By Nicola Carr

The crisis in prisons in England and Wales has been brought sharply into focus. On 16 October 2023, the Justice Secretary announced measures aimed at reducing pressure on the prisons, caused in part by a record high of 88,225 people in custody (Chalk, 2023). As if this is not cause enough for concern, forecasts indicate that the population is due to rise even higher in the coming years with predictions that by March 2027 the population may rise to anywhere between 93,100 and 106,300 people (MoJ, 2023). It is clear from the Ministry's explanation of its forecasts the government's own policies (as well as the post-coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) backlog of cases in the courts) are a central driver of prison population growth. In recent decades, almost every government policy relating to crime and justice has ratcheted up systemic pressure resulting in more people spending longer in prison. This includes longer sentences for certain offences and changes to mechanisms for prisoner release. Not to mention of course the people who remain imprisoned under the egregious Indeterminate Public Protection (IPP) sentence, which although abolished in 2012, has still left approximately 3000 people languishing in prison. While the Conservative party has been in power for over 12 years, this punitive policy direction has a longer lineage, IPPs were introduced in 2003 by a Labour Home Secretary, who has since regretted the injustice.

United Kingdom, Probation Journal Volume 70, Issue 4. 2023, 4pg

By Lucy Lang Inspector General

The myriad manifestations of systemic racism in the complex web of social systems throughout New York State and America writ large are well-documented. Criminal justice systems in particular are rife with racial inequities at every stage, from initial contact to arrest, trial, and sentence, and through re-entry and beyond, which are themselves inextricably connected to devastating racial disparities in inter-related and surrounding systems including, for example, education, housing, and public health. In December 2016, The New York Times1 reported on a specific alarming instance of such disparities—those in the allocation of behavioral infraction tickets2 and the attendant punishment by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) to incarcerated individuals in the year 2015.3 Following publication of the New York Times findings, the then governor directed that the New York State Inspector General “investigate the allegations of racial disparities in discipline in State prisons” and recommend solutions.4 After an initial review, the Inspector General recommended that DOCCS engage the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) 5 , a federal agency that is part of the U.S. Department of Justice, to complete a comprehensive assessment based on their extensive national expertise. The Inspector General oversaw that process and the implementation of the accepted recommendations. Over the following half-dozen years, with the cooperation of DOCCS, the Inspector General continued to monitor these trends to determine whether the NIC recommendations had the desired impact, to observe the impact of additional measures implemented by DOCCS to identify and address possible racial bias in its facilities, programs, and disciplinary actions, and  to gather more comprehensive data in hopes of conclusively identifying the root causes of the observed disparities. As part of that effort, the Inspector General conducted its own comprehensive analysis of data maintained by DOCCS on the discipline of incarcerated individuals. This analysis expanded upon the methodology used by the Times6 by covering a broader period (2015-2020), using an alternate method of tallying of incarcerated populations7, and including reports of rule violations, which are known as Misbehavior Reports, that were ultimately dismissed. 8 In addition, the Inspector General retained a professor who is an expert in statistics to review and comment on its analysis.

United States, New York State Office of the Inspector General. 2022, 175pg

By: Matt Davis, Desiree L. Fox, Ciara D. Hansen,, Ann M. Miller

Native people are disproportionately incarcerated in the United States. Several factors contribute: a history of federal oppression and efforts to erode Native culture, a series of federal laws that rejected tribal justice systems in place long before European contact, historical trauma that has a lasting impact on the physical and mental well-being of Native people, a complicated jurisdictional structure that pulls Native people further into justice involvement, and a deficiency of representation for the accused in tribal courts. Although people accused of crime in tribal courts are afforded the right to counsel, tribal governments are not constitutionally required to provide appointed counsel for the indigent. As a result, there are uncounseled convictions in tribal courts used against Native people in state and federal systems.

There are 574 federally recognized tribal governments in the United States, each with its own culture, sovereign government, justice system, and historical relationship with the United States government. For this reason, interventions meant to address over-incarceration of Native people should start at the tribal level. Tribes could impact disparity on a national level by providing supportive and restorative services for those involved in their own justice systems. Tribes could impact disparities by providing public defender services, in particular, holistic public defense that employs a restorative approach. A holistic model of public defense addresses the issues that contribute to people’s involvement in the criminal justice system and the collateral consequences to criminal charges and convictions. Providing services that address underlying needs results in improved life outcomes that predictably result in less criminal justice involvement. This article highlights the Tribal Defenders Office (TDO) for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes that has implemented holistic defense in a tribal setting.

Initially modeled after the Bronx Defenders, the Tribal Defenders holistic defense practice aligns with tribal values by going beyond the criminal case to view the accused as a whole person with a range of legal and social support needs that if left unmet will continue to push them back into the criminal justice system. Over the years, the Tribal Defenders’ team has worked to integrate into the community, listen to feedback from clients and the community, and refine the program accordingly. Through twelve years of integrated practice, TDO staff learned several lessons that have shaped their success: services come first, invest in culturally relevant research and services, listen to clients and the community, and adhere to cultural safety.

Although the article promotes holistic defense to the indigent as a solution to inequities facing justice-involved Native people, it also highlights other promising practices. Tribal systems have access to national organizations that support their efforts to address criminal justice challenges. There are tribal courts, victim services, probation departments, and reentry programs that have taken traditional, restorative principles and applied them in innovative ways to promote healing, wellness, and community safety.

United States, Safety & Justice Challenge. 2023. 23pg

By Jacqueline Beard

In March 2020 the Justice Secretary told the Justice Committee that the pressure on prisons in England and Wales due to coronavirus was acute.“a potential hotbed for viral transmission”, stating that “they are overcrowded, understaffed and often dirty”.2 The Head of the Prison Governors Association told the Guardian: 1 The Chair of the Justice Committee described prisons as a combination of prison overcrowding, prisoner lockdown and staff shortages as a result of prison workers needing to isolate themselves meant that the system was facing unprecedented pressure.3 The physical health of the prison population, across a broad range of conditions, is much poorer than that of the general population.4 The proportion of prisoners aged over 50 increased from 7% in 2002 to 16% in March 2019.5 Living conditions across much of the prison estate are poor. As at February 2020, 60% (70) of prison establishments were crowded.6 These 70 prisons accommodated around 60,000 prisoners or 71% of the total prison population. On 27 April 2020 the Justice Secretary said that the numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths in prisons were lower than had been originally predicted and that “while we are not out of woods”, prisons were coping and dealing well with the threat of covid-19. 7  A press release from the Ministry of Justice on the 28 April 2020 said that “jails are successfully limiting deaths and the transmission of the virus within the estate”.8 As of 12 May, 404 cases had been confirmed amongst prisoners. 21 prisoners and 7 members of prison staff had died.9  Public Health England (PHE) reported on 24 April 2020 that data it had collected “suggests that the ‘explosive outbreaks’ of COVID19 which were feared at the beginning of the pandemic wave are not being seen. Instead, there is evidence of containment of outbreak”.10 PHE’s report stated that because access to testing for prisoners has been limited and variable, the number of confirmed cases reported “does not represent the true burden of infection in the prison system”. It states that in addition to the 304 laboratory-confirmed cases in prisoners in England and Wales (at the time the report was written) data showed there had been also over 1,783 possible/probable cases. 

London, House of Commons Library. 2020. 10pg

By James Hess

The California Prison Industry Authority (CALPIA) is a self-supporting training and production program currently operating within the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). CALPIA provides training, certification and employment to inmates in a variety of different fields. The goods and services produced by CALPIA are sold to the state and other government entities, which provides an economic benefit to the state. In addition to the vocational and economic aspect of the program, one of CALPIA’s missions is to reduce the subsequent recidivism of their inmate participants. This research examines the effect of participation in CALPIA on the recidivism of CDCR inmates released into the community. 

Irvine, California, School of Social Ecology. 2021, 40pg

By Julian V Roberts, Gabrielle Watson, Rhys Hester

Members of racial, ethnic, and Indigenous minorities have long accounted for disproportionate percentages of prison admissions in Western nations and of prison populations. The minorities affected vary between countries. Discriminatory or differential treatment by criminal justice officials from policing through to parole is part of the problem. Much media and professional attention focuses on sentencing, where the decision-making is most public. An emerging body of research identifies sentencing as a cause—or, at the very least, an amplifier—of minority over-incarceration. Solutions aiming to reduce it have been implemented, with varying but modest degrees of success, in the United States, England and Wales, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand. Progress toward reducing minority over-incarceration has been slow. Most US sentencing commissions have failed to determine the extent to which their guidelines contribute to the problem. The Sentencing Council of England and Wales has taken the limited step of warning judges about racial disparities, without suggesting remedial steps to be taken. Courts in Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand have taken more activist approaches, mitigating sentences when offenders adduce evidence of discrimination or abuse by criminal justice officials.

Crime and Justice, Volume 52. 2023

By Briana Jones & Laura Goren

Virginia can be a place where every young person has the support and resources to reach their full potential and where young people who get into trouble are helped to get back on the right track. Unfortunately, currently in Virginia, the youth court system frequently imposes fines and fees on troubled young people and their families, placing additional barriers in their path. This creates long-standing harm for children who enter the system and their families, with Black teenagers most often being swept into the youth criminal legal system and therefore facing the greatest financial and family harms. Analyses of these economic and social impacts of fines and fees on Black and Brown teenagers highlight the pressing challenges these children and their families can face and offer alternative measures that could better help youth who encounter the juvenile justice system.

Richmond, VA: The Commonwealth Institute, 2022. 6p

By Nicholas Goldrosen, Christian Michael Smith, Maria-Veronica Ciocanel, Rebecca Santorella, Shilad Sen, Shawn Bushway, Chad M. Topaz

Substantial race-based disparities exist in federal criminal sentencing. We analyze 380,000 recent (2006–2019) sentences in the JUSTFAIR database and show that these disparities are large and vary considerably across judges. Judges assign White defendants sentences 13% shorter than Black defendants' and 19% shorter than Hispanic defendants' sentences, on average, conditional on case characteristics and district. Judges one standard deviation above average in their estimated Black-White disparity give Black defendants sentences 39% conditionally longer than White defendants' sentences, vis-à-vis average disparity of 13%. Judges one standard deviation above average in their estimated Hispanic-White disparity give Hispanic defendants sentences 49% conditionally longer than White defendants' sentences, compared to the average disparity of 19%.

Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, Volume 179, Issue 1, pages 92–113 (March 2023)

By Richard S. Frase

Sentences to probation and other community-based sentences require backup sanctions to encourage compliance with the conditions of probation and respond to violations of those conditions. The most severe backup sanction in felony cases in the United States is revocation of release and commitment to prison. But such revocations have been a major contributor to mass incarceration;1 moreover, such revocations can result in offenders whose crimes do not justify a prison sentence being sent to prison—the problem of “net-widening.”2 Legal systems have taken a variety of approaches in structuring backup sanctions for probation violations, particularly custodial sanctions. This article surveys and critiques two kinds of suspended prison sentences frequently used as backup sanctions in U.S. state and federal guidelines systems, and a third option that employs more limited custodial backup sanctions. When a court employs the first type of suspended sentence—a suspendedexecution prison sentence (SEPS)—it first imposes a specified prison term and then suspends some or all of that term and places the offender on probation with specified conditions. If the offender violates those conditions, the court has the option of executing the suspended prison term, usually with minimal hearing or other procedural requirements. In some systems, the court may also choose to execute only part of the suspended prison term. By contrast, the second type of suspended sentence—suspended imposition of sentence (SIS)—involves a form of deferred sentencing: the court places the offender on probation without making any decision about what specific prison term should be imposed for the crime or crimes for which the offender has just been convicted. In the event that the conditions of probation are violated, the court holds a formal sentencing hearing, with all of the procedural requirements of such a hearing, and may then impose any sentence that could have been imposed when the SIS was first pronounced. Under the third option noted above, local jail terms are used to sanction probation violations. This takes two forms. In the first, although probation is combined with a suspended-execution or suspended-imposition sentence that could be revoked, courts are encouraged to use jail terms to sanction probation violations. In the second, probation is imposed as a free-standing sentence with only non-prison custodial backup sanctions, rather than as a condition of a SEPS or SIS sentence. Under this approach the option of commitment to prison is off the table once the court places the offender on probation.3 Each of the options above has advantages and disadvantages, which will be explored in Part III of this article. Part II provides a survey of the varying ways in which one or more of the options has been used in the nineteen U.S. guidelines systems that are currently in operation

82 Law and Contemporary Problems 51-79 (2019)

By Hayli Millar, Yvon Dandurand, Vivienne Chin, Shawn Bayes, Megan Capp, Richard Fowler, Jessica Jahn, Barbara Pickering, and Allan Castle

This Overview forms part of a broader project on the Best Interests of the Child in Sentencing and Other Decisions Concerning Parents Facing Criminal Sanctions, made possible through the support of a generous project grant from the Vancouver Foundation. The broader project’s objective is to instigate and support a systemic and cultural change in the way that the best interests of the child are considered by defence counsel, the prosecution and the courts. The ultimate intention is to mitigate the negative impact on the child of a parent facing criminal sanctions, especially when the parent/legal guardian is a primary or sole caregiver. The motivation for this work is the general lack of attention directed towards the best interests of dependent children whose parents are before the criminal courts, despite a wide range of international and regional norms and standards which suggest that domestic criminal courts are obliged to take the rights and best interests of dependent children into account as a primary consideration when making bail and sentencing decisions. This lack of attention persists despite all that is known about the negative influence of parental criminal sentences, and in particular incarceration, on children. This Overview is intended specifically to encourage active consideration of child impact and family impact at time of sentencing and other court decisions, principally by prosecutors and judges but also all those with influence in criminal proceedings, to avoid the potentially negative impacts of those decisions. A broader purpose is to raise awareness about these issues more generally, and to assist the reader in identifying practices which serve to diminish consideration of the best interests of the child, where these exist. More generally, the Overview is intended to influence policy change, to encourage greater availability of non-carceral or community-based alternatives to incarceration for people with parental responsibilities, and to support parents in mitigating the impact of their own sentencing and court order compliance on their children. The recommendations in this Overview are intended to stir productive discussion. Our efforts will have been successful if this document encourages subject matter experts and decision makers holding positions of responsibility in the criminal process to consider how the best interests of the child may most suitably and effectively be incorporated into decisions and orders of the criminal courts.

Vancouver: International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy, 2023. 56p.

By M. Camello, M., R. Shute, & J.D. Ropero-Miller

Individuals on community supervision are often required to abstain from alcohol and drug use and are typically subjected to substance use monitoring to verify sobriety, as a condition of their supervision. Providing reliable, timely, and cost- effective monitoring of alcohol and drug use for persons on community supervision as a condition of their release is a serious challenge given high-volume caseloads and concerns with public safety. This technology brief highlights technologies and solutions used to monitor alcohol and drug use for persons on community supervision. This is the third document in a four-part series on technologies to support the monitoring and supervision of individuals on pretrial release, probation, and parole (i.e., community supervision).

Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI International. 2023. 22p.

By Jennifer Peirce, Tara Dhanraj Roden, Sandhya Kajeepeta, Elizabeth Swavola, and Jesmeen Grewal

This report presents an analysis of women’s experiences with the local criminal legal system in Buncombe County, North Carolina: their pathways into and out of the jail, their living conditions and concerns during detention, and their perspectives on how services and systems in the county can improve. The underlying research project was part of the broader jail reduction work of the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) network. In 2018, the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) selected Buncombe County as a Safety and Justice Challenge site with which to partner in identifying drivers of growth within the women’s jail population and opportunities to reduce the number of women in jail. Buncombe County has a population of 269,452 (as of April 2020) and covers 656 square miles, including the City of Asheville.1 The findings in this report are based on administrative data from the jail (January 2017– April 2021); surveys with 40 women, representing nearly all the women who were held in the jail in September 2021; and interviews with 21 women conducted by Vera staff via video calls. Although the findings are responsive and specific to the needs of women in Buncombe County, many of the recommendations, if implemented, can benefit all people who are involved in the local criminal legal system.+ Broadly, this report finds that women’s pathways into jail in Buncombe County—in line with national patterns—are shaped by economic instability and laws and policies that criminalize acts of survival and acts related to substance dependency.2 In general, there is an excessive use of police, jail detention, and community supervision for low-level charges that do not pose a public safety risk. There is a clear opportunity to reduce the use of criminal legal system resources to respond to these situations and invest instead in supportive community-based services, especially for women. The key findings and recommendations from this work are grouped into six themes: 1. the criminalization of poverty, 2. bail, 3. community supervision, 4. substance use, 5. jail conditions and costs, and 6. interagency coordination and communication.

New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2022. 55p.

By Chad M. Topaz, Shaoyang Ning, Maria-Veronica Ciocanel & Shawn Bushway

Race-based inequity in federal criminal sentencing is widely acknowledged, and yet our understanding of it is far from complete. Inequity may arise from several sources, including direct bias of courtroom actors and structural bias that produces racially disparate impacts. Irrespective of these sources, inequity may also originate from different loci within the federal system. We bring together the questions of the sources and loci of inequity. The purpose of our study is to quantify race-based disparate impact and differential treatment at the national level and at the level of individual federal judicial districts. We analyze over one-half million sentencing records publicly available from the United States Sentencing Commission database, spanning the years 2006 to 2020. At the system-wide level, Black and Hispanic defendants receive average sentences that are approximately 19 months longer and 5 months longer, respectively. Demographic factors and sentencing guideline elements account for nearly 17 of the 19 months for Black defendants and all five of the months for Hispanic defendants, demonstrating the disparate impact of the system at the national level. At the individual district level, even after controlling for each district’s unique demographics and implementation of sentencing factors, 14 districts show significant differences for minoritized defendants as compared to white ones. These unexplained differences are evidence of possible differential treatment by judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys.

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 10, Article number: 366 (2023)

By The Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice

KEY POINTS • Despite the common practice of drug testing as a condition of supervision, there is no research that focuses on the effectiveness of drug testing on its own in reducing recidivism and drug use. • Increased drug testing as part of an Intensive Supervision Program (ISP) approach does not reduce re-offending but does increase the detection of technical violations and revocations. • Random drug testing alongside swift, certain, and fair sanctions shows evidence for reducing recidivism and drug use in the short-term but shows no benefit once the individual goes back to supervision as usual. • Drug testing works well as a way to monitor compliance with supervision conditions, but there is no evidence that it reduces re-offending or drug use when used apart from other supervision practices.

St.:Paul, MN: Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice , 2020. 4p.

By Nazgol Ghandnoosh

One in five Black men born in 2001 is likely to experience imprisonment within their lifetime, a decline from one in three for those born in 1981. Pushback from policymakers threatens further progress in reducing racial inequity in incarceration

Following a massive, four-decade-long buildup of incarceration disproportionately impacting people of color, a growing reform movement has made important inroads. The 21st century has witnessed progress both in reducing the U.S. prison population and its racial and ethnic disparities. The total prison population has declined by 25% after reaching its peak level in 2009.1 While all major racial and ethnic groups experienced decarceration, the Black prison population has downsized the most. The number of imprisoned Black Americans decreased 39% since its peak in 2002.2 Despite this progress, imprisonment levels remain too high nationwide, particularly for Black Americans.

Reforms to drug law enforcement and to sentencing for drug and property offenses, particularly those impacting urban areas which are disproportionately home to communities of color, have fueled decarceration and narrowed racial disparities.3 These trends have led scholars to declare a “generational shift” in the lifetime likelihood of imprisonment for Black men.4This risk has fallen from a staggering one in three for those born in 1981 to a still troubling one in five for Black men born in 2001.5 Black women have experienced the sharpest decline in their imprisonment rate, falling by 70% between 2000 and 2021.6

But nine years after national protests catapulted the Black Lives Matter movement following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and three years after a national racial reckoning triggered by Minneapolis police officers killing George Floyd, progress in reducing racial disparity in the criminal legal system is incomplete and at risk of stalling or being reversed.

The United States remains fully in the era of mass incarceration. The 25% decline in the total prison population since 2009 follows a nearly 700% buildup in imprisonment since 1972.7 The prison population in 2021 was nearly six times as large as 50 years ago, before the era of mass incarceration, and in 2022 the prison population expanded.8 The prison and jail incarceration rate in the United States remains between five and eight times that of France, Canada, and Germany and imprisonment rates in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma are nearly 50% above the national average.9 The reluctance to fully correct sentencing excesses, particularly for violent crimes as supported by criminological evidence, prolongs the harm and futility of mass incarceration.10

Racial equity in incarceration remains elusive. The lifetime likelihood of imprisonment among Black men born in 2001, although decreased, remains four times that of their white counterparts.5 Black women’s rate of imprisonment in 2021 was 1.6 times the rate of white women.12 These disparities are even more pronounced in certain states, and among those serving the longest sentences.13 In 2021, American Indian and Latinx people were imprisoned at 4.2 times and 2.4 times the rate of whites, respectively.14 Fully uprooting these racial and ethnic disparities requires both curbing disparities produced by the criminal legal system and addressing the conditions of socioeconomic inequality that contribute to higher rates of certain violent and property crimes among people of color.

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2023. 16p.

By Selma Djokovic and Ryan Shanahan

Findings from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) conducted in prisons in South Carolina show that Restoring Promise’s approach to culture change significantly reduces prison violence and the use of restrictive housing (commonly referred to as solitary confinement).1 Restoring Promise Restoring Promise, an initiative of the MILPA Collective and the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera), works with departments of corrections to transform housing units so that they are grounded in dignity for young adults (ages 18 to 25) in prison. Launched in 2017, Restoring Promise is now operating in six prisons and one jail across five states. The housing units are led by trained corrections professionals and mentors— incarcerated people over the age of 25 who are serving long, often life, sentences who live on the unit with and guide the young adults. Participation for young adults includes living in a designated housing unit, having a structured and meaningful daily schedule, being connected to mentors, developing leadership skills, enhancing connections to family and community, and designing and participating in specialized programs and activities. The program strives to transform the prison culture into one of accountability, healing, and learning.2 The findings Restoring Promise housing units had less violence and fewer restrictive housing unit stays. Findings from an RCT conducted in South Carolina show that Restoring Promise’s approach to culture change in prisons significantly reduces violence. Young adults living in a Restoring Promise unit experienced a 73 percent reduction in the odds of a conviction for a violent infraction and an 83 percent reduction in the odds of a restrictive housing stay during their first year of participation, compared to the control group in general population. These numbers account for a range of factors that may have implications for the outcomes (including custody level, education level, pre-treatment outcomes, length of time in the study, race, and age). Researchers looked at other outcomes and did not find significant treatment effects (disciplinary misconduct, grievances, injuries, staff use of force, and medical/mental health interventions).

New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2023. 8p.

By Jamie Jenkins

The largest book ban in the United States takes place in this country’s prison system. Prison officials can ban any book that threatens the security or operations of the facility. Books about Black people in America and books about the history and politics of prisons are often targeted for their potential to be divisive or incite unrest. The result is that Black people, who are already disproportionately victimized by the criminal punishment system, are prevented from reading their own history and the history of the institution imprisoning them. This Note examines the legal backdrop enabling these draconian book bans to persist today. As an example, it highlights the recent ban of Heather Ann Thompson’s “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy” in Attica Correctional Facility. It situates book bans in prisons alongside the anti-CRT mania plaguing our school systems, and labels both practices as forms of “memory law” meant to stifle the democratic engagement of marginalized groups. Finally, this Note argues for a rebalancing of interests that centers the rights and needs of incarcerated people.

(January 16, 2023). Columbia Law Review, Forthcoming, Available at

By Ben Grunwald

With mounting support for dramatic criminal justice reform, the question is no longer whether we should decarcerate American prisons but how. This question is far more complicated than it might seem. We could cut the prison population in half, for example, by drastically shortening sentences. Or we could reduce prison admissions. Or we could do both. And we could do either or both for countless combinations of criminal offenses. Moreover, even when they reach the same numeric target, these strategies are not equivalent. They would have vastly different consequences for both prisoners and the public and widely varying timeframes to take effect. To pick among them, we need richer metrics and more precise empirical estimates to evaluate their consequences.

This Article begins by proposing metrics to evaluate the relative merits of competing decarceration strategies. The public debate has focused almost exclusively on how we might decarcerate while minimizing any increases in crime and has, therefore, underappreciated the costs of prison itself. We should consider at least three more metrics: the social harm of incarceration, racial disparity, and timing. Next, the Article develops an empirical methodology to identify the range of strategies that would reduce the national prison population by 25, 50, and 75%. Finally, it identifies the best performing strategies against each metric.

The results have several broader takeaways. First, the optimal approach to decarceration depends heavily on which metrics we value most. The results thus quantify a stark set of policy choices behind a seemingly simple objective. Second, the results confirm that, to dramatically shrink prisons, it is critical to decarcerate a substantial number of people convicted of violent offenses—a fact that may surprise the majority of Americans who believe people convicted of drug offenses occupy half of prison beds. Finally, the results show that race-neutral decarceration strategies are likely to exacerbate rather than mitigate racial disparities. Armed with the conceptual tools and methodologies developed in this Article, we can make more informed decisions about how to best scale down prisons, given our priorities and constraints.

33 Stanford Law & Policy Review (2022 Forthcoming), Duke Law School Public Law & Legal Theory Series No. 2021-41,

By Richard Walton

Prisons exist to keep the public safe by depriving the most serious offenders of their liberty, and to enable them to become law-abiding citizens. In recent years, those priorities increasingly have been neglected by the Ministry of Justice and Her Majesty’s Prisons and Probation Service. The collective rights of the vast majority of the public have been overlooked, without noticeable benefit to those who have been sentenced to prison. The case of Usman Khan, who launched an Islamist terror attack in central London in November, despite being released on supposedly strict licence conditions, illustrates the inherent risks of an approach that appears to set poorly researched offender rehabilitation programmes above the safety of ordinary citizens. This is especially true in the context of extremist offenders, who are ideologically motivated and more difficult, sometimes impossible, to rehabilitate. Khan, previously convicted for involvement in a plot to bomb the London Stock Exchange, hoodwinked his supervisors, who allowed him to travel to the heart of the capital, with fatal consequences for two young people and their families. This should not have happened: the process that led to it has to be re-examined. It is clear that a reordering of priorities for ministers, officials, police and probation officers is urgently required. The alleged terrorist attack at HMP Whitemoor, which is said to have featured replica suicide vests, is further evidence that the most dangerous offenders are not being monitored effectively and in the public interest – even within a Category A prison. This report sets out some of the organisational changes that would help to achieve the necessary change.The recommendation for the Home Office to reabsorb Her Majesty’s Prisons and Probation Service (HMPPS) is persuasive. The Ministry of Justice, formed in 2007, has proven to be institutionally flawed and a cultural timidity still persists among officials around the management of terrorist offenders. The 13-year experiment, which removed prisons from the purview of the Home Office, has failed and should be brought to a close. It would make far more sense – in operational and strategic terms – for the Home Secretary, who has ministerial responsibility for domestic security, policing and public safety, to be once again accountable for the management of all prisoners, with the assistance of an able and knowledgeable Prisons Minister. A Home Office structured along traditional lines would also be in a stronger position to direct information-sharing and more carefully assess the risks to public safety posed by prisoners – notably terrorist offenders – on their release. A revamped Home Office must review how prisoner behaviour is evaluated, as well as the schemes designed to deradicalise terrorist offenders and rehabilitate other dangerous offenders. As the report explains, there has been little empirical study into the effectiveness of schemes designed to challenge extremist world views. Specialist training is vital here, and the use of the best psychological and neurological techniques to assess risk and danger. This is not work for the generalist: as Usman Khan’s case shows, those who are ideologically motivated of Islamist extremism are capable of hiding their true intent for long periods in order to carry out devastating acts of violence. Finally, legislating to prevent seriously dangerous convicted terrorists and possibly some other dangerous offenders from being released early into the community on licence is an idea that deserves serious consideration (and properly informed debate in both Houses of Parliament). It is likely to gain public support but judges must be persuaded of its legal integrity too. As the Government explores these legislative changes and structural changes in the round, it must ensure that public safety is paramount.

London: PolIcy Exchange, 2020. 28p.

By Daniela Ronco, Alvise Sbraccia, Giovanni Torrente

This project’s goal is to assess strategies and programmes which prevent, deter and counter radicalization in prison and identify and analyse good practices regarding new or existing deradicalization, disengagement and rehabilitation programmes and risk assessment tools. The analysis has been carried out having in mind the international and European standards for the the protection of detainees' rights. Research incorporates qualitative and quantitative data analysis on official government documents and interviews with stakeholders from prison administration and management, prison staff, Imams, chaplains and other religious representatives. The relevance of results is to develop practices across Europe to effectively manage individuals considered radicalized, at risk of being or to prevent others. Ensuring common knowledge by disseminating to national and European networks will improve de-radicalization measures across prisons.

European Prison Observatory 2019. 47p.