By Peer Schouten and James Barnett

Contemporary banditry in northwest Nigeria is a multifaceted phenomenon that encompasses a wide spectrum of violence waged by heavily militarised yet loosely organised rural gangs. These groups engage in everything from cattle rustling to kidnapping for ransom and extortion of peasant communities, with bandits becoming important de facto authorities in swathes of rural northwest Nigeria. 

Underpinning the contemporary bandit conflict, we argue, is an ongoing ‘battle for the bush’ — a struggle over land, governance and rural livelihoods. Historically, the bush functioned as a shared space for farmers and pastoralists. However, land use data shows that the expansion of cropland farming has gradually overtaken grazing lands, reducing pastoral mobility and generating increasing conflicts. The state’s failure to mediate these tensions or provide equitable land policies, coupled with the breakdown of traditional conflict resolution mechanisms, has allowed grievances to fester. In response, bandits have violently reclaimed and reshaped the governance of the bush, not only as a refuge but as a domain of coercive rule, imposing levies on farming and controlling access to land and cattle.

We examine the historical drivers of this transformation and analyse how opportunistic criminals and social bandits have evolved into de facto rural rulers. Along the way, the trend of cropland expansion is being reversed. Yet instead of reestablishing a pastoral idyll, banditry is reproducing the very conditions that gave rise to it, further undermining rural livelihoods in the northwest. This has compounded rural poverty and food insecurity while depriving pastoralist youths’ access to government services and education that could provide for a better future. Our analysis implies that the crisis cannot be solved through military interventions alone but requires a rethinking of rural governance.

Schouten, P., & Barnett, J. (2025). Battle for the bush: banditry and violent agrarian change in northwest Nigeria. 

Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS). DIIS Working Paper Vol. 2025 No. 12

2025. 34p.

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 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 Chandler Hall and Alice Hamblet

  We all have a right to feel safe and be free from violence as we go about our daily lives. However, when violence does occur, few are prepared for the unexpected trauma, injury, and expense that can result. When someone experiences violence in the United States, the criminal legal system too often neglects the immediate and long-term needs of survivors of violence, instead disproportionately focusing resources on punishing the person or persons responsible for causing the harm. To address this imbalance, Congress passed the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) in 1984, which established the Crime Victims Fund (CVF) to provide financial support to state crime victim compensation (CVC) programs and victim service providers. Currently, there is a 75 percent federal match for state CVC programs, meaning that for every dollar that a state spends on victim compensation grants to survivors, it receives 75 cents from the federal government. Despite the key role that financial relief can play in healing after violence, America continues to fail to make necessary investments supporting victims and survivors of violence. In fiscal year 2021, state and local governments spent a combined $274 billion on police, corrections, and criminal-legal proceedings. That same year, the federal CVF was capped at slightly more than $2 billion. Too often, survivors are left to deal with the lasting and compounding effects of their victimization without support; the results—which can include bankruptcy, chronic illness, depression, and anxiety—are devastating. While financial support alone cannot eliminate the lifelong pain and trauma associated with victimization, research shows that financial-induced stress following harm is a stronger predictor of the development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than victimization itself. As such, victim compensation can be lifesaving. By federal law, CVC programs must cover out-of-pocket expenses such as medical bills, burial costs, and lock replacement that are not covered by other means, including private insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid. As such, CVC programs have the potential to aid survivors who have no other means of support. Moreover, victim compensation programs can help to break cycles of violence. The adage “hurt people, hurt people” rings true. While most survivors do not engage in future violence, the fact remains that people who commit violence often have experienced it themselves. This may be the case especially for people living in neighborhoods that experience frequent violence and who, due to systemic disinvestment and inequities, do not have access to healing resources such as adequate social services or medical or mental health care. When survivors receive the support they need to heal, they are less likely to commit harm. What is more, healed people, heal people. Providing survivors with victim compensation to meet unexpected costs associated with experiencing violence opens doors for intergenerational and community healing, as the impacts of untreated trauma and economic instability can ripple and compound to their families and communities at large. Victim compensation programs, therefore, have the potential to not only deliver on the promise to make survivors safer, but to help break cycles of violence, thereby making entire communities safer.   

Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, 2025. 73p.

Delphine Brisson-Burns

Abstract

Eighth Amendment Jurisprudence proscribes criminalization based on “status.” Based on United States Supreme Court case law, for the purposes of this paper, “status” is understood to mean an “ongoing state of being.” This paper argues that race is “status” and thus criminalizing people of color based on race violates the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of the Eighth Amendment. Further, in the United States, racial “status” is criminalized both directly and indirectly. Racial “status” is criminalized directly by police officers’ frequent use of racial profiling to build criminal cases against people of color. On the other hand, racial status is criminalized indirectly when police officers interpret conduct that is inextricably tied to racial “status” as inherently criminal. Finally, this paper argues that recriminalization of “felons” is an unconstitutional criminalization of “status,” disproportionately harming communities of color.

Recommended Citation

Delphine Brisson-Burns, Criminalizing Race: How Direct And Indirect Criminalization Of Racial “Status” Constitutes Cruel And Unusual Punishment, 21 UC Law SF Race & Econ. Just. L.J. 71 (2024).

By Sarah J Summers.

From the introduction:

Sentencing law and theory is closely bound up with the justification of punishment. 1 It is thus unsurprising that sentencing theory is generally perceived as falling squarely within the domain of moral philosophy. 2 Much of the debate has focused on whether retribution or consequentialist notions of deterrence or rehabilitation should serve as the principal aim on which the sentencing system is based. There are numerous articles by proponents of the various theories explaining why their theory should provide the primary basis for the determination of the sentence. 3 The importance of the moral philosophical discussion transcends national boundaries. Despite considerable diversity in the legal cultures and traditions of the various legal systems, ‘[p]rinciples of uniformity and retributive proportionality are now recognised to some extent in almost all systems, but sentences in these systems are also designed to prevent crime by means of deterrence, incapacitation and rehabilitation’.4 Whereas broadly ‘correctionalist’ accounts of punishment underpinned the penal welfare model of punishment for much of the twentieth century, 5 the ‘just deserts’ movement 6 of the 1980s was in line with a transfer of focus away from the individualized treatment of offenders and towards a vision of punishment which not only favoured a more standardized approach to the treatment of offenders, but which also expressly legitimized retributivist penalties and practices…..

London Oxford. 2022. 280p.

By Hans Kurella.

A Modern Man of Science.. Translated from the German by M. Eden Paul. “Entirely new, however, is the attempt here made to demonstrate how high is the position of Lombroso’s brilliance may justly be said to have occupied in a epoch of positive study of the world, of mankind and society.”

New York, Reman Co. (1910) 199 pages.