We've The Prison Policy Initiative has added 29 new reports to the Research Library:

COVID-19

• Pandemic, Social Unrest, and Crime in U.S. Cities by Council on Criminal Justice, July, 2021
  "The motor vehicle theft rate was 21% higher - 9,861 more motor vehicle thefts - during the first half of 2021 than the year before."
• A global analysis of the impact of COVID-19 stay-at-home restrictions on crime by Amy E. Nivette et al., June, 2021
  "While some early studies suggested that violent and non-violent crime dropped as regulations were imposed, there is also evidence that the effects of COVID-19 on crime are not universal across countries nor across different categories of crime."

Community Impact

• How Does Restorative Justice Work? A Qualitative Metasynthesis by Masahiro Suzuki and Xiaoyu Yuan Shanghai, October, 2021
  "Knowledge is scarce as to what elements of restorative justice lead to the positive results, and how."
• The Overlooked Victim Right: According Victim-Survivors a Right of Access to Restorative Justice by Lynn S. Branham, August, 2021
  "Criminal justice systems in the United States currently leave victim-survivors with some of their most basic needs unmet or only partially met."
• The Opioid Epidemic and Homicide in the United States Paywall :( by Richard Rosenfeld, Joel Wallman, Randolph Roth, January, 2021
  "Those who happen to live in communities with high opioid use...suffer from the impact of living in communities with high homicide rates."

Conditions of Confinement

• Impact of a Prison Therapeutic Diversion Unit on Mental and Behavioral Health Outcomes by Molly Remch, September, 2021
  "After adjustment for confounding, the rate of all infractions in restrictive housing was 3 times the rate in TDU."
• 'I Refuse to Let Them Kill Me': Food, Violence, and the Maryland Correctional Food System by The Maryland Food & Prison Abolition Project, September, 2021
  "Food in prison serves three fundamental functions: as an everyday mechanism of control, dehumanization, and punishment; as a site of exploitation and profit for private food service corporations; and as a form of violence and premature death." This report is divided into six parts, all of which are available at this link.

Disability

• Disability's Fourth Amendment by Jamelia Morgan, April, 2021
  "I discuss the ways in which disability mediates interactions with law enforcement and how Fourth Amendment doctrine renders disabled people vulnerable to policing and police violence."

Drug Policy

• A New Approach: A Prosecutor's Guide to Advancing a Public Health Response to Drug Use by Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College, September, 2021
  "With robust enforcement powers and political influence, prosecutors have a unique opportunity to improve our society's response to drug use while minimizing the harms of the legal system."

Economics of Incarceration

• The predatory dimensions of criminal justice by Joshua Page and Joe Soss, October, 2021
  "Consistent with developments that financialized the broader political economy, predatory criminal justice practices pivoted toward tools that charge prices, create debts, and pursue collections."

Health impact

• Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics and the Justice Systems by National Council for Mental Wellbeing, August, 2021
  "CCBHCs are required to deliver a comprehensive scope of services to meet clients' full [mental health/substance use] needs while integrating services with primary care."

Jails

• What to Do About Closing Rikers by Vital City, September, 2021
  "Closing Rikers and the policies that make the closure possible will determine whether New York City remains the safest large city in the country with the fewest people jailed per capita."

Police and Policing

• Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA, 1980-2019: a network meta-regression by Global Burden of Diseases 2019 Police Violence US Subnational Collaborators, October, 2021
  "We found that more than half of all deaths due to police violence that we estimated in the USA from 1980 to 2018 were unreported in the National Vital Statistics System."
• Police Foundations: A Corporate-Sponsored Threat to Democracy and Black Lives by Color of Change and LittleSis, October, 2021
  "[We] have compiled the most extensive research to date on the links between police foundations and corporations, identifying over 1,200 corporate donations or executives serving as board members for 23 of the largest police foundations in the country."
• Cops Don't Stop Violence: Combating Narratives Used to Defend Police Instead of Defunding Them by Community Resource Hub and Interrupting Criminalization, July, 2021
  "Police are facing one of the greatest crises of legitimacy in a generation. So they are reaching for one of their most reliable weapons -- fear."
• Policing by the Numbers by Council on Criminal Justice, June, 2021
  "Efforts to develop responses that achieve the twin goals of crime control and justice must be grounded in hard data and research evidence, as well as personal and professional experience."
• Defund the Police - Invest in Community Care: A Guide to Alternative Mental Health Responses by Interrupting Criminalization, May, 2021
  "This guide highlights considerations for real, meaningful shifts away from law enforcement and towards autonomous, self-determined community-based resources and responses to unmet mental health needs."
• A Neglected Problem: Understanding the Effects of Personal and Vicarious Trauma on African Americans' Attitudes Toward the PolicePaywall :( by Daniel K. Pryce et al., April, 2021
  "Even for the proportion of African Americans who had positive perceptions and interactions with the police, their views of the police seemed to be further complicated by broader concerns of discriminatory treatment."
• Cops, Clinicians, or Both? Collaborative Approaches to Responding to Behavioral Health Emergencies by National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors, August, 2020
  "Individuals [in behavioral health crisis] account for a quarter of police shootings and over 2 million jail bookings per year. Explicit and implicit bias magnify these problems for people of color."

Poverty and wealth

• Driving Injustice: Consequences and Disparities in North Carolina Criminal Legal and Traffic Debt by Duke Law School Wilson Center for Science and Justice, September, 2021
  "Over 650,000 people, or 1 in 12 adults in North Carolina currently have unpaid criminal court debt. One consequence of unpaid debt is indefinite suspension of driving privileges."

Probation and parole

• Electronic Prisons: The Operation of Ankle Monitoring in the Criminal Legal System by Kate Weisburd et al., September, 2021
  "Monitoring and its attendant rules significantly burden basic rights, liberty and dignity."

Public Opinion

• Public Opinion About Police Weapons and Equipment: An Exploratory AnalysisPaywall :( by Kevin H. Wozniak, Kevin M. Drakulich, and Brian R. Calfano, March, 2021
  "We find that public opinion defies easy classification into "militarized" versus "routine" equipment categories...perceptions of police misconduct and bias predict opposition to some types of tools."

Race and ethnicity

• County-Level Context and Sentence Lengths for Black, Latinx, and White Individuals Sentenced to Prison: A Multi-Level AssessmentPaywall :( by Katherine A. Durante, June, 2021
  "Race and ethnicity continue to be salient predictors of punishment, with Black and Latinx individuals facing harsher outcomes than their White counterparts."

Recidivism and Reentry

• Recidivism Rates: What You Need to Know by Council on Criminal Justice, September, 2021
  "This brief summarizes the key takeaways from the most recent [recidivism] report, released in July 2021, and analyzes them in the context of previous findings."
• Beyond The Record: A Justice-Oriented Approach to Background Checks by John Jay College Institute for Justice and Opportunity, September, 2021
  "This guide contains information about the negative impact of a conviction record, and how background checks often perpetuate the racial disparities within our country's criminal legal system."

Women

• In the Extreme: Women Serving Life Without Parole and Death Sentences in the United States by Sentencing Project, September, 2021
  "One third of the women serving life without parole are Black. Among women in our sample of over 1,000 women across 16 states we find that Black women were on average 4.5 years younger at sentencing compared to white women."

Youth

• Federal Sentencing of Child Pornography: Production Offenses by United States Sentencing Commission, October, 2021
  "Notably, in 2020 alone, the Cyber Tipline of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received 21.7 million reports of child sexual abuse imagery, online child exploitation and enticement, child sexual molestation, and child sex trafficking."
• Federal Sentencing of Child Pornography: Non-Production Offenses by United States Sentencing Commission, June, 2021
  "The average sentence [for non-production child pornography offenses] increased more gradually, from 91 months in fiscal year 2005 to 103 months in fiscal year 2019."
• Predictive Properties of a General Risk-Need Measure in Diverse Justice Involved Youth: A Prospective Field Validity Study by Jessica Prince et al., April, 2021
  "Across jurisdictions, there has been debate about the use of structured risk-need assessment measures with diverse justice involved youth (e.g., Indigenous peoples, females)."