By Bryce E. Peterson, KiDeuk Kim, and Rochisha Shukla

This document provides a technical summary report of the Urban Institute’s research on contraband in jails and prisons in the United States, as well as the interdiction strategies that correctional agencies use to prevent, detect, and removed contraband from their facilities. The study employed a mixed-methods design which consisted of field testing the National Survey of Correctional Contraband (NSCC) in the six state Departments of Correction, and conducting in-depth case studies in 11 prisons and jails, including facility walk-throughs, observations, and semi-structured interviews with correctional facility leadership and staff. Key findings are organized based on four themes: entry points; interdiction strategies; prevalence of contraband; correlates of contraband levels. The summary concludes with a discussion of the implications of key findings for criminal justice policy and practice, as well as recommendations for future research on contraband issues and interdiction strategies.

Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2024. 37p.

By United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney’s Offices, Northern and Southern Districts of Mississippi Civil Divisions

The Department of Justice has reasonable cause to believe that the State of Mississippi and Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) violate the constitutional rights of people incarcerated at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility (Central Mississippi), South Mississippi Correctional Institution (South Mississippi), and Wilkinson County Correctional Facility (Wilkinson).

• MDOC fails to protect incarcerated persons from violence. MDOC does not adequately supervise incarcerated people, control contraband, and investigate incidents of harm and misconduct. These basic safety failures and the poor living conditions inside the facilities promote violence, including sexual assault. Gangs operate in the void left by staff and use violence to control people and traffic contraband.

• Restrictive housing practices create a substantial risk of serious harm. MDOC holds hundreds of people at Central Mississippi and Wilkinson in restrictive housing for prolonged periods in appalling conditions. Restrictive housing units are unsanitary, hazardous, and chaotic, with little supervision. They are breeding grounds for suicide, self-inflicted injury, fires, and assaults.

These violations are systemic problems that have been going on for years. In April 2022, we found conditions at another MDOC facility, Mississippi State Penitentiary (Parchman), violated the Constitution. Many of the conditions we identified at Parchman exist at Central Mississippi, South Mississippi, and Wilkinson. Across all these facilities, MDOC does not have enough staff to supervise the population. The mismatch between the size of the incarcerated population and the number of security staff means that gangs dominate much of prison life, and contraband and violence, including sexual violence, proliferate. Prison officials rely on ineffective and overly harsh restrictive housing practices for control. This Report begins by explaining the methodology and scope of our investigation. It then describes the facilities we investigated. Next, the Report identifies the constitutional violations. We grouped the violations into two sections: failure to protect from violence and substantial risk of serious harm from restrictive housing practices. In each section, we highlight particular incidents of violence, gang activity, and misconduct as examples of the type of incidents that give rise to constitutional violations and to show the severity of the harm. We also examine MDOC’s recent steps to address these concerns and why their efforts fall short. We end by outlining the minimum measures needed to remedy the violations.

Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, 2024. 60p.

By Columbia Legal Services

  Washington’s prisons are public institutions run by the state Department of Corrections (DOC). The purpose of state correctional institutions is ostensibly to rehabilitate individuals, and to do so without a profit motive or by facilitating profit-seeking behavior. However, the state realizes enormous cost-savings from underpaying its captive labor force as little as $1.00 per hour. People incarcerated perform essential operations jobs like cleaning units and bathrooms or working in food service, all for meager pay far below Washington’s statewide minimum wage. People in prison also often perform unpaid labor as DOC fails to approve all jobs as paid positions. Washington State has recognized in other settings that underpaying detained workers is wrong. In 2017, Washington State sued the GEO Group—a for-profit corporation running the private immigration detention center in Tacoma—for failure to pay its workers (people in custody in the detention center) in accordance with Washington’s minimum wage law. At the time, the GEO Group was paying workers in custody $1.00 per day. The State brought this lawsuit – and has so far prevailed – on the basis that private prisons must comply with Washington State wage laws. And yet, the State has not taken similar steps to protect people in state, local, or municipal prisons and jails. Instead, state law currently exempts people housed in public carceral facilities from the definition of “employees” for the purposes of Washington’s minimum wage and labor standards laws. Further, people in Washington state prisons face severe consequences if they refuse to work, including lengthier prison sentences. This system of coerced and underpaid labor within DOC is nothing short of modern-day slavery. And, in keeping with this sordid legacy, people in prison face ongoing discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and immigration status—all of which are barriers to gaining and maintaining the employment people need to avoid punishment and to earn enough to pay for basic necessities. Correctional Industries (CI) is the division within DOC that operates businesses and employs people in custody in Washington prisons. CI reported over $133 million in revenue and over $38 million in assets in fiscal year 2023. The majority of CI workers fall into one of two classes of employment: Class II and Class III. Class II jobs are generally referred to as “CI jobs,” and entail working outside the prison unit, either in an operations role (e.g., food production, laundry, etc.), or producing other goods and services (e.g., furniture manufacturing) that CI then sells to various government agencies and nonprofit organizations. Class II workers usually earn between $0.80 and $2.85 per hour and are eligible for overtime pay.6 Class III jobs are generally considered “unit jobs,” and include porters, facility maintenance, and other essential tasks around the prison units. Despite the wide range of prison jobs, DOC fails to provide people in prison with sufficient opportunities for real-world job training or skill acquisition, leaving people in custody unprepared to gain employment after release.   In response to growing awareness and concern over labor exploitation in prisons, in 2023, the state legislature allocated funds to increase the wage floor for Class III jobs from $0.42 to $1.00 per hour. However, DOC then capped worker earnings at $40 per week.7 Even with this raise, people in DOC custody are paid far below the 2024 state mandated minimum wage of $16.28 per hour, and meanwhile the cost of living in prison is rising.

Seattle: Columbia Legal Services. 2024, 62pg

By Kesha A. Moore

As the coronavirus continues to spread in the U.S. and surge in an increasing number of states, it is critical that we consider the role of jails in the transmission of the virus. Even with highly effective social distancing outside of the jails, our national rates of COVID-19 deaths are projected to rise by 98% due to infections in jails. Jails act as a revolving door for the spread of COVID-19 in our communities. Inhabitants of the jails — both staff and incarcerated persons — come from our communities and soon return to them. Thus, the strategy of social distancing to limit the spread of COVID-19 can only be effective if it includes jails, which are a primary vector for the infection. 

New York: NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Thurgood Marshall Institute, 2020.

By  Sandhya Kajeepeta

After four decades of growth, the size of the U.S. incarcerated population has been declining for the past decade, and racial disparities were beginning to shrink. The start of the COVID-19 pandemic triggered immediate calls for decarceration (i.e., reducing the number of people incarcerated), given the high risk of the virus spreading in congregate settings like jails and prisons and subsequent, inevitable spread to the neighboring community. Although the majority of incarcerated people were left behind bars to face potential illness and death, the U.S. incarcerated population experienced its largest recorded one-year population reduction in U.S. history. This large-scale decarceration undoubtedly saved lives and will have long-term benefits for those who were diverted out of jails and prisons, as well as their families and communities. However, not all benefited from the decarceration equally: racial disparities in jail and prison worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Black people represented a larger percentage of the incarcerated population as it declined. In this brief, we examine the drivers of pandemic-related decarceration, interrogate its impacts on racial disparities, and draw lessons to inform policy recommendations for racially equitable decarceration.

New York: NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Thurgood Marshall Institute, 2023. 21p.

By Christina Das and Jackie O’Neil

Across the country, thousands of elected officials wield considerable power over the function and outcomes of the criminal legal system. Each year, in some states and districts, voters elect state attorneys general, district attorneys, sheriffs, state supreme court judges, and trial court judges. These elected officials make choices and take actions that formatively influence the functions of the criminal legal system. For example: district attorneys have considerable discretion when deciding whether to file criminal charges against someone accused of committing a crime, and trial court judges make decisions that significantly impact the outcomes of criminal trials, such as determining what evidence can be shown to a jury. However, millions of Americans who have a vested interest in the fairness of our criminal legal system – those who are detained while awaiting their criminal trial – are denied a meaningful opportunity to vote, despite their right under the law to do so. Most individuals held in city or county jail at any given time have not been convicted of any crime and are awaiting a trial, meaning they retain their legal right to vote, but procedural and logistical barriers make it difficult or impossible for them to do so. Reforms that make it easier to vote from jail, up to and including the establishment of polling locations inside jail facilities, will help eligible incarcerated voters to actualize their right to vote from jail.

New York: NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Educational Fund, Thurgood Marshall Institute, 2023. 15p.

By Michele Goodwin

 Nearly sixty years ago, Dr. King penned the illuminating Letter from a Birmingham Jail, marking the persistence of criminal punishment in the lives Black Americans seeking inclusion, equality, and freedom. Symbolically, his confinement both foreshadowed the strange and troubling role incarceration would play in the lives of Black Americans generations to come and illustrated the connective fabric of slavery to his present conditions. The profundity of the letter cannot be ignored, nor the space from which Dr. King wrote it—incarcerated after peacefully protesting to advance civil rights for Black Americans. Decades later, many of the concerns undergirding the impetus for Dr. King’s powerful missive, including voter suppression, persist. Similarly, equality in education remains an unanswered goal and incomplete vision for the civil rights movement. In fact, the modern challenge no longer demands inclusion and desegregation alone—the urgent objectives undergirding  Brown v. Board of Education —but rather sparing Black children from unequal surveillance, punishments, and the “school to prison” pipeline. Yet, equality in voting and education—as crucial as they are—did not comprise nor define the full vision for the civil rights movement or emancipation from enslavement for that matter. The path to substantive civil liberties and civil rights—and freedom in a meaningful sense—included dismantling discrimination in housing, employment, healthcare, food access, and criminal justice forged by lawmakers. 

Boston: Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, 2022. 68p.

By Peter Leasure, Douglas A. Berman and Jana Hrdinova

In the current study, we provide an overview of federal law on intermittent confinement, present data on the use of intermittent confinement in the federal system and weekend incarceration in the state system, discuss existing research on intermittent confinement and weekend incarceration, and present results of a survey of federal probation officers on their opinions of intermittent confinement. Overall, the results of the study indicated that intermittent confinement and weekend sentences are rarely used in federal and state systems (relative to traditional incarceration sentences). Additionally, we found that a single federal district (Texas West) accounted for the majority of federal intermittent confinement cases across several years of data. Results of the survey of federal probation officers showed that logistical issues with intermittent confinement and incarceration facility availability may be a cause for low numbers of intermittent confinement sentences. The finding about logistical issues with intermittent confinement was consistent with previous research. Informed by these findings, directions for future research are discussed in detail.

Drug Enforcement and Policy Center. February 2024, 174pg

By Zarek Khan

The literature on probation supervision has paid significant attention to prisoner reintegration into society. Many of these studies are based on retrospective samples of ex-prisoners as their primary analytical focus. Research studies on the early transitions from prison to the community have predominantly examined men’s experiences. This article explores the experiences of a small group of men and women serving their sentences in the community while under probation supervision. Drawing on interview extracts, it is argued that probation practices hinder, rather than support, post-release necessities for men and women seeking to reintegrate into society. The article highlights the implications for future research on probation supervision and re-entry.

Probation Journal 2023, Vol. 70(4) 350–366

By Carolyn Yule and Rachel Schumann

Accused individuals employ various techniques in response to the challenges posed by living with bail conditions. By asking ‘what advice would you give to an accused individual who must appear in bail court and who will be assigned conditional bail’, this study assesses how individuals navigate release on bail in the community. A thematic analysis of interviews with 108 accused yielded three master themes: ‘abiding by the system’; a ‘broken system’; and ‘working the system’. The findings add to current research by identifying points of similarity, but also difference, in how common discourses used by bail court actors and bail scholars – including responsibilisation, self-governance, and accountability – are responded to by accused. The results reveal how individuals accused of a crime find ways to assume a more advantageous position within a system largely perceived as working against them.

Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, Pages: 516-534 First Published: 26 July 2023

By Eva Knutz, Thomas Markussen, Linda Kjær Minke

The focal point of this article is the design of a game-based tool for dialogue (‘Dads’ Round’) developed in collaboration with the Danish Prison and Probation Service for a Parenting Program. The tool is unique insofar as it includes stories collected from prisoners’ children about their troubled relationship with their fathers. By Evaluating the tool through interviews with incarcerated fathers, we demonstrate how they work together as peers to assess how such a tool works to help assume parenting roles during incarceration. Through the fathers statements, the stories they share and their collaborative scaffolding, we are able to identify the tool’s potential effect on parenting practices as well as pinpoint strengths and weaknesses of the tool. Our study suggests that new notions of parenting and doing family must be carefully considered in the design of parenting programmes.

Howard Journal of Crime and Justice Volume 62, Issue 4. 2023

By Saori Toda

In recent years, parole decision-makers have grappled with an intensifying challenge in addressing public concerns. While discussions on the rise of ‘parole populism have emerged, especially in Canada, the United States, Australia, and England and Wales, little is known about the way public concerns influence parole release in Japan. This article engages in a legal-systematic analysis of the intricate relationship between public concerns and Japanese parole decision-making in general and release from life imprisonment in particular. The article argues that, while Japanese selective parole decision-making considering public concerns in secrecy may have partially contributed to political rhetoric encouraging parole, it also poses unique challenges distinct from those in Anglophone jurisdictions. It reveals the value of fostering a transparent and accountable parole decision-making system to promote a more balanced and fair approach to parole in the Japanese context.

Howard J. Crim. Justice.2024;63:98–117.

By Dorina Damsa

The Nordics have employed discourses of gender equality and women’s rights and a welfare-oriented approach to punishment as integral parts of inclusive welfare states and their ‘goodness’. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with non-citizen women at Vestre Prison in Denmark, this article suggests that the will to punish and banish prevails over the state’s commitment to women's rights and protection. Rather than being an inherent feature of incarceration, the pain experienced by non-citizen women in prison is a ‘political statement’(Bosworth, 2023). Employing precarisation, incarceration, and deportation to govern unwanted non-citizens and (re)produce the borders of membership, the Danish state also reproduces the conditions for gendered harm. Bordered penalty, this article concludes, is gendered.

Howard J. Crim. Justice. 2024;63:43–61

By Eric G. Lambert, Monica Solinas-Saunders, Nancy L. Hogan

This study examined the influence of job demands (role ambiguity, role conflict, role overload and dangerousness) and job resources (job variety, supervisor structure and training views) on employee perceptions of procedural justice, general perceptions of distributive justice, and specific perceptions of distributive justice. Using a sample of 160 employees at a high-security prison, the regression analyses found that only demands of role conflict was inversely correlated with procedural justice and both distributive justice measures. Role ambiguity was inversely related to procedural but was not related to either dimension of distributive justice. Furthermore, dangerousness was inversely associated with distributive justice (both general and specific), but it was not correlated with procedural justice. Among the job resources, job variety was positively associated with procedural and both distributive justice measures. Supervisor structure was predictive of procedural but not distributive justice. Role overload, and training views had non-significant relationships with all the justice measures.

The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice Volume 63, Issue 1, 2024

By Stuart Ross, Mark Wood, Ron Baird and Kajsa Lundberg

The COVID-19 pandemic required corrections agencies to rapidly adapt their service delivery models to minimise person-to-person contact. Digital service delivery played a key role in the process. This shift to remote service delivery highlighted the opportunities and benefits offered by digital service delivery technologies, as well as their risks and drawbacks.

This paper draws on the results of a scoping review of digital developments in corrections. It examines the impact of the shift to digital platforms on the way that activities and services were delivered and on the way that these digital solutions were shaped by a range of technology and resourcing factors. It also explores the impact of the shift to virtual modes of communication and service delivery on service providers and service users.

Trends & issues in crime and criminal justice no. 677. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology. 2023. 16p.

By Tom O’Grady and Gemma Buckland

The Better Justice Partnership has set out to transform the penal system. But to state the obvious, it is politicians and their advisers who enact reforms. If we want to influence their choices, we must first understand them. This report is an attempt to see the world of criminal justice reform through their eyes. We explain their worldview from first principles. We show when and where they share the common assumptions of the criminal justice reform sector, and how they differ. We also discuss what they think is politically feasible, and why they sometimes resist changes that reformers see as common sense. Armed with this knowledge, we then outline how the Better Justice Partnership should go about achieving its aims of a more effective and humane penal system in England and Wales. The central message of this report is that if it wants to be more impactful, the criminal justice charity sector needs to become more politically savvy. Policymakers view the sector as politically naïve. They think that campaign groups are too quick to point out problems yet too slow to suggest feasible solutions. Sometimes they feel misunderstood, wishing that reformers would show greater awareness of the constraints under which they operate. In their opinion criminal justice is a uniquely difficult area of government to work in, and the political peril faced by those in the Ministry of Justice is not recognised. This lack of understanding matters. If reformers had a better grasp of the constraints under which politicians act, they could have more influence on them. Our interviewees clearly believe that the penal system in England and Wales is in a deep crisis, with radical reforms needed. When deciding what changes to make, they share many of the end goals of the sector. They all want a much greater focus on rehabilitation. Where they arguably differ is that their core goal is to balance punishment with rehabilitation. Both must go together in their view, and much else that they do flows from this basic assumption. What stops politicians and their advisers from attempting bold reforms? They do not view public opinion as an insurmountable barrier. In fact they think that in the right circumstances, the public could be persuaded to take a less punitive path. So they lack neither knowledge about what should change, nor a belief that the public would stand in its way. But they view reforms as exceptionally hazardous, and say that there can be little political incentive to enact them. The risks are high and the rewards potentially very low. The Better Justice Partnership, therefore, could focus its efforts not so much on educating politicians and the public on what needs to change, but rather on persuading politicians that it is worth their while – and not too risky – to make those changes in the first place. That they feel afraid of trying to make changes is crucial in understanding why some changes that seem obvious to penal reformers are viewed as anathema by politicians. Disagreements are as much about what can be done as what should be done. We identified several key barriers to reform. Fear of the media response is uppermost in politicians’ minds. They also perceive a lack of interest in justice from colleagues, and the unique career risks run by anyone entering the Ministry of Justice, as crucial. In their view the Treasury stands in the way of change too, perhaps more so than in any area of government. Above all, any strategy that Better Justice creates will need to give politicians a clear incentive to tread what they perceive as being an exceptionally hazardous path. Our participants made many suggestions for change, which we outline in detail at the end of this report. These included ways to frame reforms (for instance, as saving money) that would make them more politically palatable. They argued for gradual policy changes that slowly build confidence with the media and the public; slower change in the near term may achieve much faster changes in the long run. More progressive reforms could also be wrapped up in other changes, such as better police funding or support for victims, that make the public feel safer and show that politicians have their interests at heart. And their dual focus on punishment and rehabilitation means that they view smart tagging and visible community payback schemes as obvious, and politically viable, reform strategies.

London: NACRO, 2024. 40p.

By NACRO (UK)

This briefing examines: the level and range of mental health problems in prison and how people in prison who have mental health problems are identified; the impact that the prison environment can have on people’s mental health; the support currently available in prison and the impact all this can have on people’s ability to turn their lives around on release. We propose solutions which aim to ensure that everyone has access to the right support whilst they are in prison and on release. Improving the mental health of people in contact with the criminal justice system is an essential step to reducing reoffending and ensuring people can rebuild their lives in the community when they are released. In addition to providing the right treatment and support, we must ensure that prisons are not the cause of mental health problems, nor should they contribute to a deterioration in someone’s mental health, either because of a poor prison environment or a lack of treatment and support when it’s needed. The quotes used throughout this briefing come from people with lived experience of the justice system that have been supported by Nacro. Summary of our main recommendations We set out recommendations at the end of this report which we believe will help people in the justice system get the support they need for good mental health. These are grouped as follows: The beginning of the criminal justice journey: Our recommendations focus on keeping people out of prison where they would be better supported and rehabilitated in the community. During a prison sentence: These recommendations concentrate on improved screening and training to identify mental health needs; improved support provision and improved relationships with staff; improving the prison regime to ensure purposeful activity and time out of cell and improve safety; and embedding a more trauma-informed approach. Transfer and transition into the community: Here we focus on the need to improve timely transfers to secure mental health facilities, and embed and evaluate the RECONNECT care after custody service.

London: NACRO, 2024. 28p.

By Abby Ballou

It is widely held that providing postsecondary education programs to incarcerated individuals will improve postrelease labor market outcomes. Little research evidence exists, however, to support this view. To test the effect of postsecondary carceral education credentials on employer perceptions of hireability, the current study uses a factorial design to survey a sample of employers nationwide (N = 2,538). Employers were presented with résumés of fictional applicants applying to a job as a customer service representative at a large call center. The résumés randomized education credentials earned while incarcerated. Results indicate that employers were significantly more willing to interview applicants with postsecondary education credentials relative to applicants with only a General Educational Development (GED) diploma. Although Black applicants who had earned a sub-baccalaureate certificate saw improvements in hireability relative to GED holders, Black applicants who had earned a bachelor's degree did not. In contrast, White applicants benefited both from sub-baccalaureate certificates and bachelor's degrees. Results from a mediation analysis suggest that these credentials signal important information to employers about applicant attributes and that improved perceptions of applicant ability and likelihood to reoffend drive the overall effect. Implications for future research and policy are explored.

First published: 04 March 2024 https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12364

By  Eiri Ohtani

The three alternative to detention (ATD) pilots provided case management to 126 individuals with irregular immigration status. 86% remained engaged, 12% disengaged or absconded and 2% were forcibly removed. 25% achieved case resolution, with a permanent or temporary migration outcome. ‣ Consistently across the two evaluations in 2018 and 2020, it has been shown that the case management has had a positive impact on individuals’ ability and capacity to work towards case resolution and can help them to stay engaged in migration processes. Case management had at least some impact, and in many areas a huge impact, on a wide range of areas of individual wellbeing and engagement. 99% of individuals had improved ability to participate in informed decision making and 96% had improved ability to engage with the immigration procedures over time. ‣ The positive impact of case management through the pilots can be more confidently asserted in this second evaluation due to the much larger size of the sampled data: client summary sheets of 99 out of 126 clients (79%) were examined in detail in 2020, as opposed to 31 out of 93 clients (33%) in 2018. ‣ A wider range of data examined for this evaluation, including 30 case studies and 12 client interviews (of which 7 were conducted by the evaluator), generally corroborate the data provided by the pilot implementors in the client summary sheets. ‣ Although the evaluation considered whether the cost-effectiveness of the three pilots can be established, limitations in the available data and other factors make it difficult to draw conclusions. Approximate average costs of case management per beneficiary per day for each of the pilots. ‣ Given the positive impact generated by the pilots, their approach and principles could beneficially be extended more broadly throughout the migration systems. The pilots also identified gaps and shortcomings in each country’s immigration system which are exposing individuals to unnecessary risk of detention and which, if addressed, can reduce the use of detention. A sustained and collaborative process of reform, based on the learning of the pilots and involving structured collaboration among governments, migrants, civil society and other actors, could deliver systemic improvements that would benefit all stakeholders.

Belgium, European Programme for Integration and Migration. 2020, 55pg

MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

ROBERT B. EDGERTON

World Wide Torture is a thought-provoking exploration of the dark and harrowing reality of torture practices across the globe. This groundbreaking documentary delves into the sinister depths of human cruelty, shedding light on the experiences of victims and the perpetrators behind these heinous acts. Through powerful storytelling and impactful visuals, World Wide Torture challenges viewers to confront the uncomfortable truths about torture and its widespread presence in today's world. This compelling film offers a sobering reminder of the urgent need to address this grave violation of human rights.

LEWISTON. EDWIN MELLEN PRESS. 2007. 125p.