By National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

The history of the U.S. criminal justice system is marked by racial inequality and sustained by present day policy. Large racial and ethnic disparities exist across the several stages of criminal legal processing, including in arrests, pre-trial detention, and sentencing and incarceration, among others, with Black, Latino, and Native Americans experiencing worse outcomes. The historical legacy of racial exclusion and structural inequalities form the social context for racial inequalities in crime and criminal justice. Racial inequality can drive disparities in crime, victimization, and system involvement. Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice: Science, Practice, and Policy synthesizes the evidence on community-based solutions, noncriminal policy interventions, and criminal justice reforms, charting a path toward the reduction of racial inequalities by minimizing harm in ways that also improve community safety. Reversing the effects of structural racism and severing the close connections between racial inequality, criminal harms such as violence, and criminal justice involvement will involve fostering local innovation and evaluation, and coordinating local initiatives with state and federal leadership. This report also highlights the challenge of creating an accurate, national picture of racial inequality in crime and justice: there is a lack of consistent, reliable data, as well as data transparency and accountability. While the available data points toward trends that Black, Latino, and Native American individuals are overrepresented in the criminal justice system and given more severe punishments

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  compared to White individuals, opportunities for improving research should be explored to better inform decision-making.

Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2022. 343p.

By Terry-Ann Craigie, Ames Grawert, and Cameron Kimble

America is approaching a breaking point. For more than four decades, economic inequality has risen inexorably, stunting productivity, weakening our democracy, and leaving tens of millions struggling to get by in the world’s most prosperous country. The crises that have rocked the United States since the spring — the coronavirus pandemic, the resulting mass unemployment, and a nationwide uprising for racial justice — have made the inequities plaguing American society more glaring than ever. This year’s intertwined emergencies have also driven home a reality that some would rather ignore: that the growing gap between rich and poor is a result not just of the market’s invisible hand but of a set of deeply misguided policy choices. Among them, this groundbreaking report reveals, is our entrenched system of mass incarceration. Mass incarceration reflects and exacerbates so many dimensions of this country’s divides — in income and health, in voice and power, in access to justice, and most importantly, over race. The number of people incarcerated in America today is more than four times larger than it was in 1980, when wages began to stagnate and the social safety net began to be rolled back. We’ve long known that people involved in the criminal justice system — a group that’s disproportionately poor and Black — face economic barriers in the form of hiring discrimination and lost job opportunities, among other factors. This report demonstrates that more people than previously believed have been caught up in the system, and it quantifies the enormous financial loss they sustain as a

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  result; those who spend time in prison miss out on more than half the future income they might otherwise have earned.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice, 2020. 44p.

By Scot Wortley, Akwasi Owusu-Bempah Huibin Lin and The Canadian Association of Black lawyers (CABL)

Despite the global COVID-19 pandemic and the various stay-at-home orders in countries around the world, millions of people took to the streets to protest this and other brutal killings of Black men and women by police officers in the United States. [...] Canada also has a well-documented history of police misconduct and to the extent that members of certain communities are more likely to have been stopped and searched by police - one of the findings of this report - then significant differences in perceptions of the police and courts seem inevitable. [...] Race and Criminal Injustice is an important examination of perceptions of the criminal justice system in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and follows earlier research by the same authors that found that perceptions of the police and the courts differed significantly by racial group. [...] The results suggest that one-third of the Black respondents (34%) had been stopped by the police in the past two years, compared to 28% of White respondents and 22% of Chinese respondents. [...] Respondents were next asked: “If a man and a woman – with the same criminal history or record – committed the same crime, who would get the longer sentence in court: the man, the woman, or do you think they would get the same sentence?” A slight majority of White (51.3%) and Asian respondents (50.7%) respondents believe that a man and woman would get the same sentence, compared to only 33.3% of Bl.

Toronto: Ryerson University Faculty of Law, 2021. 90p.

By Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union

Human Rights Watch / ACLU joint submission regarding the United States’ record under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination

It has been nearly 30 years since the United States ratified the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). Yet progress towards compliance remains elusive—indeed, grossly inadequate—in numerous key areas including reparative justice; discrimination in the US criminal legal system; use of force by law enforcement officials; discrimination in the regulation and enforcement of migration control; and stark disparities in the areas of economic opportunity, education, and health care. Racism and xenophobia persist as powerful and pervasive forces in American society. The ICERD is an important part of the solution: to confront these global problems effectively, the US needs to confront discrimination head on and proactively and swiftly engage in efforts to meet its international obligations. This report and its detailed appendix offer an initial roadmap for the US government to fulfill its obligations under the treaty.

New York: Human Right Watch and ACLU, 2022. 98p.

By Jaquelyn L. Jahn, Jessica T. Simes, Tori L. Cowger & Brigette A. Davis

Systemic racism in police contact is an important driver of health inequities among the U.S. urban population. Hyper-policing and police violence in marginalized communities have risen to the top of the national policy agenda, particularly since protests in 2020. How did pandemic conditions impact policing? We assess neighborhood racial disparities in arrests after COVID-19 stay-at-home orders in Boston, Charleston, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco census tracts (January 2019-August 2020). Using interrupted time series models with census tract fixed effects, we report arrest rates across tract racial and ethnic compositions. In the week following stay orders, overall arrest rates were 66% (95% CI: 51-77%) lower on average. Although arrest rates steadily increased thereafter, most tracts did not reach pre-pandemic arrest levels. However, despite declines in nearly all census tracts, the magnitude of racial inequities in arrests remained unchanged. During the initial weeks of the pandemic, arrest rates declined significantly in areas with higher Black populations, but absolute rates in Black neighborhoods remain higher than pre-pandemic arrest rates in White neighborhoods. These findings support urban policy reforms that reconsider police capacity and presence, particularly as a mechanism for enforcing public health ordinances and reducing racial disparities.

Boston: Boston University, 2021. 29p.

By Samuel R. Gross, Maurice Possley, Ken Otterbourg, Klara Stephens, Jessica Paredes and Barbara O'Brien

Black people are 13.6% of the American population but 53% of the 3,200 exonerations listed in the National Registry of Exonerations as of August, 2022. Judging from exonerations, innocent Black Americans are seven times more likely than white Americans to be falsely convicted of serious crimes. We see this racial disparity, in varying degrees, for all major crime categories except white collar crime. This report examines racial disparities in the three types of crime that produce the largest numbers of exonerations: murder, sexual assault, and drug crimes. For both murder and sexual assault, there are preliminary investigative issues that increase the number of innocent Black suspects: for murder, the high homicide rate in the Black community; for rape, the difficulty of cross-racial eyewitness identification. For both crimes, misconduct, discrimination and racism amplify these initial racial discrepancies. For drug crimes, the preliminary sorting that increases the number of convictions of innocent Black suspects is racial profiling. In addition, the Registry lists 17 “Group Exonerations” including 2,975 additional wrongfully convicted defendants, many of whom were deliberately framed and convicted of fabricated drug crimes in large-scale police scandals. The overwhelming majority are Black.

Irvine, CA: National Registry of Exonerations , 2022. 55p.

By Eugene M. Avrutin

In October 2013, one of the largest anti-migrant riots took place in Moscow. Clashes and arrests continued late into the night. Some in the crowd, which grew to several thousand people, could be heard chanting “Russia for the Russians” with their animus directed towards dark-skinned labor migrants from the southern border. The slogan “Russia for the Russians” is not a recent invention. It first gained notoriety in the very last years of the tsarist regime, appealing primarily to individuals drawn to the radical right. Analyzing a wide range of printed and visual sources, Racism in Modern Russia marks the first serious attempt to understand the history of racism over a span of 150 years. A brilliant examination of the complexities of racism, Eugene M. Avrutin's panoramic book asks powerful questions about inequality and privilege, denigration and belonging, power and policy, and the complex historical links between race, whiteness, and geography.

London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 160p.

By Scott Mire and Cliff Roberson

Violence is a complex subject that is rooted in a multitude of disciplines, including not only criminology but also psychology, sociology, biology, and other social science disciplines. It is only through understanding violence as a concept that we can hope to respond to it appropriately and to prevent it. The Study of Violent Crime: Its Correlates and Concerns is a comprehensive text that provides a current analysis of violence and violent crime in the United States.

Boca Raton; New York: London: CRC Press, 2010. 244p.

Edited by Joel Busher and Lee Jerome

This open access book explores the enactment, impact and implications of the Prevent Duty across a range of educational contexts. In July 2015 the UK became the first country to place a specific legal requirement on those working in education to contribute to efforts to ‘prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’. Drawing on extensive research with staff, children and young people, the editors and contributors provide new insight into how this high-profile – and highly contentious – policy has shaped educational practice in Britain today. It will be a valuable resource for researchers, policymakers and others interested in the design, implementation and on-the-ground effects of Prevent or similar programmes internationally that place education at the heart of efforts to prevent or counter violent extremism.

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 180p.

By Ciarán McCabe

Beggars and begging were ubiquitous features of pre-Famine Irish society, yet have gone largely unexamined by historians. This book explores at length for the first time the complex cultures of mendicancy, as well as how wider societal perceptions of and responses to begging were framed by social class, gender and religion. The study breaks new ground in exploring the challenges inherent in defining and measuring begging and alms-giving in pre-Famine Ireland, as well as the disparate ways in which mendicants were perceived by contemporaries. A discussion of the evolving role of parish vestries in the life of pre-Famine communities facilitates an examination of corporate responses to beggary, while a comprehensive analysis of the mendicity society movement, which flourished throughout Ireland in the three decades following 1815, highlights the significance of charitable societies and associational culture in responding to the perceived threat of mendicancy. The instance of the mendicity societies illustrates the extent to which Irish commentators and social reformers were influenced by prevailing theories and practices in the transatlantic world regarding the management of the poor and deviant. Drawing on a wide range of sources previously unused for the study of poverty and welfare, this book makes an important contribution to modern Irish social and ecclesiastical history.

Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018. 320p.

By Geoffrey R. Skoll

Fear has long served elites. They rely on fear to keep and expand their privileges and control the masses. In the current crisis of the capitalist world system, elites in the United States, along with other central countries, promote fear of crime and terrorism. They shaped these fears so that people looked to authorities for security, which permitted extension of apparatuses of coercion like police and military forces. In the face of growing oppression, rebellion against elite hegemony remains possible. This book offers an analysis of the crisis and strategies for rebellion.

New York: Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.  247p.

By Robert M. Zecker

Race was all over the immigrant newspaper week after week. As early as the 1890s the papers of the largest Slovak fraternal societies covered lynchings in the South. While somewhat sympathetic, these articles nevertheless enabled immigrants to distance themselves from the "blackness" of victims, and became part of a strategy of asserting newcomers' tentative claims to "whiteness." Southern and eastern European immigrants began to think of themselves as white people. They asserted their place in the U.S. and demanded the right to be regarded as "Caucasians," with all the privileges that accompanied this designation. Immigrant newspapers offered a stunning array of lynching accounts, poems and cartoons mocking blacks, and paeans to America's imperial adventures in the Caribbean and Asia. Immigrants themselves had a far greater role to play in their own racial identity formation than has so far been acknowledged.

New York; London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. 360p.

Edited by A. L. Beier and Paul Ocobock

Throughout history, those arrested for vagrancy have generally been poor men and women, often young, able-bodied, unemployed, and homeless. Most histories of vagrancy have focused on the European and American experiences. This is the first book to consider global laws, homelessness, and the historical processes they accompanied. Vagrancy and homelessness are used to examine the migration of labor, social and governmental responses, poverty through charity, welfare, and prosecution. Cast Out includes discussions of the lives of the underclass, strategies for surviving and escaping poverty, the criminalization of poverty by the state, the rise of welfare and development programs, the relationship between imperial powers and colonized peoples, and the struggle to achieve independence after colonial rule.

Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008. 409p.

By Brooke Kroeger

In her provocative book, Brooke Kroeger argues for a reconsideration of the place of oft-maligned journalistic practices. While it may seem paradoxical, much of the valuable journalism in the past century and a half has emerged from undercover investigations that employed subterfuge or deception to expose wrong. Kroeger asserts that undercover work is not a separate world, but rather it embodies a central discipline of good reporting—the ability to extract significant information or to create indelible, real-time descriptions of hard-to-penetrate institutions or social situations that deserve the public’s attention. Together with a companion website that gathers some of the best investigative work of the past century, Undercover Reporting serves as a rallying call for an endangered aspect of the journalistic endeavor.

Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 2012. 518p.

Edited by Guy Elcheroth and Neloufer de Mel

This volume bridges two different research fields and the current debates within them. On the one hand, the transitional justice literature has been shaken by powerful calls to make the doctrine and practice of justice more transformative. On the other hand, collective memory studies now tend to look more closely at meaningful silences to make sense of what nations leave out when they remember their pasts. The book extends the scope of this heuristic approach to the different mechanisms that come under the umbrella of transitional justice, including legal prosecution, truth-seeking and reparations, alongside memorialisation. The 15 chapters included in the volume, written by expert scholars from diverse disciplinary and societal backgrounds, explore a range of practices intended to deal with the past, and how making the invisible visible again can make transitional justice - or indeed, any societal engagement with the past - more transformative. Seeking to combine contextual depth and comparative width, the book features two key case analyses - South Africa and Sri Lanka - alongside discussions of multiple cases, including such emblematic sites as Rwanda and Argentina, but also sites better known for resisting than for embracing international norms of transitional justice, such as Turkey or Côte d’Ivoire. The different contributions, grouped in themed sections, progressively explore the issues, actors and resources that are typically forgotten when societies celebrate their pasts rather than mourning their losses and, in doing so, open new possibilities to build more inclusive processes for addressing the present consequences of past injustice.

London; New York: Routledge, 2022. 257p.

Edited by Marco Castrignanò, Carolina Mudan Marelli and Teresa Carlone

Analyzing with an ethnographic approach The Wire, one of the most important TV series on American ghettos, to understand and question the sociological perspective that emerges from the series, positioning it into the broader scientific debate. This is, in a nutshell, the work presented in the book It's all in the Game, the outcome of a laboratorial research activity carried out in 2020 by students and teachers of the Sociology of Communities and Urban Neighborhoods class, at the University of Bologna. The text is structured into four chapters, resulting from the four topics used to analysis the TV series: forms of social capital, the relationship between structural forces- culture of poverty and individual agency, neighborhood effects mechanism and the relationship between statistics and political action. Four subjects that are the core of many neighborhood- studies related researches and on which the TV series makes a clear stand. We analyzed those topics through a critical perspective, not considering them as a truth about ghettos, but as a very precise way of thinking about life in the American suburbs.

Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2022. 158p.

Edited by Dominique Grisard, Annelise Erismann, Janine Dahinden

Violence is a persistent element of modern history and it always has been gendered. Today’s violent times have politicized and mobilized new publics, generated creative forms of resistance, incited the most unlikely coalitions, and emboldened to live life differently. The systemic use of rape as a strategy in war fare, nationalism, and settler colonialism, the persistency of intimate partner violence, and the increasingly open racist, sexist, transphobic, and homophobic discrimination are just a few examples of violence’s omnipresent gender dimension. The contributions of this volume analyse violence and multiple forms of resistance from an interdisciplinary gender perspective. They show that violence is not just a central and powerful structuring principle of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, and class, but that it is also part of the fabric of nation states and structures all social relations. In addition, the contributions depict manifold strategies and tactics of confronting gendered violence.

Zurich: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), 2022. 155p.

By Jon Lewis, Seamus Hughes, Oren Segal and Ryan Greer

“Basically, they’re domestic terrorists. That's why we’re here,” stated a Georgia Assistant District Attorney on February 14, 2020. The prosecutor was attempting to explain to a judge why two members of The Base, a violent white supremacist group, should not be let out on bond. Prosecuting domestic terrorists through the state court system instead of the federal system may seem unusual, but it is a result of the mosaic of different approaches federal and state prosecutors use to address the increasing threat of domestic extremism. Cases like these demonstrate the need to examine whether the government is using all the tools at its disposal to address the threat of white supremacist violence. It also underscores the need to ensure that government and law enforcement officials have the resources and knowledge they need to track the criminal activities of violent extremists and, whenever possible, prevent terrorist acts. The United States has struggled to adapt to a changing domestic terrorism landscape. In the last two months alone, more than a dozen Americans were arrested as part of wideranging investigations into a growing domestic terrorism threat stemming from individuals and groups that have a number of international ties. In response to the upsurgence of these groups, the seriousness of the threat they pose, and the manner in which they operate, U.S. officials have raised alarms. For example, Elizabeth Neumann, the Assistant Secretary for Threat Prevention and Security Policy at the Department of Homeland Security, recently told a Congressional committee that, “it feels like we

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  are at the doorstep of another 9/11…we can see it building and we don’t quite know how to stop it.” This policy paper focuses on the recent arrests of domestic extremists, as well as current efforts by law enforcement to disrupt and counter the growing influence of racially motivated violent extremist ideology—specifically white supremacy—and analyze the current state of enforcement actions against two domestic networks: The Base and Atomwaffen Division. In the accompanying policy recommendations, the authors outline administrative actions, legislative and policy changes, and other possible federal and state legal and prosecutorial powers that could allow for a more comprehensive and effective approach to countering these threats.   

Washington, DC: George Washington University, Program on Extremism, 2020. 35p.

By Pete Simi

A hypothetical “lone gunman” walks into a reproductive health care clinic spraying bullets from his assault rifle screaming that “abortion is murder!” and “the Army of God seeks revenge for the unborn fetuses murdered every year!” The shooting rampage leaves three individuals dead and 11 others injured. Additional weapons and explosives are discovered in the shooter’s van parked outside the clinic. Inside the van, a slew of literature explains how abortion is part of a liberal, feminist initiative to “enslave white Americans.” During the shooter’s interview with law enforcement later that day, he explains his motive was to “intimidate the general public by enforcing God’s law while sending a message to any other abortion killers that they might want to find another line of work.” In the days following the attack, scattered media coverage describes the gunman as “deranged,” “crazed,” and “unstable.” Few, if any, note the clear political and religious motivation nor do any of the articles describe the incident as “terrorism” or the shooter as a “terrorist.” What should we conclude about this scenario? The fact that the shooter was driven by ideological concerns seems obvious, yet the response suggests the link is apparently not so obvious. Understanding the relationship between ideas and violence presents several substantial challenges. These challenges are magnified given our tendency toward employing a highly inconsistent assessment of when and how ideas influence violence.

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  We tend to perceive a close connection between ideas and violence when the incident involves a Muslim perpetrator, while relying on a far different metric when the perpetrator is not Muslim. And the consequences are tremendous with major differences in terms of public perceptions and legal treatment.

Washington, DC: George Washington University, Program on Extremism, 2020. 12.

By Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, Blyth Crawford, Valentin Wutke

Salafi-jihadism and right-wing white supremacist extremism are two of the most visible, active, and threatening violent extremist movements operating in the West today, responsible for dozens of attacks throughout North America and Western Europe. With the increased threat of white supremacist terrorism in the West have also come questions about its relationship to jihadist terrorism. This study provides an assessment of the ideological similarities between the two movements, concluding that they share key traits and political outlooks, some of which have become increasingly widespread over recent years in the Western world and beyond. Firstly, these forms of extremism are the most violent iterations of their respective movements. Jihadists are the ideological fringe of the wider Islamist movement, while white supremacist extremists emerge from more mainstream, right-wing white identity and supremacist politics. They are both reactionary political movements. They treat any form of social or political progress, reform, or liberalization with great suspicion, viewing these chiefly as a threat to their respective ‘ingroups’. In this sense, jihadists too are extreme right-wing actors even if they are rarely referred to in such terms. Both movements share a similar underlying diagnosis for the ills of their respective societies, placing blame primarily on the forces of liberal progress, pluralism, and tolerance.  

Washington, DC: George Washington University, Program on Extremism, 2021. 103p.