continued)    

Washington, DC: U.S. National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, 2025. 45p.

By Giulia Bruschi

While most of the immigration towards Spain come from South American countries, the Western Mediterranean and the Atlantic remain the most important mixed migration routes from Africa toward Spain, and Europe more in general.

The steady increase in irregular arrivals via the Canary Islands since 2020 has catalysed the attention of EU policymaking and has continued to strain the reception system in the Canary Islands. In 2025, crackdowns on departures from Mauritania led to a reduction in irregular crossings. However, the Atlantic remains one of the deadliest sea crossings worldwide, and the land journeys to embarkation points also remain fraught with risks.

Meanwhile, the Western Mediterranean route continues to be used by migrants from West African countries, who must cross North Africa to reach the Mediterranean shores, and also poses several risks.

In this context, throughout 2024, MMC, in partnership with UNHCR, interviewed 497 migrants recently arrived in Spain via the Canary Islands, the Mediterranean, or via the land crossing in Ceuta and Melilla. The interviews aimed to explore their migration drivers, journeys, as protection risks in transit, asylum and onward movement intentions from Spain.

Mixed Migration Centre, 2025. 31p.

By Barna Konkolÿ Thege, Chaz Robitaille, Lujayn Mahmoud, Eden A. Kinzel, Rameen Qamar, Jamie Hartmann-Boyce, Olivia Choy

Aggressive/antisocial behaviors in children and youth may result in impairments in family, social, or academic functioning and lead to long‐term negative consequences for both the individual and society as a whole. The potential of healthy diet and nutritional supplements to reduce aggression and antisocial behavior is an active area of study in nutritional mental health sciences. The goal of this systematic review is to (1) investigate the effectiveness/efficacy of nutritional interventions(dietary manipulation, fortification or supplementation) in reducing excessive aggression, antisocial behaviors, and criminal offending in children/youth (systematic review and meta‐analysis); and (2) provide an overview of implementation barriers and facilitators regarding nutritional interventions in children/youth (qualitative/narrative synthesis). After consulting theCampbell Collaboration's methodological guidelines, a comprehensive search for published and unpublished papers on controlled intervention studies was performed (up to February 26, 2024) using both electronic databases (MEDLINE,Embase, Cochrane Library, APA PsycInfo, Scopus, and the Allied and Complementary Medicine Database) and other resources (e.g., Google Scholar, reference list of included studies and other reviews, websites of public health agencies). This study focuses on children and youth (up to the age of 24) presenting with an above‐average level of aggression/antisocial behavior. In terms of the intervention, we considered both dietary manipulation and nutritional supplementation with aduration long enough (minimum of 1 week) that a significant change in the individual's nutritional status could be expected.We included studies with a controlled design if, for outcomes, they reported on (1) behavioral‐level violence/aggression toward others in real‐life (non‐simulated) settings, (2) antisocial behaviors, or (3) criminal offending. Initial screening,checking for eligibility criteria, data extraction from, and risk of bias assessment for each eligible study were conducted independently by two reviewers. To perform the meta‐analysis, data from each original report were standardized(transformed into Hedges' g) so that results across studies could be meaningfully combined and interpreted. Data con-versions, computation of pooled effect sizes, and estimation of publication bias were conducted using the ComprehensiveMeta‐analysis software (Version 4). Altogether, 51 reports (describing 50 individual studies) met our inclusion criteria, and72 effect sizes were extracted from these reports. Nutritional interventions with a broad target (e.g., broad‐spectrummicronutrient supplementation or general improvement in diet quality) had the most consistent and largest intervention

Campbell Systematic ReviewsVolume 21, Issue 3Sep 2025

By Christine Mitchell, Renae A. Badruzzaman

  When you witness someone in crisis — a mental health emergency or other escalating situation — what are your options to intervene? For most, the only available option is to call 911. And in most places, the 911 system is directly tied to the police department, making police involvement essentially inevitable. But police are not a source of safety, especially for Black, Indigenous, disabled, and people with mental health needs. Policing in the US is a system rooted in violence and punishment, not care. Calling the police can escalate a crisis, turning calls for distress into arrest, violence, or death. Without trusted, community-led alternatives, we are left with a wrenching dilemma: stay silent and unsupportive in moments of crisis, or risk escalation, criminalization, and compounded trauma and violence. Because of this, many communities across the US are working to interrupt police violence against people with mental health needs by building up community-based, community-led, non-police crisis response programs. While more evaluations of each of these types of programs are needed, there is already a body of literature that suggests these alternative models are both more effective at meeting the needs of people in crisis and more trusted by the community. One such program is Mental Health First (MH First), a project of the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP) launched in 2020 in Oakland and Sacramento, CA. MH First is a community-led crisis response hotline outside of the 911 and police system that community members can call when they, or someone in their community, is experiencing a crisis. The program’s guiding principles include autonomy, healing justice, abolition, intersectionality, disability justice, and harm reduction. This evaluation — conducted while the program is on a strategic planning hiatus — takes a close look at MH First’s first four years of operation to assess how the program is working, what impacts it’s had, and what is needed to grow its reach and deepen effectiveness. Using a mixed-methods process evaluation, we conducted 29 interviews with key stakeholders, and analyzed 167 survey responses from community members in Oakland and Sacramento. Our evaluation focuses on community perceptions of MH First, program strengths, and areas for growth. In particular, we examined the program’s current structure and operations, perceived impact, and potential for deepening and increased services to the Oakland and Sacramento communities Overall, interviewees and survey respondents were very positive about and appreciative of the program. Interviewees noted that the program is trusted by and rooted in the local communities it serves, an essential part of providing appropriate and accessible care to those who call. Trust is further increased by the clear, transparent values of community, autonomy, and abolition that guide MH First’s work. Importantly, MH First is building power and self-efficacy in the local and national community through their trainings, technical assistance, and volunteer recruitment — through which they have trained thousands of volunteers to staff the program. On the national level, interviewees named that MH First provides a strong model that indicates that non-police mental health crisis response programs are practical and possible. Relative to other forms of mental health crisis response, including police and co-response models, MH First is highlighted as more appropriate and more effective at meeting community needs. Our evaluation also identified areas where MH First could grow and improve to better serve the Oakland and Sacramento communities. Interviewees expressed a desire for MH First to increase reliability by expanding their hours of operation to 24/7, rather than during select hours of the week. Some also suggested that MH First transition from a volunteer-only service, to include at least some paid staff. Finally, interviewees felt that MH First should focus on preventative measures and follow-up care, not just crisis management and intervention. In order to be able to meet these areas of growth, interviewees offered suggestions for expanding the program’s reach, including through policy change, a clear narrative and communications strategy, more trainings to build community capacity, and long-term sustainable investment in the program. Two big picture questions remain for the program’s consideration: First, how can MH First avoid the co-optation of their principles and strategy by entities that dilute or stray from MH First’s values and purpose? Interviewees spoke of the inevitability of co-optation and shared strategies for how to reframe or leverage co-optation to expand the program, while still maintaining control over the narrative of the program’s practice. Second, should MH First remain an entity outside of local, county, or state government, or should it be housed under a governmental office or supported with government funds — or some combination of both? Our interviewees had strong opinions on this question, with some feeling that operating within the government and social safety net would allow MH First to be more sustainable and accessible, and others believing that moving under a government agency would cause the program to lose its current spirit and vision. Our evaluation concludes with six recommendations for MH First: 1: Continue to prioritize being deeply rooted in and led by community members in Oakland and Sacramento, particularly Black, Indigenous, Latine, and disabled community members who are most impacted by policing 2: Publicly share more stories of success, including robust qualitative and quantitative data analysis 3: Provide preventative care in order to interrupt pathways to crisis situations and follow-up care in order to ensure people have what they need following crisis 4: Expand hours of operation as much as possible to ensure the hotline is accessible and reliable 5: Increase resources and funding for the program, including considerations of whether MH First is willing and able to receive government funding 6: Pass policy and budget allocations that shift money from the carceral state to non-police grassroots response, including to MH First   

Berkeley, CA: Mental Health First, July 2025.  72p.

By: Kristan Russell, Marly Zeigler, Moriah Taylor

Implementing best practices in child welfare court cases is critical to ensuring positive outcomes for youth and families. However, it is also essential that courts are assessed for their fidelity to implement these practices and whether they are having the intended impacts. This article outlines findings from a pre/post evaluation examining the impacts of the implementation of the Enhanced Resource Guidelines (ERGs) in three urban jurisdictions. The findings from this study yield valuable insights regarding the extent to which ERGs implementation positively impacts key outcomes in court practices and case processing. Implications for ongoing practice and future research are discussed. From Volume 76, Issue 2.

Pittsburgh: National Center for Juvenile Justice, National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges,, 2025. 18p.

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.