Our mission is to empower activists, journalists, and policymakers to shape effective criminal legal system 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.

The intersection of the immigration & criminal legal systems

Hello friends,

Immigration has dominated the news in recent weeks, as the Trump administration has expanded its brutal (and often unconstitutional) efforts to remove immigrants from this country. That’s why in this month’s newsletter, we’re highlighting some reports and resources that shine a light on the intersection of immigration and the criminal legal system in the United States.

• Many of the arguments in favor of brutal crackdowns on immigrants focus on bogus claims about crime. The truth is, as this 2021 CUNY Institute for State & Local Governance report explains, when immigration increases in a community, violent crime usually goes down.
• President Trump has worked to enlist local jails in his immigration crackdown, but he’s far from the first person to pursue this strategy. This 2019 study tracks county participation in immigrant detention between 1983 and 2013. Related, this 2023 report explains how jails and prisons that close often reopen shortly thereafter as immigration detention facilities.
• It’ll come as no surprise to most that immigration detention facilities are inherently harmful to the people held in them. This 2025 report shows that people held in immigration facilities for longer than six months report worse physical and mental health. Similarly, this 2023 report utilizes a unique dataset to shed light on the emergency medical responses at immigration facilities in California.

If you want to learn more, I encourage you to visit the section of our Research Library devoted to the intersection of the immigration and criminal legal systems and check out our guide explaining where to find more data and research on the criminalization of immigrants.

Now, on to this month’s additions to the Research Library, where we’ve added 21 new reports focused on homelessness, drug policy, prison discipline policies, and more. Thanks for reading,

-Leah Wang, Senior Research Analyst

We've The Prison Policy Initiative has added 21 new reports to the Research Library:

Community impact

See 113 reports on the impact of the criminal legal system on housing, schools, employment, neighborhoods, and more.

• Housing First as an Alternative to Criminalization: Preliminary Findings from Interviews with Unhoused and Formerly Unhoused People in Miami-Dade County by Matthew D. Marr and Melissa Hurtado Nuez, February, 2025
  "Because of the poor conditions in the shelter system, many leave and return to unsheltered homelessness, losing trust and disengaging from the system."

Conditions of confinement

See 277 reports on prison and jail conditions such as solitary confinement, labor, discipline, food, and more.

• A Moment of Reckoning: A Blueprint for Resolving the Ongoing Crisis and Transforming New York State's Prison System by Justice Policy Institute, March, 2025
  "Approximately 98% of so-called assaults on staff in the last three months of available data (Nov. 2024-Jan. 2025) resulted in no injury (73%) or minor injury (25%) to staff...That injury data has remained relatively the same over the last several years."
• Bad Behavior: How prison disciplinary policies manufacture misconduct by Prison Policy Initiative, January, 2025
  "Misconduct records discredit incarcerated people in parole and clemency proceedings, while traumatizing disciplinary punishments like solitary confinement increase the chances they'll be arrested again someday in the future."

Courts and trials

See 168 reports on prosecutors, judges, public defense, court caseloads, and more.

• Discovery Reform in New York: What Can the Data Tell Us? by Data Collaborative for Justice, April, 2025
  "Among cases other than indicted felonies, New York City's speedy trial dismissal rate rose significantly, increasing especially among misdemeanors from 9% in 2019 to 49% in 2024."
• Contracted to Fail: How Flat-Fee Contracts Undermine the Right to Counsel in California by The Wren Collective, March, 2025
  "Eight of the ten counties with the highest incarceration rates in [California] rely on flat-fee contracts, including all of the top five...contract systems result in deeply problematic outcomes."
• Prosecutor-Led Diversion Unveiled: Lessons and Insights From Implementing Project Reset in Two Jurisdictions by Venita Embry et al, September, 2024
  "Both [diversion] programs offer individuals the opportunity to avoid a criminal conviction while also receiving services, which may reduce recidivism and the size of the correctional population."

Drug policy and treatment

See 181 reports on punishing and treating drug use in the criminal legal system.

• Barriers to Universal Availability of Medications for Opioid Use Disorder in US Jails by Elizabeth Flanagan Balawajder et al, April, 2025
  "[Medication for opioid use disorder] availability was associated with urbanicity, location in a Medicaid expansion state, county opioid overdose rate, and county social vulnerability."
• Redesigning Public Safety: Substance Use by Center for Policing Equity, April, 2024
  "Despite using and selling illicit drugs at similar rates as White people do, Black people are more likely to be arrested, incarcerated, and reported to law enforcement by medical professionals for substance use."

Economics of incarceration

See 182 reports on the economic drivers and consequences of mass incarceration.

• Why jails and prisons can't recruit their way out of the understaffing crisis by Prison Policy Initiative, December, 2024
  "Many of the issues for which "understaffing" is blamed are fundamental to mass incarceration, and are best addressed through decarceration -- not a jobs program for corrections officers or further investments in surveillance and imprisonment."
• The Long-Term Impact of Debt Relief For Indigent Defendants in a Misdemeanor Court by Fines and Fees Justice Center, July, 2024
  "Participants who had their fines and fees relieved were 15 percent less likely to be jailed over the 44-month follow-up period: fee relief eliminated roughly 620 days of incarceration among the 295 treatment respondents."

Families

See 158 reports on the criminal legal system’s impacts on families.

• Uprooting Policing: What Police Abolitionists Teach Us About Family Policing by Emma Ruth, May, 2025
  "This work compares law enforcement and the child welfare or "family policing" system side-by-side, examining how both are agents of policing."

Health and healthcare

See 220 reports on access to healthcare, chronic and infectious disease, mortality, and more.

• Cut-rate care: The systemic problems shaping 'healthcare' behind bars by Prison Policy Initiative, February, 2025
  "This walled-off healthcare system functions like a cost control service for corrections departments, organized around limiting spending and fending off lawsuits rather than actually caring for anyones' health."

Pretrial detention

See 133 reports on the costs and outcomes of detaining people before trial.

• The False Promise of Bail: An Analysis of Pretrial Release Mechanisms and Court Appearance in Tulsa County, Oklahoma by The Bail Project, June, 2025
  "No other avenue for pretrial release was nearly as common as commercial bail bonds. Just 133 (4%) people paid their own bail in full, at an average cost of $1,024; another 117 (3.5%) were bailed out by The Bail Project, at an average cost of $3,171."
• How punitive is pretrial? Measuring the relative pains of pretrial detention by Claudia N. Anderson, Joshua C. Cochran, and Andrea N. Montes, December, 2023
  "Individuals in pretrial detention report more disorderly environments than people in prisons, but also report more access to external social support and better views of staff legitimacy."
• Locked Up and Awaiting Trial: A Natural Experiment Testing the Criminogenic and Punitive Effects of Spending a Week or More in Pretrial Detention by Matthew DeMichele, Ian Silver, and Ryan Labrecque, June, 2023
  "We use a doubly robust difference-in-differences design to assess the relationship between pretrial detention with court appearances, new arrests prior to adjudication, and convictions for the instant offense."

Reentry and recidivism

See 255 reports on the challenges and outcomes for people released from incarceration, including collateral consequences.

• Opening the "Black Box" of Tenant Screening by Urban Institute, March, 2025
  "Decisions around which entries count as a different or "unique" individual and which score thresholds constitute a valid match across datasets can significantly affect the associated criminal and eviction history for certain people."

Sentencing policy

See 144 reports on the rise and impact of excessive criminal sentences.

• The Eugenic Origins of Three Strikes Laws How by Sentencing Project, March, 2025
  ""Habitual offender" laws are widely understood to have emerged in the late 1900s as part of the "tough-on-crime" movement, but the historical record is clear that they proliferated much earlier as part of the eugenics movement."

Sex-related convictions

See 18 reports on the unique punishment of sex-related crimes through registries, civil commitment, and other means.

• Ineffective, Costly, and Harmful: Debunking the Sex Offense Registry by Sex Offense Litigation and Policy Resource Center (SOLPRC) at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, March, 2025
  "That SORN laws do not prevent sexual violence and are counterproductive to successful reintegration is enough to call for a change in sexual violence policy. But these laws also inflict palpable harm to registrants, their families, and their communities."

Women and gender

See 145 reports on gender disparities in the criminal legal system.

• Recommendations for Prioritizing Treatment for Incarcerated Women Who Are Pregnant and in Need of Substance Abuse Treatment by Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services, November, 2024
  "Based on its review of research, relevant laws, regulations, and standards in Virginia and other states, concerning the treatment of pregnant individuals in need of SUD treatment, the workgroup proposed several recommendations."
• State Laws on Substance Use Treatment for Incarcerated Pregnant and Postpartum People by National University-Based Collaborative on Justice-Involved Women & Children, October, 2023
  "From our review, only 7 states had statutes related to treatment of substance use disorders in pregnant incarcerated populations, despite the evidence that many incarcerated pregnant people struggle with substance use."

Youth and juvenile justice

See 400 reports on youth in the criminal legal system.

• The Real Cost of 'Bad News': How Misinformation is Undermining Youth Justice Policy in Baltimore by Sentencing Project, December, 2024
  "More than half of the Fox45 crime stories indicating the age of persons committing offenses (53%) focused primarily or partly on youth under age 18...Yet youth under 18 represented just 5% of arrests in Baltimore City [over the same period]."