Our mission is to empower activists, journalists, and policymakers to shape effective criminal justice policy, so we go beyond our original reports and analyses to curate a database of the best empirical research on the criminal legal system available online. This newsletter includes just the newest additions to this database.

A look at some of the research that caught our eyes in 2024

Friends,

Lots of really great research about the criminal legal system was published in 2024. As the year ends, we wanted to flag a few pieces that have stuck with us in case you missed them (and even if you didn’t, they’re worth a second look).

• Loyola Chicago’s Center for Criminal Justice released a report that looked at the first year of Illinois’ Pretrial Fairness Act, which ended cash bail in the state. The report shows judges held longer hearings and more deliberative processes before deciding to hold people pretrial, and fewer people were held behind bars awaiting trial. These findings should encourage more states to follow this path.
• Our friends at the National Consumer Law Center released their report, Medical Debt Behind Bars, which shows how medical copays and other fees behind bars trap incarcerated people in debt even after their release, harm their health, and make it more likely that contagious diseases spread through prisons and jails.
• A November report on food and nutrition from the Correctional Association of New York added to the growing body of evidence that the food served in prisons is unacceptable in quantity and quality, pushing incarcerated people to buy overpriced (and still unhealthy) foods through the commissary. It adds to the growing body of research that confirms what many already know: prison food is bad and bad for you.
• And finally, if you missed Prison Policy Initiative's rundown of some of our most important reports, briefings, and wins, I hope you'll check it out, too.

This barely scratches the surface of the incredible research that is being done across the country. You can dive deeper by visiting our Research Library.

Keep reading for the newest additions to the library. We highlight 22 new reports that look at the experiences of people with disabilities behind bars, how probation and parole conditions are set, the effectiveness of second-look laws, and much more.

See you in 2025,

-Leah Wang, Senior Research Analyst

We've The Prison Policy Initiative has added 22 new reports to the Research Library:

Conditions of Confinement

See 418 other reports on prison and jail conditions such as solitary confinement, inhospitable environments, labor, discipline, food, and more.

• Crumbling Conditions Create Crisis in Minnesota Prisons by Office of the Ombuds for Corrections, February, 2024
  "One [issue] that stands out...the extremely high and uncomfortable temperatures in living units in the summer, especially in the top tiers of antiquated facilities...the condensation from summer humidity makes the galleys...slippery."

Crime and Crime Rates

See 382 other reports on crime, crime rates, and victimization.

• The effect of pollution on crime: Evidence from data on particulate matter and ozone by Jesse Burkhardt et al, November, 2019
  "We find a robust positive effect of increased air pollution on violent crimes, and specifically assaults, but no relationship between increases in air pollution and property crimes."
• Crime is in the Air: The Contemporaneous Relationship between Air Pollution and Crime by Malvina Bondy, Sefi Roth, and Lutz Sager, April, 2018
  "The results suggest that exposure to elevated levels of air pollution is associated with increased crime rates...the effect is stronger for types of crime which tend to be less severe and...appears to be unevenly distributed across resident income groups."

Disability

See 28 other reports on the prevalence of, and challenges faced by, people with disabilities in the criminal legal system.

• Equity for Whom? How Private Equity and the Punishment Bureaucracy Exploit Disabled People by Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund, November, 2024
  "We are already seeing such an expansion of mass incarceration via criminalization and reinstitutionalization across the country in efforts to push more people experiencing mental illness and houselessness into coercive interventions."
• Disability rights and disability justice in prison: the limits of state-protected rights and the possibilities of mutual support by Stephen Meyers, September, 2024
  "The research subjects not only revealed the limits of disability rights in prison, but ways in which corrections officers used accommodations and personal assistance as means of harassing [the] disabled..."

Families

See 148 other reports on the criminal legal system’s impacts on families.

• Visits and Phone Calls by New Jersey Office of the Corrections Ombudsperson, April, 2024
  "In 2023, the Department of Corrections imposed 4,925 disciplinary sanctions involving the loss of telephone privileges on 2,475 unique individuals (about 19% of the incarcerated population)."

Health impact

See 361 other reports on access to healthcare, chronic and infectious disease, mortality, and more.

• Cancer Mortality in Louisiana's Correctional System, 2015-2021 by Totadri Dhimal et al, November, 2024
  "The cancer-specific [age-specific death rate] was 158 per 100,000 incarcerated individuals compared with 168 per 100,000 among nonincarcerated Louisiana residents and 149 per 100,000 in the US."
• Medicaid Expansion and Mortality Among Persons Who Were Formerly Incarcerated by Pasangi S. Perera et al, September, 2024
  "After Medicaid expansion, White individuals who were formerly incarcerated in RI experienced a sustained decrease of 388 deaths per 100,000 person-years per year...3 times that experienced by all racially minoritized individuals."
• Nutritional Criminology: Why the Emerging Research on Ultra-Processed Food Matters to Health and Justice by Susan L. Prescott et al, January, 2024
  "Black people have the highest incarceration rates in the US, and given the emerging research on structural racism in food inequalities, including the clustering of fast food outlets...the topic should be more prominent within biopsychosocial discourse."
• In-Custody Deaths in Ten Maryland Detention Centers, 2008-2019 by Carmen Johnson et al and the UCLA BioCritical Studies Lab, August, 2023
  "The detention centers with the most instances of in-custody death in our study sample are situated in jurisdictions with both high rates of poverty and large numbers of Black residents."
• Report: Los Angeles County Jail Deaths 2009 by Alexander Li, Grace Sosa, Terence Keel, UCLA BioCritical Studies Lab, February, 2023
  "This report provides summary data on deaths reported by [LA Sheriff's Department] in Los Angeles County Jails, as well as trends in demographic information and death determinations, during the year 2009, one of the most lethal years on record."
• Natural Causes? 58 Autopsies Prove Otherwise Evaluating the Autopsies of 58 Deaths in Los Angeles County Jails by Nicholas Shapiro, Terence Keel, UCLA Carceral Ecologies Lab, BioCritical Studies Lab, June, 2022
  "Our study shows that young Black and Latinx men are not dying merely from"

Jails

See 281 other reports on jail populations, jail conditions, jail construction, and more.

• Factors Associated With the Availability of Medications for Opioid Use Disorder in US Jails by Elizabeth Flanagan Balawajder et al, September, 2024
  "In this study, few jails indicated offering frontline treatments despite being well positioned to reach individuals with an opioid use disorder."

LGBT

See 27 other reports on the criminalization and incarceration of LGBTQ+ people.

• "I Don't Believe You, So You Might as Well Get Used to It": The Myth of PREA Zero Tolerance in Texas Prisons by Trans Pride Initiative, July, 2018
  "If the national [PREA] data is appalling, the data provided by [Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice] is even more atrocious...98% to 99% of all reports are either unsubstantiated or fabrications."

Poverty and wealth

See 149 other reports on how fines, fees, debt, and criminalization punish poor people.

• Medical Debt Behind Bars: The Punishing Impact of Copays, Fees, and Other Carceral Medical Debt by National Consumer Law Center, September, 2024
  "Charging incarcerated people copays or other medical fees for healthcare does not appear to help bring down healthcare costs for prisons or jails... the amount collected may be minimal and insufficient to reduce costs."

Probation and parole

See 119 other reports on community supervision polities, conditions, violations, and more.

• Understanding How Supervision Conditions are Set for People on Parole and Probation by Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, April, 2024
  "The overall driving factor in setting conditions appeared to be routine, indicating that conditions are not individualized to the person."
• Examining The Impact and Reasons for Technical Violations of Mandatory Supervised Release on Prison Admissions in Illinois by David Olson, Don Stemen, & Patrick Griffin, 2023
  "Although technical violators account for 20% to 30% of all admissions to IDOC, they tend to stay in prison for a shorter period of time than court-sentenced individuals."

Public Opinion

See 81 other reports on public perceptions of crime, prison, reform, and more.

• Georgia Courts Access and Fairness Survey Results by A.L. Burruss Institute of Public Service and Research at Kennesaw State University, September, 2019
  "40.9% strongly agreed, while 36.1% agreed, with the statement "The way my case was handled was fair.""

Sentencing Policy and Practices

See 271 other reports on the rise and impact of excessive criminal sentences.

• The Second Look Movement: A Review of the Nation's Sentence Review Laws by Sentencing Project, May, 2024
  "The report provides an overview of the second look laws passed by 12 state legislatures that provide judicial sentence review hearings beyond opportunities provided to those with [juvenile life without parole] sentences."

Trials

See 232 other reports on prosecutors, judges, public defense, and more.

• State Courts Play a Key Role in American Life by Pew Charitable Trusts, October, 2024
  "State courts in the U.S. handle approximately 66 million cases each year--more than twice the annual number of arrests (8 million) and traffic stops (20 million), combined."

Women

See 210 other reports on gender disparities in the criminal legal system.

• Pregnant Women in State Prisons and Local Jails: Federal Assistance to Support Their Care by United States Government Accountability Office, October, 2024
  "Officials from the Dept. of Health and Human Services and the Office of Justice Programs told us that while their grant programs are not specifically for providing maternal health care in prisons and jails...award funds could be used for this purpose."
• Women's Justice: A Preliminary Assessment of Women in the Criminal Justice System by Council on Criminal Justice and the Women's Justice Commission, July, 2024
  "Women in the criminal justice system face distinct challenges and have a unique set of needs that frequently go unaddressed."