By Juan José Martínez d’Aubuisson

Entering Barrio 18, the powerful Central American street gang, can seem like a violent rebirth. Members get a new family, a community, and a sense of belonging and protection. But this comes at a cost. Through the story of Desafío, a boy who grew up on the streets of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, InSight Crime delves into the internal workings that make Barrio 18 tick, the constant state of paranoia that its members are kept under, and the brutal response to anyone who dares to dream of a different life. “I didn’t want to be here. I was already tired of being in the middle of all this. I wanted to distance myself from the gang and become a Christian, but they said I couldn’t. I had to stay in the gang until I died,” says Desafío while sitting at an old desk in the workshop section of El Pozo, a maximum-security prison in Honduras. He had decided to escape, but escaping from prison is never easy. Especially if one prison is hidden inside another.

Washington, DC: Insight Crime, 2023. 20p.

By Julia Laskorunsky, Gerald G.Gaes and KevinReitz  

When researchers, policymakers, and advocates examine the impact of long sentences, they typically focus on issues such as the statutory lengths of sentences or the roles that prosecutors and judges play in imposing sentences. While analyses of such “front-end” factors are important, they cannot sufficiently explain the role of “back-end” factors, specifically the laws and administrative rules that govern the awarding of different forms of sentence credit and prison release. This constitutes a significant gap in our understanding of how long sentences work. As research by Kevin Reitz and colleagues has documented,1 state prison-release frameworks have far greater discretionary power over the time individuals actually serve-and, by extension, the size of prison populations-than has been previously understood. To assess the impact of the use of long sentences of 10 or more years in the U.S., it is critical to appreciate how the interplay between the laws and administrative rules governing prison release affect the actual length of time individuals spend behind bars. Based on research conducted as part of the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice’s Prison Release: Degrees of Indeterminacy project,2 this brief’s first section provides an overview of the nation’s parole and non-parole prison release systems. This overview sets up an examination of how these systems’ statutory and administrative policy frameworks influence release decisions, sentence credit awards, and the actual time individuals serve against the sentence they receive in court (i.e., the judicial maximum term). In the second section, the brief uses Colorado as a short case-study to show how one state’s back-end laws and policies affect the time individuals serve. Finally, in the concluding section, the brief points to future research and policy work on prison-release decision making including other empirical factors other than statutory and administrative frameworks that influence how much time an individual serves.  

Washington DC: Council on Criminal Justice, 2022. 23p.

By Amal Ali and Hannah Pittaway

This ground-breaking project centres on the lived experiences of Black, Asian and minority ethnic women in prison, and comes at a time when there is increased attention on race and gender inequality in the criminal justice system, but the combination of these issues rarely receives any government attention. We received over 300 survey responses from women in prison, prison staff and IMBs, improving our understanding of the double disadvantage that women from minority ethnic backgrounds face. We are very grateful to the women with lived experience who co-designed the survey and all those in custody for their honesty and openness when completing it. Their accounts of direct and indirect racism and poor treatment are shocking and distressing. Even more upsetting is their sense of fatalism - they see it as part of their everyday lives. The women lack confidence in the complaints system, do not trust that they will be treated fairly and are often unaware of how the IMB can help. The impact of the pandemic has made this worse. There is an urgent need to address these issues nationally and locally. IMBs play an important role given their day-to-day presence in prisons. Community scrutiny is a vital tool to hold criminal justice agencies to account. The CJA has focused on improving community scrutiny for several years looking at police powers, police custody and now prison custody. We consistently see the same themes: the need for better and more consistent data collection and analysis, more effective equalities training and support, and for community volunteers to be more representative of the populations in the criminal justice system. The recommendations in these reports map out sensible steps Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS), the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and IMBs can take to make positive change and I hope to see them being implemented with haste.  

London: Criminal Justice Alliance, 2022. 38p.