Friday, April 4 2025:

• Slavery Revisited in Penal Plantation Labor, Andrea C. Armstrong. April, 2012. "Most types of prison labor will approximate conditions of involuntary servitude [thus] permissible under the convict-labor exception of the Thirteenth Amendment...Other types of labor, however, may approximate conditions of slavery."
• Parental Prisoners: The Incarcerated Mother's Constitutional Right to Parent, Emily Halter. July, 2018. "While the Supreme Court has chipped away at the rights of prisoners in other areas, finding that many rights are forfeited at the prison doors, it has never ruled on the status of parental rights during incarceration."
• Impediments to Reproductive Justice: The Criminal Legal System and American Carceral State, Harvard Law Review. June, 2024. "Until there is a reckoning with how criminal law relates to and affects reproductive rights, legal advocates for abortion cannot fully realize reproductive justice."
• Duration in Immigration Detention and Health Harms, Altaf Saadi et al. January, 2025. "Detention periods of 6 months or more [were] associated with higher rates of self-rated poor health, mental illness, and PTSD compared with those detained less than 6 months.."
• Expanding Alternatives to Incarceration in NYC: A Pathway to Safely Closing Rikers Island, New York City Alternatives to Incarceration (ATI) and Reentry Coalition. January, 2025. "Expanded application of ATls alone will not fully decarcerate Rikers. The City must also...fully implement its 6-A Work Release program and empower the Local Conditional Release Commission to use their authority to release eligible individuals."
• Four Decades of Law Enforcement in New York State: Changing Arrest, Prosecution, and Sentencing Trends, 1980-2023, Data Collaborative for Justice. December, 2024. "After adjusting for population declines outside NYC, misdemeanor arrest rates per 100,000 people in the suburbs and upstate increased from 1980 to 1990 and then declined throughout nearly all of the remaining 34 years examined."
• Toward Safety, Liberty, and Equity: A Community-Centered Framework for Redesigning Minnesota's Pretrial System, Minnesota Justice Research Center. February, 2025. "On average, people spend longer in jail pretrial in Greater Minnesota, particularly in counties that overlap with or border Minnesota's tribal nations."
• The Public Harm Under a For-Profit Probation System: Spotlight on Augusta, Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. December, 2024. "Metro Augusta has some of the state's highest concentrations of Georgians with low incomes. For Georgians experiencing poverty, a private probation model provides few to no easy exits from misdemeanor probation supervision."
• A Call for Greater Compassion: How Pennsylvania's Compassionate Release Statute Reinforces Cruelty, Abolitionist Law Center. December, 2025. "Altering the life expectancy requirements could make the statute less restrictive...Requiring merely that an individual be seriously ill, in tandem with proposing a release plan, would provide a far more effective, compassionate avenue of relief."
• The Labor Market for People with Conviction Histories: An Examination of Access to Good Jobs, Vera Institute of Justice. January, 2025. "Findings from this study underscore the value of a bachelor's degree's flexibility, but also the ambiguous barriers people leaving prison with these credentials may have to navigate in seeking a job."
• Depressive Symptoms among Pregnant and Postpartum Women in Prison, Mariann A. Howland et al. July, 2021. "More time remaining in prison after giving birth was associated with higher levels of postpartum depressive symptoms, after adjusting for depressive symptoms during pregnancy."