Bail and Pretrial Justice in the United States: A Field of Possibility

In this review of scholarship on bail and pretrial justice in the United States, we analyze how the field of bail operates (and why it operates as it does), focusing on its official and unofficial objectives, core assumptions and values, power dynamics, and technologies. The field, we argue, provides extensive opportunities for generating revenue and containing, controlling, and changing defendants and their families. In pursuit of these objectives, actors consistently generate harms that disproportionately affect low-income people of color and amplify social inequalities. We close with an analysis of political struggles over bail, including current and emerging possibilities for both reformist and radical change. In this, we urge scholars toward sustained engagement with people and organizations in criminalized communities, which pushes scholars to reconsider our preconceptions regarding safety, justice, and the potential for systemic change and opens up new avenues for research and public engagement.

Don't Call It a Comeback: The Criminological and Sociological Study of Subfelonies

After featuring prominently in early law and society research, the study of subfelony enforcement and processing was largely eclipsed by the study of mass incarceration. Of late, the subject matter has enjoyed a resurgence. This review addresses what things might be included in a study of subfelonies, what aspects about them researchers have studied, and why it might be theoretically interesting to study them.

Assessing the Impact of the Violence Against Women Act

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has been hailed as the federal government's signature legislation responding to gender-based violence. VAWA, passed in 1994 and reauthorized three times since then, has created several new programs and protections for victims of gender-based violence. VAWA is, however, primarily a funding bill and what it primarily funds is the criminal legal system. But the criminal legal response to gender-based violence has not been effective in decreasing rates of gender-based violence or deterring violence. A VAWA that discontinued funding for the criminal legal system and instead focused on economics, prevention, and community-based resources—a noncarceral VAWA—could better meet the needs of victims of gender-based violence and target the underlying causes of that violence.

Sanctions, Perceptions, and Crime

The interplay of sanctions, perceptions, and crime has special significance in criminology and is central to a long tradition of perceptual deterrence research as well as to more recent scholarship on crime decision-making. This article seeks to review this body of research as it pertains to three basic questions. First, are people's perceptions of punishment accurate? The evidence indicates that people are generally but imperfectly aware of punishments allowed under the law but are nevertheless sensitive to changes in enforcement, especially of behaviors that are personally relevant. Second, does potential apprehension affect people's perceived risk and behavior when faced with a criminal opportunity? A highly varied body of literature supports the conclusion that perceptions are sensitive to situational cues and that behavior is sensitive to perceived risk, but these links can be weakened when individuals are in emotionally or socially charged situations. Third, do people revise their risk perceptions in response to crime and punishment experiences? Studies of perceptual change support the contention that people systematically update their perceptions based on their own and others’ experiences with crime and punishment. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 5 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

The Impact of Incarceration on Recidivism

The US prison population stands at 1.43 million persons, with an additional 740,000 persons in local jails. Nearly all will eventually return to society. This review examines the available evidence on how the experience of incarceration is likely to impact the probability that formerly incarcerated individuals will reoffend. Our focus is on two types of studies, those based on the random assignments of cases to judges, called judge instrumental-variable studies, and those based on discontinuities in sentence severity in sentencing grids, called regression discontinuity studies. Both types of studies are designed to account for selection bias in nonexperimental estimates of the impact of incarceration on reoffending. Most such studies find that the experience of postconviction imprisonment has little impact on the probability of recidivism. A smaller number of studies do, however, find significant effects, both positive and negative. The negative, recidivism-reducing effects are mostly in settings in which rehabilitative programming is emphasized and the positive, criminogenic effects are found in settings in which such programming is not emphasized. The findings of studies of pretrial incarceration are more consistent—most find a deleterious effect on postrelease reoffending. We also conclude that additional work is needed to better understand the heterogeneous effects of incarceration as well as the mechanisms through which incarceration effects, when observed, are generated. For policy, our conclusion of the generally deleterious effect of pretrial detention adds to a larger body of evidence pointing to the social value of limiting. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 5 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Analytic Criminology: Mechanisms and Methods in the Explanation of Crime and its Causes

Criminology is a smorgasbord of disparate theory and poorly integrated research findings. Theories tend to focus either on people's crime propensity or the criminogenic inducements of environments; rarely are these two main approaches effectively combined in the analysis of crime and its causes. Criminological research often either avoids questions of causation and explanation (e.g., risk factor approach) or is based on research designs that yield highly partial accounts (e.g., place-oriented experimental work). To advance knowledge about crime and its causes and prevention, we argue that there is a need for an analytic criminology that allows key theoretical insights and central empirical findings about people's crime propensities and environments’ criminogenic inducements and their combination to be integrated based on an adequate action theory. In this review, we outline this approach and its main methodological implications and discuss how its focus on why and how questions leads to a characteristic integration of theory development, methods, and research. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 5 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Gang Research in the Twenty-First Century

For nearly a century, gang scholarship has remained foundational to criminological theory and method. Twenty-first-century scholarship continues to refine and, in some cases, supplant long-held axioms about gang formation, organization, and behavior. Recent advances can be traced to shifts in the empirical social reality and conditions within which gangs exist and act. We draw out this relationship—between the ontological and epistemological—by identifying key macrostructural shifts that have transformed gang composition and behavior and, in turn, forced scholars to revise dominant theoretical frameworks and analytical approaches. These shifts include large-scale economic transformations, the expansion of punitive state interventions, the proliferation of the Internet and social media, intensified globalization, and the increasing presence of women and LGBTQ individuals in gangs and gang research. By introducing historically unprecedented conditions and actors, these developments provide novel opportunities to reconsider previous analyses of gang structure, violence, and other related objects of inquiry. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 5 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Criminal Record Stigma and Surveillance in the Digital Age

This review analyzes criminal record stigma and surveillance through the concept of digital punishment: the collection and widespread dissemination of personally identifiable data by the American criminal legal system and subsequent private actors. The analysis is organized into three parts: a descriptive account of the technological, legal, and social factors that have created mass criminal record data; a theoretical framework for understanding digital criminal records through stigma and surveillance theories; and an argument that contemporary criminal records constitute digital punishment, with emphasis placed on how digital records are disordered, commodified, and biased. I close by raising policy-relevant questions about the widespread disclosure and uses of criminal legal system data for extralegal purposes. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 5 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Green Criminology: Capitalism, Green Crime and Justice, and Environmental Destruction

Green criminology has developed into a criminological subfield with a substantial literature. That literature is so vast that a single review cannot do it justice. This article examines the definition of green crime, the historical development of green criminology, some major areas of green criminological research, and potential future developments. Unlike traditional criminology with its focus on human victims, green criminology recognizes that various living entities can be victims of the ways in which humans harm ecosystems. Green research thus explores crime, victimization, and justice from several theoretical positions that acknowledge these unique victims. Although green criminology contains several approaches, this review primarily focuses on political economic green criminology. The section titled The Definition, Overview, and Historical Development of Green Criminology identifies, but does not review in depth, other forms of green criminology. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 5 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

The Failed Regulation and Oversight of American Prisons

When the state incarcerates, it assumes an affirmative, non-negotiable obligation to keep people in prison safe and to provide for their basic needs. In the United States, the three branches of government—legislative, executive, and judicial—are in theory collectively responsible for making certain that this obligation is fulfilled. In practice, the checks and balances built into the system have failed to ensure even minimally decent carceral conditions. This review maps this regulatory failure. It shows that, in all branches of government, rather than policing prison officials, the relevant institutional actors instead align themselves with the officials they are supposed to regulate, leaving people in custody unprotected and vulnerable to abuse by the very actors sworn to keep them safe. This pattern is no accident. It reflects a palpable normative hostility and contempt toward the incarcerated, an attitude with deep roots in the virulent race hatred endemic to the American carceral project from its earliest days. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 5 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.