The NCVS is an annual self-report survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau on behalf of the BJS that captures information about nonfatal personal and household crimes experienced by U.S. residents age 12 and older. The current report summarizes findings using data combined from the years 2020 to 2023. By pooling results across multiple years, the estimates become more stable and reliable, allowing for clearer comparisons among different groups.

Whether an area is labeled urban, suburban, or rural depends on where the victim lives, not where the crime happened. Urban areas include locations within city boundaries or census-designated places that meet certain thresholds for population size and density. Rural areas are defined as those lying outside of urbanized zones and clusters as designated by the U.S. Census Bureau. Suburban areas are essentially the in-between spaces that don’t fall neatly into either the urban or rural category, such as classic residential suburbs, small towns with limited downtown areas, and smaller cities with low urban density. On average, 69% live in suburban areas, 19% live in rural areas, and 12% live in urban areas.

Violent Crime

Overall, rural areas had the highest reporting rate for violent crimes (51%), followed by suburban areas (43%), while urban areas had the lowest reporting rate (38%). The differences were most stark for rape/sexual assault, which only 13% of urban victims reported compared to 52% in rural areas, a difference of 39 percentage points. Reporting rates for simple and aggravated assaults also followed a similar pattern, with the lowest reporting rates in urban areas. For robbery, reporting rates followed a slightly different pattern, with the lowest rates in suburban areas (49%), compared to 63% in urban areas and 73% in rural areas.

Source: Wang & Thompson (2025). “Reporting to Police by Type of Crime and Location of Residence, 2020–2023,” Figure 1. Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/reporting-police-type-crime-and-location-residence-2020-2023/web-report

Property Crime

While people were less likely to report property crimes in general, patterns mirrored those for violent crimes. Rural areas had the highest reporting rates (36%), followed by suburban (33%) and urban (25%) areas. This pattern was largely driven by theft reporting rates, which were 31% in rural areas, followed by 28% in suburban areas, and 20% in urban areas. For auto theft, people from rural areas were most likely to report (81%) and people in urban areas were the least likely (73%). For burglary, rates differed only slightly, ranging from 41% to 44%.

Wang & Thompson (2025). “Reporting to Police by Type of Crime and Location of Residence, 2020–2023,” Figure 2. Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/reporting-police-type-crime-and-location-residence-2020-2023/web-report

Conclusion

Overall, people living in rural areas were the most likely to report crime to the police, regardless of crime type (property vs. violent). According to a companion report published in 2024, there are several reasons why people may choose not to report crime, including fear of getting the offender in trouble, belief that the police would not do anything to help, or if the issue was considered too personal or too trivial to report.

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What Exactly Is Retail Theft?

“Retail theft” is a broad term covering a range of theft-related crimes where a retail business is the victim. This can include shoplifting, burglary, embezzlement, robbery, and even vandalism, depending on how the crime is committed and the value of goods stolen. Because statewide crime statistics don’t track offenses by victim type, there’s no single data point that captures retail theft. For this analysis, the report uses two proxies: shoplifting (stealing $950 or less from a store during business hours) and nonresidential burglary (unlawfully entering a store or other non-home location to commit theft, regardless of value). These two categories offer the clearest available picture of how retail theft may be evolving.

Retail Theft Trends: A Decade in Review

The rate of reported retail theft in California has shifted over the past ten years, with notable increases and declines tied to key events. After a modest rise in 2015, theft rates fell steadily, dropping 20% between 2015 and 2021. This included a sharp drop between 2019 and 2020, likely driven by pandemic-related shutdowns and stay-at-home orders that temporarily reduced opportunities for theft.

However, that downward trend reversed after the early pandemic period. Between 2021 and 2023, reported retail theft jumped by 32%. Over the full 2014–2023 period, the statewide rate rose by 11%, or an additional 48 incidents per 100,000 people.

Importantly, this data may understate the real scope of recent increases: several major law enforcement agencies—covering about 10% of the state population—failed to report complete data for 2023. For example, the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department submitted only partial data for the year.

Source: California Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), “Retail theft in California,” Figure 1.

County-Level Differences

The statewide trend masks significant variation across counties. For example, while the state saw a slight increase in theft rates between 2014 and 2015, some counties experienced declines. More recently, from 2019 to 2023, the sharpest increases in theft were concentrated in large urban counties, especially Los Angeles, Alameda, Sacramento, and San Mateo. In contrast, many smaller counties actually saw theft rates decline. The report suggests that differences in retail density or other local conditions may explain these trends, though the exact reasons remain unclear.

Source: California Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), “Retail theft in California,” Figure 2.

Impacts of Policy Changes

A variety of factors can influence retail theft, ranging from retail technology and economic conditions to homelessness and addiction. This report focused on how changes in criminal justice policy may have shaped California’s retail theft trends over the past decade. Two major influences stand out: the passage of Proposition 47 and a series of criminal justice system shifts that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Proposition 47

Proposition 47, approved by voters in 2014, significantly reduced penalties for lower-level crimes, including many types of retail theft. It reclassified several offenses from felonies or wobblers (crimes that can be charged as either misdemeanors or felonies) to misdemeanors. For example, shoplifting offenses involving goods valued under $950 must now be charged as misdemeanors, even if the same conduct might previously have qualified as felony burglary or “petty theft with a prior.” Receiving stolen property under the $950 threshold is also now a misdemeanor.

These changes altered arrest and detention protocols, making it more difficult for officers to arrest individuals for misdemeanor thefts unless they directly witnessed the offense. Moreover, the measure limited the Legislature’s ability to later increase penalties without securing a two-thirds majority vote. Collectively, these reforms led to lower arrest and incarceration rates for retail theft and may have weakened deterrents, influencing how law enforcement agencies respond to theft-related incidents.

Pandemic-Era Criminal Justice Changes

The COVID-19 pandemic brought a second wave of systemic changes that further disrupted the criminal justice landscape. Temporary policies such as zero-dollar bail enabled many individuals arrested for lower-level offenses to be released immediately. Efforts to reduce jail and prison crowding led to early releases, while law enforcement agencies often shifted toward issuing warnings rather than making arrests in order to limit in-person contact.

Additional policy changes included shortened probation terms under AB 1950 and increased investment in pretrial release programs, both of which reduced the number of people held in custody. At the same time, many law enforcement agencies reallocated resources to address rising violent crime, likely reducing the attention given to property crimes like retail theft.

Two Key Mechanisms Driving Crime Rates

Criminal justice policies tend to influence crime rates through two primary mechanisms: the likelihood of apprehension and the rate of incarceration. When individuals perceive a low likelihood of being caught, crime often increases. In California, the property crime clearance rate dropped from 14% in 2014 to just 8% in 2023, with a particularly sharp decline during the pandemic.

Source: California Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), “Retail theft in California,” Figure 4.

Similarly, a decline in incarceration rates may have expanded the pool of people in the community with the opportunity to commit crime. Following Proposition 47, California’s incarcerated population declined by about 7%, and it fell by another 22% between 2019 and 2023 due to pandemic-related reforms.

Source: California Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), “Retail theft in California,” Figure 5.

Empirical research generally supports the conclusion that Proposition 47 led to an overall increase in larceny, including both retail and non-retail theft. A 2018 study found that California experienced a 9% higher larceny rate compared to other states following the law’s implementation. However, its specific impact on retail theft is harder to quantify, given changes in how such offenses are defined and reported.

The effect of pandemic-era changes on retail theft appears more modest. A 2024 study found that reductions in jail populations and declining clearance rates may have increased nonresidential burglaries by 2% to 3%, but these factors could only account for roughly one-third of the total increase in retail theft observed during the pandemic period.

Legislative Responses

In response to mounting concerns about retail theft, California lawmakers have passed a wide range of new laws aimed at deterring theft, increasing penalties for repeat or organized offenses, and enhancing law enforcement’s ability to respond. While some of these laws date back a few years, many of the most significant reforms only took effect in late 2024 or early 2025. These changes focus on three main goals: increasing the likelihood of apprehension, expanding incarceration options for repeat offenders, and improving coordination and enforcement capacity.

Strengthened Arrest and Detention Authority

Two recent laws have strengthened law enforcement’s authority to arrest and detain shoplifters. AB 2943 (2024) permits officers to make warrantless arrests for misdemeanor shoplifting even if they did not witness the crime firsthand. Meanwhile, AB 1065 (2018) allows courts to hold certain shoplifting suspects in custody before trial, particularly those with recent theft-related citations. These changes could deter theft by increasing the chance of immediate consequences.

Elevating Misdemeanors to Felonies

Several recent laws have made it easier to charge retail theft as a felony, which carries longer potential incarceration terms. Proposition 36 (2024) and AB 2943 allow prosecutors to aggregate the value of multiple thefts—regardless of whether they occurred at different stores or over a period of time—to meet the $950 threshold required for felony charges. AB 1065 (2018) formally defined organized retail theft as a felony when individuals work together to steal and resell merchandise. Additionally, AB 2943 (2024) established a new felony offense for possessing stolen goods valued at $950 or more with the intent to sell, even if the possession spans multiple incidents. Proposition 36 also reinstated a version of petty theft with a prior, enabling felony charges for people with two or more prior theft convictions.

Longer Sentences and Supervision

Some recent laws have extended the length of penalties and probation terms for retail theft offenses. AB 2943 allows courts to impose up to two years of misdemeanor probation for shoplifting cases, doubling the previous standard of one year. Additionally, SB 1416, AB 1960, and Proposition 36 provide for longer prison sentences when the value of theft or property damage exceeds $50,000, with further sentence enhancements for large-scale crimes involving multiple participants.These changes aim to reduce repeat offenses by keeping high-volume offenders off the streets for longer periods and encouraging court-mandated treatment.

Boosting Enforcement Capacity and Retail Protections

Implementation Considerations

With a wide range of new retail theft laws now in effect, the California Legislature’s job isn’t done. Lawmakers must now monitor how these laws are being implemented and whether they’re delivering real results. Lawmakers may want to review usage data or consult directly with stakeholders to understand whether laws are gaining traction or being ignored because they’re too cumbersome to use.

Retailers, police officers, prosecutors, and even the general public need to understand the new tools available. Without awareness and training, these reforms won’t be used effectively and may fail to deter theft. For example, felony charges now depend on the cooperation of retailers to document and report repeated thefts. If stores don’t know that their evidence could make a legal difference, they may not invest the effort.

Some prosecutors might aggressively pursue felony charges under Proposition 36, while others may take a more lenient stance. Similarly, corporate chains may benefit more than small businesses when thefts across multiple locations can be aggregated. Uneven application could lead to questions about fairness, equity, or unintended consequences.

When local law enforcement agencies and district attorneys develop successful approaches for tackling retail theft, the Legislature should ask whether those insights are being collected and disseminated across counties and cities.

Online resale markets are evolving fast, and so are the methods used to fence stolen goods. The Legislature may need to revisit current rules on online platforms to ensure they’re still effective as new technologies emerge.

Key Outcomes to Monitor

With tougher retail theft laws now in effect, California lawmakers face a critical question: Are these laws actually achieving what they set out to do? While implementation is one piece of the puzzle, the real test lies in outcomes. Below are the key outcomes the Legislature should be considering to guide effective oversight.

Retail Theft Rates

Ultimately, the goal of recent laws is to reduce retail theft. Monitoring reported rates of shoplifting and commercial burglary will help lawmakers track trends over time. But interpreting these numbers isn’t always straightforward. New laws may encourage more reporting or increase arrests, making it seem like crime is rising even if actual theft is not. That means increases in reported crime could reflect greater enforcement, not necessarily more criminal activity.

Clearance Rates

Clearance rates, i.e., the share of crimes solved or closed by arrest, are a strong signal of how likely offenders are to be caught. Research shows that increasing the chance of apprehension can deter crime more effectively than longer sentences. Monitoring clearance rates for retail theft and burglary could help assess whether law enforcement is better equipped to catch and charge suspects under the new laws. But again, more reporting could push clearance rates down even if police are actually solving more crimes.

Unintended Consequences

Every major policy shift carries risk. More aggressive enforcement of retail theft might push crime into other areas, or lead organized theft rings to exploit legal gaps—for example, recruiting minors who face less severe punishment. Lawmakers should also watch for disparities in how the laws affect different groups, especially by age, race, housing status, or region. Engaging directly with law enforcement and community stakeholders may reveal these patterns before they show up in statewide data.

Costs vs. Benefits

The final and most important question: Are these new laws worth it? Tough-on-crime policies can be expensive, especially when they rely on incarceration. Research consistently shows that interventions increasing the chance of being caught (such as more patrols or coordinated investigations) are often more cost-effective than longer sentences. The Legislature should weigh whether recent laws strike the right balance between effectiveness, fairness, and fiscal responsibility.

Increased arrests, prosecutions, and longer sentences will likely drive up jail, prison, and probation populations, especially if prosecutors and judges apply the new laws broadly. But actual cost increases will vary widely depending on local implementation. Monitoring incarceration and supervision trends over time can help lawmakers identify cost drivers. Understanding who is being incarcerated under the new laws and for how long can also guide future decisions about resource allocation.

Conclusion

In response to growing public concern, both the Legislature and California voters have enacted a series of law changes aimed at reducing retail theft. These changes significantly expand the enforcement and prosecutorial tools available to law enforcement agencies and local prosecutors. However, the actual impact of these reforms will depend heavily on how they are implemented at the local level.

The report by the Legislative Analyst’s Office outlines the key provisions of these recent laws, reviews research on how such tools can influence crime rates, and identifies key oversight questions for the Legislature to consider. As the state moves forward, careful monitoring of both implementation and outcomes will be essential. Ongoing legislative oversight can help ensure that these laws are applied effectively, fairly, and in a manner that delivers measurable public safety benefits.

These recent laws reflect a significant shift in how California is approaching retail theft: emphasizing more aggressive arrest powers, tougher penalties for repeat and organized offenders, and investments in coordination and prevention tools. Whether these changes will meaningfully deter theft or shift criminal behavior remains to be seen, but they mark a major reversal of the more lenient policies of the past decade.

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Researchers found that the spike in homicides was tended to be more severe in cities and communities already struggling with high baseline violence, with contributing factors including reduced police staffing, disrupted public services, and concentrated group-related gun violence. Surprisingly, unemployment shifts during the pandemic were not consistent predictors of rising homicides, challenging common assumptions.

National Homicide Spike

Homicide rates in the United States rose by 30% in 2020, marking the largest single-year increase in homicides in over a century. Elevated homicide rates persisted through 2021 but began normalizing over the next two years, resembling those of 2018 and 2019 by mid-2024. As established by the research, the initial rise in homicide rates corresponded with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was exacerbated by social unrest following the death of George Floyd. The Manhatten Institute study categorized the period into three phases: 1) Baseline (2018–2019), 2) Spike (2020–2021), and 3) Recovery (2022–2023).

Source: Manhattan Institute (2025), Spike and Recovery Homicide in Big Cities, 2018–23.

City-Level Analysis

Analysis of cities’ recovery from homicide spikes reveals diverse outcomes. Researchers found that cities with higher initial homicide rates prior to the spike period experienced the largest absolute increases in homicide rates. However, looking at proportional changes, which allow for a focus on how much a rate has increased relative to its original figure, painted a different picture. For example, St. Louis and New Orleans had very high baseline homicide rates and also saw some of the largest raw increases. However, because their starting points were already elevated, these increases appear less dramatic when looking at proportional increases. Yet, from a public health and safety perspective, any increase in these high-crime areas is often much more damaging because these cities already face considerable social and economic challenges. Even a modest uptick in their homicide rates can be indicative of serious destabilizing trends.

In contrast, Portland, Mesa, and Austin had relatively low homicide rates before the pandemic, and experienced the largest proportional increases. In these cities, a jump from 5 to 10 homicides per 100,000 people is still a 100% increase, which feels much more significant relative to the city’s previous experience with crime.  For example, Portland, which started with a homicide rate of about 4.2 per 100,000, saw its rate more than double to 10.5 per 100,000 in the Spike period, representing a massive disruption in the social fabric and the capacity of the local justice system to cope with crime. States with significant social unrest following events such as the death of George Floyd, like those in the Midwest and Northwest (e.g., Minneapolis, Portland), experienced higher proportional increases.  The unrest likely disrupted social order and also led to reductions in proactive policing. In the case of Portland, for instance, much of the increase in violence was attributed to the police defunding movement, which significantly reduced police staffing and resource allocation.

Some cities experienced impressive recoveries, reverting close to pre-spike homicide levels. For example, St. Louis nearly fully recovered, but to an extremely high baseline, with the highest homicide rate in the sample across all three periods. Meanwhile, cities Miami, Buffalo, and Nashville experienced spikes of at least 20% but then recovered to within 10% of their starting value. Other cities did not recover so well, with homicide rates that remained high or even continued increasing in the Recovery period. This is particularly concerning among cities that already had high baseline rates. For instance, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Memphis, and New Orleans had baseline homicide rates above 15 homicides per 100,000 population, experienced spikes of at least 40%, and recovered by less than one-third.

This correlation suggests that high baseline rates may predict poorer recovery outcomes. However, this was not universally true, as there were a few strange anomalies. For example, Portland started from a low baseline, saw the largest homicide spike in proportional terms, and continued to see increases even as the nation as a whole recovered. In contrast, Baltimore’s homicide rate has consistently been one of the highest among U.S. cities, with the second-highest baseline homicide rate (54 per 100,000, behind only St Louis). Yet, the city did not see a sharp proportional uptick in homicide rates. This contrasts with cities like St. Louis or New Orleans, which experienced significant spikes. Further, some cities were resilient against the homicide spike altogether, such as Anchorage, Honolulu, and Newark, New Jersey. For the former two, it’s quite possible that being outside of the contiguous United States played a role that made these two cities different than the others. The same cannot be said for Newark, however.

Ultimately, these diverse outcomes underscore the complex, interwoven factors ranging that shaped each city’s response to the crisis, emphasizing that no single factor can fully explain the fluctuations in homicide rates.

Unemployment and Crime

The study found that while unemployment was modestly correlated with homicide in the baseline period (2018-2019), where a clear pattern emerged showing a correlation between unemployment rates and homicide rates across various regions. This correlation supports a well-documented theory in criminology that socioeconomic factors, such as job availability and economic stability, can influence crime levels.

However, when the analysis shifted to consider changes in unemployment rates (comparing the baseline period to the spike period), the impact on violence and homicides was statistically insignificant. This suggests that while unemployment may generally be associated with violence, it does not necessarily predict specific changes during these tumultuous years. Cities that experienced some of the sharpest rises in homicide, such as Louisville, St. Louis, and New Orleans, did not see corresponding changes in unemployment. Conversely, some cities with high unemployment did not suffer a major rise in homicides. In essence, even as unemployment may have risen dramatically during the pandemic, it did not lead to a predictable increase in violent crime.

This disconnect challenges longstanding assumptions about economic distress as a driver of violent crime and suggests other crisis-related factors may have played a more pivotal role. This perspective advocates for deeper investigations into the multifaceted causes of crime, especially during unprecedented times. Factors such as changes in policing practices, law enforcement responsiveness, community engagement, social services availability, and even broader societal conditions (e.g., mental health crises, social isolation) may overshadow the impact of mere economic factors like unemployment.

Law Enforcement Dynamics

One of the study’s main findings relates to reductions in proactive policing during the pandemic and in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Proactive policing refers to officers actively engaging in measures to prevent crime before it occurs, rather than solely responding to incidents after they have happened. This can include strategies such as community policing, increased patrols in high-crime areas, and proactive investigations aimed at deterring criminal activity. The 2020 homicide surge coincided with a dramatic drop in proactive policing across many jurisdictions. This was partly due to pandemic-related staff shortages, but also to widespread anti-police protests and rising criticism of law enforcement, particularly in major cities. Cities with both high homicide rates and significant pullbacks in policing (e.g., St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Atlanta) were especially affected.

This decrease in proactive policing may correlate with the rise in certain types of violence, especially gun-related and gang violence. However, because law enforcement practices vary quite a bit across localities, the relationship between police activity and homicide rates is likely nuanced. While strong local law enforcement practices may act as a deterrent to crime, gaps in these practices could exacerbate violence, particularly during high-stress periods. According to the Manhattan Institute study, when police departments experienced increased turnover, resignations, or a shift in focus towards managing protests and community dissatisfaction, the effectiveness of proactive policing diminished. This could have created an environment more conducive to crime, with potential offenders perceiving reduced risks of apprehension.

Another important consideration is police staffing levels, which is crucial for the effectiveness of law enforcement agencies in managing crime. The study identifies a noticeable relationship between changes in police staffing and shifts in homicide rates during the Baseline and Spike periods. Cities that started with higher homicide rates and saw significant reductions in police personnel typically experienced more substantial increases in homicide rates. The findings highlight the need for law enforcement agencies to focus on maintaining adequate staffing and implementing proactive measures that foster community engagement and trust, aiming to reduce overall crime rates and improve public safety effectively.

Outliers and Anomalies: Portland and Baltimore

Not all cities followed these trends. Baltimore, for example, had one of the highest baseline homicide rates but did not see a dramatic increase during the spike. Portland, on the other hand, had a low baseline but experienced a record-breaking homicide surge. These anomalies support the idea that local dynamics play an important role in the homicide increase and merit further study.

Portland

According to a homicide analysis from the Portland police department, from 2019 to 2021, homicides became increasingly concentrated among a small segment of the population, with only about 0.1% directly involved. Gun homicides rose significantly, making up 75% of all homicides during this period, compared to 60% from 2015 to 2019. Over half of these were linked to gang-involved individuals, with around 30 active gangs and 1,000–1,495 members citywide. Nearly one in five gang-affiliated individuals were involved in a homicide or shooting during the study period, pointing to a high-risk, tightly connected group driving much of the violence. Group violence tended to stem from ongoing disputes and retaliations, with retaliatory shootings occurring, on average, 125 days after an initial violent incident. Public safety efforts are urged to focus on these high-risk networks to interrupt cycles of violence.

According to a data published in 2025, gun violence was also highly concentrated among a small group of individuals and geographical areas: 77% of firearm homicides occurred in 26 disadvantaged neighborhoods, and houseless individuals—who made up 38% of all homicide victims—were found to be 650 times more likely to be killed by gun violence than housed residents. The top drivers of gun violence included gangs/groups (33%), domestic violence (12%), housing instability (12%), robbery or stolen vehicles (8%), and personal disputes (8%).

Baltimore

In sum, Baltimore’s experience suggests that a mix of policing reform and adaptive social infrastructure can help cities weather periods of acute instability. Its trajectory offers valuable lessons for designing durable public safety strategies, particularly in urban areas with histories of concentrated violence. Understanding these nuances can critically inform future public policy and community safety initiatives aiming to manage and mitigate interpersonal violence, particularly in urban settings.

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Let us all take a moment today to remember those who gave their lives in the defense of freedom.

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This first theme seeks to tackle the intersection of prison, healthcare, and infectious disease, and the systemic factors contributing to inadequate healthcare and high rates of disease in prisons. The articles included here feature one from the summer of this year, two from the end of 2019, one from the summer of 2018, and one reaching back to December of 2011. This post is timely with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and includes one article specifically focused on its impact in prison systems. While scholarship on the pandemic’s impact on prisons is limited to date, a small section at the end of the post includes a handful of articles from both anthropology journals and medical journals which are quick and informative reads.

In the summer 2020 issue of the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, U.S. magistrate judge Gabriel Fuentes discusses the impact of COVID-19 on decisions for detention or release by federal judges in the U.S. in his article, “Federal Detention and ‘Wild Facts’ During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Fuentes analyzes the typical use of the Bail Reform Act by federal court judges in determining whether a defendant poses too much risk to the general public if released. Fuentes then breaks down the ways in which a defendant may use the Bail Reform Act in their favour to argue for release based on the risk of contracting COVID-19 if detained. Finally, Fuentes identifies the need for judges to take seriously the “wild facts” of COVID-19 which come from human experience and scientific discovery as opposed to law. He notes that despite lockdowns, health screenings, increased sanitation measures, and visitation restrictions imposed by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, COVID-19 is still spreading quickly in prisons. Fuentes indicates that the decision judges must face in their rulings has expanded from ‘will the defendant pose a risk to the community if released?’ to ‘is the risk that the defendant poses to the community greater than their risk of contracting COVID-19 while in prison?’

The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography’s October 2019 issue included a historical article by Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, which utilizes a case study of Philadelphia’s Arch Street Prison to analyze the intersections of criminal justice and penal policy, poverty, and disease in the 19^th century. The article, “‘Severe punishment for their misfortunes and poverty’: Philadelphia’s Arch Street Prison, 1804-37,” analyzes prison records from an investigation into the conditions of the Arch Street Prison, following the cholera epidemic in 1832, after it decimated one third of the prison’s population. The prison itself housed vagrants and debtors in poor, unclean, overcrowded conditions, exacerbated by the increased arrest of supposedly disease-ridden and dirty vagrants to prevent the spread of cholera in the general public. While New York City released its petty criminals during the 1832 pandemic, Philadelphia did not, and the spread of cholera within the city was blamed on vagrants and the Black population – the Arch Street Prison population. The investigation of the Arch Street Prison concluded that its poor cleanliness, air quality, prisoner diets, and housing situation were as much to blame for the vulnerability and spread of disease as poverty, particularly when contrast with the conditions and lack of cases in prisons housing convicts, and resulted in policy changes and reform of the penal system.

In December 2019’s issue of the International Journal of Prisoner Health, Terrylyna Baffoe-Bonnie, Samuel Kojo Ntow, Kwasi Awuah-Werekoh, and Augustine Adomah-Afari published an article entitled “Access to a quality healthcare among prisoners – perspectives of health providers of a prison infirmary, Ghana.” The authors conducted a study in the James Camp Prison (JCP) in Accra, Ghana, through interviews and participant observation with the five medical staff working in the facility. Based on World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines to adequate health systems and information obtained in the study, the authors determine that the facility’s health system is inadequate on many fronts: it has a poor health information system, with medical records not being transferred from other prisons, and medical records not kept in the JCP or released with prisoners; there is a lack of even basic medical supplies and equipment, which are heavily reliant on donation; there are not enough qualified health workers in the JCP, particularly in light of their risk of exposure to infectious diseases; access to healthcare delivery within the prison is limited by resources and staff, and there are inadequate methods of transferring patients to a hospital if necessary; and financing provided by the prison is insufficient and delayed.

A few months prior, the August 2019 issue of the International Journal of Prisoner Health featured an article by Diana Palma and Jennifer Parr, “Behind prison walls: HIV vulnerability of female Filipino prisoners,” which articulates the results of a study conducted with female Filipino prisoners and NGO directors to understand the vulnerability of pre-trial female prisoners to HIV. Palma and Parr highlight the disproportionate number of female sex workers with HIV in the Philippines (representing 62% of cases), as well as their limited access to testing, and the recent increase of female prisoners due to the criminalization of drug use and sex work. Not only are female sex workers more vulnerable to HIV contraction, they are then detained in an environment with high-risk for the spread of HIV. Their findings from the study indicated that the confluence of a lack of prisoner knowledge of HIV prevention and contraction, unsafe sexual practices inside and outside of prison, lack of education, childhood sexual abuse, no male and female separation of prisoners, health care staff with little training and knowledge of the disease, HIV testing but no treatment, stigma around HIV and contraceptives, and inequitable gender norms contributed to the vulnerability and high risk of female prisoners to HIV. The authors end by denoting the cyclical loop in which females are more vulnerable to HIV as a result of social determinants, these social determinants increase the chances of imprisonment, and imprisonment serves to maximize exposure and female vulnerability to HIV contraction.

The Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health published an article in June 2019 entitled “Guards in Prisons: A Risk Group for Latent Tuberculosis Infection” by Luisa Arroyave, Yoav Keynan, Deny Sanchez, Lucelly López, Diana Marin, Maryluz Posada, and Zulma Vanessa Rueda. The authors focus on an often-neglected prison population which is also at high risk of contracting infectious disease: prison guards. They conducted a study in two all-male prisons in Medellín and Itaguí, Colombia, in which they interviewed and tested 194 guards to assess their working conditions in relation to the prevalence of latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI). Of the 194 guards screened, 75 tested positive for LTBI, with a prevalence of 55.8% at one prison, and 39.1% at the other prison. The tests, together with the interview information, revealed an increased prevalence of LTBI in relation to administrative tasks, longer terms of employment in prisons, drug use at least once, and male sex. Other factors contributing to high rates of LTBI and TB in prisons are similar to studies conducted with prisoners, including inadequate screening, delayed diagnoses and treatment, and high exposure to TB. From this study, the authors conclude that both prisoners and prison guards are vulnerable and at high risk of contracting TB, which is both a risk to the prison guards and the wider community.

The Health and Human Rights Journal’s June 2018 issue included an article by Emily Nagisa Keehn and Ariane Nevin regarding the treatment and prevention of HIV and TB in South Africa’s prisons, and the use of advocacy and litigation in reform of prison health systems. The article, “Health, Human Rights, and the Transformation of Punishment: South African Litigation to Address HIV and Tuberculosis in Prisons,” indicates that the prevalence of HIV and TB stems from the prison conditions themselves, including overcrowding, excessive incarceration, poor infrastructure, and human rights abuses. The authors argue that in order to address and reduce HIV and TB in prisons, the laws and policies governing prisons and incarcerated people require reform, which is most effectively achieved through strategic litigation cases which target “systemic drivers of disease.” The cases analyzed have resulted in reform to unconstitutional health policies and practices, and changes in the criminal justice system at large, serving their purpose in protecting and upholding human rights in prisons despite unpopular public opinion and stigma.

Reaching back a bit further, in December 2011’s issue of the Health and Human Rights Journal, Medea Gegia, Iagor Kalandadze, Mikheil Madzgharashvili and Jennifer Furin published an article entitled “Developing a human rights-based program for tuberculosis control in Georgian prisons.” The authors note that TB disproportionately affects vulnerable populations, and prison populations in particular, stemming from their increased risk in contraction of TB due to overcrowding, unsanitary conditions and inadequate nutrition, and lack of proper diagnoses and treatment. While there was some success following the International Committee of the Red Cross’s initiative to improve diagnosis and treatment in Georgian prisons following a 1997-98 study, TB cases continued to rise both within the prison population and the broader Georgian population. With the prison population increasing from 4,000 to 25,000 between 2004 and 2010, most prisons are operating above their full prisoner capacity, and the Georgian government has declared the situation a health and human rights emergency. The authors conducted a study involving interviews and participant observation in one prison, a hospital, and two health centers, revealing problems with the existing TB control program, including poor infrastructure, inadequate resources and human resources, inadequate screening, and delays in treatment. Finally, the authors propose reforms including the training and certification of incarcerated people as health workers for TB education, screening and care, improved TB diagnosis through molecular testing, enhancements to prison infrastructure to limit mobility, improve air quality and decrease the number of people in one room, and working with a local NGO.

Finally, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its disproportionate impact on vulnerable populations can be helpfully viewed in relation to previous epidemics and infectious diseases, but we also sought out recent scholarship regarding the impact of COVID-19 itself in prisons. Research takes time to do and write up, but scholars already studying prisons have been sharing their perspectives and work. Jason Bartholomew Scott had a one-page article in June’s issue of Social Anthropology entitled “A pandemic in prisons,” Catarina Fróis’s article “COVID-19 Pandemic and Social Distancing in Prisons” appeared in the June issue of Anthropology Today, and the Journal of Institutional Studies (Revista Estudos Institucionais) published “Political Health Inside Rio de Janeiro’s Prison System: Impacts of COVID-19 Pandemic” by Natália Lucero Frias Tavares, Rodrigo Grazinoli Garrido, and Antonio Eduardo Ramires Santoro in April – the abstract is in English through DOAJ, but the article itself is in Portuguese. As well, recent medical journal publications include JAMA Network’s “COVID-19 Cases and Deaths in Federal and State Prisons” by Brendan Saloner, Kalind Parish, and Julie Ward in July 2020, “Prisoners in a pandemic: We should think about detainees during Covid-19 outbreak” by Pamela Tozzo, Gabriella D’Angiolella, and Luciana Caenazzo in the June issue of Forensic Science International: Synergy, and finally, June’s issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine included the article “COVID-19 and the Correctional Environment: The American Prison as a Focal Point for Public Health” by Andre Montoya-Barthelemy, Charles Lee, Dave Cundiff, and Eric Smith.

In January 2019’s issue of the International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice, an article entitled “Vulnerabilities, victimization, romance and indulgence: Thai women’s pathways to prison in Cambodia for international cross border trafficking” was published by Samantha Jeffries and Chontit Chuenurah. The article utilizes ten in-depth interviews with Thai women incarcerated in Cambodia for international cross-border drug trafficking, exercising a feminist pathways approach to understand women’s journeys into prison. Working in a largely under-researched area, Jeffries and Chuenurah identify that life experiences including personal mental illness, familial abuse and domestic violence, low education levels and limited employment opportunities have increased their vulnerability, and restrained their opportunities and choices. For many of the women interviewed, their histories and traumas resulted in increased vulnerability and susceptibility to exploitation, resulting in their knowing or unknowing drug trafficking through deception, coercion, force or threat, though some women willingly trafficked drugs for money or in order to travel. Categorizing their victimization or agency in trafficking, the authors identify four distinct pathways shaped by their lives and experienced traumas that led the women to prison: romantic susceptibility, domestic violence, criminogenic, and self-indulgent.

Looking at the mental well-being and social identity of undocumented immigrants detained in British Immigration Removal Centres, Blerina Kellezi, Mhairi Bowe, Juliet Wakefield, Niamh McNamara, and Mary Bosworth’s article “Understanding and coping with immigration detention: Social identity as cure and curse” was published in March 2019’s issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology. The authors interviewed 40 detainees to assess the intersection of social identity and struggle, with social identity serving as a social cure for some detained immigrants struggling with their loss of social networks, agency, and rights, and social identity serving as a social curse of burden and distress for others. Immigrants lived in the UK for an average of eight years in precarious situations as they waited for updates on their immigration status prior to detainment. Struggling with the loss of social networks and family, rights and legal status, as well as agency and control, some detainees sought existing identities and the support of available family and friends to cope with detention, and others found emerging identities within detention to cope with and make sense of their experiences. Amongst those seeking existing identities and family, some found support and validation within existing social identities, and some found those identities and social ties to be burdensome and not supportive in their experiences of detainment. Similarly, the adoption of emerging detainee identities was beneficial, supportive, and validating for some, but diminishing, bleak, and a reminder of trauma, struggle, and an uncertain future for others. In their analysis of the interviews, the authors conclude that the precarious nature of undocumented immigrants’ lives prior to detainment already contributed to poor mental health, stress, and suicidal tendencies, with detainment aggravating illness. Within detainment, existing and emerging social identities had both positive and negative impacts on mental health and well-being, and immigrants’ ability to cope with detainment.

The Journal of Sociology similarly published an article regarding immigrant detention, though “Crimmigration, imprisonment and racist violence: Narratives of people seeking asylum in Great Britain” explores the exacerbation of trauma through imprisonment for illegal immigration of asylum-seekers specifically, where the previous article included asylum seekers and immigrants who: overstayed their visa, had prison sentences, had problems with their passport, and entered illegally. Monish Bhatia’s article, published in the November 2019 issue, is the product of ethnographic research with asylum seekers in northern England over 18 months, as well as interviews with 22 asylum seekers and undocumented migrants, and six specialist practitioners. Bhatia focuses on racist violence against asylum seekers entrenched in UK social relations perceiving minority immigrant culture and national identity as a threat. The violence explored here manifests itself in the immigrant-perceived unfair use of criminal law to punish violations of immigration laws, and the social harm it inflicts on an already traumatized group of people seeking safety and asylum from violence elsewhere. Bhatia argues that imprisonment upon immigration serves to negatively impact already-fragile mental health, as asylum-seekers experience new trauma of racism and violence through and within imprisonment, finding a cage and lack of legal rights where they sought freedom.

The South African Journal of Psychology’s March 2019 issue included an article by Pieter Nieuwoudt and Jason Bantjes exploring the experiences of South African health professionals in correctional facilities with suicidal offenders. “Health professionals talk about the challenge of suicide prevention in two correctional centres in South Africa” sought to gather insight on factors contributing to suicidal behavior among incarcerated offenders, as well as areas and methods of improvement of mental health services in correctional facilities. The authors conducted interviews with ten health professionals from two correctional centres in Cape Town, with participants identifying the “unsafe, dangerous, stressful, and hopeless” environment of correctional facilities as heavily contributing to suicidal behaviour in offenders. Some of the factors that the health professionals identified as being linked with suicidal behaviour include pre-existing and often untreated mental health and drug use issues, violence, victimisation and gangsterism within the correctional facility, substance use within the correctional facility, overcrowding of the facility, and stigma associated with mental health issues. The authors discuss the identified factors as being systemic issues within the correctional facilities, and indicate that in order to improve mental health services and decrease suicidal behaviour, these systemic issues need to be addressed.

Critical Criminology’s December 2019 issue included the article “‘It’s Like Everyone’s Trying to Put Pills in You’: Pharmaceutical Violence and Harmful Mental Health Services Inside a California Juvenile Detention Center” by Jerry Flores and Kati Barahona-López. The article is based on two years of ethnographic research, interviews and focus groups in El Valle, a California juvenile detention center, and examines the prescription of psychotropic medications by mental health staff to incarcerated young Latina women. Perceived as hyper-dangerous within the criminal justice system, the interviews and ethnographic research indicate that young Latina women in El Valle were subject to pharmaceutical violence during diagnosis and (mis)treatment stage, which led to psychological harm and exacerbated existing mental health issues, and during the prescription of medication stage, in which the women were coerced and forced to take medication despite their resistance. The authors indicate that the women were incorrectly and haphazardly diagnosed and medicated, with doctors forcing a combination of psychotropic medications, antidepressants, and sleeping medications on incarcerated women. In bringing this research to the larger field of research in prisons, the authors identify pharmaceutical violence through mental health services as an emerging form of punishment in centers of confinement, and implicate legal statutes as justifying pharmaceutical violence – what the authors deem legal violence.

In January 2019’s issue of the American Journal of Criminal Justice, Dana DeHart and Aidyn Iachini published the article, “Mental Health & Trauma among Incarcerated Persons: Development of a Training Curriculum for Correctional Officers.” The authors conducted a study assessing the implementation and effectiveness of a three-part training curriculum for U.S. correctional officers on dealing with serious mental illness and trauma amongst prisoners. With high rates of people with mental illness in prisons, and the U.S. carceral system unable to adequately support the needs of those people and contributing to recidivisms, a training and education curriculum of some form for officers is a necessity. After developing the training curriculum alongside an institution for higher education, DeHart and Iachini conducted pilot testing and analyzed the results. They conclude that their curriculum had positive results amongst correctional officers partaking in pilot training, “enhancing officers’ attitudes, knowledge, and skills in responding to mental health issues of incarcerated persons.” As well, the curriculum is easily accessible, available for free online, and adaptable to specific trainers and officers’ needs.

In The Prison Journal’s May 2019 issue, Jason Williams, Sean Wilson, and Carrie Bergeson published an article looking at the lasting impacts of incarceration on Black males post-incarceration, “‘It’s Hard Out Here if You’re a Black Felon’: A Critical Examination of Black Male Reentry.” Through critical ethnographic accounts and interviews with nine formerly incarcerated Black males in the United States, the authors analyze their perceptions and lived experiences of reentry and its challenges. The challenges identified by the formerly-incarcerated males include criminal record stigma, othering and heightened discrimination which limit and hinder their successful societal reintegration by restricting their access to employment, housing, and social interaction, leading to difficulties in supporting their families and children, and issues with masculinity and self-identification. As the formerly incarcerated Black males indicated social relations, relationships with and providing for their children as necessary to maintaining their mental health and successful reintegration, challenges and an inability to succeed in these areas upon reentry serve to negatively impact their mental health, and often lead to substance abuse and recidivism.

Finally, an article published in September 2014 in Medical Anthropology Quarterly by Joseph Galanek, “Correctional Officers and the Incarcerated Mentally Ill: Responses to Psychiatric Illness in Prison,” analyzes correctional officers’ ability to use discretion when making decisions regarding inmates with mental illness. Using ethnographic fieldwork, as well as interviews with 23 staff and 20 inmates in the Pacific Northwest Penitentiary in the United States, Galanek indicates that correctional officers’ ability to form connections and relationships with mentally ill offenders, as well as their autonomy in being flexible with rules, allowed for positive impacts in inmate behaviour while ensuring the safety and security of the penitentiary. Relationships between officers and mentally ill inmates in the penitentiary rely on trust and respect, as well as insight gained through intensive interactions. This insight and trust allows officers to use their discretion in how they treat and punish inmates with mental illness, how they speak to inmates, and if they provide help requested by inmates. The use of discretion by officers in the author’s ethnographic accounts indicate an emerging institutional space for officer agency and discretion, as well as relationships and trust with inmates with mental illness, as maintaining the stability of inmates was critical to maintaining safety and security within the penitentiary.

Welcome back to In the Journals! This ongoing series aims to bridge conversations that are often siloed by discipline, geographical region, language, and race. One of our goals is to make sure that the diverse voices currently reporting their research on policing, crime, law, security, and punishment are presented here. We are continuing our catch-up and also reaching back further to develop article collections around different questions and themes, with this post highlighting articles on police abolition both historically and in this present moment.

The theme for this post is timely with the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests, many of which are calling not for reform of the institution of police, but the abolishment of police entirely. In recognition of abolitionist movements seeking to see the end of the criminal justice system entirely, not only the end of policing, this post contains articles addressing the abolition of the penal institution as well. This articles featured here are from 2020 and 2019, and with some reaching back further to include prevalent articles from 2006, 2000, and1994.

May 2020’s issue of Radical History Review, “Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination,” included several articles focused on police abolition and alternatives to policing. The entire issue is certainly worth a read if you feel so inclined, however for the purposes of this post, only a couple of the articles have been included here. In their introduction to the issue, titled “Worlds without Police,” the editors Amy Chazkel, Monica Kim and A. Naomi Paik highlight the global demonstrations of policing power and brutality throughout 2019. They touch on police brutality and the rise of the 2013 Black Lives Matter movement globally, which included the rallying cry of “I can’t breathe,” following Eric Garner’s death – a mirror of what is being seen again now with George Floyd’s death and subsequent protests. The editors introduce the “radical” idea of police abolition and reallocation of public resources to more appropriate community services, which they say is not a result of the excessive violence inflicted by police, but comes from an understanding that the problem is the police force as an institution itself. Before providing an overview of the articles included in the issue, they comment on the inadequacy of reform, as institutional problems hinder police ability to ensure public safety, and indicate that our inability to see a world without police stems from the institution’s embeddedness and naturalization in society, despite the reality of their poor and often harmful performance. The issue itself seeks not to reach back historically to “premodern” worlds without police, but to highlight more recent spaces and worlds without formal institutions of law enforcement.

The same issue included the article, “React or Be Killed: The History of Policing and the Struggle against Anti-Black Violence in Salvador, Brazil,” based on an interview conducted by Amy Chazkel with Andreia Beatriz Silva dos Santos and Fábio Nascimento-Mandingo, two members of the political organization Reaja ou Será Morto(a) (React or Be Killed), regarding worlds without police. The interview facilitated by Chazkel is based on the idea of worlds without police, with dos Santos, a family doctor researching the health of Afro-Brazilians, and Nascimento-Mandingo, a historian in Afro-Brazilian cultural history, bringing historical insights to the idea of abolition in Brazil. Neither participant believes in a utopian imagining of harmonious and peaceful worlds without police, and they instead draw on Brazil’s history of policing and imprisonment to understand how a world might be lived without police. Together, they recount the creation of Brazil’s police force as intended to quell the Black revolts against slavery and fight against quilombos (runaway slave communities), in order to maintain white supremacy. While they agree that abolition is necessary as Black lives remain the target of the police and prison institutions, they indicate that “abolition” comes from a different historical moment that is entirely separate from this one, and remains linked with white liberal ideologies. As with the abolition of slavery, the conceptualization of a world without police cannot just mean the end of policing – abolition needs to resolve other systemic problems and factors beyond policing as an institution.

In April 2019’s issue of the Harvard Law Review, Patrisse Cullors published the article, “Abolition and Reparations: Histories of Resistance, Transformative Justice, and Accountability.” Cullors’ article provides historical context on abolition, arguing that Black political struggles against institutions of oppression need to be grounded in a framework and praxis of abolition in order to effectively challenge and undermine these systems. Similar to dos Santos and Nascimento-Mandingo, Cullors indicates abolition’s twofold goal of demolishing “oppressive systems, institutions, and practices, but also to repair histories of harm… and incorporate reparative justice into our vision of society and community building.” Cullors utilizes personal experiences with the U.S. criminal justice system and as a Black Lives Matter organizer to ground her understanding of the importance of police and prison abolition and its alternatives, including having first responders trained in restorative justice, healing, and antiracist practices to attend calls. Abolition to Cullors goes beyond the institutions of national police or prisons; it includes the abolition of Border Patrol, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and the abolition of the U.S. military and wars both in the U.S. and abroad. Abolition places community, families, and healing at the center of society. Abolition is personal and individual just as much as it is collective, community-based, state-based, national, and even global.

Reaching back to March 2006, Domício Proença Júnior and Jacqueline Muniz’s article ‘“Stop or I’ll Call the Police!’: The Idea of Police, or the Effects of Police Encounters Over Time,” was published in The British Journal of Criminology. The article is heavily theory-based, arguing that the “idea of police,” defined as a state’s citizens’ belief that police are working to ensure their safety and will help them when called, is required to ensure the upholding of laws in democratic societies, but that the idea of police loses its credibility when the police neglect to fulfill their expected tasks, specifically when they misuse force and power, are found to be corrupt, or go on strike. One of two cases that Proença Júnior and Muniz analyze to apply this theory, which they reconstructed from newspaper and magazine sources, is the 1997 police strike in Brazil following the increase of some but not all police salaries. The authors indicate that the complete strike of the police in Pernambuco and closure of emergency response services led to chaos, disorder, and an increase in crime, supporting the authors’ theory that the idea of police ability to uphold safety is necessary to maintain order. As mentioned by several of the other scholars included here, however, ‘abolition’ is not simply the removal of police officers or the police as an institution, it must also involve the implementation of other and better equipped services to fulfill the “idea of police” that Proença Júnior and Muniz identify.

Fall 2000’s issue of Social Justice included Angela Davis and Dylan Rodríguez’s article, “The Challenge of Prison Abolition: A Conversation.” Similar to Amy Chazkel’s interview with Andreia Beatriz Silva dos Santos and Fábio Nascimento-Mandingo, Davis and Rodríguez’s article is in conversation format, with Rodríguez interviewing Davis on her personal and professional experience with prison abolition. For Rodríguez, prison abolition is the only answer to the mass containment and effective elimination of large numbers of poor, black people from U.S. society; and for Davis, it is the only way to stop the prison industry from continuing to expand and repress marginalized populations. They speak on the strengths and weaknesses of the International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA) as an abolitionist movement, including its overwhelmingly white and faith-centred homogeneity and lack of recognition of racial aspects of incarceration, penal systems and abolition. Like police abolitionists, Davis argues that abolition of the penal system requires a shift of addressing social problems with other an better-suited means than prison, and shifting resources to community support services like education, health care, housing, and rehabilitation. Rodríguez asks the important question, “Why have we come to associate community safety and personal security with the degree to which the state exercises violence through policing and criminal justice?”, and Davis indicates that we need a new vocabulary to replace current language that separates crime from punishment, and identifies how punishment is “linked to poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia.”

While the “In the Journals” roundup feature is intended to include recently published journal articles, a theme like abolition requires the inclusion of canonical sources, to understand how social order was maintained prior to the institution of police. Virginia Hunter’s book, Policing Athens: Social Control in the Attic Lawsuits, 420-320 B.C., published in 1994 by Princeton University Press, included the chapter “Policing Athens: Private Initiative and Its Limits.” With no police force or an army available for large-scale policing, Athens’ methods of law enforcement and social control have been the subject of many scholars, and something that Hunter seeks to understand through analyzing the historical Attic lawsuits. Through a deep analysis of the lawsuits, Hunter identifies that all organs of government and ordinary citizens policed and investigated when extraordinary policing measures were required, but more ordinary situations were handled by citizens themselves and didn’t require the intervention of authorities. In several of the cases, which included a violent attempted theft of a prostitute, an investigation into a man’s free status, an investigation into a woman’s free status and justice for stolen property, and the recovery of stolen state goods, among others, bystanders actively took sides and intervened to quell the situations. In Athens, even official decrees or court decisions required individuals and bystanders to act on their own for reparations – every individual was an agent of law enforcement themselves. Acting in what Hunter terms “private initiative,” individuals were responsible for investigation into their own case being brought forward, including bringing witnesses, researching and submitting applicable laws and decrees; apprehension of the criminal or offender involved in their case with the right to use force if necessary, and with the help of any willing friends, family or bystanders; and preparing and presenting the case themselves in court to a jury. What Athens’ social control hinged on was each individual’s responsibility to ensure the safety of and justice for their own society.

Welcome back to In the Journals! This ongoing series aims to bridge conversations that are often siloed by discipline, geographical region, language, and race. One of our goals is to make sure that the diverse voices currently reporting their research on policing, crime, law, security, and punishment are presented here. We are continuing our catch-up to develop article collections around different questions and themes. This post brings together article from throughout 2019 and 2020 to identify experiences and impacts of police discrimination, as well as to understand police socialization and training which instills discriminatory and racialized biases in practice.

In “The Jungle Academy: Molding White Supremacy in American Police Recruits,” included in American Anthropologist’s March 2020 issue, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús uses ethnography in a police academy to argue that through militaristic training, officers mold recruits by inciting fear and teaching racist jungle metaphors of the streets and citizens they are patrolling, even in cultural diversity training. The training sculpts impressionable recruits to be uniform in action and mentality, forcing them to naturalize the jungle logic depiction of ghettos as urban jungles, and their inhabitants as animals, as well as the biases that logic entails. Beliso-De Jesús argues that these logics dehumanize and other Black, Indigenous, and people of colour while reinforcing narratives of white supremacy, and that their use is crucial in the creation of a “jungle academy” which reshapes young citizens into police officers that embody and maintain the white governance and supremacy of the state through racialized state violence. Beliso-De Jesús identifies the training program as idolizing and cultivating in every way possible the large and athletic white man who is docile yet commands respect, militant, and has an alpha male mentality, and operates on the basis of fear, control and submission when policing. This image and the article produce a clear understanding of the way in which the training of police officers creates racial discrimination and biases that uphold white superiority and non-white inferiority, and why donning a police uniform both allows and causes officers to act on that training.

Criminology and Criminal Justice included Mie Birk Haller et al.’s article, “Minor harassments: Ethnic minority youth in the Nordic countries and their perceptions of the police” in their February 2020 issue, which utilizes semi-structured interviews with ethnic minority youth in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark, to understand their experiences with police. Haller et al. identify subtle provocations and intimidations by police on ethnic minority youth, arguing that these constant interactions negatively impact their experiences of procedural justice, as well as their compliance with law enforcement. Interviewees indicated that police attitudes were often negative when dealing with them, and police language was often discriminatory and patronizing, making them feel inferior, insecure and scared, and decreasing their trust in police. The authors argue that this racialization of ethnic minorities not only upholds existing discrimination and instills feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, discomfort, humiliation and lack of belonging amongst youth, but has also led to a lack of desire and willingness to comply with law enforcement, a distrust in police desire and ability to protect and keep them safe, and has encouraged them to engage in criminal activities and self-protective behaviour.

In April 2020, Transforming Anthropology published an article entitled, “Contentious Bodies: The Place, Race, and Gender of Victimhood in Colombia” by Dani R. Merriman. In this article, Merriman explores ethnographic accounts of police discrimination of Afro-Colombian rural farmers in María la Baja over sixty years of war and interspersed peacetime, but also how individuals use what she deems “contentious bodies” to resist state attempts at labelling them violent guerilla combatants. With violence of guerilla groups in the early 1960s claiming to be the voice of the landless peasant, Merriman identifies black farmers in María la Baja as being used as reasoning for insurgent movements claiming to protect them, yet also experiencing unprovoked, violent and torture-based killing by those same groups seeking to dehumanize and other them. Not only have black farmers experienced decades of violence because of guerillas claiming to act on their behalf, they have also been targets of racialization, police discrimination and state labelling of them as violent and guerillas. With no viable recourse or proof that they were not guerillas, black famers staved off police discrimination and racialization by using their contentious bodies, calloused and broken from farm work and not insurgent activity, to prove their innocence and victimization, not perpetration.

May 2020’s issue of BMC International Health and Human Rights included the article, “‘An ethnographic exploration of factors that drive policing of street-based female sex workers in a U.S. setting – identifying opportunities for intervention” by Katherine H. A. Footer et al. Using ethnography mixed with police observation and interviews involving 64 officers, Footer et al. identify factors at the individual, community, structural and organizational levels as key to shaping the harmful behaviour and practices of police officers towards cisgender female sex workers. They argue that police behaviour reinforces stigmatization and spatial limitations of sex workers while honouring community demands to police sex work, particularly in gentrifying neighbourhoods. Proximity to violent crime led to arrests of female sex workers as police searched for information, and community opposition to sex work caused the forced displacement of female sex workers to more marginalized areas with less complaints, policing and patrolling, even when it risked the health and safety of the sex workers. Officers used dehumanizing language to depict female sex workers, and painted an image of them as unworthy of police protection despite their acknowledged vulnerability to crime and assault. Footer et al. call for the decriminalization of sex work, policy reforms regarding police practices, as well as a shift in community and police cultural landscapes to improve the safety and health of female sex workers.

Northwestern University Law Review published I. India Thusi’s “On Beauty and Policing” in March 2020, identifying the impact of police officers’ perceptions of beauty on their policing of different classes of sex workers in Johannesburg, South Africa. Through ethnographic fieldwork, Thusi identifies that police officers’ perceptions and policing of sex workers produces and reinforces a hierarchy of desirable and valuable bodies and preserves racial and gender subordination. Thusi asks critical questions regarding who the police are protecting and serving, as their intended function identifies, when they are not only neglecting but also harming the lives of already vulnerable and marginalized black female sex workers in their choices to surveil and protect white sex workers perceived as beautiful. Not only does the study indicate that blacker bodies are under-policed for protection reasons, it also identifies the police as more aggressive in those interactions than with whiter bodies. Their actions reinforce the white supremacy and black inferiority ideologies on which South Africa was previously based, as well as who is worthy and important to society based on perceived beauty by police officers. Police are not protecting and serving vulnerable communities and populations, Thusi argues, they are protecting and preserving society’s biases by perpetuating them through their actions.

In May 2019, Jaime Amparo Alves’s article on discriminatory policing practices and resistance strategies in Colombia, “Refusing to Be Governed: Urban Policing, Gang Violence, and the Politics of Evilness in an Afro-Colombian Shantytown,” was featured in the Political and Legal Anthropology Review. Alves argues that policing in El Guayacán, Colombia is Foucauldian in its governing nature, as it enforces boundaries of space based on race through the targeting of black bodies and places, which both allows a spatial solution for national crime and security anxieties, and justifies a lack of governance, state divestment, social abandonment, and police aggression within those spaces. Based on fieldwork in El Guayacán from 2013 to 2018, Alves identifies the discourse utilized by police officers to depict black bodies as unruly and insecure, and black livelihoods as uncivilized and violence-ridden, causing what he terms ‘social death’, creating spatial limitations, and justifying a lack of state involvement. Despite this combination functioning to give “spatial form to racist imaginaries of crime and order,” Alves indicates a simultaneous regaining of control and territorial autonomy of El Guayacán by residents (and largely gangs) as a result of that very lack of state governance in the area, as he seeks to understand their engagement with the state and a possibility for reinventing black life outside of it.

Rune Steenberg and Alessandro Rippa’s article, “Development for all? State schemes, security, and marginalization in Kashgar, Xinjiang,” published in Critical Asian Studies in February 2019 uses ethnography to identify reactions and strategies of Uyghurs to increased and discriminatory policing and securitization by the PRC. Steenberg and Rippa’s article is based on research spanning 2009 to 2017, and focuses on the modernist, state-driven and economic growth-focused development between 2010 and 2014, which created wealth and income disparities and incited Uyghur-led violence often labelled acts of terror, and the subsequent development of increased policing and surveillance of Uyghurs, and securitization of Kashgar. The repressive security measures taken by the state and implemented by police led to detainment in “re-education” centers, with the state presence in Uyghur lives ever-increasing and entirely controlling, cutting off outside contact by late 2017. Steenberg and Rippa identify the use of state presence and surveillance through police officers to repress and marginalize Uyghurs in Kashgar, and they argue that the roots of this discrimination are based in China’s economic development and policy, which created wealth and social disparities and incited the violence.

Welcome back to In the Journals! This ongoing series aims to bridge conversations that are often siloed by discipline, geographical region, language, and race. One of our goals is to make sure that the diverse voices currently reporting their research on policing, crime, law, security, and punishment are presented here. We are continuing our catch-up to develop article collections around different questions and themes. This post brings together articles from throughout 2019 and 2020 to identify the intersections of policing and migration. This includes the impacts of policing on migrants during and following the crossing of borders, the methods of deportation and securitization mobilized by police and border security, the production of citizenship by policing authorities and migrants, and the devolution of policing power to non-police actors.

Ioana Vrăbiescu’s article, “Deportation, smart borders and mobile citizens: using digital methods and traditional police activities to deport EU citizens,” was published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies in August 2020. The article analyzes eight months of fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2017 with police units in France and Romania, in order to understand digital methods of deporting European Union citizens in France across the Schengen border in Romania. Adding to literature on crimmigration and digital technology used in policing borders, Vrăbiescu identifies a gap between the supposed controlled management of migration as a result of digital technologies introduced by the state in the deportation apparatus, and the reality of the Schengen border’s “messiness”. This “messiness” at the border results from the poor implementation of and training with digital technologies, unharmonious border patrol practices across the EU, the influence of nation-state narratives and norms of criminality and who poses a threat to the state, and the selective use of technology by border patrol officers. Vrăbiescu argues that technologies contribute to the draconian ‘Departheid’* policies and practices which work to systematically and totally remove illegal migrants, contribute to structural violence against Romanian citizens, and causes a surplus deportation of Romanian citizens from France. She notes that despite EU and state promotion of the use of digital surveillance technologies in migration control, border policing remains dependent on more traditional patrol methods and the discretion of officers interpreting and enforcing norms and regulations.

*The term ‘Departheid’ was proposed by Barak Kalir in his June 2019 article in Conflict and Society: Advances in Research, “Departheid: The Draconian Governance of Illegalized Migrants in Western States.”

International Migration published Mia Hershkowitz, Graham Hudson, and Harald Bauder’s article, “Rescaling the Sanctuary City: Police and Non-Status Migrants in Ontario, Canada” in April 2020. The article analyzes promises of protection made by Canadian cities for migrants in contrast with requirements of local police to cooperate with Canadian Border Services Agency representatives. Through interviews with Ontario police officers, the authors identify that despite sanctuary-city policies adopted in several Ontario cities, which prohibit the identification of non-status residents to Federal authorities by city employees, local police do not implement the sanctuary-city policies, and believe they have authority to report information regarding citizenship status to Federal authorities. With officers identifying provincial law and policy as being at odds with municipal sanctuary-city policy, they preference provincial legislation, influenced by inconsistent customs across police forces, and national securitization rhetoric which identifies non-status migrants as a threat to the state. Despite police officers’ recognition of the important values upheld by the sanctuary-city policy, their sense of securitization and perceived partnership with the Canadian Border Services Agency overrules the values of the policy. The authors call for clarity in provincial legislation, – which they claim already supports sanctuary policy – arguing that it would impose interpretive constraints on local police officers, and require them to uphold the sanctuary-city policy.

August 2020’s issue of Social Science & Medicine included an article entitled “Challenges to medical ethics in the context of definition and deportation: Insights from a French postcolonial department in the Indian Ocean” by Nina Sahraoui. Sahraoui utilizes interviews conducted with healthcare professionals in Mayotte and local and international health institutions to identify midwives’ power to police in migration control through their assessment of pregnant women intercepted at sea by police. She argues that midwives are socialized into logics of border enforcement, and granted the power to police patients’ mobility or immobility, determining if migrant pregnant women’s health can handle detainment and deportation. The increasing role of medical professionals – and in the case of Mayotte, midwives – in the policing of migrants (biopower) challenges medical ethics, as midwives are forced to make decisions on a patient’s medical status which will impact their migration status and could put their health at risk. This biopolitical management role that midwives are charged with infringes on their medical independence and relations of care, as their decisions on migrants’ mobility are informed by police authority pressure, state positions and policies on migration issues, social norms and stigmas surrounding migrants, and medical ethical norms of appropriate caretaking.

The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology’s November 2019 issue included the article, “‘We Came for the Cartilla but We Stayed for the Tortilla’: Enlisting in the Military as a Form of Migration for Zapotec Men” by Iván Sandoval-Cervantes. The article, based on over one hundred formal and informal interviews conducted in Zegache in Oaxaca with Indigenous Zapotec community members (Zegacheños), explores factors leading to Indigenous men’s enlistment in the Mexican military. Many of these factors are economic, with men seeking a better life, health care, and economic means for themselves and their families, as the military provides skills and experiences which can expand employment opportunities both within Mexico and internationally. Sandoval-Cervantes identifies these factors as similar to those which lead to transnational migration of Indigenous youth, with enlisting also requiring Zapotec migration within Mexico during service. Zapotec Indigenous men become policing agents themselves as soldiers in the Mexican military, with policing being the catalyst for internal migration during service, as well as a requirement for transnational migration following service. Sandoval-Cervantes argues that enlisting in the military is itself a form of internal migration (and transborder experience), and becomes obligatory for migration as it provides men with the cartilla – proof of identity which is required to obtain a Mexican passport.

Anja Franck published an article in Asia Pacific Viewpoint’s April 2019 issue, entitled “The ‘street politics’ of migrant il/legality: Navigating Malaysia’s urban borderscape.” The article uses fieldwork with formal and informal Burmese labour migrants, police officers, and NGOs in George Town, Malaysia, to argue that migrants use whatever means available to them to navigate the urban borderscape, avoid police exploitation, and challenge the state’s production of migrant subjects and the urban city. Franck identifies migrants as agents in the bordering process, transforming urban space and its borders, as well as social relations, through their everyday encounters with police. She focuses on Malaysia’s policing of migrants internally instead of through their more easily-crossed transnational border, and identifies borders as performed and brought into existence through bordering practices. Burmese migrants’ access to Malaysia’s urban space is restricted through state internal immigration control and border-making practices, but is also transformed and redefined through everyday actions of border-making by migrants themselves, indicating the limits of state power to control and discipline migrants. These bordering practices are performed in the streets by both the state and migrants – the state’s practices being policing, spatial divisions, and the production of migrants as unwanted and illegal, and migrant practices being their continued presence in urban spaces and avoiding encounters with enforcement apparatuses, infringing on the state’s production of their identity and exclusion of them from urban space.

Looking at the intra-state policing of migrants, Tomonori Sugimoto’s August 2019 article in City & Society, “Urban Settler Colonialism: Policing and Displacing Indigeneity in Taipei, Taiwan,” focuses on the policing of the Indigenous Pangach/Amis people following their migration to Taipei. Sugimoto argues that Pangach/Amis urban migrants face ongoing dispossession of identity and land through state techniques of urban settler colonialism. After being displaced from Taipei following WWII, Pangach/Amis people migrated back to Taipei in the 1960s and 1970s, building urban squatter settlements as an attempt to reclaim their land. Following this migration, the Taiwanese government sought to re-displace the Pangach/Amis from urban Taipei in the 1990s and 2000s, utilizing police to force Indigenous relocation from squatter communities to a housing complex, which was under the surveillance of security guards and an on-site Han manager. Not only did the state force Indigenous relocation of settlements to a location heavily surveilled and policed, they sold Indigenous-occupied land to developers, enabling the policing of Indigenous street businesses and settlements, largely through fines, to ensure displacement. State dispossession was also naturalized by urban non-Indigenous residents, who further policed Pangach/Amis land and identity by claiming Han majority in Taipei, and depicting Indigenous settlements, street businesses and behaviour as uncivilized. Sugimoto identifies policing of Pangach/Amis migrants in Taipei as enacted by the state itself, by security guards, by Han community members, and by corporate developers in order to re-dispossess Indigenous land and identity.

Welcome back to In the Journals! This ongoing series aims to bridge conversations that are often siloed by discipline, geographical region, language, and race. One of our goals is to make sure that the diverse voices currently reporting their research on policing, crime, law, security, and punishment are presented here. We are continuing our catch-up to develop article collections around different questions and themes. This post brings together articles on incarceration, rehabilitation, and recidivism from throughout 2019 and 2020, to identify the effectiveness of and limitations to rehabilitation programs within prisons, as well as alternatives to contemporary prisons in administering punishment and rehabilitation – including decarceration and rethinking offender reform and harm reduction.

Katharina Maier’s article, “Canada’s ‘Open Prisons’: Hybridisation and the Role of Halfway Houses in Penal Scholarship and Practice” was published in The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice’s December 2020 issue. Maier analyzes data collected from in-depth interviews with twenty-seven residents and fifteen employees of four halfway houses in a north-western Canadian city, in order to identify Canadian halfway houses as a form of Nordic open prisons. Open prisons, in contrast to contemporary walled prisons which process and hold as opposed to rehabilitate or help offenders, have been identified as exceptions to the punitive turn of Western contemporary carceral logic and penal systems. With halfway houses focusing on producing an atmosphere reflective of broader society, providing residents independence and agency, operating on a reward and punishment system, and prioritizing rehabilitation, Maier argues for their reconceptualization from post-prison institutions to open prisons. Throughout the article, she notes that halfway houses share many similarities to Nordic open prisons, and are viable prison alternatives which are capable of reducing recidivism within a controlled yet humane prison environment. The article identifies the harms created by incarceration in contemporary closed prisons, as well as the transformative role Canadian halfway houses could have not as post-prison institutions facilitating re-entry and seeking to repair harms created by imprisonment, but as open prisons and correction facilities themselves. As community-based alternatives to closed prisons, Maier argues that halfway houses could reduce Canada’s carceral footprint and address some of the issues facing existing correctional facilities.

The December 2020 issue of The Oriental Anthropologist included the article, “An Empirical Assessment of the Effectiveness of Offenders’ Rehabilitation Approach in South Africa: A Case-Study of the Westville Correctional Centre in KwaZulu-Natal,” by Patrick Bashizi Bashige Murhula and Shanta Balgobind Singh. Through semi-structured interviews and focus groups with thirty inmates and twenty correctional center officials, the authors argue that despite the South African Department of Correctional Services’ (DCS) mandate to provide rehabilitation services to offenders, the DCS failed in its implementation of the needs-based care programs. The needs-based care rehabilitation programs are designed to reduce recidivism by developing specific intervention and treatment plans and services based on an assessment of recidivism risks and needs, coupled with the South Africa rehabilitation principle which identifies individual inmate values, learning styles, and cognitive abilities. Despite potential benefits and recidivism reduction resulting from the program, challenges with implementation have hindered its effectiveness. The authors indicate that assessments were done with a “one-size-fits-all” approach instead of individually; there were a lack of prison resources and staffing challenges for social workers, psychologists, and educational instructors which limited programming; correctional officers and social workers were performing psychologists’ duties; and services were hindered by prison overcrowding (and a resulting environment non-conducive to rehabilitation).

In the same issue of The Oriental Anthropologist, a similar article was published by Nozibusiso Nkosi and Vuyelwa Maweni, entitled “The Effects of Overcrowding on the Rehabilitation of Offenders: A Case Study of a Correctional Center, Durban (Westville), KwaZulu Natal.” The authors similarly discuss challenges posed by the correctional environment to rehabilitation, identifying overcrowding as having negative physical, social, and psychological impacts on offenders and reducing the effectiveness of rehabilitation programs. The article is based on ten semi-structured interviews with offenders, and five with correctional officers. While the correctional center provided the rehabilitation services as indicated in Murhula and Singh’s article, Nkosi and Maweni also find the same issues with program implementation. Nkosi and Maweni’s research identifies overcrowding as being the biggest challenge, as it creates conditions which inhibit rehabilitation efforts. Overcrowded conditions resulted in a lack of resources, inmate uncleanliness, insufficient medical care which decreased inmate health and increased deaths, inadequate sleeping arrangements, as well as less supervision and increased periods for inmates in cells. Inmates identified that conditions made them feel and behave like animals, increased incidences of violence and gang prevalence, and decreased their access to rehabilitation programs.

The California state’s attempts at dealing with the problem of overcrowding in detention centers through moderate decarceration, as identified by Victor Shammas, are incompatible with the system’s current belief that criminal rehabilitation requires punitive measures. Shammas’ article, “The Perils of Parole Hearings: California Lifers, Performative Disadvantage, and the Ideology of Insight,” appeared in the May 2019 issue of the Political and Legal Anthropology Review. Shammas utilizes fieldwork data collected from participant observation of twenty parole hearings in a California men’s prison, identifying that the state’s attempts at transforming the penal system to allow leniency in parole grants for inmates serving life sentences are futile amidst a hyperincarceration regime, with rehabilitation embedded and inseparable from retributive punitivity, and enmeshed in a culture of punishment. Shammas identifies parole hearings as oblivious hearings; hearings where parole boards were not actually listening, merely routinely completing a checklist of supposed insight and reform, which, if they result in parole grants, are likely be reversed by California’s governor regardless. Factors impacting board decisions include supposed ‘insight’ gained by inmates, performance and participation in rehabilitation programming, perceived self-sufficiency and self-improvement, introspection and transformation – all of which supposedly indicate likelihood of recidivism. In measuring inmates rehabilitation and recidivism likelihood by moral individual and responsibility measures, there remains a fundamental lack of listening and a heavy judgment of veridiction in parole hearings, both of which counteract supposed moderate decarceration measures.

Suzanne Morrissey, Kris Nyrop, and Teresa Lee’s article, “Landscapes of Loss and Recovery: The Anthropology of Police-Community Relations and Harm Reduction,” was published in Human Organization’s Spring 2019 issue. The article uses fieldwork conducted in Seattle, Washington in 2012, with low-level drug offenders and commercial sex workers participating in the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program, as well as police officers and case managers. The LEAD program was instituted in Seattle as a collaboration between the United States Department of Corrections, Seattle Police Department, King County Crisis Diversion Facility, the Defender Association Racial Disparity Project, and ACLU of Washington State, in order to redirect low-level offenders to community-based services instead of prison, and reduce recidivism. With the goal of analyzing the effectiveness of LEAD’s harm reduction capabilities, the authors identify the effectiveness of the program in reducing recidivism through a combination of rehabilitation, mental health, personal livelihood and educational development, and legal advocacy services. LEAD participants were 60 percent less likely to be arrested within six-months than those who did not participate in the program, and identified an increase in their quality of life, that their needs were addressed, and relationships with law enforcement officers improved. The authors further note that the program reduced community stigma around offence, and bridged divides in opinion of community members, law enforcement officers, and offenders.

The June 2019 issue of Transcultural Psychiatry included Sandra Teresa Hyde’s article, “Beyond China’s drug century: Yunnan’s first therapeutic community and narratives of drug treatment and mental health care.” Hyde’s article is based on ethnographic research from Yunnan Province’s residential therapeutic community for drug users, Sunlight, which she mobilizes in her analysis of China’s contemporary response to recreational drug consumption and mental health crises amidst a so-called second industrial revolution. Through nine months of participant observation at the Sunlight facility over three years, alongside 80 informal and 30 formal interviews with residents and staff, Hyde argues that China’s rapid increase in drug use stems from rapid urbanization and globalization which threatened the economic situations and mental health of citizens. Despite its attempt to manage the drug use and declining mental health resulting from this industrial revolution, Sunlight, following a therapeutic community rehabilitation model, walks the same line of success and failure as past opium consumption projects in China did. As the first rehabilitation center of its kind in China, Sunlight continues to face challenges posed by the intersection of punitive and rehabilitative approaches, as well as the national and local political rhetoric of addiction and treatment.

Welcome back to In the Journals! This ongoing series aims to bridge conversations that are often siloed by discipline, geographical region, language, and race. One of our goals is to make sure that the diverse voices currently reporting their research on policing, crime, law, security, and punishment are presented here. We are continuing our catch-up to develop article collections around different questions and themes. This post brings together articles on militarization from throughout 2019 and 2020 to look at the various ways in which states militarize and demilitarize – specifically the militarization and demilitarization of police, space, bodies, and animals.

September 2020’s issue of Critique of Anthropology saw Mona Bhan and Purnima Bose’s article, “Canine counterinsurgency in Indian-occupied Kashmir,” which identifies the presence of street dogs as embodying military terror and producing anxiety about India’s occupation of Kashmir. With police dogs functioning as literal weapons of the state, mobilizing Indian military power over Kashmiri people, they “embody the force and bestiality of the state as they become vectors of militarized violence through the mauling and killing of Kashmiris.” While these Military Working Dogs (MWDs) embody the bestiality of the state, street dogs inflict supplemental violence on Kashmiri people, informalizing state terror through their presence around MWDs and places of military control. Kashmiri citizens associate street dogs with state militarization and tools of counterinsurgency, with distinctions between street dogs and MWDs becoming blurred, as both are utilized in the Indian forces’ militarization of Kashmir and dehumanization of Kashmiris. Street dogs are regarded with honour by Indian forces and citizens, are constructed as superior to Kashmiri people, and have been recruited to the Indian military as the first line of security against insurgents. In the minds of Kashmiris, this links the militarized occupation of Kashmir to human-canine interactions, even though street dogs existed in Kashmir prior to occupation, and were not initially a tool of counterinsurgency.

Stuart Schrader’s article, “More than Cosmetic Changes: The Challenges of Experiments with Police Demilitarization in the 1960s and 1970s,” was published in the Journal of Urban History’s September 2020 issue. The article focuses on the California Menlo Park Police Department’s efforts to demilitarize the police force and change police-public relations in the 1960s and 1970s, while many U.S. police forces were adopting more aggressive and militant policing tactics. In contrast to other California and U.S. police departments’ violent, militarized policing tactics and uniforms intended to control civil unrest and perceived disrespect that police faced, Victor Cizanckas, then police chief of the Menlo Park Police Department, sought to demilitarize Menlo Park and gain respect through reforming the “paramilitary” aspects of policing based on critiques of physical excesses and racial prejudices. This included instituting “soft wear” uniforms, a tie and green or gold blazer concealing their gun in lieu of the typical blue uniform; repainting police cars a pastel green and white instead of black; decreasing punitive measures promoting “arrest for arrest’s sake”; and eliminating paramilitary-influenced hierarchical and paternal relations and ranks, and replacing them with functional roles and horizontal relations within the force. All of these techniques sought to demilitarize in order to change police interactions with the public and address problems of racial inequity. Schrader identifies the differences in militarization and demilitarization tactics, the benefits and limitations that Cizanckas’ reform and demilitarization had, and ultimately argues that Cizanckas’ approach was still top-down and did not offer deeply democratic governance or eliminate social and political conditions that make police departments necessary in the first place.

Current Anthropology’s February 2019 issue included “Unburials, Generals, and Phantom Militarism: Engaging with the Spanish Civil War Legacy” by Francisco Ferrándiz. Based on sixteen years of ethnographic work, Ferrándiz analyzes the present impact of dictator Francisco Franco’s production of Spain as a militarized state through what he denotes the “funerary apartheid” – Franco’s use of territory and necropower, through grave exhumations and burying those on opposing sides of the war in different spaces of death, to maintain sovereign control following the Civil War (1936-1939). Following the end of the war, the dead defeated Republicans were deemed “reds” and “Marxist hordes” and re-buried in mass graves, while dead Nationalist rebels were claimed by the state and re-buried with religious and military honour. In the years during and since the dictatorship (1939-1975), monuments and symbols of Franco’s regime have been dismantled, with mass grave exhumations and reburials of Republican soldiers occurring beginning in 2000, and Nationalist bodies in tombs or mausoleums returned to their families – all of which were heavily contested. Children and grandchildren of the soldiers have lived in militarized spaces which memorialized and commemorated the military rebel Nationalists and dehumanized the Republicans, as well as the dismantling of the dictatorship’s legacy and the demilitarization of public spaces. Franco militarized spatial landscapes in Spain through a necropolitical control of space, and the demilitarizing process is lengthy and incomplete, with Francoism a lingering militaristic phantom felt by citizens.

“Racialized Geographies and the ‘War on Drugs’: Gender Violence, Militarization, and Criminalization of Indigenous Peoples” was included in November 2019’s issue of The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. The article’s author, Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo, analyzes life stories of women victims of sexual violence based on long-term research on women in prisons in militarized and paramilitarized regions, to understand the impacts of Mexico’s “war on drugs” on the bodies and territories of Indigenous peoples. She argues that in racialized territories in Mexico, Indigenous women’s bodies have become battlefields of violence, and a tool of the state in conveying messages of the dispossession of Indigenous territories and resources. In the present context of the war on drugs, violence against women reproduces old war strategies to form new and informal wars which are more violent and have racialized impacts on Indigenous peoples and territories: in essence, a modified form of colonization. In the war on drugs, the Mexican state deployed military violence against Indigenous peoples which has increased their imprisonment and displacement from communities to federal prisons, with constitutional reforms increasing Indigenous vulnerabilities in the criminal justice system and militarizing their communities. These techniques of colonization mobilized in the war on drugs are further deployed and messaged through sexual violence on women’s bodies, embodying patriarchal and colonial ideologies. In resistance to these patriarchal and violent techniques, Indigenous and peasant women have organized to collectively confront the state’s military violence inflicted on them and their communities.

Narges Bajoghli’s article, “The Researcher as a National Security Threat: Interrogative Surveillance, Agency, and Entanglement in Iran and the United States,” was published in December 2019 in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Bajoghli utilizes fieldwork from Iran with militarized groups, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Basij paramilitary organization, to understand how research with militarized groups positions the researcher as a national security threat under heightened surveillance by intelligence officers and secret police. Following interrogative surveillance by IRGC and Basij paramilitary interlocutors in which they tested Bajoghli to ensure her research activity would not be a threat to the state, they would tell her their own real stories of the state which contradicted the state’s narratives. In the state’s surveillance of researchers like Bajoghli who are perceived as threats to state security for their research inquiries which threaten the state narrative they are seeking to uphold, secret police and intelligence officers surveil her interactions with military and paramilitary members. In their role as military and paramilitary, her interlocutors support the Islamic Republic regime and work to naturalize the state narratives of sovereignty through surveillance and intimidation, – while being surveilled by the state’s secret police and intelligence themselves – but they resist and use their military power in other ways as well, creating space outside of surveillance for Bajoghli and telling their real stories of the state.