Our mission is to empower activists, journalists, and policymakers to shape effective criminal justice policy, so we go beyond our original reports and analyses to curate a database of the best empirical research on the criminal legal system available online. This newsletter highlights the newest additions to this database.

Talking turkey about clemency

Hey Friends,

This week, President Trump, following a longstanding and pretty tactless tradition, will pardon two turkeys. It was the latest headline-grabbing use of the presidential clemency powers.

Presidents and governors have clemency powers that allow them to totally erase a criminal conviction (this is called a pardon) or reduce a person’s sentence (this is a commutation). It is a powerful tool that could be used to address past injustices and turn the page on the nation’s failed era of mass incarceration. Unfortunately, though, all too often, turkeys and political allies are the primary beneficiaries of their clemency decisions.

In this month’s newsletter, we’re taking a closer look at clemency powers: how they work, how often they’re used, and what can be done to make them a better tool for justice. Here are a few of the highlights:

• In this 2020 report, the Urban Institute explains how governors can and should use their clemency powers to drastically reduce prison populations, not on a case-by-case basis, but through broad eligibility criteria that can correct historically excessive sentencing, racial disparities, or other harms.
• For a more data-centric examination, check out our 2022 report, Executive Inaction, which looks at commutations. In our report we show that eight northeastern states grant very few commutations, about one out of every 10,000 sentenced and imprisoned individuals.
• The Collateral Consequences Resource Center has an essential resource on pardon authorities in all 50 states, where a map displays the relative frequency with which each state pardons people and provides a detailed comparison of state policies and structures regarding considering and issuing pardons.

You can find more about clemency, pardons, and commutations in our Research Library.

Now, let’s get to this month’s updates to our Research Library. We’ve added 22 new reports, focused on drug courts, Medicaid expansion, the impact of extreme heat on law enforcement decisions, and more. We hope this is useful in your work!

—Leah Wang, Senior Research Analyst

P.S. If you find this newsletter and other research from the Prison Policy Initiative valuable, we hope you’ll consider making a contribution as part of your end-of-year giving. This work is only possible thanks to the support of people like you, who are committed to ending mass incarceration in America. Thanks for your consideration!

We've The Prison Policy Initiative has added 22 new reports to the Research Library:

Community impact

See 118 reports on the impact of the criminal legal system on housing, schools, employment, neighborhoods, and more.

• Extreme Heat and Calls to Law Enforcement Related to Domestic Violence by Arnab K. Dey et al, August, 2025
  "We found a positive association between extreme heat and DV-related calls in New Orleans for both absolute and percentile-based thresholds, especially for heat waves lasting for 5 or more consecutive days."

Conditions of confinement

See 286 reports on prison and jail conditions such as solitary confinement, labor, discipline, food, and more.

• "You want to be in the hell you already know": How prison transfers regularly upend incarcerated people's lives by Iolanthe Brooks, June, 2025
  "Over the course of 2022, over 70% of New York's prisons transferred the equivalent of 50% or more of their January populations to other facilities. Of those, nine prisons (18%) had turnover of over 100% of their start-of-year population size."

Courts and trials

See 178 reports on prosecutors, judges, public defense, court caseloads, and more.

• A Moment for Misdemeanor Policy Change by Center for Justice Innovation, August, 2025
  "For most people entering the criminal justice system on lower-level charges, the best possible systemic response is simply to dismiss their case or to not even file the charges to begin with."
• Drug Courts in the Americas by Social Science Research Council, October, 2018
  "The substantial diversity among drug court models complicates efforts to evaluate their impact...but our review of the existing evidence shows the claim that drug courts provide an alternative to incarceration is debatable."

Death penalty

See 155 reports on capital punishment and executions.

• Death Row U.S.A. Winter 2023 by Legal Defense Fund, January, 2023
  This quarterly report lists the number of prisoners on death rows, executions to date, and Supreme Court cases related to the death penalty.

Disability

See 34 reports on the prevalence of, and challenges faced by, people with disabilities in the criminal legal system.

• Reducing Barriers: A Guide to Obtaining Reasonable Accommodations for People with Disabilities on Supervision by ACLU, March, 2024
  "People with disabilities regularly need changes to the way supervision is administered, such as appointment reminders, plain-language instructions, deaf interpreters, and alternative meeting times or locations."

Health and healthcare

See 237 reports on access to healthcare, chronic and infectious disease, mortality, and more.

• Providing Equitable Surgical Care to Patients in Law Enforcement Custody Paywall :( by Elinore J. Kaufman et al, May, 2025
  "No national statistics are available on the need for surgery among incarcerated people. Autopsy data suggest that nearly a quarter of deaths among incarcerated individuals were attributable to causes that could have been treated with surgery." Although this article is behind a paywall, you can read more about the study here.
• Policies for waiving medical copays in prisons are not enough to undo the harm caused by charging incarcerated people for health care access by Prison Policy Initiative, May, 2025
  "If copay waivers were being applied routinely and consistently, we would expect people without a chronic condition to be more likely to have never seen a doctor since incarceration, but this was not the case."
• Literature Review and Data Analysis on Deaths in Custody by National Institute of Justice, December, 2022
  "Relative to their share of the U.S. residential population, males and Black individuals are overrepresented for all three types of custody deaths...the gender and racial/ethnic distribution is similar across deaths related to arrest, jails, and prisons."
• Medicaid Expansion's Spillover to the Criminal Justice System: Evidence from Six Urban Counties by Carrie E. Fry, Thomas G. McGuire, and Richard G. Frank, July, 2020
  "Overall, Medicaid expansion reduced both the probability of rearrest and the number of arrests in two of the three county pairs."
• Postmortem Incidence of Acute Surgical- and Trauma-Associated Pathologic Conditions in Prison Inmates in Miami Dade County by Alexander Busko et al, January, 2019
  "Sixty-nine deaths (22.9%) were due to acute surgical- or trauma-associated pathologic conditions, of which 51 (73.9%) were associated with problems from emergency general surgery and 18 (26.1%) were associated with trauma."

LGBTQ

See 27 reports on the mass criminalization and incarceration of LGBTQ+ people.

• The California Parole Board's Treatment of Transgender Individuals by UCLA Williams Institute, April, 2023
  "Approximately 43% (16 out of 37 with relevant data) of parole hearings for transgender individuals included misgendering and/or insensitive or biased comments."

Policing

See 280 reports on arrests, traffic stops, law enforcement interactions, and more.

• Mobile Crisis Response Teams Support Better Policing: Evidence from CAHOOTS by Jonathan Davis et al, May, 2025
  "We find that a series of program expansions into new areas and times reduced the likelihood that a 911 call resulted in an arrest and increased access to medical services."
• Atlanta Policing Alternatives and Diversion Case Study by Carl Vinson Institute for Government at University of Georgia, 2024
  "At the time of diversion, law enforcement officers most commonly reported homelessness and poverty as the primary concerns (81.7%), but diversions often included multiple concerns."

Poverty and wealth

See 170 reports on fines, fees, debt, and the criminalization of poor people.

• We Scrape Together Pennies: Fairness and Effectiveness of Monetary SanctionsPaywall :( by Ebony L. Ruhland, May, 2024
  "Supervision officers have little discretion in the number of fines and fees assessed but have more discretion in collecting the payments and punishing or sanctioning nonpayment." The full article is behind a paywall, but Fines and Fees Justice Center provides key findings from the study.

Pretrial detention

See 143 reports on the costs and outcomes of detaining people before trial.

• Navigating Bail Reform in America: A State-by-State Overview by R Street Institute, March, 2024
  "While nearly all states designate some type of required timeframe for a defendant to appear before a judge for bail consideration, only some specify a concrete time limit."

Probation and parole

See 138 reports on community supervision policies, conditions, violations, and more.

• An Algorithmic Assessment of Parole Decisions by Hannah S. Laqueur and Ryan W. Copus, December, 2022
  "[R]esults suggest that the Board is at least partially pursuing retribution and/or insulating themselves from political fallout; however, it might also be the case that the Board is simply not capable of accurately assessing risk with its current tools."

Sentencing policy

See 148 reports on the rise and impact of excessive criminal sentences.

• Over-Federalization: Federal Intrusion Into State Criminal Law by Sentencing Project, October, 2025
  "Over the past 50 years...broadening interpretations of the Constitution's Commerce Clause have offered Congress an ever-expanding ability to make traditionally state and local offenses federal crimes as well."

Women and gender

See 152 reports on gender disparities in the criminal legal system.

• New data on pregnancy prevalence, outcomes, and programs in prisons are welcome additions, but raise new questions by Prison Policy Initiative, May, 2025
  "The [Bureau of Justice Statistics] report also helpfully touches on services like prison nursery programs; however, crucial details about their implementation are left out -- a gap we attempt to fill in this briefing using our own research."
• Georgia Criminal Justice Data Landscape Insights A Closer Look at Incarcerated Women, Probation, Crimes, and Arrests by Carl Vinson Institute for Government at University of Georgia, October, 2024
  "This report explores pre-pandemic trends, the impacts of the pandemic on different aspects of the criminal justice system, and ultimately what 3 the beginnings of a recovery look like."
• A Debt of Care: Commercial Bail and the Gendered Logic of Criminal Justice Predation by Joshua Page, Victoria Piehowski, and Joe Soss, February, 2019
  "Our analysis is based on an immersive ethnographic study of the bail industry in 2015 and 2016. For about eighteen months, Joshua Page worked as a bail bond agent, participating and observing as an employee on the frontlines of the industry."

Youth and juvenile justice

See 402 reports on youth in the criminal legal system.

• Criteria and Procedures for Meaningful Parole Review for People Sentenced as Youth by Tessa Bialek, Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, April, 2024
  "Building on the case law and legislative reforms, this white paper proposes model policies for robust constitutional compliance and meaningful, comprehensive parole review for people serving long sentences for crimes committed as youth."