By Joe Russo, Samuel Peterson, Michael J. D. Vermeer, Dulani Woods, Brian A. Jackson

Racial and ethnic disparities are pervasive in the U.S. criminal justice system. These disparities often compound as an individual progresses through each stage of the justice system, beginning with police contact and continuing through prosecution and correctional control. Not surprisingly, people of color are overrepresented in the probation and parole population, yet relatively little attention has been paid to disparate treatment and outcomes at this stage.

Probation and parole staff and other system actors exercise considerable discretion in responding to technical violations. Technical violations are instances of noncompliance with the conditions of supervision — such as failing to report to the supervising officer, leaving the jurisdiction without permission, and testing positive on a drug test—that, while not criminal, can lead to severe consequences for justice-involved individuals. The spectrum of responses to technical violations can range from a warning all the way up to a recommendation to revoke supervision. Evidence suggests that technical violations are an important driver of incarceration.

The handling of technical violations may be influenced by a variety of factors, including officer judgment and jurisdictional policy, and there is evidence of racial and ethnic disparities in how they are handled. Ultimately, disparities in the processing of technical violations can exacerbate and perpetuate existing disparities in incarceration and undermine the legitimacy of the justice system. This report presents findings and recommendations from an expert panel that explored challenges and opportunities associated with reducing disparities at the technical violation decision point.

Key Findings

• The lack of evidence on the sources of disparities in community supervision contributes to a lack of known approaches for responding to them.

• The working relationship between an officer and a supervisee is critical to successful outcomes.

• A lack of diversity or cultural sensitivity among officers and supervisee perceptions of justice system illegitimacy can be barriers to forming quality relationships of trust.

• Research is needed to determine the impacts of (1) such factors as the working relationship between and officer and a supervisee, a lack of diversity or cultural sensitivity among officers, and supervisee perceptions of justice system illegitimacy on supervisee violation behaviors, (2) responses to these behaviors, and (3) disparities.

• Supervisees of color often have inequitable access to resources, which can be a barrier to successful completion of supervision and a contributing factor in disparate outcomes.

• Information management tools are needed to increase transparency about and accountability for disparities.

• Jurisdictions would benefit from developing data dashboards to help track, analyze, and display key metrics so that progress may be measured — and corrective actions taken as needed — at the officer and agency levels.

  Recommendations

• Develop best practices for the use of technology to eliminate barriers to compliance. Evaluate pros, cons, and impacts of these approaches on outcomes and disparities.

• Develop best practices and strategies to directly provide resources (e.g., food pantries, clothing, transit vouchers) to disadvantaged supervisees and/or coordinate with community resources to provide these services. Explore the feasibility of monetary assistance for sustenance and/or emergency support.

• Conduct research into supervisee perceptions of the justice system’s legitimacy along racial and ethnic lines and the impact of these perceptions on compliance and outcomes.

• Conduct research to determine whether the use of credible messengers improves relationships with supervisees and to examine the impact of this practice on supervision outcomes.

• Study jurisdictions that have reduced disparities to better understand the dynamics associated with successful outcomes and to develop an evidence base of effective strategies.

• Conduct research to determine the impacts of more-general system reforms (e.g., caps on probation sentences, reductions in the number of technical violations) on disparities in technical violation behaviors, responses, and outcomes.

• Develop management tools (e.g., dashboards) to track disparity metrics, in near real time, at the agency, supervisor, and officer levels to promote transparency and accountability and to identify patterns to be investigated and addressed (e.g., coachable moments for staff, policy or program review).

• Reinforce supervision practices in which staff actively engage in barrier-reduction strategies to "meet supervisees where they are" in terms of appropriate accommodations and service delivery that do not compromise public safety.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2023. 32p.

By Giada Girelli, Marcela Jofré, and Ajeng Larasati

Harm Reduction International (HRI) has monitored the use of the death penalty for drug offences worldwide since our first ground-breaking publication on this issue in 2007. This report, our 13th on the subject, continues our work of providing regular updates on legislative, policy and practical developments related to the use of capital punishment for drug offences, a practice which isa clear violation of international human rights and drug control standards.

This year marks the beginning of a new approach to our flagship publication. Every edition of this report will provide key data and updated categories, as well as high-level developments at the national and international level. A deeper analysis of developments and trends will be published in the 2024 edition and on alternate years. The methodology used for both reports remains the same. HRI opposes the death penalty in all cases without exception.

Harm Reduction International, 2024. 22p.

by Phil Bowen

This data review is a quantitative analysis of Citizens Advice data for clients who faced fine arrears between 2019 and 2023. It sits within our research project looking at the impact of court fines on people on low incomes, alongside our report, 'Where the hell am I going to get that money from?: The impact of court fines on people on low incomes'. It specifically seeks answers to the following questions: How has the court fine been used over the past five years?; Which offences do people get fined for?; Who gets fined and what are the demographics of those individuals who receive fines?; And what are the outcomes associated with fines, specifically repayment rates, re-offending rates and imprisonment for fine default?

London: Centre for Justice Innovation, 2024. 37p.

by Lucy Slade

Despite court fines being the most used sentence in the English and Welsh criminal justice system, it is rare that they feature in the discussion of justice reform engaged in by policymakers, academics and the third sector. To shine a light on this important, but under examined, area of our justice system, the Centre has undertaken a research project looking specifically what is the impact of their use. It is the first of its kind to look at what ought to happen— and what actually does. As part of this project, we have reviewed the literature of court fines and financial impositions in the criminal courts of England and Wales. This is accompanied by our report, which brings together the findings of our review of publicly available data, and qualitative interviews with people in low-incomes who have received a fine.

London: Centre for Justice Innovation, 2024. 11p.

by Lucy Slade and Stephen Whitehead

Almost everyone who is convicted in a court in England and Wales leaves with a bill to pay. Yet there is a striking gap in our knowledge on the most common sentencing outcome handed down by our courts: the court fine. A new report by the Centre for Justice Innovation published today (16 May 2024) seeks to address this knowledge gap. The report is called: “Where the hell am I going to get that money from?” The impact of court fines on people on low incomes.

The research, specifically conducted during this cost of living crisis, suggest that the impacts of getting a court fine are often highly disproportionate: while better off people experience only minor hardships, such as forgoing a holiday,for a significant number of those on the lowest incomes paying their court fine pushed them deeper towards unmanageable debt, destitution and significant levels of anxiety and mental anguish.

The research highlights that, contrary to the sentencing objectives of the court fine, the financial impact of fines and charges are not experienced equally by people with different levels of means. The research also found major gaps on the data collected, especially on the socio-economic status of those who are fined, meaning there is not a clear picture of who gets fined, who pays and who doesn’t (and why).

The research. The research is a comprehensive study based on a wide range of sources including interviews with 56 people with experience of fines who live on a low income; a literature review; analysis of public data on court fines; and of Citizens Advice data for clients who faced fine arrears between 2019 and 2023; and focus groups with 14 magistrates.

Findings from the data review:

• Men received the majority of fines (2,534,714, 64%), with women receiving 944,547 (24%), and a further 474,557 fines issued where sex was not recorded (12%). This is in keeping with the preponderance of men in the sentencing and the criminal justice caseload more generally.

• Women were proportionally more likely to receive fines than men (85% compared with 73%), in part, because they are more likely to commit the less serious offences, which result in a fine.

• Of the ten offences for which fines are most often issued, women receive the majority of fines for only one of these, TV licence evasion, where they represent three quarters of people whose gender is recorded.

Key findings

Almost everyone who is convicted of a crime in a court in England and Wales leaves with a bill to pay. Over 75% of people convicted each year are sentenced to a fine. Yet while many of the offences for which fines are given are deemed “minor,” the research suggests that, for people on low incomes, the impact of fines is anything but.

• A large number of the offences for which court fines are imposed are strongly linked to people’s pre-existing poverty, such as TV licence evasion.

• Many of the 56 interviewees reported that the financial burdens placed on them by the court had pushed them further into debt, with some pushed into destitution and into further offending to pay off the court fine.

• For some, the financial burdens took a severe toll on their mental and physical health, particularly where they faced prolonged payment periods in a never-ending cycle of payments.

• While fine amount

  • are meant to be determined by an individual’s financial circumstances, this system did not seem to work effectively in practice.

  • The imposition of other non means-tested financial charges alongside the fine, such as prosecution costs, often pushed the total amount owed to the court up from something affordable to an amount that felt impossible to pay in the time allowed.

  • Court fine enforcement action (which is subject to less regulation than commercial credit recovery), particularly the threat of bailiffs, added further financial and wellbeing strains, especially for those already struggling to make insufficient household budgets last.

  • Magistrates suggested that they often felt their hands were tied, leaving them to sentence people on low incomes to fines, the magistrates knew they could not pay.

  • Many interviewees felt that a fine was, in theory, an appropriate punishment for the offence they committed, but the confusing processes of the current system often meant that the total amount they eventually needed to pay was seen as excessive

London: The Centre for Justice Innovation, 2024, 41p.

By The Death Penalty Research Center

In January 2024, Ohio lawmakers announced plans to expand the use of the death penalty to permit executions with nitrogen gas, as Alabama had just done a week earlier. But at the same time the Attorney General and the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association are championing this legislation, a bipartisan group of state legislators has introduced a bill to abolish the death penalty based on “significant concerns on who is sentenced to death and how that sentence is carried out.” The competing narratives make it more important than ever for Ohioans to have a meaningful, accurate understanding of how capital punishment is being used, including whether the state has progressed beyond the mistakes of its past.

Early 19th century Ohio Black Laws imposed various legal restrictions on the rights and status of Black people in the state, not dissimilar to what would later become Black Codes in many Southern states. As constitutional historian Dr. Stephen Middleton explains, “Although the penal code of Ohio did not explicitly provide for a dual system for handling criminal cases, the Black Laws naturally made race an element in the criminal justice system.”

Ohio’s 1807 “Negro Evidence Law” prohibited Black people from testifying against white people in court, thus instituting a legal double standard. Articles in African American newspapers from the time reported numerous instances where white assailants attacked Black victims with impunity because there was no legal consequence without a white person who could testify on the victims’ behalf. The state also passed racial restrictions on juries in 1816 and 1831, officially barring Black people from jury service. These laws no longer exist, but modern studies reveal that jury discrimination continues.

One of the most significant ties between historical death sentencing and the modern use of capital punishment is the preferential valuing of white victims. Multiple Ohio-specific studies have concluded that when a case involves a white victim—especially a white female victim—defendants are more likely to receive a death sentence or be executed. A review of all aggravated murder charges in Hamilton County from January 1992 through August 2017 revealed that prosecutors are 4.54 times more likely to file charges with death penalty eligibility if there is at least one white victim, compared to similarly situated cases without white victims. A separate study of Ohio executions between 1976 and 2014 found that homicides involving white female victims are six times more likely to result in an execution than homicides involving Black male victims. DPIC independently analyzed race of victim data for all 465 death sentences in the state and found that 75% of death sentences were for cases with at least one white victim. For context, most murder victims in the state are Black (66%).

Black capital defendants have also faced instances of overt racism from jurors, prosecutors, and even their own attorneys. During closing arguments, the prosecuting attorney in Dwight Denson’s trial suggested that if jurors did not sentence him to death, they might as well rename Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood to “Jungle Land,” adding, “Leave it to Dwight Denson. Leave it to people like him.” An attorney for Malik Allah-U-Akbar (tried as Odraye Jones) reiterated false, racialized testimony from an expert witness during closing arguments: “I think it’s a quarter of the…urban [B]lack American youth come up with antisocial personality disorder…. This isn’t a situation you can treat. … You have to put him out of society until it runs its course.”

As the current debate over the use of the death penalty in Ohio continues, this report provides historical information, context, and data to inform the critical decisions that will follow.

Washington, DC: Death Penalty Information Center, 2024. 49p.

By Becky Feldman

Today, there are nearly two million people in American prisons and jails – a 500% increase over the last 50 years. In 2020, over 200,000 people in U.S. prisons were serving life sentences – more people than were in prison with any sentence in 1970. Nearly one-third of people serving life sentences are 55 or older, amounting to over 60,000 people. People of color, particularly Black Americans, are represented at a higher rate among those serving lengthy and extreme sentences than among the total prison population.

Harsh sentencing policies, such as lengthy mandatory minimum sentences, have produced an aging prison population in the United States. But research has established that lengthy sentences do not have a significant deterrent effect on crime and divert resources from effective public safety programs. Most criminal careers are under 10 years, and as people age, they usually desist from crime. Existing parole systems are ineffective at curtailing excessive sentences in most states, due to their highly discretionary nature, lack of due process and oversight, and lack of objective consideration standards. Consequently, legislators and the courts are looking to judicial review as a more effective means to reconsider an incarcerated person’s sentence in order to assess their fitness to reenter society. A judicial review mechanism also provides the opportunity to evaluate whether sentences imposed decades ago remain just under current sentencing policies and public sentiment.

Second Look Defined

Legislation authorizing judges to review sentences after a person has served a lengthy period of time has been referred to as a second-look law and more colloquially as “sentence review.”

This report presents the evolution of the second look movement, which started with ensuring compliance with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in Graham v. Florida (2010) and Miller v. Alabama (2012) on the constitutionality of juvenile life without parole (“JLWOP”) sentences. This reform has more recently expanded to other types of sentences and populations, such as other excessive sentences imposed on youth, and emerging adults sentenced to life without parole (“LWOP”). Currently, legislatures in 12 states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government have enacted a second look judicial review beyond opportunities provided to those with JLWOP sentences, and courts in at least 15 states determined that other lengthy sentences such as LWOP or term-of-years sentences were unconstitutional under Graham or Miller.

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2024. 42p.

By Paul McGorrery and Paul Schollum

When sentencing someone for criminal offending, courts can select from a number of possible sentencing orders, such as imprisonment, a drug and alcohol treatment order, a community correction order (CCO), a fine, an adjourned undertaking, or a dismissal with or without conviction. Courts can also often impose a combination of these sentencing orders if doing so would be appropriate in the circumstances of the case. The focus of this report is a particular combination of sentencing orders imposed in the same case: imprisonment with a CCO (a combined order). A CCO is a sentencing order that an offender serves in the community while subject to various mandatory conditions as well as at least one optional condition. When courts impose a combined order, the offender commences their CCO on release from prison. Aim and research questions The aim of this report is to present a statistical profile of combined orders of imprisonment with a CCO in the 9 calendar years from 2012 to 2020.

Melbourne: Sentencing Advisory Council (VIC), 2023. 28p.

By Anna Chalton, Paul McGorrery, Zsombor Bathy, Dugan Dallimore, Paul Schollum and Octavian Simu

This report provides an in-depth analysis of how Victorian courts sentence stalking offences contrary to section 21A of the Crimes Act 1958 (Vic). It considers the demographics of stalkers, the relationship between stalking offenders and victims, the sorts of stalking behaviours sentenced in Victorian courts and the sentencing outcomes for stalking offences. It also explores the link between stalking and family violence, the rate of reoffending among stalking offenders and the prevalence of stalking offences in rural and regional Victoria

Melbourne: Sentencing Advisory Council (VIC), 2022. 104p.

By Felicity Stewart, Paul McGorrery

Deferring (or postponing) sentencing for a short time, up to 12 months, is one of the ways that courts can achieve the various purposes of sentencing in Victoria (for example, community protection and rehabilitation) and ensure that judicial officers have all the information they need in deciding an appropriate sentence in a case.

Introduced in the adult criminal jurisdiction in 2002, sentence deferral has evolved into a vital, but potentially under-utilised, part of the Victorian sentencing landscape. Over the last two years, those who work in the criminal justice system have told us that sentence deferral can be a highly effective therapeutic tool. Sentence deferral can support complex and vulnerable offenders in their rehabilitation and can protect the community in the long-term by allowing offenders to participate in programs that reduce their risk of reoffending. In some cases, a person’s progress during the deferral period can make the difference between receiving a prison sentence and receiving a community order.

In this report, the Victorian Sentencing Advisory Council makes 10 recommendations for reform that have been informed by their research, data analysis and consultation. In developing these recommendations, they were mindful not to ‘fix what isn’t broken’, in particular, not to disrupt the aspects of sentence deferral that make it work well, especially its flexibility and lack of formality. The Council has only made recommendations where there was strong evidence for change.

Melbourne: The Sentencing Advisory Council, 2024. 115p.

By The Center for Human Rights

The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred urgent and growing concerns about the health of immigrants held in detention centers in the United States. In fact, awareness of the problem is not new: in 2016, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) inspector general raised deep questions about the agency’s preparedness for a possible pandemic event,[1] concerns that were reiterated last December when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) denounced DHS for having medical infrastructure it described as “not sufficient to assure rapid and adequate infection control measures.”[2]

Here in Washington, over the course of recent years, increasing activism by people detained at the Northwest Detention Center[3] (NWDC) and community supporters has spurred pointed criticism by elected officials at the local, state, and national level of conditions within the facility. Sustained media attention and multiple lawsuits have also forced the facility to defend its practices. In March 2020, the Washington State Legislature passed HB 2576, a law mandating inquiries into state and local oversight mechanisms regarding conditions in the NWDC, further underscoring the perceived need to address gaps in understanding regarding the health and welfare of those housed within the facility.

In this context, the UW Center for Human Rights (UWCHR) considers it important to make our ongoing research on conditions within the NWDC available to the public. As part of our longstanding effort to examine the human rights implications of federal immigration enforcement in our state, UWCHR has sought, since 2017, to obtain information about conditions of detention in public and private detention facilities where immigrants are housed in Washington state.[4] While our efforts to obtain information about conditions within the NWDC have been only partially successful due to the lack of transparency surrounding the facility, the information we have obtained is sufficiently concerning, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, that we are choosing to share our initial findings with the public even as our collection and analysis of further data continues.

This report will be published as a series discussing areas of human rights concern at the facility, including background, methodology, and relevant human rights standards; sanitation of food and laundry; allegations of medical neglect; use of solitary confinement; COVID-19 and health standards; reporting of sexual assault and abuse; and uses of force and chemical agents. The report includes research updates covering concerns about cleanliness at the detention center going unanswered and a look at the context for Charles Leo Daniel’s death at the NWDC.

The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington

By Benjamin van Rooij, Malouke Esra Kuiper, and Alexis Piquero

Legal punishment, at least in part, serves a behavioral function to reduce and prevent offending behavior. The present paper offers an integrated review of the diverse mechanisms through which punishment may affect such behavior. It moves beyond a legal view that focuses on just three such mechanisms (deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation), to also include other socializing, delegitimizing, compliance obstructing, and offence adapting mechanisms in how punishment may influence offending. The paper assesses the quality of existing empirical knowledge about the different effects of punishment and the conditions under which these effects exist. It concludes that punishment has at least thirteen different influences on crime prevention, five positive and eight negative. It shows that such effects are conditional, depending on the offender, offence, punishment, and jurisdiction. Furthermore, it shows that the effects vary in their directness, proximity, onset and longevity. It concludes that our current empirical understanding does not match the complex reality of how punishment comes to shape crime. In light of this, the paper develops a research agenda on the integrated effects of punishment moving beyond limited causal mechanisms to embrace the fuller complexity of how sanctions shape human conduct by adopting a complexity science approach.

UC Irvine School of Law Research Paper Forthcoming.Amsterdam Law School Research Paper No. 2024-13. Center for Law & Behavior Research Paper No. 2024-01

By Vishal Kamat, Samuel Norris and Matthew Pecenco

The criminal justice system affects millions of Americans through criminal convictions and incarceration. In this paper, we introduce a new method for credibly estimating the effects of both conviction and incarceration using randomly assigned judges as instruments for treatment. Misdemeanor convictions, especially for defendants with a shorter criminal record, cause an increase in the number of new offenses committed over the following five years. Incarceration on more serious felony charges, in contrast, reduces recidivism during the period of incapacitation, but has no effect after release. Our method allows the researcher to isolate specific treatment effects of interest as well as estimate the effect of broader policies; we find that courts could reduce crime by dismissing marginal charges against defendants accused of misdemeanors, with larger reductions among first-time defendants and those facing more serious charges.

Written March 2024. SSRN.

By Paul H. Robinson and Jeffrey Seaman

The decarceration movement enjoys enthusiastic support from many academics and activists who point out imprisonment’s failure to rehabilitate and its potential criminogenic effects. At the same time, many fiscal conservatives and taxpayer groups are critical of imprisonment’s high costs and supportive of finding cheaper alternatives. Yet, despite this widespread support, the decarceration movement has made little real progress at getting offenders out of prison, in large part because community views, and thus political officials, are strongly committed to the importance of doing justice – giving offenders the punishment they deserve – and decarceration is commonly seen as inconsistent with that nonnegotiable principle. Indeed, almost no one in the decarceration movement has attempted to formulate a large-scale decarceration plan that still provides for what the community would see as just punishment.

In this Article, we offer just such a plan by demonstrating that it is entirely possible to avoid the incarceration of most offenders through utilizing non-incarcerative sanctions that can carry a total punitive effect comparable to physical prison. New technologies allow for imposing “electronic prison” sentences where authorities can monitor, control, and punish offenders in a cheaper and less damaging way than physical prison while still doing justice. Further, the monitoring conditions provided in electronic prison allow for the imposition of a wide array of other non-incarcerative sanctions that were previously difficult or impossible to enforce. Even while it justly punishes, electronic prison can dramatically increase an offender’s opportunities for training, treatment, education, and rehabilitation while avoiding the problems of unsupported families, socialization to criminality, and problematic reentry after physical incarceration. And, from a public safety standpoint, electronic prison can reduce recidivism by eliminating the criminogenic effect of incarceration and also provides longer-term monitoring of offenders than an equivalently punitive shorter term of physical imprisonment. Of course, one can imagine a variety of objections to an electronic prison system, ranging from claims it violates an offender’s rights to fears it may widen the net of carceral control. The Article provides a response to each.

Electronic prison is one of those rare policy proposals that should garner support from across the political spectrum due to effectively addressing the complaints against America’s incarceration system lodged by voices on the left, right, and center. Whether one’s primary concern is decarcerating prisoners and providing offenders with needed treatment, training, counseling, and education, or one’s concern is reducing crime, imposing deserved punishment, or simply reducing government expenditures, implementing an electronic prison system would provide a dramatic improvement over America’s current incarceration policies.

Written April 2024. U of Penn Law School, Public Law Research Paper No. 24-20,

Sandra Babcock, Nathalie Greenfield and Kathryn Adamson

This article presents a comprehensive study of 48 persons sentenced to death between 1990 and 2023 who presented as women at the time of their trials. Our research is the first of its kind to conduct a holistic and intersectional analysis of the factors driving women’s death sentences. It reveals commonalities across women’s cases, delving into their experiences of motherhood, gender-based violence and prior involvement with the criminal legal system. We also explore the nature of the women’s crimes of conviction, including the role of male co-defendants and the State’s use of aggravating factors. Finally, we reveal for the first time the extent to which capital prosecutions are dominated by men—including judges, elected District Attorneys, defense attorneys, and juror forepersons—and explain why gender matters in determining who lives and who dies.

We present our data against the backdrop of prevalent theories that seek to explain both the rarity of women’s executions and the reasons why certain women are singled out for the harshest punishment provided by law. We explain why those frameworks are inadequate to understand the role that systemic gender bias plays in women’s capital prosecutions. We conclude by arguing for more nuanced research that embraces the complexities in women’s capital cases and accounts for the presence of systemic and intersectional discrimination.

Cardozo Law Review, Forthcoming (Written April, 2024}.

By Andrew Jordan,  Ezra Karger,  Derek Neal

   We examined 70,581 felony court cases filed in Chicago, IL, from 1990–2007. We exploit case randomization to assess the impact of judge assignment and sentencing decisions on the arrival of new charges. We find that, in marginal cases, incarceration creates large and lasting reductions in recidivism among first offenders. Yet, among marginal repeat offenders, incarceration creates only short-run incapacitation effects and no lasting reductions in the incidence of new felony charges. These treatment-impact differences inform ongoing legal debates concerning the merits of sentencing rules that recommend leniency for first offenders while encouraging or mandating incarceration sentences for many repeat offenders. We show that methods that fail to estimate separate outcome equations for first versus repeat offenders or fail to model judge-specific sentencing tendencies separately for cases involving first versus repeat offenders produce misleading results for first offenders.  

 Working Paper 31939. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2024. 73p.

By Hilde Tubex and Natalie Gately

This paper contributes to the growing body of scholarship related to the impact of imprisonment on families, from the particular perspective of parents, siblings and other close relatives of people serving a life sentence. We argue that those family members are often overlooked in research and service provision, while bearing the burden of the association with the offender. This is particularly problematic for relatives of life sentenced prisoners, having to cope with the seriousness of the offence, and the uncertainty of the perspectives of release. Based on 17 interviews conducted in Western Australia, we discuss family members’ confrontation with and experiences throughout the criminal justice system. We report on how they manage to “live with life” and which coping mechanisms they developed. Our findings call for more investment into the matter, to generate a scholarship for a better understanding of and supporting initiatives for those close relatives.

Journal of Criminology, 2023. Online first

MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

HERBERT L. PACKER

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: THIS Is A BOOk about law and some related subjects; but it is not a specialized book, and I hope that it will be read by people who are not specialists. It is a book about a social problem that has an important legal dimension: the problem of trying to control antisocial behavior by imposing punishment on people found guilty of violating rules of conduct called criminal statutes. This device I shall call the criminal sanction. The rhetorical question that this book poses is: how can we tell what the criminal sanction is good for? Let us hypothesize the existence of a rational lawmaker-a man who stops, looks, and listens before he legislates. What kinds of questions should he ask before deciding that a certain kind of conduct (bank robbery, income tax evasion, marijuana use) ought to be subjected to the criminal sanction?

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, STANFORD, CALIFORNIA. 1968. 389p.

By Marie Manikis and Nicholas Doiron

The continuous perpetration of unjustified harms by the carceral state through its use of solitary confinement justifies the creation of a novel process of automatic sentence review. This process is necessary to account for such state-perpetrated harms and communicate censure more accurately. This article proposes the use of a communicative theory of punishment developed in sentencing to characterise and account for the state’s wrongdoing and harms in the context of a sentence that involves solitary confinement. Specifically, it outlines a justification for an automatic review process of the offender’s carceral sentence based on an expanded and relational understanding of censure developed in the literature and proposes a two-step process to implement this review.

(2024) 26:1 Punishment & Society 72-90.

By  Paul H. Robinson and  Jeffrey Seaman

Few claims have won such widespread acceptance in legal academia as the “mass incarceration” narrative: the idea that the rise in America’s prison population over the last half century was fueled largely by the needless and unjust imprisonment of millions of criminal offenders due to punitive changes in sentencing. To many academics and activists, the question is not how accurate the mass incarceration narrative is, but how mass incarceration can be ended. This Article argues the “mass incarceration” narrative is based on a series of myths and, as a result, many proposed reforms are based on a misunderstanding of America’s past and present carceral practices. A more accurate understanding is needed to produce effective reform.The central myth of the mass incarceration narrative is that exceptional and unjustified punitiveness largely explains America’s significant increase in prison population since the 1960s. This explanation overlooks the numerous non-sentencing factors that increased incarceration: a near doubling in U.S. population, higher crime rates, increased justice system effectiveness, deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, new and tightened criminalizations, worsening criminal offender histories, and more. While this Article makes no attempt at statistical precision, these non-sentencing factors can easily explain most of America’s elevated incarceration compared to the 1960s—a fact in direct conflict with the mass incarceration narrative. Additionally, while some punishments have increased in severity since the 1960s, most of these increases are likely to be seen as moving sentences closer to what the community – and many incarceration reformers – would believe is appropriate and just, as in cases of sexual assault, domestic violence, stalking, human trafficking, firearm offenses, and child pornography, among others.Comparing America’s prison population to foreign countries, as the mass incarceration narrative often does, similarly overlooks the contributions of many of these non-sentencing factors and incorrectly assumes that a higher American per capita incarceration rate always reflects a problem with American, instead of foreign, practice. While America can certainly learn from foreign countries, the reality is that many foreign sentencing practices have sparked chronic and widespread dissatisfaction abroad. It may be that the dispute over incarceration practices is more a dispute between the elites and the community than a dispute between the U.S. and other democracies’ populations.While all decarceration reformers should welcome a clearer picture of America’s incarceration practices, it is hard not to conclude that many mass incarceration myths were created deliberately by those who oppose not only incarceration but punishment generally. For these activists, the mass incarceration narrative is primarily a means toward eliminating punishment, a goal that is difficult to pursue directly because it is so contrary to the views of the general population and even a majority of academia.This Article is not pro-incarceration. It subjects the mass incarceration narrative to much needed scrutiny precisely because reforming incarceration practices is necessary. The criminal justice system should strive to deliver just punishment in the most societally beneficial way, which we believe means increasing the use of non-incarcerative sanctions. The myths of the mass incarceration narrative frequently lead activists to overlook non-incarcerative reforms that deliver just punishment—a tragic failure because such reforms would have much stronger popular support than the anti-punishment or unsophisticated anti-prison reforms now pushed by the mass incarceration narrative.Part I of the Article describes the mass incarceration myths that have become so broadly accepted. Part II reviews the facts of American incarceration practice, which contradict many, if not most, aspects of the narrative. Part III offers our reform proposals, which we believe more accurately address the problems in current incarceration practice. Central to those proposals are the use of creative non-incarcerative sanctions that still deliver punishment proportional to a nuanced assessment of each offender’s moral blameworthiness

U of Penn Law School, Public Law Research Paper No. 24-04