By Jazmin E. Palacios

For this thesis paper, the author analyzed cases from the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals and the U.S. District Courts in which inmates challenged the constitutionality of their conditions of confinement in extremely hot facilities. The author applies inductive methods and analytic procedures of grounded theory to identify legal doctrines, concepts, representations, and themes of court litigation and case law about excessive heat in correctional facilities. Through a review of constitutional law history and the analysis of federal court decisions, the author examines the constitutionality of incarcerating inmates in extremely hot facilities and offers policy guidance to prison officials on mitigation efforts in heat-related conditions of confinement. The author discusses legal precedents for questions addressing the conditions of confinement, and suggests some policy implications that consider the many prisoners who are on medications that risk severe illness and death when exposed to excessive heat, including that prison medical personnel should keep real-time records of inmates taking their medications, what their work assignments are, where they are housed, and what remedial efforts are being taken to ameliorate heat exposure. The author also suggests that inmates not taking high-risk medications but with a history of heat-related illnesses should be carefully monitored by officials to lessen sickness and reduce deaths, and notes that while things like air conditioning were previously considered a luxury, as global warming intensifies, it has increasingly become a medical necessity to avoid adverse outcomes of heat exposure.

Huntsville, TX: Sam Houston State University, 2021. 135p.

By Penal Reform International and The Thailand Institute of Justice

  This 2023 edition of Global Prison Trends by Penal Reform International (PRI) and the Thailand Institute of Justice (TIJ) is published at a time where a string of financial crises and ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are greatly affecting vulnerable people around the world. People in conflict with the law – and their families – are being hit by rising costs of living and austerity measures, as are prison systems. Our report assesses the impact of economic crisis on prisons and people detained or working in them, including in terms of food security. We also highlight the impacts of imprisonment on families who are often relied on to meet even the basic needs of their loved ones in prison. Long-standing under-resourcing of prison administrations and inadequate support for families in need are compounding this situation. Adequate resourcing and capacity of prison systems are prerequisites to protecting the human rights and basic needs of every person affected by imprisonment. The impact of prison overcrowding is central to our analysis in this year’s edition of Global Prison Trends. From healthcare and nutrition to rehabilitation and countering violence and criminal subcultures in prison, all initiatives would be more viable and effective, and human rights of all better protected, with fewer people in prison.   

London: Penal Reform International, 2023. 56p.

By  Mitali Nagrecha

  Over the last few decades, advocates in the United States have exposed the injustices of high fines and fees that courts charge people sentenced to criminal and civil violations. Courts impose fines as punishment for offenses— often in addition to other punishment such as probation or jail—and they charge fees (also referred to as costs or surcharges) to fund the court and other government services. The number of fees and the amounts assessed have been increasing over the last decades, in part because fees are being used to generate revenue for local and state governments. Rarely, if ever, do U.S. courts consider people’s ability to pay before imposing these sanctions.3 When people are  unable to pay, they can become trapped in the system, facing a cycle of consequences including additional fees, court hearings, warrants, arrest, and incarceration.4 In response to advocacy exposing how these punitive practices harm people and communities, jurisdictions have begun to reform. The most direct efforts seek to repeal revenue-raising fines and fees. More common, however, is the adoption of requirements that courts assess people’s ability to pay at the  sentencing hearing, and/or before punishing people for nonpayment.5 Though high monetary sanctions are prevalent in all courts, much of this reform attention has focused on misdemeanor courts that sentence ordinance violations and misdemeanor crimes. This is because fines are a common component of misdemeanor criminal sentences, and because  there are clearer conflicts of interest inherent in the structure of some lower level courts that rely on fines and fees to fund their operations.6 It is in this reform context that academics, advocates, and government leaders have considered day fines as a potential model for the United States. Day fines are used in over 30 countries in Europe and Latin America to  calculate fine amounts that are tailored to people’s ability to pay.7 Day fines are set using a two-part inquiry. Courts first consider the nature and seriousness of the offense, measured in units or days. For example, a common low-level    misdemeanor may receive 20 units. Courts then calculate how much the person can pay per day/unit  based on their individual financial circumstances. The amount a person must pay per day is called the daily rate. Someone earning very little may be required to pay $5 per unit for a total fine of $100, while someone earning more may  be required to pay $20 per unit for a total fine of $400. Day fines provide a framework for setting a fine based not just on  the nature of the offense, but also on how much a fine will impact the person given their financial circumstances. The  resulting fines are theoretically more fair because people of different means experience the fines similarly. A $400 fine affects a person earning that amount per week differently than a person who earns that amount in one day. In the United  States, day fines hold the promise not only of making fines more fair, but also of making fines affordable to avoid the spiral  of negative consequences that people face upon nonpayment. Despite the theoretical resonance of day fines as a  potential solution, there has been very limited information available about how this model works in practice. This project  fills this knowledge gap.  

Cambridge, MA: Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School. 2020. 156p.

By Jay Gormley

• Criminal fines are the most common criminal sanction and account for about 75% of principal sanctions issued by courts. As a principal sanction, fines are most commonly used for relatively less serious offences where an out of court disposal (OOCD) or discharge is not appropriate or possible. However, fines can also be used as a complementary sanction to another disposal - such as a community order for more serious offences.

• There is a need for the law to provide better clarity concerning the most appropriate role for criminalisation. Most notably, there could be better clarity about the relationship between criminal fines issued by courts and non-criminal fines issued by criminal justice personnel (e.g. police officers and prosecutors) by way of an OOCD.

• In the past, defaulting on a fine frequently resulted in the next step being a custodial sentence. Today, other sentencing disposals have to be considered first, ameliorating this issue. However, currently, there is no available data on how many people default on a fine, are given another order (e.g. a community order) which they also fail to comply with, and are ultimately given a custodial sentence for what was initially a finable offence. This matter requires urgent clarification and it should also be investigated whether it contributes to the high number of short custodial sentences.

• Fines, more than any other disposal, raise questions of fairness given the socio-economic inequality in society. Without care, fines risk disproportionately punishing the poor who may suffer more from a fine of a given amount. The Sentencing Council provides crucial guidance in this respect, but it could be taken further.
London: Sentencing Academy, 2022. 20p.

By Todd D. Minton

This report provides statistics on the demographic characteristics, most serious offense, and conviction status of persons held in Indian country jails. It also describes facility characteristics, including capacity and staffing. The report supports the mandate established by the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 that requires BJS to establish and implement a tribal data collection system, to support tribal participation in national records and information systems, and to annually report to Congress the data collected and analyzed in accordance with the act.

Highlights

• After peaking in 2019 (at 2,890 persons) and declining sharply in 2020 (to 2,020 persons) due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the midyear jail population increased for the second consecutive year by midyear 2022 (2,250).

• Indian country jails admitted 5,570 persons during June 2022, a 4% decline from the 5,780 admissions during June 2021.

• The ratio of jail admissions to average daily population (ADP) was about 2.6 to 1 in June 2022 (5,570 admissions to 2,170 inmates), down from 5.5 to 1 in June 2012 (12,500 admissions to 2,253 inmates).

• Four in 10 inmates were held for violent offenses at midyear 2022, up from about 3 in 10 in 2012.

  Washington DC:U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2023. 16p.  

By Sharon Dolovich

In the prison law context, even when civil rights claims are strong on the merits, incarcerated litigants will lose most of the time. And even when lawyers win on behalf of their incarcerated clients, conditions don’t tend to change on the ground as much as they should. Regardless, prisoners’ rights lawyers do an enormous amount of good. In this essay, I argue for the indispensability of legal advocacy on behalf of people in custody despite how unfriendly courts are to claims brought from prison. Indeed, I suggest that, at this moment in the development of the carceral state, lawyering for the incarcerated is among the most impactful means we have to move our carceral system closer to consistency with the basic normative commitments of a constitutional democracy. In making this case, this essay describes (1) how lawyers help to lift the veil of secrecy that otherwise shrouds much of what happens in prison; (2) the work lawyers do as watchdogs, calling out and challenging the abuse and exploitation of the incarcerated; and (3) the way that, through their work, lawyers validate the humanity—and thus the dignity and self-respect—of their clients, who more typically exist in a systematically dehumanizing institutional environment

UCLA School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 23-07m 2023.

By Alison Siegler

  This Report reveals a fractured and freewheeling federal pretrial detention system that has strayed far from the norm of pretrial liberty. 2 This Report is the first broad national investigation of federal pretrial detention, an often overlooked, yet highly consequential, stage of the federal criminal process. Our Clinic undertook an in-depth study of federal bond practices, in which court watchers gathered data from hundreds of pretrial hearings. Based on our empirical courtwatching data and interviews with nearly 50 stakeholders,3 we conclude that a “culture of detention” pervades the federal courts, with habit and courtroom custom overriding the written law. 4 As one federal judge told us, “nobody’s . . . looking at what’s happening [in these pretrial hearings], where the Constitution is playing out day to day for people.” Our Report aims to identify why the federal system has abandoned the norm of liberty, to illuminate the resulting federal jailing crisis, and to address how the federal judiciary can rectify that crisis. This Report also fills a gaping hole in the available public data about the federal pretrial detention process and identifies troubling racial disparities in both pretrial detention practices and outcomes. Federal pretrial jailing rates have been skyrocketing for decades. Jailing is now the norm rather than the exception, despite data demonstrating that releasing more people pretrial does not endanger society or undermine the administration of justice. Federal bond practices should be unitary and consistent, since the federal bail statute—the Bail Reform Act of 1984 (the BRA)—is the law of the land and governs nationwide.5 Yet this study exposes a very different reality than that envisioned by the Supreme Court, one in which federal judges regularly deviate from and even violate the law, and on-the-ground practices vary widely from district to district. O  

Chicago: University of Chicago, School of Law, Federal Criminal Justice Clinic, 2022. 280p.

By The Death Penalty Information Center

The Death Penalty Information Center’s new report on race and the death penal­ty in Tennessee places the state’s death penal­ty sys­tem in his­tor­i­cal con­text, doc­u­ment­ing how racial dis­crim­i­na­tion and racial vio­lence con­tin­ue to influ­ence the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty. Doomed to Repeat: The Legacy of Race in Tennessee’s Contemporary Death Penalty, released June 22, 2023, notes that as the Tennessee Department of Correction devel­ops new lethal injec­tion pro­to­cols and pre­pares to resume exe­cu­tions, the state may find it use­ful to under­stand how Tennessee arrived at its cur­rent cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem.

The report explains that in the 18th and 19th cen­turies, the use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in Tennessee was large­ly depen­dent on the race of the defen­dant. There were 13 offens­es for which Black peo­ple could receive the death penal­ty, com­pared to just two offens­es that could result in death sen­tences for white cit­i­zens. From the begin­ning, the death penal­ty was applied dif­fer­ent­ly based on race.  The death penal­ty was not the only form of lethal pun­ish­ment that tar­get­ed Black Tennesseans. The report ties Tennessee’s use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment to its trou­bled his­to­ry of racial ter­ror. Tennessee was the site of more than 500 lynch­ings, accord­ing to Tennesseans for Historical Justice, and a nation­wide study of death sen­tences between 1989 and 2017 found a sig­nif­i­cant sta­tis­ti­cal rela­tion­ship between a state’s his­to­ry of lynch­ing and the num­ber of death sen­tences giv­en to Black defendants. 

Many of the his­tor­i­cal issues relat­ed to race in the state, includ­ing seg­re­ga­tion and Black vot­er dis­en­fran­chise­ment, are still preva­lent in Tennessee today. For exam­ple, the state has the high­est pro­por­tion of dis­en­fran­chised Black res­i­dents in the United States, with more than 1 in 5 Black peo­ple unable to vote. Concerns regard­ing vot­er dis­en­fran­chise­ment have been height­ened as the state leg­is­la­ture has con­tin­ued to remove pow­er from local­ly elect­ed pros­e­cu­tors to han­dle var­i­ous aspects of cap­i­tal cas­es, and shift­ed the author­i­ty to the state’s Attorney General, who is not elected. 

Washington DC: Death Penalty Information Center, 2023. 69p.

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 Marta Nelson, Samuel Feineh and Maris Mapolski

To understand how the United States became one of the most incarcerated nations in the world, it is critical to understand the role that excessive and harsh sentencing has played. In this report, Vera addresses a main driver of mass incarceration: our sentencing system. Dismantling our system of mass incarceration in favor of a narrowly tailored sentencing response to unlawful behavior can produce more safety, repair harm, and reduce incarceration by close to 80 percent, according to modeling on the federal system. This report summarizes the evidence surrounding sentencing’s impact on safety, offers new guiding principles for sentencing legislation that privilege liberty, outlines seven key sentencing reforms in line with these guiding principles, and suggests a “North Star” for sentencing policy with a presumption toward community-based sentences except in limited circumstances. Severe sentences do not deter crime, retribution often does not help survivors of crime heal, and the U.S. sentencing system overestimates who is a current danger to the community and when incarceration is needed for public safety. Instead, we need a system that privileges liberty while creating real safety and repairing harm.

New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2023. 81p.

By Ashley Nellis

This report documents the rates of incarceration for white, Black and Latinx Americans in each state, identifies three contributors to racial and ethnic disparities in imprisonment, and provides recommendations for reform.

Washington DC: The Sentencing Project, 2021. 25p.

By Leah wang

Over 1 million people sit in U.S. state prisons on any given day. They are also suffering from physical and mental illnesses, or navigating prison life with disabilities or even pregnancy. We add to the existing research showing that state prisons fall far short of their constitutional duty to meet the essential health needs of people in their custody. As a result, people in state prison are kept in a constant state of illness and despair. This report is divided it sections: Physical health problems: Chronic conditions and infectious disease Access to healthcare: People in state prison disproportionately lacked health insurance Mental health problems: Exceptionally high rates among incarcerated people Disabilities: Disproportionate rates of physical, cognitive, and learning disabilities Pregnancy and reproductive health: Expectant mothers are underserved in prison Conclusions and recommendations: How do we begin to address unmet needs in prisons? About the unique data used in this report This report offers a detailed view of the people in state prisons nationwide, using the most recent self-reported, nationally representative data available, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates. Though correctional populations are in constant flux, the Survey data released just over a year ago are essential to understanding incarceration today.

Northampton, MA: Prison Policy Initiative, 2022. 29p.

By Rob Allen and Laura Janes

There has been a growing recognition of the distinct needs of young adults in the criminal justice process, largely due to the work of the Transition to Adulthood Alliance. However, the extent to which the criminal justice system meets the needs of young adults aged 18-25 who go through the parole process has received very little attention. The vast majority of young adults considered by the Parole Board (the Board) have not been designated as “dangerous” by a sentencing court and have been recalled to prison for failing to comply with the terms of their licence after their automatic release. A small minority have been designated as “dangerous” at the point of sentence which means the court has formed the view that they are at risk of committing further offences that will cause serious harm. In these cases, the Board is required to consider whether they can be safely released from prison without putting the public at risk of serious harm. Young adults, currently defined by the Board as 18 to 21 year olds, only make up around 2% of the Board’s overall case load. Young adults are much less likely to have been deemed dangerous by the courts compared to the other cases the Board reviews. …  

London: Barrow Cadbury Trust , 2023. 56p.

Kyle J. Bares1, Thomas J. Mowen

Emerging research has shown that the parole officer, much like friends and family, can be an important source of social support for returning persons. While this body of literature is growing, existing research provides little insight into understanding how specific types (e.g., interpersonal and/or professional) of parole officer support matter. Using panel data from the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative, results of mixed-effects models demonstrate that greater levels of parole officer support are associated with decreased odds of reincarceration. Furthermore, parole officer professional support (e.g., providing correct information) exerts a more robust effect than interpersonal support (e.g., listening and caring). Findings suggest policy makers should consider programming to strengthen the professional relationship between the parole officer and returning person. 

Crime Delinq. 2020 June ; 66(6-7): 1023–1051 

By Shawn Bushway 

Job training programs for people under supervision have been based on an economic framework that identifies individuals involved in crime as a disadvantaged group with poor human capital. The best available research evidence has not found that these programs consistently improve employment outcomes. This article reviews the evidence for the effectiveness of standard job training programs and then examines new developments in the field that use alternative frameworks for understanding the roles of such programs. The first alternative is signaling: how people under community supervision use the completion of job training to signal to employers and others that the behavior that led to their conviction is either anomalous or no longer representative of them. The second alternative is a model of desistance known as identity change: the ways in which job training can help individuals solidify a new, more prosocial identity. I make sense of extant work and new alternatives and provide a set of recommendations for change in the community supervision system.

  ANNALS, AAPSS, 701, May 2022  

By Leah Wang and gabriel sayegh

In the United States, the number of people under the surveillance of probation and parole systems is nearly twice the number of those behind bars. Community supervision, which refers mainly to probation and parole, is “too big to succeed.” (Simply defined, probation is a court-ordered “suspended” sentence served in the community, typically with a set period of supervision; parole is a conditional release after incarceration.) This is true throughout the country — and Connecticut is no exception, particularly in terms of its outsize probation system, which jeopardizes the well-being and progress of more than 30,000 people and their families. Chronically underfunded and overly punitive, probation rarely serves as an alternative to incarceration, as it was originally intended. And people released from prison to parole supervision often struggle to rebuild their lives during the reentry process….

Easthampton, MA: Prison Policy initiative, 2023. 20p.

By Devah Pager, Rebecca Goldstein, Helen Ho, and Bruce Western 

  Court-related fines and fees are widely levied on criminal defendants who are frequently poor and have little capacity to pay. Such financial obligations may produce a criminalization of poverty, where later court involvement results not from crime but from an inability to meet the financial burdens of the legal process. We test this hypothesis using a randomized controlled trial of court-related fee relief for misdemeanor defendants in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma. We find that relief from fees does not affect new criminal charges, convictions, or jail bookings after 12 months. However, control respondents were subject to debt collection efforts at significantly higher rates that involved new warrants, additional court debt, tax refund garnishment, and referral to a private debt collector. Despite significant efforts at debt collection among those in the control group, payments to the court totaled less than 5 percent of outstanding debt. The evidence indicates that court debt charged to indigent defendants neither caused nor deterred new crime, and the government obtained little financial benefit. Yet, fines and fees contributed to a criminalization of low-income defendants, placing them at risk of ongoing court involvement through new warrants and debt collection.

American Sociological Review, Volume 87, Issue 3, 2022.

By Lindsay Bing, Becky Pettit, Ilya Slavinski

Low-level misdemeanor and traffic violations draw tens of millions of people into local courts to pay fines and fees each year, generating billions of dollars in revenue. We examine how standardized legal fines and fees for low-level charges induce disparate treatment and result in disparate impact. Using a mixed-methods approach that incorporates administrative court records as well as interviews with criminal defendants from Texas, we find that although the majority of defendants readily pay for and conclude their case, African American, Latinx, and economically disadvantaged defendants spend disproportionate amounts of money and time resolving theirs. Analysis of criminal case records illustrates the disparate impact of monetary sanctions through the accrual of debt and time spent resolving a charge. Interviews reveal irreconcilable tensions between American ideals of equality in sentencing and the meaning and value of money and time in an increasingly unequal society.

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 8(2): 118–136  , 2022.

By Brittany Friedman, Alexes Harris, Beth M. Huebner, Karin D. Martin, Becky Pettit, Sarah K.S. Shannon, Bryan L. Sykes

Monetary sanctions are an integral and increasingly debated feature of the American criminal legal system. Emerging research, including that featured in this volume, offers important insight into the law governing monetary sanctions, how they are levied, and how their imposition affects inequality. Monetary sanctions are assessed for a wide range of contacts with the criminal legal system ranging from felony convictions to alleged traffic violations with important variability in law and practice across states. These differences allow for the identification of features of law, policy, and practice that differentially shape access to justice and equality before the law. Common practices undermine individuals’ rights and fuel inequality in the effects of unpaid monetary sanctions. These observations lead us to offer a number of specific recommendations to improve the administration of justice, mitigate some of the most harmful effects of monetary sanctions, and advance future research.

  RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 8(1): 221–43, 2022

By Kate K. O’Neill, Tyler J Smith, Ian Kennedy

Although men’s incarceration rates have declined in the United States, women’s have stayed steady and even risen in some areas. At the same time, courts have increased their use of monetary sanctions, especially for low-level offenses. We propose that women’s incarceration trends can be partially explained by county dependence on monetary sanctions as a source of revenue. We suggest that monetary sanctions expose female defendants to processes that increase their likelihood of incarceration, especially in counties more reliant on monetary sanctions as a source of revenue, and where women’s poverty rates are high. Using data from Washington State, we find county dependence on monetary sanctions is positively associated with rates of women sentenced to incarceration. Although rural counties’ rates are higher, they depend on monetary sanctions no more than nonrural counties do.

  RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 8(2): 157–72. 2022;