By The Council of State Governments Justice Center

This report highlights the significant progress made in reducing recidivism across the country over the past 15 years. Since its passage in 2008, the Second Chance Act has invested in state and local efforts to improve outcomes for people leaving prison and jail, with a total of nearly 1,200 grantees from 48 states and 3 territories administering programs that have served more than 400,000 people.

For the past 15 years, federal, state, local, and Tribal governments, as well as community-based organizations across the country, have been focused on reducing recidivism like never before. This report answers three critical questions:

What progress has been made?

• State-level reincarceration rates are 23 percent lower since 2008.

• Fewer returns to custody mean that more people can rejoin their families and contribute in their communities. States are achieving these rates with changes in policy and by increasing opportunities and resources to support employment and connections to behavioral health care and housing.

How much could states save by reducing recidivism further?

• Despite the progress made, states will spend an estimated $8 billion on reincarceration costs for people who exited prison in 2022.

• Scaling effective policies and reentry models can reduce the economic and human costs of recidivism, while creating meaningful opportunities for returning people to contribute to the workforce and their families and communities.

Are states ready to expand their efforts?

• In the past year, leaders in Missouri, Alabama, North Carolina, and Nebraska have set bold goals for reducing recidivism and improving reentry outcomes further by 2030.

• The goals include increasing access to treatment, mental health services, and medical care; improving individuals’ economic independence by ensuring they are better prepared for work and have access to employment; and increasing access to stable housing.

New York: Council of State Governments Justice Center, 2024.

By Penal Reform International and the Life Imprisonment Worldwide Project

This briefing, co-published by Penal Reform International and the Life Imprisonment Worldwide Project, therefore examines informal life imprisonment worldwide, drawing on key findings from international research. It places these findings in the context of the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (Nelson Mandela Rules) and other relevant criminal justice and human rights standards.

This briefing calls on policymakers and practitioners to reflect on informal life sentences and to include within them the more general constraints that should apply to the use of all forms of life imprisonment. It also provides specific recommendations on the imposition and implementation of informal life sentences.

There is growing recognition that life imprisonment is a severe sentence that, if it is used at all, should be imposed sparingly, implemented humanely and give people serving life sentences hope of release when they cease to pose a danger to society. Informal life imprisonment can be as harsh, and in some cases even harsher, than formal life imprisonment. Whilst attention has been given to formal life imprisonment, little is known about informal life sentences. Failure to examine the imposition and implementation of informal life sentences allows for a further class of harsh sanctions and their shortcomings to go unnoticed.

London: PRI. 2024, 24pg

By Shirin Bakhshay

The American public has complex views on criminal punishment. They are driven primarily by retributive motivations. But they have other justice considerations, such as restoration and rehabilitation, that can be activated in different ways. Laypersons are also motivated to psychologically distance and dissociate from those they perceive to be criminal “others” and to see punishment itself as a kind of dissociation, embodied by the prison form. The psychological processes that produce these beliefs lead to an insistence on prison as a necessary criminal justice outcome, despite reservations about its effectiveness and concerns about the state of mass incarceration and punitive penal policy more generally.

This Article builds on the psychology of punishment literature to offer a deeper understanding of the dissociative theory of punishment and how it produces the belief in the necessity of prison. Drawing on original, qualitative focus group data and analysis, this Article identifies the specific psychological mechanisms that motivate dissociation, explains the role of the belief in retributive justice as part of this process, and offers nuanced insights into the contours of the dissociative theory and the way people psychologically reason about criminal punishment.

Georgetown Law Journal, Vol. 111, No. 6, 2023, 84pg

By Craig S. Lerner

For over 250 years, Western intellectuals have been pronouncing capital punishment a barbarity doomed to be swept into the dustbin of history. The death penalty, we have repeatedly been told, is an “anachronism” inconsistent with the spirit of the modern age—a relic that would, in a generation or two, fade away. What is distinctive about recent decades is the confidence and monolithic quality of elite opinion, at least in the West. There is a swelling confidence that the death penalty is, at last, at the cusp of extinction.

This Article questions the descriptive claim that the death penalty is dying, either in the United States or in the world at large. Simply counting the number of nations that have technically abolished the death penalty fails to capture the apparent permanence of capital punishment. Many non-Western civilizations retain the death penalty with a vigor that surprises and disappoints Western intellectuals. And even within the United States, given the prohibitive cost of imposing a death sentence, it is remarkable how determined so many Americans are to continue to execute the worst of criminals.

As argued in this Article, the simplest answer to the puzzle of capital punishment’s persistence is that the retributive impulse is, as Justice Potter Stewart observed, “part of the nature of man.” The answer is so obvious that what is puzzling is not the persistence of the death penalty but that some people regard this persistence as puzzling. The dismay of modern Western intellectuals at the recurring failure of abolitionist efforts points to defining features of that intelligentsia. Since the Enlightenment, many intellectuals have regarded nature as a weak and even nonexistent constraint on human progress. It is from this perspective that the persistence of capital punishment, so seemingly rooted in human nature, comes to sight as such a puzzling disappointment.

Lerner, Craig S., The Puzzling Persistence of Capital Punishment. 2024, 48pg

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.