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.

A closer look at parole

Hello friends,

Parole can and should be a meaningful tool for decarceration, but too often it falls short of this potential. Instead, dysfunction, a system that fails to acknowledge progress, and board membership that is largely comprised of law enforcement, has resulted in fewer and fewer people being released on parole every year.

Our new report, Parole in Perspective, takes a deep dive into the laws and regulations governing these systems, the decision-making criteria they rely on, and the data on releases. But a lot of questions remain about these systems, particularly around decision disparities. So, this month, we’re highlighting some of the best research on this topic:

• Little data exists about racial and gender disparities in parole decisions. Two studies, though, looking at two different states — South Carolina and California — found startling, but perhaps unsurprising results, namely that Black people are much less likely to be granted parole than white people.
• Similarly, a study examining parole transcripts for women incarcerated for homicide directly related to intimate partner violence found that if the women mentioned the violence they experienced during their hearings, it made it less likely that they’d be granted parole.
• Finally, this 2022 study examines the impact of race and victim impact statements on parole board decisions, raising serious questions about the need for these statements.
• We also have an entire section of our Research Library dedicated to parole and probation issues. I hope you’ll check it out.

This still leaves the question, “What can be done to fix these broken systems?” For that, we partnered with the MacArthur Justice Center to develop 16 guiding principles to make parole the successful tool for decarceration that it should be. And if you’re with an organization working on parole reform, please consider signing on in support of these principles.

Now, on to this month’s additions to our research library. We’ve got 24 new reports focused on the intersection of mass incarceration and climate disasters, how bail reform promotes community safety, exploitative prison release cards, and much more.

We hope this is useful in your work,

—Leah Wang, Senior Research Analyst

We've The Prison Policy Initiative has added 24 new reports to the Research Library:

Conditions of confinement

See 285 reports on prison and jail conditions, such as solitary confinement, labor, discipline, food, and more.

• "You feel like you going to die:" The intersection of mass incarceration and climate disasters by Katherine LeMasters, Zaire Cullins, Erin McCauley, and Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, August, 2025
  "Individuals feared the unknown, not knowing if they would be evacuated, when they would receive food, and when they could check on family members."
• Positive Programs: Safer prisons are within reach by Alabama Appleseed, July, 2025
  "The case studies [in this report] prove that shifts in approach that take into account the capacity for change and leadership among incarcerated people themselves are transforming prison culture."

Courts and trials

See 175 reports on prosecutors, judges, public defense, court caseloads, and more.

• Improving Court Attendance: The Essential Guide to Court Reminder Programs by ideas42, May, 2025
  "The Colorado state court reminder program switched from required sign-ups to automatic enrollment (with the ability to opt-out) and increased reminders from about 56,000 to 224,000 in one month."

Crime

See 289 reports on crime, crime rates, and victimization.

• Hope After Harm: An Evaluation of State Victim Compensation Statutes by Center for American Progress and Common Justice, September, 2025
  "The estimated total cost of harm to victims of aggravated assaults in the United States in 2023 was nearly $43 billion. When victims of violence are uninsured or have no other means of paying...states ultimately bear the brunt of these costs."
• Justice at a Crossroads in New York City: Reexamining Crime, Victimization, Enforcement, Incarceration, and Racial Disparities by Data Collaborative for Justice, April, 2025
  "The first report analyzes trends based on official data--including summonses, arrests, prosecutions, and more; the second report offers a first-ever analysis of annual victim survey data for New York City."

Disability

See 33 reports on the prevalence of, and challenges faced by, people with disabilities in the criminal legal system.

• The Overrepresentation of People with Disabilities and Deaf People in Local Criminal Legal Systems by Safety and Justice Challenge, June, 2025
  "Unlike jails, the data collection methods used by [the Bureau of Justice Statistics] for state and federal prisons enable researchers to conclude who in prison has a psychiatric disability, who has a non-psychiatric disability, and who has both."
• Ending the Discriminatory Pretrial Incarceration of People with Disabilities: Liability under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act by Margo Schlanger, Elizabeth Jordan, and Roxana Moussavian, June, 2022
  "Providing alternatives to pretrial incarceration would constitute a reasonable modification to, not a fundamental alteration of, the underlying criminal/immigration processing systems."

Economics of incarceration

See 188 reports on the economic drivers and consequences of mass incarceration.

• Sentenced to Grow Old: How Long-Term Incarceration is Fueling a Prison Aging Crisis in Illinois, Iowa, and Texas by Justice Policy Institute, August, 2025
  "In 2020, it was estimated that people over age 55 comprised about one-eighth of the state prison population [in Texas] but accounted for almost half of the [Texas prison system's] hospitalization costs."
• Unfair, Deceptive, and Abusive: Prison Release Cards and the Protection of Captive Consumers by Sunny K. Frothingham, March, 2024
  "While release money received in cash could sit unused for years, the cardholder's entire original balance of $30 could be entirely eclipsed by fees within six months."

Health and healthcare

See 231 reports on access to healthcare, chronic and infectious disease, mortality, and more.

• New report reveals successes and limitations of medications for opioid use disorder in New York state prisons by Prison Policy Initiative, March, 2025
  "Not nearly enough people in New York prisons had access to necessary care, as evidenced by the rapid increase of participation...from 2022 to 2023, the participation rate in the treatment program increased by a staggering 552%."
• Suicide methods in the year following release from pretrial jail detention Paywall :( by JohnBosco Chika Chukwuorji et al, March, 2025
  "Given that poisoning, often with drugs or alcohol, was the commonest suicide attempt method, increasing access to effective substance use treatment may help to attenuate significant suicide risk."

Jails

See 300 reports on jail populations, jail conditions, jail construction, and more.

• Jailing the homeless: New data shed light on unhoused people in local jails by Prison Policy Initiative, February, 2025
  "More than one out of every five jailed people are booked again within a year. Unhoused people made up a disproportionate share of those rebooked, representing 4% of all unique jail bookings but 8% of those rebooked."
• Examining Jail Data In Hamilton County, Tennessee by CALEB Chattanooga, December, 2024
  "The income level analysis shows a strong correlation between lower incomes and higher arrest rates. The only three ZIP codes with over 7,000 arrests per 100,000 residents all had an average household income of less than $50,000 a year."

Policing

See 278 reports on arrests, traffic stops, law enforcement interactions, and more.

• Coordinating Alternative First Response: Key Lessons and Recommendations from New Orleans by Vera Institute of Justice, September, 2025
  "In its first year, [New Orleans' Mobile Crisis Intervention Unit] responded to almost 30 percent of all behavioral health-related 911 calls."
• Cops and Pleas: Police Officers' Influence on Plea Bargaining by Jonathan Abel, April, 2017
  "Police influence in the arena of plea bargaining--long thought the exclusive domain of prosecutors--calls into question basic assumptions about who controls the prosecution team."

Pretrial detention

See 141 reports on the costs and outcomes of detaining people before trial.

• How Real Bail Reform Creates a Safer America Replacing a System Based on Wealth with One Based on Safety by The Bail Project, August, 2025
  "Opponents of bail reform often weaponize fear and misinformation to attack policies that are working. They use isolated anecdotes to imply widespread chaos, ignoring data and dismissing the experiences of communities that have implemented reform."
• 3 Reasons Charitable Bail Funds Are Safer, More Just, and More Beneficial to Communities Than Commercial Bail Companies by Center for American Progress, April, 2025
  "Commercial bail companies typically require a 10 percent premium upfront...charitable bail funds, by contrast, provide bail payments to the court with no financial strings attached, helping minimize the financial impact of arrest."
• Looking Through The Bars: Race, Poverty, And Pretrial Detention In Hamilton County, Tennessee by CALEB Chattanooga, December, 2024
  "We found that there exists a measurable, statistically significant level of bias against Black defendants in the Hamilton County criminal system, especially those who are lower-income or living in poverty."

Probation and parole

See 134 reports on community supervision policies, conditions, violations, and more.

• Supervision Violations and Their Impact on Incarceration by Council of State Governments Justice Center, July, 2025
  "In 2023, states spent an estimated $10 billion incarcerating people for supervision violations, with over $3 billion spent incarcerating people for technical violations alone."
• Principles for Parole Reform by Prison Policy Initiative and MacArthur Justice Center's National Parole Transformation Project, July, 2025
  "[This] is meant to be a "North Star" document - a statement of belief about what our parole systems should look like."
• Justice Delayed: The Growing Wait for Parole After a Life Sentence by Sentencing Project, May, 2025
  "Since 1995, Georgia has enacted statutory changes that delay parole eligibility for life-sentenced individuals convicted of a serious violent felony [from seven, to 14, to 30 years]."
• Predicting Parole Grants: An Analysis of Suitability Hearings for California's Lifer Inmates by Kathryne Young and Thomas Favre-Bulle, April, 2016
  "The older a [lifer] was when he or she committed the crime, the less likely he or she was to be granted parole. Being ten years older made a [lifer] more than half as likely to be granted parole."
• Rebutting the Presumption: An Empirical Analysis of Parole Deferrals Under Marsy's Law by David R. Friedman and Jackie M. Robinson, March, 2014
  "[We] ultimately find evidence that several extralegal considerations, such as gender and commissioner identity, may be influencing the length of deferral periods granted under this new regime."

Sentencing policy

See 146 reports on the rise and impact of excessive criminal sentences.

• The Second Look Movement An Assessment of the Nation's Sentence Review Laws (Updated) by Sentencing Project, August, 2025
  "Courts in 16 states determined that other lengthy sentences such as [life without parole] or term-of-years sentences were unconstitutional under Graham or Miller."