Review of \u3cem\u3eBanished: The New Social Control in Urban America.\u3c/em\u3e Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert. Reviewed by Lucia Trimbur.

Book review of Katherine Beckett & Steve Herbert, Banished: The New Social Control in Urban America (2011). Oxford University Press, $19.95 (paperback)

Seattle's Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion Program: Lessons Learned From the First Two Years

Seattle's Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program is the first known pre-booking diversion program for people arrested on narcotics and prostitution charges in the United States. Launched in October 2011, LEAD is the product of a multi-year collaboration involving a wide range of organizations, including The Defender Association's Racial Disparity Project, the Seattle Police Department, the ACLU of Washington, the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office, the Seattle City Attorney's office, the King County Sheriff's Office, Evergreen Treatment Services, the King County Executive, the Washington State Department of Corrections, and others. This report draws on a number of data sources to provide an overview of LEAD's principles and operations, and to distill important lessons about what has -- and has not -- worked well in the first two years of LEAD's operations. The hope is that identification of these lessons will be useful to those interested in replicating LEAD in other jurisdictions or in enhancing its operations in Seattle. After briefly describing LEAD's principles and operations, the report identifies key "lessons learned." These are presented in four different categories: getting started; training; communication; and the transformation of institutional relationships

Punishment and penal activity : the expansion of legal fines and fees in Texas from 1985 to 2015

Across the United States, legal fines and fees generate millions of dollars per year in revenue despite widening the net of criminalization and increasing penal severity for poorer individuals. Unlike in other penal policy domains, legal fines and fees represent an ambiguously defined form of punishment that has received bipartisan support. Understudied is how legal fines and fees have become an increasingly preferred policy choice among state-level political actors. In this study, I use archival data on legal statutes and legislative sessions in Texas – home to one of the largest prison and jail system in the U.S. – to investigate the development of legal fines and fees across a 30-year period. I use insights from socio-political and legal theories to offer a comprehensive analysis of the structure of legislative policy networks and the development of legal fines and fees legislation. I demonstrate that both liberal and conservative political actors facilitated the passage of legal debt legislation. Furthermore, I consider the role of legislative testimony to show the association between testimony and the rate of legislation on legal fines and fees. I discuss the implications of my findings for understanding how policy networks and legislative activity are related to criminal justice outcomes and are influenced by a variety of social actors. My study contributes to theoretical explanations on the roles of state actors in developing policies that become increasingly implicated in social inequalities.Sociolog

Jailing Communities: The Impact of Jail Expansion and Effective Public Safety Strategies

Communities are bearing the cost of a massive explosion in the jail population which has nearly doubled in less than two decades, according to a report released by the Justice Policy Institute (JPI). The research found that jails are now warehousing more people--who have not been found guilty of any crime -- for longer periods of time than ever before. The research shows that in part due to the rising costs of bail, people arrested today are much more likely to serve jail time before trial than they would have been twenty years ago, even though crime rates are nearly at the lowest levels in thirty years. "Crime rates are down, but you're more likely to serve time in jail today than you would have been twenty years ago," said report co-author Amanda Petteruti. "Jail bonds have skyrocketed, so that means if you're poor, you do time. People are being punished before they're found guilty -- justice is undermined."The report, Jailing Communities: The Impact of Jail Expansion and Effective Public Safety Strategies, found jail population growth (22 percent), is having serious consequences for communities that are now paying tens of billions yearly to sustain jails. Jails are filled with people with drug addictions, the homeless and people charged with immigration offenses. The report concludes that jails have become the "new asylums," with six out of 10 people in jail living with a mental illness.The impact of increased jail imprisonment is not borne equally by all members of a community. New data reveal that Latinos are most likely to have to pay bail, have the highest bail amounts, are least likely to be able to pay and, by far, the least likely to be released prior to trial. African Americans are nearly five times as likely to be incarcerated in jails as whites and almost three times as likely as Latinos. Further exacerbating jail crowding problems is the increase in the number of people being held in jails for immigration violations -- up 500 percent in the last decade.In 2004, local governments spent a staggering $97 billion on criminal justice, including police, the courts and jails. Over$19 billion of county money went to financing jails alone. By way of comparison, during the same time period, local governments spent just $8.7 billion on libraries and only$28 billion on higher education."These counties just cannot afford to invest the bulk of their local public safety budget in jails, and we are beginning to see why -- the more a community relies on jails, the less it has to invest in education, employment and proven public safety strategies," says Nastassia Walsh, co-author of the report.Research shows that places that increased their jail populations did not necessarily see a drop in violent crimes. Falling jail incarceration rates are associated with declining violent crime rates in some of the country's largest counties and cities, like New York City

Employment, Wages and Public Safety

"Employment, Wages and Public Safety," one of four briefs, finds that increased employment rates and wages are associated with public safety benefits. The release of this brief corresponds with concerns about U.S. job losses and the small uptick in the national crime rate.Key findings from "Employment, Wages and Public Safety" include:Increased employment is associated with positive public safety outcomes. Researchers have found that from 1992 to 1997, a time when the unemployment rate dropped 33 percent, "slightly more than 40 percent of the decline in overall property crime rates can be attributed to the decline in unemployment."Increased wages are also associated with public safety benefits. Researchers have found that a 10 percent increase in wages would reduce the number of hours young men spent participating in criminal activity by 1.4 percent.States that had higher levels of employment also had crime rates lower than the national average. Eight of the 10 states that had lower unemployment rates in the United States also had violent crime rates that were lower than the national average. In comparison, half of the 10 states with the highest unemployment rates had higher violent crime rates than the national average in 2005.The risks of incarceration, higher violent crime rates, high unemployment rates and low wages are concentrated among communities of color. Communities of color and African Americans, specifically, experience more unemployment and lower average wages than their white counterparts. At the same time, communities of color are more likely to experience higher rates of violence than are white communities, and African Americans are more likely to be incarcerated than are whites

Ex-Offenders and the Labor Market

We use Bureau of Justice Statistics data to estimate that, in 2008, the United States had between 12 and 14 million ex-offenders of working age. Because a prison record or felony conviction greatly lowers ex-offenders' prospects in the labor market, we estimate that this large population lowered the total male employment rate that year by 1.5 to 1.7 percentage points. In GDP terms, these reductions in employment cost the U.S. economy between $57 and$65 billion in lost output