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

• Towed into Debt: How Towing Practices in California Punish Poor People by Western Center on Law & Poverty, March, 2019
  "For many Californians, a vehicle tow means the permanent loss of their car and, along with it, the loss of employment, access to education and medical care, and, for some, their only shelter." Categories: Poverty and wealth
• Driver's License Suspension in North Carolina by Brandon L. Garrett and William Crozier, March, 2019
  "We found that there are 1,225,000 active driver's licenses suspensions in North Carolina for non-driving related reasons, relating to failure to pay traffic fines and court courts, and failure to appear in court for traffic offenses." Categories: Poverty and wealth Police and Policing
• A Proposal to End Regressive Taxation through Law Enforcement by The Hamilton Project, March, 2019
  "Over the past few decades the directives handed down to the everyday agents of law enforcement have incrementally shifted focus away from public safety and toward public finance." Categories: Police and Policing
• Pregnancy Outcomes in US Prisons, 2016-2017 by Sufrin et al., March, 2019
  "Overall, 1396 pregnant women were admitted to prisons; 3.8% of newly admitted women and 0.6% of all women were pregnant in December 2016." Categories: Health impact Women
• What Percentage of Americans Have Ever Had a Family Member Incarcerated?: Evidence from the Family History of Incarceration Survey by Enns et al., March, 2019
  "45 percent of Americans have ever had an immediate family member incarcerated. The incarceration of an immediate family member was most prevalent for blacks (63 percent) but common for whites (42 percent) and Hispanics (48 percent) as well." Categories: Families Race and ethnicity
• Commercialized (In)Justice: Consumer Abuses in the Bail And Corrections Industry by National Consumer Law Center, March, 2019
  "The growth of the corrections industry accelerates the trend whereby the costs of our legal system are imposed on low-income, disadvantaged communities least able to shoulder such burdens, rather than shared as a collective public responsibility." Categories: Privatization Poverty and wealth
• Evaluation of Pretrial Justice System Reforms That Use the Public Safety Assessment: Effects in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina by MDRC, March, 2019
  "Mecklenburg County substantially reduced its use of money bail and detained fewer defendants, without sacrificing public safety or court appearance rates." Categories: Pretrial Detention
• Dirty Data, Bad Predictions: How Civil Rights Violations Impact Police Data, Predictive Policing Systems, and Justice by Rashida Richardson, Jason Schultz, Kate Crawford, March, 2019
  "The failure to adequately interrogate and reform police data creation and collection practices can result in skewed predictive policing systems and create lasting consequences that will permeate throughout the criminal justice system." Categories: Police and Policing
• Aggressive Policing and the Educational Performance of Minority Youth by Joscha Legewie and Jeffrey Fagan, February, 2019
  "Aggressive policing can thus lower educational performance for some minority groups, providing evidence that the consequences of policing extend into key domains of social life, with implications for the educational trajectories of minority youth." Categories: Police and Policing
• No Credit For Time Served? Incarceration and Credit-Driven Crime Cycles by Abhay Aneja and Carlos Avenancio-Leon, February, 2019
  "Incarceration significantly reduces access to credit, and that in turn leads to substantial increases in recidivism, creating a perverse feedback loop." Categories: Economics of Incarceration Poverty and wealth
• High Time for Criminal Justice Reform: Marijuana Expungement Statutes in States with Legalized or Decriminalized Marijuana Laws by Alana E. Rosen, February, 2019
  "States that legalize or decriminalize marijuana should automatically include expungement provisions that dismiss and erase, resentence, or redesignate the records of individuals with previous marijuana-related convictions." Categories: Drug Policy
• Impact of Risk Assessment on Judges' Fairness in Sentencing Relatively Poor Defendants by Jennifer L. Skeem, Nicholas Scurich, and John Monahan, January, 2019
  "When risk assessment information was added to these cases, judges were more likely to sentence the relatively poor defendant to incarceration than his more affluent counterpart." Categories: Pretrial Detention
• Criminal Justice Debt in the South: A Primer for the Southern Partnership to Reduce Debt by National Consumer Law Center, December, 2018
  "The excessive criminal justice debts that burden people leaving prison create a barrier to successful reentry, contributing to cycles of incarceration." Categories: Poverty and wealth
• A Public Health Strategy for the Opioid Crisis by Saloner et al., November, 2018
  "A tough-on-crime approach has a high likelihood of backfiring: overzealous law enforcement can lead fewer people to come forward when their companions are overdosing, thereby increasing health risks." Categories: Drug Policy Health impact
• Racial Bias in Bail Decisions by David Arnold, Will Dobbie, and Crystal S. Yang, April, 2018
  "Estimates from Miami and Philadelphia show that bail judges are racially biased against black defendants, with substantially more racial bias among both inexperienced and part-time judges." Categories: Race and ethnicity Poverty and wealth Pretrial Detention
• Misdemeanor Disenfranchisement? The demobilizing effects of brief jail spells on potential voters by Ariel White, March, 2018
  "Jail sentences arising from misdemeanor cases decrease voter turnout in the next election, especially for black defendants." Categories: Jails
• The Effects of Pretrial Detention on Conviction, Future Crime, and Employment: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Judges by Will Dobbie, Jacob Goldin, and Crystal S. Yang, January, 2018
  We find that pretrial detention significantly increases the probability of conviction, primarily through an increase in guilty pleas. It has no net effect on future crime, but decreases formal sector employment and the receipt of some government benefits. Categories: Pretrial Detention Economics of Incarceration
• Mass Probation and Inequality: Race, Class, and Gender Disparities in Supervision and Revocation by Michelle Phelps, 2018
  "The results suggest that probation supervision contributes to racial disparities in imprisonment, both by diverting more white defendants to probation initially and by revoking black probationers at greater rates." Categories: Probation and parole Race and ethnicity
• The Unintended Impact of Pretrial Detention on Case Outcomes: Evidence from New York City Arraignments by Emily Leslie and Nolan G. Pope, August, 2017
  "Our results indicate a strong causal relationship between pretrial detention and case outcomes. We see consistent evidence that detainees plead guilty more often to more serious offenses and some evidence that they serve longer sentences." Categories: Pretrial Detention
• Criminalization of Self-Induced Abortion in the United States: Report to the U.N. Working Group on Discrimination Against Women by Farah Diaz-Tello and Cynthia Soohoo, June, 2017
  "Whether people end their own pregnancies out of preference or necessity, historical and present trends indicate that criminalization is not a deterrent to self-induction." Categories: Women
• A Survey of Prosecutorial Diversion in Illinois by Center for Health and Justice at TASC, March, 2017
  "As a growing field, there are many opportunities for improvement in diversion practices--in how programs are designed, implemented, and evaluated; in how data are collected and shared; and in ensuring that community services are available and accessible." Categories: Sentencing Policy and Practices Trials
• "Forced into Breaking the Law": The Criminalization of Homelessness in Connecticut by Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, October, 2016
  "This cycle of incarceration and homelessness comes at a steep cost to people experiencing homelessness, as well as to taxpayers, all while failing to address the root cause of homelessness: a lack of housing solutions." Categories: Poverty and wealth
• Who Pays for Government? Descriptive Representation and Exploitative Revenue Sources by Michael W. Sances and Hye Young You, September, 2016
  "We find municipal governments with higher black populations rely more heavily on fines and fees for revenue. Further, we find that the presence of black city council members significantly reduces - though does not eliminate - this pattern." Categories: Race and ethnicity Economics of Incarceration
• Too High a Price: What Criminalizing Homelessness Costs Colorado by Homeless Advocacy Policy Project, February, 2016
  "Cities issue citations to homeless residents at a staggering rate." Categories: Poverty and wealth
• No Right to Rest: Criminalizing Homelessness in Colorado by The Denver Homeless Out Loud Report Team, April, 2015
  "In addition to formal citation and arrest, this survey finds evidence of extrajudicial harassment of homeless people. Both police and private security forces commonly harass and enforce punishments on homeless people, even without legal authority to do so" Categories: Police and Policing Poverty and wealth
• Sheriffs Addressing the Mental Health Crisis in the Community and in the Jails by Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice, 2015
  "This report identifies successful practices that local law enforcement can employ to reduce the arrest and incarceration of people living with mental illness in their jurisdictions." Categories: Mental Health Police and Policing
• The criminogenic and psychological effects of police stops on adolescent black and Latino boys by Del Toro et al., 2015
  "Our findings suggest that the single most common proactive policing strategy--directing officers to make contact with individual boys and young men in "high-crime" areas--may impose a terrible cost." Categories: Police and Policing Race and ethnicity
• A National Survey of Criminal Justice Diversion Programs and Initiatives by Center for Health and Justice at TASC, December, 2013
  With many diversion programs in the country, there are no overarching standards for collecting or publishing data for the purposes of evaluating different types of programs against common sets of performance measures such as reducing costs and recidivism. Categories: Sentencing Policy and Practices
• Incarceration as Forced Migration: Effects on Selected Community Health Outcomes by James C. Thomas and Elizabeth Torrone, October, 2006
  "High rates of incarceration can have the unintended consequence of destabilizing communities and contributing to adverse health outcomes." Categories: Health impact Community Impact