High-quality estimates of the cost of crime are central to good policymaking. For 30 years, estimates of crime costs have focused on identifying the burden borne by direct victims, third parties, and governments, conceptualized as impacts on missed work, health-care expenditures, destroyed property, and pain and suffering. I highlight recent efforts to account for these costs and point out that advances in social and computer science create clear pathways for innovation beyond the current established framework. Counterfactual-based analyses with administrative records have identified the importance of accounting for the age distribution of victims. Recent efforts to quantify the consequences of perceived racial inequality and the value of deterrence can refine estimates of the cost of government reaction. Humanity's growing reliance on the Internet for all forms of interaction requires more careful effort by social scientists to identify the societal consequences of different types of cybercrime.
Exonerations—following the wrongful conviction of the innocent—are now commonplace and widely recognized. And yet wrongful convictions continue to plague the American criminal justice system. In this article, we discuss and critique the definition and concept of an exoneration and explore the growing influence of the National Registry of Exonerations, an online database and repository of wrongful convictions that has inspired substantial scholarship since its founding in 2012. Analyzing this scholarship and the National Registry of Exonerations data and reports it relied upon, we review and analyze the primary legal errors that contribute to wrongful convictions, the reforms designed to minimize these errors, and explore the systemic problems affecting the criminal justice system that allow these errors to take root and persist.
After George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2013, three women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, created, in their words, “a Black-centered, political-movement-building project called #BlackLivesMatter.” Just over a decade later, this movement has grown into a powerful, decentralized coalition catalyzed by the protest actions following the deaths of Ferguson teen Michael Brown and New Yorker Eric Garner at the hands of police officers and by the worldwide response to police violence following George Floyd's choking death by Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis. This edition of Perspectives is an effort to take stock of how these events and attendant social movements have inspired change in criminal justice research, policy, and law. In particular, we were interested in how the past decade's events have influenced how we teach. We asked noted Yale Law School scholar and professor, James Forman, author of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize winning book Locking Up Our Own : Crime and Punishment in Black America , to select a group for and to guide a conversation on this topic. Professor Forman is joined by Bennett Capers (Fordham School of Law), Angela Davis (American University Washington College of Law), Erin Murphy (NYU School of Law), and Shaun Ossei-Owusu (University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School).
This article reviews the research on interrogation, a practice that has been undergoing a period of reform such that the terms investigative interviewing and police interviews are now commonly used when referring to the police questioning of suspects. Tracing the evolution of practice and research, we argue that the former has been heavily influenced by the latter and a robust literature on effective and ethical approaches to suspect questioning now exists, leading to numerous reforms in the United States and abroad. Whereas the goal of interrogation had been to obtain confessions, the goal of investigative interviewing is the search for truthful, accurate, and complete information. Despite the decades of research by legal and psychological scholars, there is still much to be learned, and we conclude the review by laying out several possible avenues of future research we feel are appropriate for scholars of crime and justice to undertake.
In the United States, nearly all incarcerated individuals will eventually be released. This review takes stock of recent theory and research on factors that condition the effects of incarceration and lead to variation in outcomes among those reentering the community. Reentry success is a multidimensional construct that encompasses several interrelated life domains. A small set of conceptual frameworks has been used to explain why these life domains may become collateral consequences of incarceration. The review describes how social support, education and training, employment, public programs, healthcare and addiction treatment, contextual factors, and personal change and growth may counteract those harmful mechanisms and promote positive post-release outcomes. Programs and policies that strengthen families, build human capital, facilitate labor market attachment, address personal financial problems, and reduce substance use may improve directly targeted outcomes and may also have beneficial spillover effects on other domains of interest.
In recent decades, decriminalization has gained renewed salience on the criminal justice reform agenda. This article considers the promises and pitfalls of the strategic reliance on decriminalization as a vehicle for scaling back the carceral state. Building on empirical and theoretical insights drawn from various policy domains and national contexts, this analysis sheds light on the double-edged consequences of different variants of de jure and de facto decriminalization, including legislative, judicial, and prosecutorial mechanisms of removing the criminal label from certain forms of behavior. Decriminalization reforms provide opportunities to experiment with alternatives to incarceration and demonstrate their benefits to previously skeptical audiences. However, in many cases, they widen the social control net, shore up the legitimacy of the carceral state, and perpetuate the very institutional problems they aim to address.
We use the fiftieth anniversary of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) as an opportunity to assess the contributions of the survey to our understanding of crime and its consequences, the nature of victimization, the development of criminological theory, and the advancement of survey methodology. Even though studies have established the limitations of official or police-recorded crime data in representing crime, it is not uncommon for data users to be unaware of or discount the reasons supporting victim surveys. We critically review the existing knowledge and describe how the survey has developed and changed over time, the reasons behind such modifications, and the changes that began in 2024. Given the challenges that survey research currently faces, we conclude the review with suggestions on how the survey can maintain its unique importance and relevance in the future.
In 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned nearly fifty years of the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade in its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization . In the period since, mounting legal and medical chaos has emerged, testing the limits of law and legal order and resulting in heightened surveillance and policing of pregnancy and motherhood. This review, however, starts from the perspective that reproductive policing and surveillance began before Dobbs and even Roe . Its origins must rightfully be acknowledged as dating back centuries to the commodification of women and children and the federal enactment of fugitive slave laws, which implicitly and explicitly embedded surveillance in their texts. Weaving an analytical thread from the Antebellum period to the present, this review observes the persistence of policing, even as it has transformed throughout the decades.
This review critically examines long-term trends of lethal violence in England and Wales. Notably, the timing, character, and distribution of the homicide drop here deviates from trends observed in other forms of violence and comparable jurisdictions. Drawing on extensive research and multidecade data from the Homicide Index (1977–2020), this review explores key theoretical frameworks, disaggregates offender and victim profiles, and investigates the structural, cultural, and interpersonal factors shaping lethal violence. Particular attention is given to the gendered and racialized dimensions of homicide, the increasing proportion of unsolved cases, and the importance of developing bespoke models. The review identifies critical data gaps, especially around ethnicity, and outlines priorities for future research. It argues for recognizing homicide as a distinct phenomenon in England and Wales, requiring tailored theoretical and empirical attention.
Social ties are a defining feature of policing. They enforce norms, carry prestige, reward loyalty, silence dissent, create cohesion, and protect group boundaries. Network analysis maps these ties—from assigned partners to the colleagues officers text and meet for off-duty drinks—and examines how they shape daily actions and law enforcement culture. This review highlights key studies using network approaches to understand policing. By putting relations at the forefront, these studies build on foundational police scholarship and open new ways for investigating policing's social structure. However, despite recent advances in network approaches, current work tends to focus on misconduct and uses of force, leaving unanswered questions about how social ties can promote positive outcomes, such as officer morale, well-being, and recruitment. To advance the field, we call for comprehensive data across multiple agencies and levels to fully capture the central role of networks in policing.
This article reviews theory and evidence on the role community-oriented organizations play in reducing violence while fostering neighborhood resilience. We conceptualize community-oriented organizations as those that have a local focus on people, institutions, or places within a particular area; work to support residents and confront local challenges or problems; and are operated by institutions other than the state, with the most common organizational form being the nonprofit. After reviewing several theoretical traditions that illuminate the various mechanisms by which community-oriented organizations may be linked with crime and violence, we review the available evidence on the effectiveness of community-oriented approaches to confronting violence from both quantitative and qualitative sources. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the turn toward the community for research in criminology and for social policy.
The ebb and flow of social control efforts aimed at LGBTQ people necessitate a thorough investigation into their experiences. This review of the literature is organized around four key themes that characterize LGBTQ people's experiences with crime, criminalization, victimization, and the criminal legal system—including police, courts, and carceral facilities. LGBTQ people experience excessive rates of arrest and incarceration and have higher rates of victimization, which illustrate disproportionality. Their experiences differ from those of their cisgender and heterosexual counterparts and are conditioned by age, race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, illustrating intersectionality. The two primary, interrelated mechanisms driving LGBTQ criminalization and victimization are visibility and heteronormativity, which refers to the value systems that prioritize and reward being heterosexual and cisgender, stigmatize LGBTQ people, and encourage discriminatory treatment of people who are visibly LGBTQ. A discussion of future directions for research and policy concludes the article.
This review explores central challenges in measuring violent crime. Most data on violent crime originate from civilian calls for service that lead to police reports. We review research on the factors influencing whether victims contact the police and on police report-writing practices. We then examine how these factors affect research that estimates the causal impact of policies and interventions on violent crime, highlighting how shifts in victim and police reporting can introduce bias in these estimates. Finally, we assess the strengths and limitations of various data sources for measuring violent crime and provide some key lessons for future research.
A simple regression of treatment on outcome may not recover the causal effect due to two potential forms of bias—two-way causality between treatment and outcome and omitted variables that influence both treatment and outcome. A variety of econometric and statistical methods are available for estimating causal effects when these forms of bias are present. This review discusses one such method, instrumental variables (IV) regression. To set the stage, we discuss why a randomized experiment provides an estimate of the causal effect of the treatment on the outcome of interest as measured by a quantity called the population average treatment effect (PATE). We next elaborate on why analyses of nonexperimental data may lead to asymptotically biased estimates of the PATE. After this, we discuss the conditions under which estimates from an IV regression uncover the local average treatment effect (LATE), a constituent component of the PATE. We next turn to two illustrative examples. The first, on whether pretrial incarceration affects case outcomes, illustrates the use of IV regression to address omitted variable bias. We also use this as an opportunity to elaborate on the proper interpretation of the LATE. The second example illustrates the use of IV regression to identify the causal mechanisms underlying the PATEs estimated by randomized experiments. We close by discussing other statistical and econometric methods to address endogeneity in criminological research.
Nationalism is a complex social process and has not been very well understood or utilized in criminology. This is surprising because the concept has significant explanatory power and can unlock deep and meaningful social practices in ways that competing accounts do not. Nationalism has multiple forms and configurations, as it operates as a cultural practice, ideology, institutional arrangement, social movement, and emotional register, each with implications for criminal justice, each with integrative and exclusionary elements. This review takes up salient dimensions of nationalism to show not only its relevance for criminology but also how nationalism is foundational to criminal justice itself and its contemporary transformations. European societies are facing a series of challenges in nearly all areas of social life, including demographic declines, cultural clashes over immigration, fear of crime, and unmet demands for increased security. The interplay of nationalism and criminal justice is at the center of these conflicts and possible resolutions.
In 2022, the US Supreme Court affirmed the constitutional right of most civilians to carry concealed firearms in public for self-defense, overturning restrictive concealed carry laws in several states. Concealed carry regulations have evolved substantially through four waves of reforms, beginning with prohibitions of the practice in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to today's permitless-carry regimes in more than half of US states. In recent decades, competing claims about whether permissive concealed carry regulations deter or exacerbate criminal violence have been studied with increasing rigor, with the weight of evidence now showing that such laws cause increases in homicide and violent crime rates. We review the limited available research examining the mechanisms by which permissive concealed carry laws increase violence and the evidence that specific law provisions may contribute to those effects. This review is intended to inform ongoing decisions and debates about concealed carry regulations and their impact on violence in America.
The interconnections between immigration, crime, and criminal justice are leaving a stronger and more lasting imprint on penal policy, the design of penal institutions, policing practices, and legal outcomes than in previous periods. This review presents the work of a growing area of scholarly inquiry that highlights the transformative impact of immigration control on criminal justice. Although heated and fierce political rhetoric about immigrants commands a lot of media and scholarly attention, the actual contours of immigration policies within the criminal justice field are more difficult to discern and demand empirical examination. The review also addresses the potential challenges these developments represent for justice and the rule of law, which lie not only in the harshness of the system but also in the fact that it may serve as a vehicle for the growth of authoritarianism and exceptionalism.
This review examines the contributions of bioarchaeological research to criminological understandings of violence, focusing on the structural conditions that influence variations in violence across different societies and historical periods. Bioarchaeology offers an expansive temporal and geographical perspective, analyzing skeletal trauma to interpret diverse forms of violence—including warfare, ritual practices, and structural oppression—beyond the conventional criminological focus on crime. Contrary to narratives suggesting a linear decline in violence with the rise of state societies, bioarchaeological findings indicate fluctuating patterns of violence, often linked to the quality and stability of state institutions. Resource scarcity and climate stress are also identified as significant factors influencing violence, paralleling criminological theories that associate violence with poverty, marginalization, and social instability. The review advocates for interdisciplinary collaboration to deepen our understanding of violence as a context-dependent phenomenon shaped by ecological, institutional, and social dynamics.
This review considers recent evidence on the impact of the social safety net on crime and recidivism. The social safety net comprises means-tested public assistance (e.g., cash welfare, food assistance, disability assistance, public health insurance) and contributory social insurance (e.g., unemployment insurance). Dozens of recent studies, largely outside of criminology, evaluate the impact of shocks to the scope or generosity of social safety net programs. Findings from these natural experiments support the conclusion that public welfare policy has measurable benefits for public safety at both individual and aggregate levels. These benefits encompass property as well as violent crime and are observed over both immediate and extended time horizons. The review closes with a call for more criminological contributions to this growing literature.
