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 Access Living of Metropolitan Chicago

  According to statistics gathered from the 2011-2012 National Inmate Survey administered by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, an estimated 40 percent of individuals in jail self-reported having at least one disability. 3 Navigating jail with a disability can be complex, overwhelming, and costly. The impact of jailing a person with a disability also impacts their families and communities. The incarceration of one is essentially the incarceration of many. In the United States, the use of jail to confine people with disabilities is closely aligned with efforts to place disabled people in asylums and institutions, similar to the criminalization of black people resulting in mass incarceration following the abolition of slavery. From the end of slavery to today, laws have been enacted to criminalize and devalue both people of color and disabled individuals. These laws further socially justify these populations’ incarceration and further fuel biases and fear towards these groups. 4 Efforts to reduce jail incarceration nationwide have resulted in a range of innovative strategies, such as reducing the use of cash bail5 and the way that prosecutors make decisions about charges. 6 There is certainly a serious effort to shift how jails engage with people who need mental health supports, notably at Cook County Jail. 7 However, despite the general prevalence of disability in jails, there remain a range of under-addressed opportunities to discuss how to further reduce the jail incarceration of people with disabilities overall. A number of disability advocates have been working for many years to bring what is essentially a cross-disability look to criminal justice and restorative justice work; we need to hear and build on these efforts. Moreover, even as the National Inmate Survey showed high rates of self-reported disability status, it also showed that incarcerated people of color tended to underreport disability status.8 This poses a complex challenge to understanding the disability experience in different demographics who are impacted by police contact and jail incarceration. We feel this dynamic is of great note given current national work on reducing racial disparities in arrest trends and jail populations. This is especially important for Access Living, as the majority of people we serve directly are from black and brown neighborhoods in Chicago.  

Chicago: Access Living, 2019. 71p.

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  Advancement Project National Office, One Voice and Mississippi Votes.

Our Voices, Our Votes: Felony Disenfranchisement and Re-entry in Mississippi, a new report by One Voice Mississippi, Mississippi Votes, and Advancement Project National Office analyzes how Mississippi silences those with prior felony convictions and creates reentry barriers for returning citizens. Using statistics, national data, and personal stories from directly impacted Mississippians, the report shines a light on what people with felony convictions are up against. The report details how the state’s Jim Crow legacy not only fails to assist returning citizens, but permanently disenfranchise them. With this report, organizers hope to bring change to the Mississippi criminal legal system and restore voting rights for all incarcerated citizens who have served their prison term.

Los Angeles: Advancement Project / One Voice / Mississippi Votes, 2021. 29p.

By Leah Wang, Wendy Sawyer, Tiana Herring, and Emily Widra   

We know how many people are in state prisons, but what do we really know about who they are or how they ended up there? Over 1 million people are confined in state prisons nationwide, primarily serving sentences of anywhere from a year to life. But the walls and restrictions that keep these individuals out of public life also keep them out of the public eye: most of what we know about people in prison comes from the prison system itself. But our analysis of a unique, large-scale survey of incarcerated people provides a richer picture of just who is locked up in state prisons. From the survey data, we gain a deeper understanding of how mass incarceration has been used to warehouse people with marginalized identities and those struggling with poverty, substance use disorders, and housing insecurity, among other serious problems. Incarcerated people are a diverse cross-section of society whose disadvantages and unmet needs often begin early in life, and persist throughout their often lifelong involvement with the criminal legal system. This report is divided into sections: Demographics: Race, ethnicity, age, gender identity, and sexual orientation Employment and housing: Incarcerated people were on unstable footing long before prison Arrested early and often: Age at first arrest, youth confinement, and prior incarceration Disadvantage dating back to childhood: Family, housing, poverty, and education in youth Drug use: An extremely common factor leading up to incarceration.

Northampton, MA: Prison Policy Initiative, 2022. 28p.

By Laura M. Maruschak, Jennifer Bronson, and Mariel Alper

This brief presents findings based on data collected in the 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, a survey conducted through face-to-face interviews with a national sample of state and federal prisoners across a variety of topics, such as their demographic characteristics, socio-economic background, health, and involvement with the criminal justice system. This brief provides demographic information about prisoners who have at least one minor child and the number of minor children reported by parents in prison.

Highlights

• An estimated 684,500 state and federal prisoners were parents of at least one minor child in 2016—nearly half of state prisoners (47%) and more than half of federal prisoners (58%).

• State and federal prisoners reported having an estimated 1,473,700 minor children in 2016.

• Among minor children of parents in state prison, 1% were younger than age 1, about 18% were ages 1 to 4, and 48% were age 10 or older.

• The average age of a minor child among parents in federal prison was 10 years old.

Washington DC: U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Statistics , 2021. 8p.

By Rosemary Ricciardelli https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0905-8968 rricciardell@mun.ca, Micheal Taylor https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4959-2572, […], and Dale C. Spencer

Internationally, parole work is loaded with tensions, particularly when supervising a people convicted of sex crimes (PCSCs) who, due to their criminal history, are stigmatized and occupy the lowest rungs of the status hierarchy in prison and society more broadly. Drawing on analyses of interview data from federal parole officers (n = 150) employed by Correctional Service Canada, we interpret their perceptions and feelings about overseeing re-entry preparations and processes for the PCSCs on their caseloads. We unpack the “tensions” imbued in parole officers’ internal reflections and negotiation of complexities in their efforts toward supporting client’s rehabilitation efforts, desistance from crime while negotiating external factors (e.g., the lack of available programming), and being responsible for supervising PCSCs. We highlight facets of occupational stress parole officers experience, finding PCSCs may be more compliant when under supervision but may also require more of a parole officer’s resources, including time and energy. We put forth recommendations for greater empirical nuance concerning parole officer work and their occupational experiences and beliefs about PCSC, particularly as related to parole officer health.

  International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology , 2023. Published online before publication

By Jordan Robert Riddell  

In March 2020, the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department expanded its police-initiated citation release to allow officers to release subjects arrested for certain non-violent felony offenses (ex: larceny-theft). This decarceration effort was designed to reduce COVID-19 transmission in jails and avoid maintaining custody of people pre-trial, as too many custodial arrests would impair the operations of the Superior Court of DC during the public health emergency. Using crime incident, arrest report, and jail population data from DC for 2013 through 2020, this dissertation investigates the effect of the citation release policy modification (i.e., jail decarceration) and arrests on four types of economic crime: robbery, burglary, theft from motor vehicles, and other theft. Vector autoregression analyses suggest arrests do not deter crime and there was no detectable “decarceration” effect from expanding citation release eligibility during the study period. Findings do not support macro-level deterrence theory or the premise of a decarceration effect that has been identified in studies of prisons.

Dallas: University of Texas at Dallas, 2022. 128p.

 By Jacqueline Beard

The Parole Board. The Parole Board is an executive non-departmental public body, responsible for the parole system. The Parole Board carries out risk assessments on these prisoners to determine whether they can be safely released into the community. It is governed by the Parole Board Rules, secondary legislation that sets out the procedures that must be followed when determining parole cases.

Reforms 2018-19: transparency and reconsideration. In 2018-2019 there were reforms to Parole Board procedures, partly in response to the case of John Warboys (now known as John Radford). Rule 25 of the Parole Board Rules was amended in 2018 to allow summaries of Parole Board decisions to be provided to victims and other interested parties. Previously Rule 25 had prohibited any release of information about parole proceedings.

Root and branch review 2022. In March 2022 the Government published a root and branch review with plans for further reforms, some of which require legislation. The Government has said it will legislate for those changes which require it as soon as possible.

Most comment regarding the root and branch review focused on the proposal for a Minister to review release decisions where the Parole Board directs the release of a person who is serving a sentence for a ‘top tier’ offence. Organisations such as Justice, the Howard League for Penal Reform and the Prison Reform Trust have raised concerns about political interference in legal processes and the possibility of ‘political grandstanding’.....

London: House of Commons Library 2023. 31p.

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 

Edited by Rui Abrunhosa Gonçalves 

This book provides international perspectives on corrections, correctional treatment, and penitentiary laws. Although its focus is on African and South American countries, the information provided can be easily expanded to North America and Europe. The chapters present legal frameworks and applied research on prisons and their potential to deter crime and reduce recidivism rates. The book puts the human rights agenda at the forefront and is a useful resource for those who work in corrections, including prison, education, and probation officers.

London: InTechOpen, 2023. 146p.

By Lila  Kazemian

  In Spring 2022, the Council on Criminal Justice launched the Task Force on Long Sentences. Its mission is to examine how prison sentences of 10 years or more affect public safety, crime victims and survivors, incarcerated individuals and their families, communities, and correctional staff, and to develop recommendations to strengthen public safety and advance justice. This brief was commissioned by the Task Force to examine how the use of long sentences in the United States compares with the sentencing practices of other countries. To the author’s knowledge, there is no existing source of comparative international data on long sentences that includes individual U.S. states and offense-specific sentences. This brief draws on the most comprehensive, publicly available data on long sentences. Key Takeaways + The use of long sentences has increased in nations across the globe over the last several decades, but the U.S. remains an outlier in the extent to which it imposes them. Both the average imposed sentence length and the actual amount of time people spend behind bars (time served) are longer in the U.S. when compared with most other countries. These findings are consistent with broader correctional trends that distinguish the U.S. from other nations. + The U.S. grapples with higher rates of homicide when compared with European countries but this does not fully explain its distinctive policies regarding long sentences. Higher homicide rates may partly explain the more frequent recourse to long sentences in the U.S., but they do not explain the longer average prison sentences imposed for homicide and sexual offenses when compared with other nations. + The U.S. imposes longer sentences compared to countries with substantially higher rates of violence. Despite having lower homicide rates than many Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries, U.S. states often incarcerate more people and for longer periods of time when compared with Latin American nations. + The average sentence length imposed in the U.S. is more aligned with the criminal justice policies of Latin American countries than with those of peer industrialized nations. Differences in average sentence length are generally less pronounced when comparing the U.S. to Latin American nations. More prominent disparities exist in comparisons with European countries. + The U.S. holds a substantial proportion of the world’s population of people serving life sentences (40%) as well as the vast majority (83%) of individuals sentenced to Life Without the Possibility of Parole (LWOP). Some U.S. state laws include provisions that allow for mandatory confinement periods that are exponentially higher than those used in European nations. + The distinctive use of long sentences in the U.S. is partly due to the decentralized structure of the political and criminal justice systems. The position of the U.S. as an outlier is exacerbated by states with distinctively large populations of people serving long prison terms.   

Washington, DC: Council on Criminal Justice, 2022. 36p.

By Susan Howley

  Introduction In Spring 2022, the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) launched the Task Force on Long Sentences, a group of 16 experts representing a broad range of experience and perspectives, including crime victims and survivors, formerly incarcerated people, prosecutors, defense attorneys, law enforcement, courts, and corrections. Its mission is to examine how prison sentences of 10 years or more affect public safety, crime victims and survivors, incarcerated individuals and their families, communities, and correctional staff, and to develop recommendations to strengthen public safety and advance justice. As part of this effort, the Task Force convened nine listening sessions. The sessions were designed to gather input from victims and survivors of crime, including family members of homicide victims, close relatives of people serving long sentences, and individuals who served long prison sentences themselves. The purpose of this analysis is to elevate the perspectives of those individuals closest to long sentences – victims and survivors of serious crime and individuals who served long sentences and their loved ones. The views expressed by participants should be interpreted as direct reflections of their thoughts and feelings rather than as a blueprint for policy reform. Please also note that the opinions presented are not representative of all victims and survivors of serious crime, or all individuals who have served long prison sentences. Two overarching themes emerged from the listening sessions. First, while the sessions were designed to address victims and survivors and formerly incarcerated individuals and their loved ones separately, there was significant overlap in the experiences of participants. Many victims and survivors expressed having experienced the impact of incarceration through a family member and many formerly incarcerated people and their loved ones discussed having experienced serious violence. Although every effort was made to recruit diverse participants, the overlap in experience may be an artifact of how individuals were identified for participation in the listening sessions or may be evidence that there is significant overlap between “victims” and “offenders.” Second, there was broad agreement between victims and survivors and formerly incarcerated people and their loved ones on most of the topics explored in the listening sessions and presented below. This brief highlights where the perspectives of listening session participants were in sync-and where they diverged.

Washington, DC: Council on Criminal Justice, 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 Roger Pryzybylski, John Maki, Stephanie Kennedy, AaronRosenthal and Ernesto Lopez

  Long prison sentences—defined here as sentences of 10 years or more—may be imposed for several reasons, including to punish people engaged in criminal behavior, to prevent individuals from committing additional crimes in the future, and to warn the general public about the consequences of violating the law. This literature review explores empirical evidence on the relationship between sentence length and public safety. It synthesizes the best available research on the incapacitation and deterrent effects of prison sentences and examines whether, and to what extent, prison sentences affect individual criminal behavior and overall crime rates. The relationship between long prison sentences and public safety is complex. Although long prison sentences may be warranted in individual cases based on one or more of the varied purposes of sentencing, the imposition of such sentences on a large scale offers diminishing returns for public safety. Research consistently shows that a relatively small percentage of individuals are responsible for an outsized share of crime in their communities. But attempts to use long sentences to selectively incapacitate this population have been unable to overcome competing factors like the “replacement effect,” where the incarceration of one person leads to another individual taking their place, and the “age-crime curve,” the criminological fact that offending typically decreases with age. Since relatively few studies have focused specifically on long prison sentences, this analysis encompasses the broader literature on incarceration and crime. The report concludes with recommendations for future research.  

Washington, DC: Council on Criminal Justice, 2022. 17p.

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