Beginning in the 1970s, the United States began an experiment in mass imprisonment. Supporters argued that harsh punishments such as imprisonment reduce crime by deterring inmates from reoffending. Skeptics argued that imprisonment may have a criminogenic effect. The skeptics were right. Previous narrative reviews and meta-analyses concluded that the overall effect of imprisonment is null. Based on

American criminal laws and criminal justice systems are harsher, more punitive, more afflicted by racial disparities and injustices, more indifferent to suffering, and less respectful of human dignity than those of other Western countries. The explanations usually offered—rising crime rates in the 1970s and 1980s, public anger and anxiety, crime control politics, neoliberal economic and social policies—are

Empirical research on public policy preferences must attend to Whites’ animus toward Blacks. For a quarter-century, studies have consistently found that Kinder and Sanders’s four-item measure of “racial resentment” is a robust predictor of almost every social and criminal justice policy opinion. Racial animus increases Whites’ opposition to social welfare policies that benefit Blacks and their support

The social transformations of crime and punishment in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries challenge traditional conceptions of criminal propensity and character. A life-course framework on cohort differences in growing up during these times of social change highlights large-scale inequalities in life experiences. Entire cohorts of children have come of age in such different historical

Criminal justice is afflicted with enforcement swamping crises. Is a bigger criminal justice system the only answer? Are there better ways to scale up prevention and justice? Literatures on four system-capacity crises, selected for how different they are, show that there are collective efficacy strategies that can move from institution to institution to scale up justice and prevention. Substance abuse

Protecting the dignity and human rights of prisoners poses difficult challenges. Degradation is a hallmark of all punishment and especially of imprisonment. Prisons as total institutions entail distinctive power relations between staff and inmates that increase risks of violations of prisoners’ dignity. Protection of human dignity is complicated by difficulties in defining the term: the sense of personal

Cross-national policy movement in crime control has only recently become the focus of scholarly attention. Research findings suggest, despite appearances to the contrary, that fully fledged policy transfers are rare. In practice, soft transfer (in terms of symbolic dimensions of policy) appears more prevalent than harder manifestations (e.g., the travel of institutions, instruments, and practices)

Conceptual debates about proportionality and its moral and political force need to be placed in historical and institutional context. Conceptual, moral, political, and practical questions about proportionality are inextricably linked. This insight should lead us away from the dominant conception of proportionality as a moral precept and toward a political conception of proportionality that is inevitably

“Less here than meets the eye,” a Venusian documentary maker calling home might say. Books, films, and mass media portray organized crime as larger than life, a fearsome monster among us, an awesome moneymaking machine. Reality is different. Organized crime organizations are life-size, understandable outgrowths of local cultures, political systems, and markets. In some times and places, they control

A network approach helps us better specify and model collaboration among people involved in organized crime. The focus on collaboration raises the boundary specification problem: Where do criminal organizations start, where do they end, and who is involved? Traditional approaches sometimes assume the existence of simple, rigid structures when complexity and fluidity are the norms. A network approach

Four conditions influence the complexity of organized crime money laundering. First are diverse types of crime and forms in which proceeds are generated, including the type of payment, the visibility of crimes to victims or authorities, and the lapse before financial investigation occurs (if it does). Second, the amount of individual net profits causes differences between criminals who have no use

Human smuggling is a form of illegal trade in which the commodity is an assisted illegal entry into a country. While this is hardly a new phenomenon, evidence points to increased involvement of smugglers in facilitating these journeys. This has been linked to the hardening of entry policies in developed countries. Smuggling markets tend to possess low barriers to entry and remarkably similar organizational

Many policy makers and some academics believe that mafias move easily between countries and with little difficulty quickly become deeply rooted. The reality is more complicated. Mafiosi often move away from their home territories because they are forced to do so rather than because they relocate for strategic reasons; that kind of transplantation abroad tends to be unsuccessful. Whether transplantation

Outlaw motorcycle clubs have spread across the globe. Their members have been associated with serious crime, and law enforcement often perceives them to be a form of organized crime. Outlaw bikers are disproportionately engaged in crime, but the role of the club itself in these crimes remains unclear. Three scenarios describe possible relations between clubs and the crimes of their members. In the

Italian mafias—Cosa Nostra, Camorra, and ‘Ndrangheta—are long-lived, resilient organizations that have evolved to adapt to environmental changes. They have different organizational models. While Cosa Nostra (in the past) and ‘Ndrangheta are characterized by a unitary, vertical structure and higher-level coordination bodies, Camorra has a plurality of organizational models; the majority of clans maintain

Widely accepted findings in developmental and life-course criminology cannot be extended to criminal careers of organized crime offenders. While most offenders begin offending at a young age, criminal careers in organized crime are generally characterized by a late onset typically characterized by relatively serious offending. Different patterns exist for different groups, including early starters

The involvement of women in organized criminal activities such as street gangs, mafias, and illegal transnational markets, including human trafficking, human smuggling, and drug trafficking, is an important but understudied subject. Gendered studies and feminist theories can improve current knowledge and provide important new insights. They can enhance understanding of women’s roles, behavior, motivations

The Italian American Cosa Nostra crime families are the longest-lived and most successful organized crime organizations in US history, achieving their pinnacle of power in the 1970s and 1980s. The families seized opportunities during the early twentieth-century labor wars and under national alcohol prohibition from 1919 to 1933. Control of labor unions gave them power to determine the companies that

Efforts to standardize sentences and eliminate disparities in a state or the federal system cannot succeed; distinctive practices and norms, diverse local cultures, and practical and political needs of officials and agencies assure major local differences in sentencing practice. Presumptive sentencing guidelines developed by sentencing commissions, however, are the most effective means to improve consistency

Since 1980, 22 state and federal jurisdictions have adopted sentencing guidelines. Nineteen still have them. No two systems are alike. Experience suggests that any well-designed system requires five core features: a permanent, balanced, independent, and adequately funded sentencing commission; typical-case presumptive sentences and departure criteria; a hybrid sentencing theory that recognizes both

The jury trial has long been a keystone of the American criminal justice system. Few defendants exercise their right to trial, however, and those who do tend to receive significantly harsher punishments if convicted. This phenomenon, known as a trial tax or, conversely, as a guilty plea discount, is one of the most profound and consistent findings in the empirical sentencing literature. Estimates of

An inhabited institutions perspective views institutions from the bottom up, as “inhabited” by individual and organizational actors who have agency, rather than as static, top-down structures. Criminal justice structures and policies, such as those that govern courts and their sentencing decisions, are dependent on court participants. From this perspective, several conclusions emerge. First, theory

The Model Penal Code: Sentencing (MPCS) rewrites the 1962 Model Penal Code’s provisions on sentencing and corrections. Since the 1960s, use of all forms of punishment has exploded, including incarceration, community supervision, supervision revocation, economic sanctions, and collateral consequences of convictions. The MPCS provides an institutional framework for all major forms of punishment. It consists

The Supreme Court decision in United States v. Booker seemed to portend a new era for federal sentencing. By making federal guidelines advisory rather than “mandatory,” and authorizing judges to critically review their development, Booker empowered judges to reject unsound guidelines. Booker has had, however, surprisingly little effect on sentence severity or imprisonment use. Sentencing below guideline

Blacks and Hispanics convicted of felonies are more likely than whites to receive prison sentences for their crimes, and they receive slightly longer sentences if imprisoned. Yet the majority of prior research compares sentencing decisions at a single point in time and does not give explicit attention to whether and how racial and ethnic disparities have changed. Decades of sentencing data from Minnesota

As the United States became notorious for mass incarceration, California received outsized attention. Not so much for the sheer volume of California imprisonment but because of its chaotic operation. Populist political mood swings led to Eighth Amendment violations that caused a federal court to declare the whole system unconstitutional, a decision ultimately upheld by the US Supreme Court in Brown

Predictions of dangerousness are more often wrong than right, use information they shouldn’t, and disproportionately damage minority offenders. Forty years ago, two-thirds of people predicted to be violent were not. For every two “true positives,” there were four “false positives.” Contemporary technology is little better: at best, three false positives for every two true positives. The best-informed

Sentencing guidelines were an exclusively American enterprise until recently. Since 2004, however, other countries have joined in. Contrasting approaches are exemplified by systems developed by the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission and the Sentencing Council of England and Wales. Minnesota’s guidelines are set out in grids that categorize cases by offense and criminal history. Each cell sets

Official crime and criminal justice data are influenced by different substantive (e.g., victims’ reporting rates), legal (e.g., offense definitions), and statistical (e.g., counting rules) factors. This complicates international comparison. The UN Crime Trends Survey, Eurostat’s crime statistics, and the European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics try to enhance comparability and document

A new conception of justice in punishment is needed that is premised on respect for offenders’ human dignity. It needs to acknowledge retributive and utilitarian values and incorporate independently important values of fairness and equal treatment. Punishment principles, policies, and practices lined up nicely in mid-twentieth-century America. Utilitarian principles implied a primary goal of crime

The process by which a massive compact object (like white dwarfs, neutron stars, black holes etc) gravitationally captures ambient matter is called accretion. The accretion of matter on to a compact massive star is the likely source of energy in the observed binary X-ray sources. Since black holes are ‘black’, there cannot be any direct observational evidence of them. Thus they must be observed by

Wars are related to subsequent violence in complex and at times contradictory ways. The relationships between war and postwar violence, recognized throughout history, have attracted the attention and concern of researchers, state officials, and policy makers and the broader public. Methodological challenges, however, limit the potential for isolating the precise circumstances under which war and postwar

During the 1980s and 1990s, state lawmakers shifted juvenile justice policies from a nominally offender-oriented rehabilitative approach toward a more punitive and criminalized one. Pretrial detention and delinquency dispositions had disproportionate adverse effects on minority youths. Despite juvenile courts’ convergence with criminal courts, states provided fewer and less adequate procedural safeguards

The consequences of a person’s prior crimes remain after the debt to society is paid and the sentence is discharged. While the practice of using prior convictions to enhance the severity of sentence imposed is universal, prior record enhancements (PREs) play a particularly important role in US sentencing, and especially in guidelines jurisdictions. In grid-based guidelines, criminal history constitutes

Research findings on the psychological effects of solitary confinement have been strikingly consistent since the early nineteenth century. Studies have identified a wide range of frequently occurring adverse psychological reactions that commonly affect prisoners in isolation units. The prevalence of psychological distress is extremely high. Nonetheless, use of solitary confinement in the United States

Dangers exist in both maximalist approaches to deterrence and minimalist ones. A minimal sufficiency strategy aims to avert these dangers. The objectives are to convince people that the webs of relationships within which they live mean that lawbreaking will ultimately lead to desistance and remorse and to persuading offenders that predatory crime is simply wrong. Alternative support and control strategies

Crime and Justice has been published by the University of Chicago Press since 1979, originally as a hardcover annual journal and more recently both in print and electronically. In 2016–17, it was possible to investigate the scholarly influence of 374 articles published in 44 volumes between 1979 and 2015, according to Google Scholar and the Web of Science. The most-cited articles and authors are identified

Violent crime is a major cause of social instability, injury, and death in low- and middle-income countries. Longitudinal studies in high-income countries have provided important evidence on developmental precursors of violence and other antisocial behaviors. However, there may be unique influences or different risk factor effects in other social settings. Extensive searches in seven languages and

Two principles should form the bedrock for effective policing in a democratic society. The first is that crimes averted, not arrests made, should be the primary metric for judging police effectiveness. The second is that citizens’ views about the police and their tactics for preventing crime and disorder matter independently of police effectiveness. Each principle is important in its own right and

Both targeted programs and wholesale changes are sorely needed in how individuals with mental illness are processed in the criminal justice system. Mental illness is not as directly related to criminal involvement or violence as is often assumed. Mentally ill individuals are nonetheless disproportionately present in jails and prisons. Efforts to reduce their numbers must take account of the heterogeneity

From the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, the basic drug-crime policy challenge was to manage social harms associated with the heroin and cocaine epidemics. As they ebbed, the crime-drug policy challenges changed. Alcohol receives greater attention as the leading criminogenic substance. Efforts are under way to improve and expand substance use disorder (SUD) treatment for criminally active populations

Many judge the American criminal justice system to have largely failed in its drug enforcement role, and the justice system itself has suffered a loss of community support and internal morale as a consequence. Five principles should guide improvement of drug enforcement, including that drug enforcement be viewed as a preventive activity, whose main goal is reducing drug abuse and related harms, and

American sentencing laws are rigid, harsh, and often unjust. Mass incarceration is a tragedy and a national embarrassment. Laws enacted in the 1980s and 1990s that mandated lengthy prison terms are the primary causes. The challenges are to undo mass incarceration, repeal or fundamentally overhaul the laws that caused it, and rebuild American sentencing systems. American legislators have not yet seriously

Community corrections in the twenty-first century faces three challenges: how to be an alternative to imprisonment, how to be a conduit for reducing recidivism, and how to do less harm to offenders and their families and communities. Community corrections will reduce imprisonment only if its use is viewed as a legitimate form of punishment and is incentivized, which involves subsidizing the use of

American criminal justice has deteriorated in almost every respect in the past 40 years. Overcriminalization is more common and mens rea requirements are lower. Procedural protections against wrongful conviction are weaker. Many police are demoralized and alienated from the communities they serve and lack legitimacy in the eyes of many citizens. Prosecutors have displaced judges in sentencing and routinely

American prosecutors operate within legal and practical limits, just like any other public officials within a democratic form of government. Those limits are more anemic for prosecutors than for other criminal justice officials; they have also become less effective over time. The prosecutorial function can be reimagined with more effective legal, institutional, and internal cultural constraints that

The United States has an enormous public health and safety problem from guns. The number of American civilian gun deaths in the twenty-first century through 2015 is greater than the sum of all US combat deaths in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Given our love affair with guns, the overriding policy goal has to be to reduce the toll of deaths and injuries without substantially reducing the

American parole boards have played a critical role in the formulation and administration of states’ prison policies in recent decades—and could play an equally important part in helping end mass incarceration. Long neglected by academic, research, and policy communities, systems of discretionary prison release are in need of improvement, if not “reinvention.” A plan for revitalization of parole release

Concern for equality and human dignity is largely absent from American sentencing. Prison sentences are imposed much more often than in any other Western country. Prison terms are incomparably longer. The greater frequency of imprisonment is a product of punitive attitudes and politicization of crime control policies. The longer terms result partly from abolition of parole release in every jurisdiction

Belgian sentencing is in a period of turmoil. Belgian judges value their independence. Most believe in the desirability of individualized sentencing and resent intrusions on their autonomy. Although many continue to hold classsical views about the purposes of sentencing, new practices and laws, triggered partly by several decades of rising imprisonment rates and recent efforts by policy makers and

Structural differences in sentencing systems and normative differences in the nature and influence of prevailing conceptions of justice make huge differences in patterns and practices in Western countries. In most, the views of elected politicians, the media, and the general public are believed to be irrelevant to sentencing decisions; prosecutors are politically insulated career civil servants and

Identifying the nature and causes of penal change over decades can be a fraught exercise, particularly where those changes are gradual and the reasons for changes are diffuse. Like climate change and weather patterns, Australia’s rising prison population is the product of forces that are also evident in Western Anglophonic societies but that vary in scale and speed depending on local conditions. These

Sentencing in England and Wales has evolved in a direction apart from other common law countries. Although sentencing problems found in many Western nations are present, legislative and judicial responses have been very different. The use of custody rose steeply in the 1990s and has remained stable around that level in recent years. Crimes of violence and sexual aggression have, however, attracted

Significant changes in Italian political, socioeconomic, and institutional contexts since 1985 have led to markedly harsher policies and laws. Sentencing law and penal policies have changed substantially. In the late 1980s, the legislature embraced rehabilitation in corrections and enacted a new Code of Criminal Procedure modeled on principles and values typical of adversarial legal systems. The demise

Broad harmony and much commonality characterize the basic principles and core priorities of the sentencing systems of the four larger Nordic countries, notwithstanding rich diversity in details. Since 1960, there have been three distinctive phases in criminal justice policy and associated law reforms. A liberal period of “human and rational penal policy” from the late 1960s to early 1990s reformulated

In contrast with many Western nations, the structure of Canadian sentencing and its overall effects on imprisonment did not change dramatically over the past century. To a large extent, Parliament left sentencing to judges. Broadly speaking, imprisonment was seen as a necessary evil to be used sparingly. Sentencing principles legislated in 1996 largely reflected the status quo. However, the period

Sentencing practice in Germany has long been stable, reflecting slightly falling crime rates. Public prosecutors dismiss the majority of cases that the police file with them as “cleared.” In a significant percentage of provable cases, prosecutors demand a penance payment of suspects in exchange for dismissal; many others are dismissed without any consequence for the suspect. Criminal courts dispose

French sentencing is characterized by broad judicial discretion and an ethos of individualized justice focused on rehabilitation. The aims are to prevent recidivism, and so protect the interests of society, while reintegrating the offender. By contrast, the political Right, characterized by the recent Sarkozy regime, favors deterrence through harsher penalties, minimum prison sentences, increased incarceration