By James René Jolin, ; Benjamin A. Barsky, ; Carrie G. Wade; et alMeredith B. Rosenthal, PhD3,5

 IMPORTANCE - By expanding health insurance to millions of people in the US, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) may have important health, economic, and social welfare implications for people with criminal legal involvement—a population with disproportionately high morbidity and mortality rates. OBJECTIVE To scope the literature for studies assessing the association of any provision of the ACA with 5 types of outcomes, including insurance coverage rates, access to care, health outcomes, costs of care, and social welfare outcomes among people with criminal legal involvement. EVIDENCE REVIEW - The literature search included results from PubMed, CINAHL Complete, APA Psycinfo, Embase, Social Science Database, and Web of Science and was conducted to include articles from January 1, 2014, through December 31, 2023. Only original empirical studies were included, but there were no restrictions on study design. FINDINGS Of the 3538 studies initially identified for potential inclusion, the final sample included 19 studies. These 19 studies differed substantially in their definition of criminal legal involvement and units of analysis. The studies also varied with respect to study design, but difference-in-differences methods were used in 10 of the included studies. With respect to outcomes, 100 unique outcomes were identified across the 19 studies, with at least 1 in all 5 outcome categories determined prior to the literature search. Health insurance coverage and access to care were the most frequently studied outcomes. Results for the other 3 outcome categories were mixed, potentially due to heterogeneous definitions of populations, interventions, and outcomes and to limitations in the availability of individual-level datasets that link incarceration data with health-related data. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE-  In this scoping review, the ACA was associated with an increase in insurance coverage and a decrease in recidivism rates among people with criminal legal involvement. Future research and data collection are needed to understand more fully health and nonhealth outcomes among people with criminal legal involvement related to the ACA and other health insurance policies—as well as the mechanisms underlying these relationships.  

JAMA Health Forum. 2024;5(8):e242640. doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2024.2640

By Michele Deitch

This in-depth article provides comprehensive background information about the nature, value, and history of correctional oversight; documents the shifting landscape and increasing momentum around the oversight issue over the last decade; highlights key distinctions between prison and jail oversight; and provides a comprehensive assessment of the state of prison and jail oversight in the U.S. today. The article includes tables listing and categorizing every correctional oversight body in the United States as of 2020.

American Journal of Criminal Law 47, no. 2 (2020): 207–74.

By Kayla Freemon  

An estimated 5.4% of individuals in United States jails are in private facilities. While our knowledge about jail experiences and private prisons has grown in recent years, little is known about the private jail experience. Jail stays are often assumed to be a less severe punishment; however, transient and diverse populations and limited investments in treatment and programming suggest jails may be particularly unsafe. The current study uses the 2011–12 National Inmate Survey to compare how individuals perceive and experience safety while incarcerated in public and private jails. A quasi-experimental approach is taken using propensity scores to match individuals in private jails to those in public facilities based on demographics, past experiences, and incarceration measures. The findings suggest that individuals in private jails perceived these facilities as less safe compared to their public counterparts. Respondents in private jails reported higher levels of gang activity in their facility, more had belongings stolen while detained, and fewer individuals believed the facility was adequately staffed or that corrections officers ended fights quickly. This study highlights harms experienced in both public and private jails and underscores a need for more research on the private jail experience.

Journal of Criminal Justice Volume 90, January–February 2024, 102134

By Stephen Raher

The growth of public expense associated with mass incarceration has led many carceral systems to push certain costs onto the people who are under correctional supervision. In the case of prisons and jails, this frequently takes the form of charges associated with telecommunications, food, basic supplies, and access to information. The operation of these fee-based businesses (referred to here as “prison retail”) is typically outsourced to a private firm. In recent years, the dominant prison retail companies have consolidated into a handful of companies, mostly owned by private equity firms. This paper explores the practices of prison retailers and discusses potential consumer-law implications. After an overview of the prison retail industry and a detailed discussion of unfair practices, the paper looks at some potential legal protections that may apply under current law. These protections, however, prove to be scattered and often illusory due to mandatory arbitration provisions and prohibitions on class adjudication. The paper therefore concludes with recommendations on a variety of steps that state, local, and federal governments can take to address the problems inherent in the current model.

17 Hastings Race & Poverty L.J. 3 (2020).

By  Madeline M. Carter

In a new report titled Sustaining the EBDM Model: The Indiana Story, the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) reveals how, as part of a multi-phase pilot study, Grant County, Indiana, realized numerous breakthroughs in community supervision, data collection, and pretrial services by applying EBDM. Steering the county was a policy team comprising local stakeholders who worked closely with NIC to develop a set of realistic, attainable goals. They included:

• Restructuring caseloads to optimize supervision for people at the highest risk to reoffend

• Revising the probation violations process to expand alternatives to revocation

• Enhancing data collection
  
  Based on those goals, Grant County was able to attain the following wins:

• 42% decrease in people on probation being convicted of a misdemeanor

• 26% reduction in people on probation being convicted of a felony

• 19% reduction in new referrals to supervision, leaving more time to implement behavioral interventions with people at the highest risk to reoffend

Washington DC: U.S. Department of Justice National Institute of Corrections, 2022. 41p.

By Matthew Cracknell

As part of the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms, 70 ‘local’ prisons in England and Wales were re-designated as resettlement prisons, in order to provide additional through-the-gate support to individuals serving short sentences. Drawing on staff and prisoner interviews in one case study resettlement prison, this article considers what challenges were involved with implementing a resettlement culture in a local prison. Findings first outline factors inhibiting the resettlement status of the prison; these include a tension between attempts to implement a more expansive resettlement remit into the prison, while also fulfilling more long-standing core institutional duties; the size and churn of the prison population; wide-scale apathy caused by change fatigue; and government austerity policies which caused significant difficulties in the day-to-day staffing of the prison. This article then turns to practitioner responses to the re-designation, finding that practitioners interpreted resettlement in two limited ways: top-down managerial attempts to instil a wider resettlement culture into the prison, and resistance from prison officers who felt unwilling or unable to expand their roles beyond custodial and security concerns. This article concludes by outlining how this set of inter-related barriers frustrated staff and prisoners alike, eroding a sense of hope and purpose and impeding true cultural change.

Criminology & Criminal JusticeVolume   23, Issue 2, April 2023, Pages 165-182

By Jeffrey R. Baker

This article is a study of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian Realism, a progressive school of social ethics rooted in Christian theology, and its critical evaluation of American mass incarceration. Christian Realism seeks justice in society under law, formed by love as its fundamental organizing principle. It acknowledges a world with endemic structural injustices and social immorality, but it finds temperate hope in the human potential for love, redemption, and generosity. Christian Realism reckons that any institution committed to justice must inevitably compromise to achieve incremental progress toward good. But it projects steady, hopeful progress toward justice, even as systems calibrate themselves to stave off the worse effects of human nature. On this tricky ground, Christian Realism wrestles with individual morality within flawed systems, the universal struggle to act morally when social realities drive people to self-interest and antagonism. Christian Realism issues a call to evaluate society’s injustices, then to implement steps that approach justice, without regard for dogma or party. Niebuhr acknowledges that people will break the law and harm others and that society must protect itself from violence and disorder. He recognizes that every choice requires grueling negotiations between liberty and coercion, freedom and order. In this thicket, Christian Realism takes the side of the oppressed, excluded, and impoverished against entrenched powers, because a just society will provide equal opportunity for all life, rooted in an abiding love among neighbors. Evaluating the American criminal legal system, Christian Realism critiques and condemns mass incarceration and the ascendant preference for violent retribution. The society that sustains mass incarceration fails on three fronts, at least. First, mass incarceration is maximally coercive, signaling a failure of stable, fair means for confronting conflict in society. Second, the entrenched interests of mass incarceration impose corrupting pressures on individual officers and judges invested with discretion, limiting their ability to exert moral force within an unjust system. Third, economic powers have captured the carceral system to advance business interests to the detriment of human dignity, equal opportunity, and love, calcifying the criminal justice system and suppressing movements for reform. Retribution and incarceration are policy choices. A jurisprudence of love that grounds the law in human dignity opens the way for serious alternatives for measured punishment, public safety, therapeutic rehabilitation, community restoration, and social redemption. These may include polices of restorative and therapeutic justice; constructive reentry programs; shorter sentences; decriminalization; reformed plea bargaining; increased investment in education; or other novel ideas to address the forces that drive people to do harm, to treat people justly when they cause harm, and to advance restoration and redemption for the sake of a just society. Christian Realism tests every policy against its commitments to justice and love and its real consequences in the world, even when compromising for incremental, sustainable progress. Thus, Christian Realism welcomes experiments to meet the needs of a just society – order through minimal coercion, fair and stable mechanisms for addressing conflict, the empowerment of the poor and disenfranchised, and laws founded in love. 

Georgia Criminal Law Review (forthcoming 2025)

By Felix Owusu

The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office (SCDAO) has taken steps to limit its use of criminal sanctions for individuals charged with nonviolent offenses, including identifying 15 common charges that arraigning Assistant District Attorneys (line ADAs) should presumptively decline to prosecute (DTP) or divert when possible. These changes, driven by policies introduced by District Attorney (DA) Rachael Rollins after her inauguration in January 2019, reflect mounting evidence that relying on policing, criminal adjudication, and incarceration to address non-violent offenses is costly, exacerbates racial disparities, and is often ineffective at improving public safety. Others are concerned, however, that increasing leniency for even minor offenses will embolden people who commit crimes and lead to more serious misconduct. Below I attempt to analyze the impact of these policy changes on case adjudication as well as future offending behavior for those whose cases were impacted. I primarily rely on administrative data from the SCDAO’s internal case management database as well as criminal records from the Department of Criminal Justice Information Services (DCJIS). Using an event study design, I find that after DA Rollins' inauguration, prosecution rates declined by roughly 5 percentage points on average for cases consisting of charges included in the declination and diversion policy (DTP list cases) and nearly 10 percentage points for cases involving nonviolent misdemeanors more generally. These average decreases mask substantial heterogeneity by offense category and defendant race. Prosecution rates declined substantially less for cases involving Black defendants, and decreases in prosecution rates were concentrated among a subset of DTP list offenses like driving with a suspended license. Consistent with the scope of the policy, prosecution rates for cases involving felonies or violent offenses were not similarly impacted. I also explore the impact of the declination and diversion policy on reoffending using a difference-in-differences design to account for unobserved factors that could impact recidivism throughout the policy's implementation. Consistent with past research, I find that the introduction of the declination and diversion policy was associated with small (although statistically indistinguishable from zero) decreases in overall reoffending and violent reoffending.  

Boston:The Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, 2022. 

By Sandra Susan Smith

As a growing number of jurisdictions across the country have attempted to implement bail reforms, debates have intensified about the relationship between such reforms and crime, including and perhaps especially violent crime. Similar debates, for instance, have raged in New York, where the backlash against bail reform caused the state legislature to roll back key elements just three months after implementation. In recent weeks, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has proposed further rollbacks to the law to address continued concerns that bail reform has contributed to spikes in the state’s violent crime rate. Although largely driven by politics, these debates raise an important and timely set of empirical questions: What role does pretrial detention/release play in producing, or threatening, public safety? Does pretrial release incentivize crime and drive-up crime rates, including violent crime, as many in law enforcement have claimed? Or, all things considered, is pretrial detention the greater risk to public safety? This discussion paper is an effort to synthesize the evidence on this question. Before doing so, however, I specify the conceptualizations of public safety that I deploy throughout. I then draw from academic and policy research on the costs and benefits to public safety of pretrial detention/release, distinguishing evidence from studies of the impacts of releases resulting from routine pretrial practices, from bail reform, and from responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. No matter the cause of pretrial release, the evidence seems clear: Overall, pretrial detention is a far greater threat to public safety than pretrial release. Not only does detention increase the risk that even low-risk individuals might reoffend (or be rearrested), but detention also initiates a series of collateral consequences downstream that are difficult for many to overcome.

Arnold Ventures Public Safety Series, July 2022. 14p.

By The Washington State Office of the Corrections Ombuds Solitary Confinement Research Team (OCO-SCRT). . Research Team:  Angee Schrader OCO-SCRT Project Lead Senior Corrections Ombuds - Investigations E.V. Webb, M.E.S. OCO-SCRT Thematic Analysis Lead Assistant Corrections Ombuds - Investigations Elisabeth Kingsbury, J.D. OCO Deputy Director Heather Bates OCO Public Records & Contract Manager Madison Vinson, J.D. OCO Assistant Corrections Ombuds - Policy Sara Appleton OCO Quality Assurance & Training Manager Zachary Kinneman

Civilian oversight of corrections brings an independent set of eyes and, if done correctly, the values of integrity, respect, collaboration, equity, and courage to bear witness to the ways in which the norms and cultures of carceral systems are rooted in secrecy, a lack of transparency, and rules and regulations. The Washington State Office of the Corrections Ombuds (OCO) is the only civilian oversight of the Washington State corrections system established in state government with the authority and responsibility to investigate actions or inactions of the Washington Department of Corrections (WADOC). The OCO routinely monitors places that are among the most opaque public institutions in our state – the state’s corrections facilities (prisons and reentry centers). In addition to monitoring prisons and reentry centers, the OCO, in its capacity as the statewide prison oversight mechanism, responds to the governor and legislature’s concerns about conditions of confinement and the inherent dangers of living and working inside corrections facilities. Advocates of eradicating the use of solitary confinement in WADOC have waged a multi-year campaign requesting greater attention be paid to what happens to people living and working inside prisons in the state of Washington. Some elected officials have demanded greater accountability and transparency from the WADOC about the use of solitary confinement. Multiple bills calling for a reduction in solitary confinement have been introduced in the state legislature in recent years; however, none have passed out of the legislature. At the end of the 2023 legislative session, seeing that once again, a bill requiring the WADOC: to reduce the use of solitary confinement would not pass out of the legislature, a request was made of the OCO to write a report answering a short list of specific questions about the WADOC ‘s historical and current use of solitary confinement. This report, Solitary Confinement: Part II, looks deeply at the experiences, perspectives, and opinions of a sampling of people who have lived in solitary confinement in WADOC prisons with the goal of providing additional context to the data discussed in Part I. The final release, Solitary Confinement: Part III, will piece together Part I and Part II in a discussion of opportunities for further administrative policy changes and legislative solutions. Solitary Confinement: Part II highlights the voices and experiences of a sample of 13 individuals who have spent extensive time in solitary confinement while incarcerated in the state of Washington. This report also provides key terms, photographs, and further context for public understanding of solitary confinement in Washington State prisons. The goal is to provide greater transparency around the conditions and experiences of people living in solitary.  

By The Washington State Office of the Corrections Ombuds Solitary Confinement Research Team (OCO-SCRT).  Angee Schrader, OCO-SCRT Lead Sara Appleton,  Heather Bates,  Zachary Kinneman, Madison Vinson,  E.V. Webb

Solitary Confinement: Part I is the first of three reports on solitary confinement planned for release throughout the coming months. Part I responds to the legislature’s direction to conduct a review of all incarcerated people who had or have been: 1. housed in solitary confinement or any other form of restrictive housing more than 120 days in total, or 2. housed in solitary confinement or any other form of restrictive housing more than 45 consecutive days in Fiscal year 2023 (July 1, 2022-June 30, 2023). Civilian oversight of corrections brings an independent set of eyes and, if done correctly, the values of integrity, respect, collaboration, equity, and courage to bear witness to the ways in which the norms and cultures of carceral systems are rooted in secrecy, a lack of transparency, and rules and regulations. The Washington State Office of the Corrections Ombuds is the only civilian oversight of the Washington state corrections system established in state government with the authority and the responsibility to investigate actions or inactions of the Washington Department of Corrections (WADOC ). The Office of the Corrections Ombuds (OCO) routinely monitors places that are among the most opaque public institutions in our state – the state’s corrections facilities (prisons and reentry centers). In addition to monitoring prisons and reentry centers, the OCO, in its capacity as the statewide prison oversight mechanism, responds to the governor and legislature’s concerns about conditions of confinement and the inherent dangers of living and working inside corrections facilities. Advocates of eradicating the use of solitary confinement in WADOC have waged a multi-year campaign requesting greater attention be paid to what happens to people living and working inside prisons in the state of Washington. Some elected officials have demanded greater accountability and transparency from the WADOC about the use of solitary confinement. Multiple bills calling for a reduction in solitary confinement have been introduced in the state legislature in recent years; however, none have passed out of the legislature. At the end of the 2023 legislative session, seeing that once again, a bill requiring the WADOC to reduce the use of solitary confinement would not pass out of the legislature, a request was made of the Office of the Corrections Ombuds (OCO) to write a report answering a short list of specific questions about the WADOC ’s historical and current use of solitary confinement. This report, Solitary Confinement: Part I, provides a step-by-step answer to the specific questions asked by the Legislature  

Olympia: The Ombudsman, 2024. 421p.

By Alex Roth, Sandhya Kajeepeta, and Alex Boldin

Probation—a court-ordered period of supervision in the community for people convicted of criminal charges—has traditionally been viewed as an alternative to incarceration, and sentencing more people to probation rather than prison was long proposed as a solution to the problem of mass incarceration. (See “A brief history of probation” on page 2.) However, as the number of people on probation in the United States has grown massively and probation supervision has become more punitive over the past few decades, more recent reports have focused on how probation is contributing to mass incarceration. These reports explain how increasingly large numbers of people are having their probation supervision revoked and are then being sentenced to incarceration, often for noncompliance with conditions of supervision rather than new criminal charges. Although most of these reports mention both prisons and jails when discussing how probation violations have contributed to mass incarceration, they provide almost no specific information about how such violations affect jail populations. The information about probation’s impact on jails included in some of these reports is often extremely old and sometimes incorrect, propagated from reports that cite previous reports in a sort of game of statistical “telephone.” Meanwhile, other reports simply acknowledge the reality that there is no good national data on how probation contributes to incarceration in local jails. The lack of information about probation’s impact on jail populations is problematic because far more people are admitted to jails than prisons every year and jails are a driving force in mass incarceration generally, and jail populations are also marked by significant racial disparities. This brief will summarize what we do know about probation and how it can contribute to jail populations. It will also present an analysis of data from nine cities and counties participating in the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), a national initiative that seeks to address over-incarceration by changing the way the  United States thinks about and uses jails. The Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) was able to obtain more detailed jail data from these sites than is available at the national level. This analysis offers examples of how probation affects jail incarceration and the kind of data and analysis that is needed at the national level. Finally, this brief will highlight work being done in two SJC sites—St. Louis County, Missouri, and Allegheny County, Pennsylvania— to reduce the number of people on probation in their jails. This brief is intended both to spur greater consideration of the problem of probation’s contribution to jail populations and to suggest ways to address it.  

New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2021. 50p.

By Joshua Grossman, Julian Nyarko, and Sharad Goel

We evaluate the statistical and conceptual foundations of empirical tests for disparate impact. We begin by considering a recent, popular proposal in the economics literature that seeks to assess disparate impact via a comparison of error rates for the majority and the minority groups. Building on past work, we show that this approach suffers from what is colloquially known as “the problem of inframarginality”, in turn putting it in direct conflict with legal understandings of discrimination. We then analyze two alternative proposals that quantify disparate impact either in terms of risk-adjusted disparities or by comparing existing disparities to those under a statistically optimized decision policy. Both approaches have differing, context-specific strengths and weaknesses, and we discuss how they relate to the individual elements in the legal test for disparate impact. We then turn towards assessing the disparate impact of search decisions among approximately 1.5 million police stops recorded across California in 2022 pursuant to its Racial Identity and Profiling Act (RIPA). The results are suggestive of disparate impact against Black and Hispanic drivers for several large law enforcement agencies. We further propose alternative search strategies that more efficiently recover contraband while also exerting fewer racial disparities.

Journal of Law and Empirical AnalysisVolume 1, Issue 1, June 2024

By Emily Widra

More than 1 in 10 people admitted to state prisons every year have committed no new crime, but have simply broken one or more of the many conditions, or rules, of their probation. All of this unnecessary incarceration is the predictable result of widely-adopted probation conditions that are so vaguely defined, so burdensome, and so rigidly applied that they actually broaden the scope of what counts as “recidivism.” Through these conditions, courts and probation authorities create punishable offenses that go far beyond criminal law, setting people up to fail. And because the vast majority of people under correctional control are on probation — 2.9 million people, 1 far surpassing the 1.9 million people incarcerated — these trap-like conditions make probation a major driver of mass incarceration, not the “alternative” it’s supposed to be. Shrinking the massive probation system — and the number of people incarcerated from community supervision — is central to ending mass incarceration. Doing so requires challenging existing “standard conditions” that (a) are often in conflict with one another, (b) exacerbate the challenges people on probation are already facing, and (c) empower probation officers — rather than courts — to make subjective decisions that can lead to revocation and incarceration. Examining these conditions clarifies why probation often functions as an on ramp to incarceration instead of an alternative, and can help advocates and policymakers reorient probation systems away from incarceration. Unfortunately, standard probation conditions are often difficult to locate and parse, vary between jurisdictions, and use complicated and unclear language, so to aid in this effort, we collected and analyzed the standard conditions for 76 jurisdictions across all 50 states and Washington, D.C., creating one of the most comprehensive compilations of these rules to date. 

Northampton, MA: Prion Policy Initiative, 2024. 

By David M. Doyle and consisted of Dr. Avril Brandon, Dr. Joe Garrihy, r. Amina Adanan and Prof. Denis Bracken  The Irish Penal Reform Trust and  h Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology

The Irish Penal Reform Trust launched an independently commissioned exploratory research study on the rights and experiences of foreign national and minority ethnic groups in the Irish penal system on Thursday 27 April 2022. "Sometimes I'm missing the words": The rights, needs, and experiences of foreign national and minority ethnic groups in the Irish penal system were supported by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) under the Human Rights and Equality Grant Scheme 2020-2021. Very little information exists on the needs and lived experiences of minority ethnic and foreign national people in prisons and on probation in Ireland. This report aims to bridge that gap and consider these needs and experiences within the context of relevant policy and law. The report was commissioned by IPRT from the Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology.

The need for reform is outlined in 18 recommendations made in the report.

Findings from the research include: 

• Based on an analysis of the quantitative data provided by the Irish Prison Service (IPS), it was found that foreign nationals may receive longer sentences than Irish nationals for controlled drug offenses and sexual offenses.

• Further analysis, along with interviews from professional stakeholders, established that the IPS data – while including statistics on prisoners’ nationality – was deficient in the areas of ethnicity and religion of the prison population.

• Interview data revealed that there were significant challenges faced by foreign nationals and minority ethnic people in prison concerning access to services, respect for different religious backgrounds, as well as language and communication barriers.

• Experiences of racism at different stages of the criminal justice process had the effect of limiting trust with any part of the penal system.

Dublin: Irish Penal Reform Trust, 2022. 73p.

By: Scrutinize and The Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at NYU School of Law.

Increased focus on state judiciaries has significant potential to improve the criminal legal system. Recognizing the need for evaluation metrics for judges, this report pioneers a data-driven, evidence-based approach to assessing the judiciary. We analyze written appellate decisions to quantify individual trial court judges' decisions and impacts. This methodology transforms complex judicial texts into accessible data, creating metrics of judicial performance for use by policymakers and the public. This report introduces ‘excessive sentence findings’ as a method to assess individual judges’ decisions and their impact. In New York, appellate courts review sentences for excessiveness and can reduce them in the “interest of justice,” a rare and clear signal—from highly respected institutional actors—that a lower court judge made an exceptionally troubling choice. We identify lower court judges with sentences reduced by appellate courts for being excessive and calculate the total number of years reduced from those sentences. The study reveals patterns of repeated excessive sentencing by several specific judges, raising questions about judicial accountability in New York.

Key Findings:

• Sixty-five lower court judges were found to have engaged in excessive sentencing more than once between 2007 and 2023.

• The 12 judges with five or more most excessive sentence findings had their sentences reduced by a total of 1,246 years.

• Two judges had a total of 39 excessive sentence findings between them, with the appellate court reducing a total of 684.5 years from the sentences they imposed.

Recommendations:

• New York’s court system should increase its transparency by releasing detailed, judge-level sentencing data.

• New York’s court system should publish annual reports summarizing excessive sentence findings and detailing the judges involved, the legal arguments made, and the appeal outcomes.

New York: The Authors, 2024. 32p.

By Mia Bird, Mia, Alissa Skog and Molly Pickard

 The California prison system is designed to house and provide rehabilitative services to people sentenced to prison for felony offenses. Although most people in prison are serving multi-year sentences, 39.6% of people released during the past ten years spent one year or less in prison custody. The proportion of people released after these short stays (of one year or less) increased from about one-third of all releases in 2014 to about one-half in 2023. In 2020 and 2023, the Committee on Revision of the Penal Code recommended that short prison stays of one year or less be served in county jails. This recommendation was designed to build on California’s Public Safety Realignment Act from 2011 which required people convicted of less serious felony offenses to serve their sentence in county jail instead of prison. The Legislature has not yet adopted this recommendation, but given the State’s focus on reducing prison system costs while maintaining public safety, it remains a policy option. In this fact sheet, we explore how the number and share of people released after short stays has changed over time in California. We also explore the demographic, offense, sentencing, and county characteristics of people who have short stays in prison. To do so, we draw on data from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) for the years 2014 through 2023. KEY FINDINGS Short stays have increased as a share of all releases since 2014. Over the past decade, 39.6% of all people released from prison had stays of one year or less. However, the proportion of those with short stays increased over this period from 36.3% of all releases in 2014 to 49.5% of all releases in 2023 (Figure 1). During this period, 15.4% of people released had very short stays of six months or less. The share of people released with very short stays also increased, from 13.4% in 2014 to 21.2% in 2023. This increase in short stays was concentrated in the period following the COVID-19 pandemic. During the first year of the pandemic, people may have spent more time in jail before they were convicted, sentenced, and transferred to prison. This was due to delays in court processing and suspensions of prison transfers. In addition, public health releases to reduce the spread of COVID-19 may have also led to shorter stays in prison.1 The share of people released from short stays continued to increase in 2022 and 2023. It remains to be seen whether this trend will continue in 2024.   

Los Angeles: California Policy Lab, 2024. 7p.

By David Macdonald

Truth in Sentencing laws eliminates discretion in prison release. This decreases the incentive for rehabilitative effort among prisoners. I use a regression discontinuity design to exploit a change in these incentives created by the introduction of TIS in Arizona. Before prison, I found that sentences were reduced by 20% for TIS offenders. Further, I find that rule infractions increased by 22% to 55% and education enrolment fell by 24%. After release, I found offenders were 4.8 p.p. more likely to re-offend. I further find that recidivism and infraction effects are largest among drug and violent offenders. Finally, I show that the reduction in sentences resulted in a broad equalization of time served at the cutoff, which indicates that the removal of early-release incentives by TIS was the main mechanism driving results.

Unpublished paper, 2024. 84p.

By Sian Galsworthy

In 2019 Joseph McCann was sentenced to 33 life sentences for committing violent and sexual offences whilst subject to supervision by the National Probation Service (NPS), following his release from prison on license earlier that year. The subsequent Serious Further Offence (SFO) report prompted an independent review from His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation (HMIP) which put forward several recommendations for change, to ensure the probation service could safely and effectively protect the public. This report presents the findings from an evaluation of His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) Complex Cases pilot within the East of England Probation Region. Complex Cases have been defined as cases that meet six of eight specified criteria, which deem them complex and challenging for Probation Practitioners (PP) to manage. The pilot process consisted of triaging those cases that met six of the eight pre-determined criteria. If the practitioner required further support with their case following triage, the case was then referred to and heard at a multi-disciplinary panel which consisted primarily of senior members of Probation and Prison staff who could advise on how to best manage the case. The pilot formed part of the commitment to address the recommendation (8) put forward in the Joseph McCann HMIP report which was to: “Ensure probation staff have adequate time to become familiar with complex cases for which they assume responsibility” (HMIP, 2020) This evaluation has explored the views and experiences of those who have participated in the Complex Cases pilot, to identify how its development and subsequent roll out has been perceived so far, and if there is any early/indicative learning which can be identified for future scale-up of the pilot. The pilot commenced in the Summer of 2021, it is still active and expanding across the pilot Probation Region.   The objectives of this evaluation were: 1. To explore what has been successful about the initial roll out of the Complex Cases Pilot 2. To explore which aspects of the Complex Cases Pilot require improvement 3. To explore the effects of the Complex Cases Pilot on Probation Practitioners sense of confidence in managing the complexities of the case and practice/case management

His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service , 2024. 60p.

By The National Consumer Law Center

Consumer protection laws apply to incarcerated people. However, because of incarcerated people’s limited and highly regulated contact with the outside world, they struggle to report consumer problems such as identity theft and fraud, as well as abusive practices perpetrated by the private companies that they must rely on for essential services and goods within correctional facilities. Barriers to reporting these problems can render consumer protections toothless for this vulnerable population. Government agencies and correctional facilities can take a meaningful first step towards alleviating these consumer harms by ensuring incarcerated people can easily submit complaints without having to rely on loved ones and advocates who are not incarcerated.

Boston: National Consumer Law Center, 2024. 5p.