By Tammy Colleen Ayres, Diane Levine, Clare Anderson, Kellie Moss, Dylan Kerrigan, Mellissa Ifill, Estherine Adams, Nelroy Austin, Queenela Cameron, Martin Halliwell, Shammane Jackson, Kevin Pilgrim, Deborah Toner, Kristy Warren

This article reflects on the research process that underpinned the ESRC GCRF project ‘Mental Health, Neurological and Substance Abuse Disorders in Guyana's Jails: 1825 to the present day’. Introducing readers to a transdisciplinary team comprised of academics and practitioners, in what follows we think through how the methods of the research underpinned the production of the data used in this special issue. The article highlights the emotional labor and ethics of care among the team, the benefits of transdisciplinary research, and the mutual reciprocity and learning that took place between academics and prison staff. The goal of the project was to create equitable and ethical partnerships, and this contributed to the success of this research in terms of findings, data, and real-world impact.

The Howard Journal of Crime and JusticeVolume63, Issue4, 2024. December 2024 Pages 363-389

By Jon Collins

No-one disputes the importance of prison education. But does it help people turn away from crime and live personally fulfilling lives? And what are the key elements which make for ‘good’ prison education.

In this evidence review, Jon Collins, Chief Executive of Prisoners’ Education Trust (PET), looks at:

• The educational needs of people in prison

• The current state of prison education

• The evidence base for the effectiveness of prison education

• Critical success factors for high quality prison education.

Mildenhall Suffolk UK: Clinks, 2024. 21p.

By Catherine Flynn and Kathryn Gor

This report presents the findings of consultations held with affected children aged between 11 and 15 years old who have a parent in prison. It highlights the lack of research and policy attention given to this disadvantaged group and seeks to contribute to a stronger evidence base for future policy decisions by sharing their experiences.

An estimated 40,000 children in Australia have a parent in prison on any given day. Despite this, only three studies have heard directly from children of prisoners in the past decade and Australia currently has no guidelines around supporting children during the time of parental arrest.

Findings

1. Children largely rely on informal family supports, but there are frequently limitations on support available.

2. Teachers have the potential to be strong supporters of children who experience parental imprisonment, but need improved knowledge and skills.

3. Adults in the justice system are largely absent from children’s view.

4. The normal activities and experiences of childhood remain important to children when they have a parent in prison.

5. Children desire respect for their privacy.

6. Children want their own needs and rights to be recognised and responded to.

Melbourne: Monash University 2024. 53p.

By Marie Hutton and Rachel O’Brien

This report forms part of PRT’s National Lottery Community Fund-funded Building Futures programme that, since 2020, has been exploring the experiences of people serving long-term prison sentences. The programme has defined its long-term cohort to include those men that will spend 10 or more years in prison and eight years or more for women. It is based on a consultation with 133 men and women between the age of 18 and 75, serving their sentences in 38 prisons in the UK. This report aims to: • Understand more about the impact that a range of relationships (and their absence) have on the lives of people serving long sentences. • Explore how a range of factors support or hinder people’s ability to maintain, rebuild and develop supportive relationships. • Develop insights and ideas that inform policy and practice in line with PRT’s vision of a just, humane and effective penal system. This report and its context This report explores the shifting landscape within which this work takes place and that shapes the nature of prison life, including people’s ability to maintain supportive relationships. Alongside increases in the overall prison population, this includes a long-term rise in the number of people serving custodial sentences over 10 years (a trend that looks set to continue). These trends compound pressures on a system that has been overcrowded every year since 1994, and in which staff shortages are endemic. These pressures present significant challenges to those living and working inside, to government, to the prison system and to organisations providing services in prison. The justice system has a duty to treat people with respect due to their inherent dignity and value as human beings, ensuring they are not discriminated against on a range of grounds including ethnicity, sex and age. The contributions of participants included in this report raise significant questions about the extent to which the system is fulfilling these obligations. These issues become more pressing in the context of an aging prison population, where racial disproportionality continues to increase, and where neurodiversity and disability are becoming more prevalent. This report underlines how the prison system - behind the curve, under-resourced and emotionally charged in the public imagination - needs to be enabled to contend with disparate current and future needs. It underlines the importance of ensuring the prison system not only better meets current needs, but is also fit for the future, treating people with dignity (including when dying) and enabling them to live meaningful lives in the constrained circumstances of prison. The contribution that supportive relationships play to this end has been highlighted by  the Farmer reviews of 2017 and 2019 and the measures that have flowed from this. Although long overdue, the government has also acknowledged the need for a strategy for older people in prison. Our conclusions aim to build on these changes. Findings.  Participants provided insights about how prisons operate day-to-day, revealing gaps between policy and practice on the ground, inconsistencies and systemic pressures that undermine good practice. Having no, limited or disrupted relationships outside impacted participants’ progress and motivation and can impact Parole Board decisions about their future, including release. This speaks to evidence around pro-social relationships and the protective factors these can bring. This includes desistance from crime. However, participants emphasised the extent to which the presence of supportive relationships makes prison ‘survivable’ and how these are shaped by age and sentence length. Many described how close bonds help them feel ‘human’, ‘cared for’, giving them ‘hope’. This speaks to arguments about the legitimacy and moral justification of systems of punishment needing to be compatible with reasonable expectations of hope during and after that punishment.6 Participants also spoke about alternate lives continuing outside, with families and friends moving on without them. Many shared their fears for the future as their relationships were stretched to breaking point, they became more detached, as visits dwindled, families changed, loved ones died and children grew up. Some anticipated leaving prison with no friends or family to return to. Others faced the prospect of death in prison, with a lack of family contact in their final years. A consistent theme raised was the prevalence of people who did not have anyone on the outside, received no visits or external support. Many participants expressed empathy for those worse off than them, were supporting others and suggested ideas that could benefit current and future peers. This included changes that would increase availability of ‘partners in progress’ to support frontline staff.   

London: Prison Reform Trust, 2024. 72p. 

By Laura I Appleman

Profits have long played a critical role in the administration of punishment in America. This Article provides one of the first full-length historical accounts of how the pursuit of private profits has shaped the American carceral system over time. It argues that deriving profits from punishment has been a crucial and formative aspect of American carcerality since our earliest days. Although most scholars have focused on convict leasing in the postbellum era as the first major example of private prison profiteering, this Article shows how a predatory for-profit system of punishment well predates this, originating in the colonial era. The story of American corrections, fully told, reveals four distinct transformative periods over the nearly five-century evolution of American incarceration, ultimately explaining the condition of today’s carceral state. In addition to providing a broader and more complete historical perspective, this Article also explains how the most recent inroads of privatized, for-profit correctional entities have overtaken the contemporary workings of the carceral system, causing chaos, abuse, and death. The Article details the mechanisms through which seeking profits from incarceration has led to objectively worse conditions and outcomes for the punished. Given the now widespread privatization and corporate takeover of so many aspects of the carceral state, from healthcare to food services and beyond, it is well past time to question the role of “Big Capital.” This Article shines a light on the forgotten history of the American carceral crisis, tracing the role of profits from colonial days to the 21st century.

Forthcoming Maryland Law Review

By John Eric Humphries, Aurelie Ouss, Kamelia Stavreva, Megan T. Stevenson & Winnie van Dijk

Noncarceral conviction is a common outcome of criminal court cases: for every individual incarcerated, there are approximately three who are recently convicted but not sentenced to prison or jail. We develop an empirical framework for studying the consequences of noncarceral conviction by extending the binary-treatment judge IV framework to settings with multiple treatments. We outline assumptions under which widely-used 2SLS regressions recover margin-specific treatment effects, relate these assumptions to models of judge decision-making, and derive an expression that provides intuition about the direction and magnitude of asymptotic bias when they are not met. Under the identifying assumptions, we find that noncarceral conviction (relative to dismissal) leads to a large and long-lasting increase in recidivism for felony defendants in Virginia. In contrast, incarceration relative to noncarceral conviction leads to a short-run reduction in recidivism, consistent with incapacitation. While the identifying assumptions include a strong restriction on judge decision-making, we argue that any bias resulting from its failure is unlikely to change our qualitative conclusions. Lastly, we introduce an alternative empirical strategy and find that it yields similar estimates. Collectively, these results suggest that noncarceral felony conviction is an important and potentially overlooked driver of recidivism.

 National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 32894 Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2024. 134p.

By Matthew Cracknell

As part of the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms, 70 ‘local’ prisons in England and Wales were re-designated as resettlement prisons, in order to provide additional through-the-gate support to individuals serving short sentences. Drawing on staff and prisoner interviews in one case study resettlement prison, this article considers what challenges were involved with implementing a resettlement culture in a local prison. Findings first outline factors inhibiting the resettlement status of the prison; these include a tension between attempts to implement a more expansive resettlement remit into the prison, while also fulfilling more long-standing core institutional duties; the size and churn of the prison population; wide-scale apathy caused by change fatigue; and government austerity policies which caused significant difficulties in the day-to-day staffing of the prison. This article then turns to practitioner responses to the re-designation, finding that practitioners interpreted resettlement in two limited ways: top-down managerial attempts to instil a wider resettlement culture into the prison, and resistance from prison officers who felt unwilling or unable to expand their roles beyond custodial and security concerns. This article concludes by outlining how this set of inter-related barriers frustrated staff and prisoners alike, eroding a sense of hope and purpose and impeding true cultural change.

Criminology & Criminal JusticeVolume   23, Issue 2, April 2023, Pages 165-182

By John Wooldredge

Academic attention to violence and other forms of in-prison misconduct is on the rise, although most research continues to be framed within now stale perspectives. A broader framework is needed that builds on the more contemporary aspects of these perspectives and incorporates other elements of prison culture and management that potentially influence violent offending and victimization in prison. This article begins with an overview of cumulative knowledge on prison culture to highlight relevant ideas on inmate adaptation to confinement and how violence might manifest from (mal)adaptation. How prison management shapes and reflects culture is also discussed with an emphasis on how prison officers affect inmate safety. A bi-level framework is presented that brings together the piecemeal contributions of research to date to provide a more comprehensive understanding of offending and victimization that should facilitate crime prevention in prison while improving the humanity of the prison experience

Annual Review of Criminology, Vol. 3 (2020), pp. 165–188

By William J. Sabol, and Miranda L. Baumann

Justice reinvestment was introduced in the early 2000s as a means to respond to the massive growth in incarceration in the United States that had occurred during the past three decades by diverting offenders from prison and redirecting a portion of the associated corrections expenditures into communities to build their capacities to manage offenders locally. Over the next 17 years, the concept evolved into a Congressionally funded federal grant program that shifted the focus of reinvestment away from community reinvestment and toward a state-agency practice improvement model that ultimately aimed to improve public safety. A distinct form of justice reinvestment, the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI), was the dominant practice of justice reinvestment in the United States. It was organized as a public–private partnership that engaged states in bipartisan efforts to enact legislative reforms and other policies to address sentencing and corrections practices and adopt high-performing evidence-based practices (EBPs) that would yield the desired public safety benefits. JRI contributed to legislative reforms and adoption of EBPs, especially in community supervision. The federal JRI effort has not yet provided peer-reviewed, published evidence that it has achieved its objectives.

Annual Review of Criminology, Vol. 3:317-339, 2020.

By Sheri Lynn Johnson

With respect to African Americans, the history of racial discrimination in the imposition of the death penalty is well-known, and the persistence of racial disparities in the modern era of capital punishment is well-documented. In contrast, the influence of Latino ethnicity on the imposition of the death penalty has been studied very little. A review of the limited literature reveals evidence of discrimination against Latinos. Archival studies generally find ethnicity-of-victim discrimination, and some of those studies find ethnicity-of-defendant discrimination disadvantaging Latino defendants; these findings parallel the findings of the much more robust literature investigating bias against African American defendants and victims. The controlled experimental studies generally show both ethnicity-of-defendant and ethnicity-of-victim discrimination disadvantaging Latinos. Related literature investigating stereotypes, animosity, and discrimination in other criminal justice decisions further suggests the likelihood of ethnicity discrimination in the imposition of capital punishment, as well as the need for further research.

Annual Review of Law and Social Science Vol. 16:421-431 2020.

By Paul Kaplan

This review focuses on empirical research about contemporary challenges to the death penalty in the United States. Challenges are factors that obstruct capital punishment, including legal or political restrictions; elimination at the federal or state level; or the hindrance of the process at its operational stages of charging, adjudicating, appeals, clemency, or executions. By the best-known measures, the death penalty has been in decline in the United States since the turn of the century. Lethal injection errors—“botches”—are arguably the most important current challenge to the institution. Wrongful capital conviction has made capital punishment less tolerable to the general public. Mitigation remains an important challenge to the death penalty. This review emphasizes botches, innocence, and mitigation but also touches on disparate impact, failure-to-deliver a social benefit, and cost. Along the way, this review proposes a framework for considering challenges as they occur on two continua of impact, a micro/meso/macro axis and a narrow/wide axis.

ANNUAL REVIEW OF LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCE Vol. 20:353-368, 2024.

By Carol S. Steiker, and Jordan M. Steiker

This review addresses four key issues in the modern (post-1976) era of capital punishment in the United States. First, why has the United States retained the death penalty when all its peer countries (all other developed Western democracies) have abolished it? Second, how should we understand the role of race in shaping the distinctive path of capital punishment in the United States, given our country's history of race-based slavery and slavery's intractable legacy of discrimination? Third, what is the significance of the sudden and profound withering of the practice of capital punishment in the past two decades? And, finally, what would abolition of the death penalty in the United States (should it ever occur) mean for the larger criminal justice system?

Annual Review of Criminology, Vol. 3 (2020), pp. 299–315

By Jeffrey R. Baker

This article is a study of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian Realism, a progressive school of social ethics rooted in Christian theology, and its critical evaluation of American mass incarceration. Christian Realism seeks justice in society under law, formed by love as its fundamental organizing principle. It acknowledges a world with endemic structural injustices and social immorality, but it finds temperate hope in the human potential for love, redemption, and generosity. Christian Realism reckons that any institution committed to justice must inevitably compromise to achieve incremental progress toward good. But it projects steady, hopeful progress toward justice, even as systems calibrate themselves to stave off the worse effects of human nature. On this tricky ground, Christian Realism wrestles with individual morality within flawed systems, the universal struggle to act morally when social realities drive people to self-interest and antagonism. Christian Realism issues a call to evaluate society’s injustices, then to implement steps that approach justice, without regard for dogma or party. Niebuhr acknowledges that people will break the law and harm others and that society must protect itself from violence and disorder. He recognizes that every choice requires grueling negotiations between liberty and coercion, freedom and order. In this thicket, Christian Realism takes the side of the oppressed, excluded, and impoverished against entrenched powers, because a just society will provide equal opportunity for all life, rooted in an abiding love among neighbors. Evaluating the American criminal legal system, Christian Realism critiques and condemns mass incarceration and the ascendant preference for violent retribution. The society that sustains mass incarceration fails on three fronts, at least. First, mass incarceration is maximally coercive, signaling a failure of stable, fair means for confronting conflict in society. Second, the entrenched interests of mass incarceration impose corrupting pressures on individual officers and judges invested with discretion, limiting their ability to exert moral force within an unjust system. Third, economic powers have captured the carceral system to advance business interests to the detriment of human dignity, equal opportunity, and love, calcifying the criminal justice system and suppressing movements for reform. Retribution and incarceration are policy choices. A jurisprudence of love that grounds the law in human dignity opens the way for serious alternatives for measured punishment, public safety, therapeutic rehabilitation, community restoration, and social redemption. These may include polices of restorative and therapeutic justice; constructive reentry programs; shorter sentences; decriminalization; reformed plea bargaining; increased investment in education; or other novel ideas to address the forces that drive people to do harm, to treat people justly when they cause harm, and to advance restoration and redemption for the sake of a just society. Christian Realism tests every policy against its commitments to justice and love and its real consequences in the world, even when compromising for incremental, sustainable progress. Thus, Christian Realism welcomes experiments to meet the needs of a just society – order through minimal coercion, fair and stable mechanisms for addressing conflict, the empowerment of the poor and disenfranchised, and laws founded in love. 

Georgia Criminal Law Review (forthcoming 2025)

By Martha Newson, Linus Peitz, Jack Cunliffe & Harvey Whitehouse

As incarceration rates rise globally, the need to reduce re-offending grows increasingly urgent. We investigate whether positive group bonds can improve behaviours among incarcerated people via a unique soccer-based prison intervention, the Twinning Project. We analyse effects of participation compared to a control group (study 1, n = 676, n = 1,874 control cases) and longitudinal patterns of social cohesion underlying these effects (study 2, n = 388) in the United Kingdom. We also explore desistance from crime after release (study 3, n = 249) in the United Kingdom and the United States. As law-abiding behaviour also requires a supportive receiving community, we assessed factors influencing willingness to employ formerly incarcerated people in online samples in the United Kingdom and the United States (studies 4–9, n = 1,797). Results indicate that social bonding relates to both improved behaviour within prison and increased willingness of receiving communities to support re-integration efforts. Harnessing the power of group identities both within prison and receiving communities can help to address the global incarceration crisis.

Nat Hum Behav (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-02006-3

By Sharon Dolovich

In their welcome new article, Justin Driver and Emma Kaufman offer a provocative take on American prison law: that it is “fundamentally incoherent.” They base this conclusion on the Supreme Court’s repeated tendency to assert contradictory factual premises about prisoners and prison life. In one case, as the authors show, the Court will characterize prisons as violent and in another as “uncomfortable but mundane”; sometimes the Court describes prisoners as illiterate, at other times as strategic and effective litigators; and so on. If ever one imagined this area of the law to have a stable factual foundation, Driver and Kaufman’s dexterous excavation of the Court’s “selective empiricism” puts that notion firmly to rest. But viewed through a broader lens, the Court’s prison law jurisprudence proves anything but incoherent. For all the factual switchbacks Driver and Kaufman identify, there is an unmistakable consistency in the overall orientation of the field: it is consistently and predictably prostate, highly deferential to prison officials’ decision-making, and largely insensitive to the harms people experience while incarcerated. These features represent the practical manifestation of the divergent normative inclinations the Supreme Court routinely displays toward the parties in prison law cases. It is hardly a secret that American carceral institutions routinely burden prisoners’ fundamental liberties and fail to provide even minimally safe and healthy living conditions. Yet with prison law’s moral center of gravity tilting so far in the direction of defendants, plaintiffs bringing constitutional claims in federal court can expect to win only in the most extreme cases, leaving the prison environment largely free of judicial regulation. In this essay, I explore the mechanisms by which, despite what is known about the reality on the ground in American prisons, courts hearing constitutional challenges brought by prisoners so persistently find in favor of the state. In particular, I zero in on two components of the judicial process in this context: the construction of defendant-friendly doctrinal standards for deciding prisoners’ claims and the deferential posture with which federal courts tend to approach defendants’ assertions in individual cases. As to the doctrine, especially during the Rehnquist Court, the Supreme Court systematically deployed a set of maneuvers — which I have elsewhere termed canons of evasion — to construct doctrinal standards for prison law cases that strongly incline courts to rule in favor of the state. In Part I, by way of illustration, I map the deployment of these various mechanisms in two especially consequential cases, Whitley v. Albers and Turner v. Safley, and show how their use operates to create a doctrinal environment decidedly unfavorable to prisoners’ claims

135 Harvard Law Review Forum 302 (2022).

By Sharon Dolovich

When the state incarcerates, it assumes an affirmative, non-negotiable obligation to keep people in prison safe and to provide for their basic needs. In the United States, the three branches of government—legislative, executive, and judicial—are in theory collectively responsible for making certain that this obligation is fulfilled. In practice, the checks and balances built into the system have failed to ensure even minimally decent carceral conditions. This review maps this regulatory failure. It shows that, in all branches of government, rather than policing prison officials, the relevant institutional actors instead align themselves with the officials they are supposed to regulate, leaving people in custody unprotected and vulnerable to abuse by the very actors sworn to keep them safe. This pattern is no accident. It reflects a palpable normative hostility and contempt toward the incarcerated, an attitude with deep roots in the virulent race hatred endemic to the American carceral project from its earliest days.

Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2022. 5:153–77

By Sharon Dolovich

Any time a correctional officer (CO) physically assaults someone in prison, their conduct demands an especially compelling justification and robust ex post scrutiny. Instead, governing Eighth Amendment doctrine almost entirely defers to COs’ own judgments as to the need for force. This highly deferential approach is especially ill advised given the institutional culture of the modern American prison, which systematically demonizes and dehumanizes people in custody and thus primes COs to use violence unnecessarily. Even a standard of “objective unreasonableness” would not suffice to prevent case outcomes from reflecting a callous indifference to the safety of people in prison. What is needed instead is a reasonableness standard explicitly framed in terms of the state’s obligations to the incarcerated. This Article makes the case for such a morally robust reasonableness standard and develops an account of both the normative foundations for this approach and the principles that ought to guide, not only factfinders in individual cases, but all actors in a position to shape carceral policy. What drives the inquiry—and sets it apart from the Supreme Court’s own treatment of the constitutional claims of people in custody—is the attention paid to the concrete realities of the modern American prison. The current Supreme Court is unlikely to regard with sympathy the account offered here. But it remains open to the rest of us to insist that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment has meaningful moral content beyond the narrow, often pinched reading that currently shapes the legal doctrine. This Article is intended as part of this larger project of self-conscious moral reclamation. Its animating goals are: to expose the deep flaws in the governing law, to excavate the normative content of Eighth Amendment limits on the state’s power to inflict criminal punishment, and in the process to provide a reinvigorated moral vocabulary for understanding and challenging the use of violence by state officials against the fellow human beings they are sworn to protect. In these ways, this enterprise has considerable overlap with the growing national effort to set moral limits on police violence.

14 Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 415; UCLA School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 24-35

By Felix Owusu

The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office (SCDAO) has taken steps to limit its use of criminal sanctions for individuals charged with nonviolent offenses, including identifying 15 common charges that arraigning Assistant District Attorneys (line ADAs) should presumptively decline to prosecute (DTP) or divert when possible. These changes, driven by policies introduced by District Attorney (DA) Rachael Rollins after her inauguration in January 2019, reflect mounting evidence that relying on policing, criminal adjudication, and incarceration to address non-violent offenses is costly, exacerbates racial disparities, and is often ineffective at improving public safety. Others are concerned, however, that increasing leniency for even minor offenses will embolden people who commit crimes and lead to more serious misconduct. Below I attempt to analyze the impact of these policy changes on case adjudication as well as future offending behavior for those whose cases were impacted. I primarily rely on administrative data from the SCDAO’s internal case management database as well as criminal records from the Department of Criminal Justice Information Services (DCJIS). Using an event study design, I find that after DA Rollins' inauguration, prosecution rates declined by roughly 5 percentage points on average for cases consisting of charges included in the declination and diversion policy (DTP list cases) and nearly 10 percentage points for cases involving nonviolent misdemeanors more generally. These average decreases mask substantial heterogeneity by offense category and defendant race. Prosecution rates declined substantially less for cases involving Black defendants, and decreases in prosecution rates were concentrated among a subset of DTP list offenses like driving with a suspended license. Consistent with the scope of the policy, prosecution rates for cases involving felonies or violent offenses were not similarly impacted. I also explore the impact of the declination and diversion policy on reoffending using a difference-in-differences design to account for unobserved factors that could impact recidivism throughout the policy's implementation. Consistent with past research, I find that the introduction of the declination and diversion policy was associated with small (although statistically indistinguishable from zero) decreases in overall reoffending and violent reoffending.  

Boston:The Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, 2022. 

By Sandra Susan Smith

As a growing number of jurisdictions across the country have attempted to implement bail reforms, debates have intensified about the relationship between such reforms and crime, including and perhaps especially violent crime. Similar debates, for instance, have raged in New York, where the backlash against bail reform caused the state legislature to roll back key elements just three months after implementation. In recent weeks, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has proposed further rollbacks to the law to address continued concerns that bail reform has contributed to spikes in the state’s violent crime rate. Although largely driven by politics, these debates raise an important and timely set of empirical questions: What role does pretrial detention/release play in producing, or threatening, public safety? Does pretrial release incentivize crime and drive-up crime rates, including violent crime, as many in law enforcement have claimed? Or, all things considered, is pretrial detention the greater risk to public safety? This discussion paper is an effort to synthesize the evidence on this question. Before doing so, however, I specify the conceptualizations of public safety that I deploy throughout. I then draw from academic and policy research on the costs and benefits to public safety of pretrial detention/release, distinguishing evidence from studies of the impacts of releases resulting from routine pretrial practices, from bail reform, and from responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. No matter the cause of pretrial release, the evidence seems clear: Overall, pretrial detention is a far greater threat to public safety than pretrial release. Not only does detention increase the risk that even low-risk individuals might reoffend (or be rearrested), but detention also initiates a series of collateral consequences downstream that are difficult for many to overcome.

Arnold Ventures Public Safety Series, July 2022. 14p.

By The Washington State Office of the Corrections Ombuds Solitary Confinement Research Team (OCO-SCRT). . Research Team:  Angee Schrader OCO-SCRT Project Lead Senior Corrections Ombuds - Investigations E.V. Webb, M.E.S. OCO-SCRT Thematic Analysis Lead Assistant Corrections Ombuds - Investigations Elisabeth Kingsbury, J.D. OCO Deputy Director Heather Bates OCO Public Records & Contract Manager Madison Vinson, J.D. OCO Assistant Corrections Ombuds - Policy Sara Appleton OCO Quality Assurance & Training Manager Zachary Kinneman

Civilian oversight of corrections brings an independent set of eyes and, if done correctly, the values of integrity, respect, collaboration, equity, and courage to bear witness to the ways in which the norms and cultures of carceral systems are rooted in secrecy, a lack of transparency, and rules and regulations. The Washington State Office of the Corrections Ombuds (OCO) is the only civilian oversight of the Washington State corrections system established in state government with the authority and responsibility to investigate actions or inactions of the Washington Department of Corrections (WADOC). The OCO routinely monitors places that are among the most opaque public institutions in our state – the state’s corrections facilities (prisons and reentry centers). In addition to monitoring prisons and reentry centers, the OCO, in its capacity as the statewide prison oversight mechanism, responds to the governor and legislature’s concerns about conditions of confinement and the inherent dangers of living and working inside corrections facilities. Advocates of eradicating the use of solitary confinement in WADOC have waged a multi-year campaign requesting greater attention be paid to what happens to people living and working inside prisons in the state of Washington. Some elected officials have demanded greater accountability and transparency from the WADOC about the use of solitary confinement. Multiple bills calling for a reduction in solitary confinement have been introduced in the state legislature in recent years; however, none have passed out of the legislature. At the end of the 2023 legislative session, seeing that once again, a bill requiring the WADOC: to reduce the use of solitary confinement would not pass out of the legislature, a request was made of the OCO to write a report answering a short list of specific questions about the WADOC ‘s historical and current use of solitary confinement. This report, Solitary Confinement: Part II, looks deeply at the experiences, perspectives, and opinions of a sampling of people who have lived in solitary confinement in WADOC prisons with the goal of providing additional context to the data discussed in Part I. The final release, Solitary Confinement: Part III, will piece together Part I and Part II in a discussion of opportunities for further administrative policy changes and legislative solutions. Solitary Confinement: Part II highlights the voices and experiences of a sample of 13 individuals who have spent extensive time in solitary confinement while incarcerated in the state of Washington. This report also provides key terms, photographs, and further context for public understanding of solitary confinement in Washington State prisons. The goal is to provide greater transparency around the conditions and experiences of people living in solitary.