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1. Prosecutors, court communities, and policy change: The impact of internal DOJ reforms on federal prosecutorial practices*

   https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12275  

   Lynch, Mona; Barno, Matt; Omori, Marisa (January 2021, Criminology)

   The current study examines how key internal U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) policy changes have been translated into front-line prosecutorial practices. Extending courts-as-communities scholarship and research on policy implementation practices, we use U.S. Sentencing Commission data from 2004 to 2019 to model outcomes for several measures of prose- cutorial discretion in federal drug trafficking cases, including the use of mandatory minimum charges and prosecutor-endorsed departures, to test the impact of the policy changes on case processing outcomes. We contrast prosecutorial measures with measures that are more impervious to discretionary manipulation, such as criminal history, and those that represent judicial and blended discretion, including judicial departures and final sentence lengths. We find a significant effect of the policy reforms on how prosecutorial tools are used across DOJ policy periods, and we find variation across districts as a function of contextual conditions, consistent with the court communities literature. We also find that a powerful driver of changes in pros- ecutorial practices during our most recent period is the confirmation of individual Trump-appointed U.S. Attorneys at the district level, suggesting an important theoretical place for midlevel actors in policy translation and implementation. 

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2. Same old song and dance? An analysis of legislative activity in a period of penal reform

   https://doi.org/10.1177/1462474519887945  

   Campbell, Michael; Schoenfeld, Heather; Vaughn, Paige (October 2020, Punishment & Society)

   After years of tough-on-crime politics and increasingly punitive sentencing in the United States, economic, political, and social shifts in the 21st century have created new opportunities for opponents of the penal status quo. By 2013, a majority of states had enacted some type of reform aimed at reducing prison populations. An emerging body of punishment and society scholarship seeks to understand the possibilities and characteristics of reform efforts by examining enacted state legislation. In this article, we use a unique data set of all proposed and passed bills in three legislative sessions in New Jersey between 2001 and 2013 to provide a nuanced empirical account of change and continuity in penal logics in the period of reform. Even when not enacted, proposed legislation shapes the penal field by introducing new ideas that are later incorporated into rhetoric, policy, or practice. Proposed bills that never become law can also alter the political calculus for reformers or their opponents. Our findings demonstrate that by expanding our universe of data, we gain insight into characteristics of “late mass incarceration” that we might otherwise miss. In particular, while we find evidence of decarceration and bifurcation logics, our analysis also demonstrates that state lawmakers continue to participate in “crime control theater” and reproduce the same punitive penal logics that helped build the carceral state. 

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3. Hierarchies of Violence, Victimhood, and Remedy in the Pursuit of Women’s Rights After War

   https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksaf051  

   Berry, Marie; Lake, Milli; Raja, Sinduja; Zarook, Soraya (June 2025, Global Studies Quarterly)

   Abstract Recent postwar recovery efforts have paved the way for reforms that advance women's participation in politics, inclusion in the economy, and access to justice. In this article, we show how a singular emphasis on gender reforms after war that are inattentive to other societal cleavages can leave various forms of marginalization in the shadows. Subnational interviews on the reverberations of gender reforms in five postwar countries expose three hierarchies that structure access to rights for war-affected communities. We reveal which violence is privileged, whose violence is privileged, and which responses are privileged from the perspectives of differently situated war-affected women, showing how patterns of access to new rights can reinforce exclusionary dynamics. Importantly, because international and domestic actors tend to privilege top-down, state-based responses to wartime violence (what we term hierarchies of remedy), hierarchies of violence and victimhood frequently also reflect state actors’ priorities. Speaking to debates on legal and policy reform, we acknowledge that attention to women's rights after war offers an urgently needed corrective to earlier gender inequalities. Yet, a singular focus on gender reforms that ignores other conflict-related cleavages, particularly those that are amplified by the distribution of political power within the state apparatus, can risk obstructing access for marginalized women, sometimes reproducing grievances that contributed to violence in the first place. For policymakers, we suggest that striving for more equal access to new rights after war will help foster a more inclusive—and therefore more stable and durable—peace. 

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4. 94 different countries? Time, place, and variations in federal criminal justice

   https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38KW57J58  

   Lynch, Mona (January 2018, Berkeley journal of criminal law)

   null (Ed.)

   Frank Zimring and Gordon Hawkins’s 1991 book, The Scale of Imprisonment, was a pioneering intellectual effort to explain what was then just coming into view to social scientists and legal scholars: the massive growth and transformation of American criminal justice, particularly as manifested in what soon came to be called mass incarceration. Zimring and Hawkins endeavored to disentangle multiple forces in play, ranging from formal law, to local and regional legal norms, to a series of broader social and political transformations. In doing so, Zimring and Hawkins set out to disentangle the complex, multi-jurisdictional political and legal structures that govern imprisonment policy in the U.S. In this Article, I apply their insights about locale-based variations in criminal justice operations over time to the case of federal sentencing. Specifically, I empirically examine variations in how the “criminal history” provision of the federal sentencing guidelines is applied as a function of both time and place to demonstrate the limits of formal law in accounting for punishment outcomes. In doing so, I hope to shed additional light on how vast differences in legal practices and outcomes are produced, especially in response to top-down legal change. 

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5. State-Level Efforts to Reform Elementary Science Education

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   Lyle, Angela_M; Spillane, James_P; Haverly, Christa (March 2023, Educational Policy)

   This comparative case study explores how 18 state education agencies (SEAs) support school districts in advancing standards-based elementary science reform. We identify how SEAs understand their work in advancing elementary science reform and describe how SEAs sought to engage districts in bridging from standards to classroom practice. Based on our analysis, we argue that the school subject is a critical explanatory variable in understanding SEA efforts to support standards implementation and SEAs lean on a resource-based approach for instructional policy implementation. This study contributes to the growing research base on the role of state policy in supporting standards implementation. 

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