Projects

The Emerging Adult Justice Project leads action-research projects focused on 18- to 25-year-olds involved in the justice system. Our mission is to inform and drive developmentally appropriate and effective justice responses that advance successful paths to adulthood. 

Visit the Emerging Adult Justice Project website to learn more.

After a sustained increase in the incarceration rate, the prison and jail population of the United States is now more than seven times higher than in the early 1970s. The growth in incarceration rates was produced by a transformation of sentencing policy and a new emphasis on incapacitation and deterrence as the main purposes of punishment. As incarceration rates have now started to decline slightly, a new conversation has started about alternatives to incarceration and continuing reductions in prison and jail populations.

Founded as either an up-front diversion from incarceration (probation) or a back-end release valve to prison crowding (parole), community corrections in the United States has grown far beyond what its founders could have imagined, with a profound, unintended impact on incarceration. With 3.9 million adults under community corrections supervision in America (more than double the number in prison and jail), probation and parole have become a substantial contributor to our nation’s mass incarceration dilemma as well as a deprivation of liberty in their own right.

About 600,000 people are released from state and federal prison each year, returning overwhelmingly to neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage. The Reentry Studies—the Boston Reentry Study and New York Reentry Study— are tailored to studying the process of transition from prison to community of a hard-to-reach population under contemporary conditions of mass incarceration.

Square One is taking on the fundamental issues: poverty and racial inequality, violence and safety, criminalization and punishment. We're challenging traditional responses to crime, and looking in new places for more effective responses, by asking a new question: if we start over from “square one,” how would justice policy be different?

 Visit the Square One Justice website to learn more.

As the country’s youth incarceration rate has declined in recent years, there is now a growing movement to end the use of a punitive youth prison model in favor of a more community-centered approach. Nationwide, research and practice are demonstrating that it is possible to keep youth in their own homes and communities, with the support of their families, all while promoting safety, fairness, and accountability on all sides.Over time, the Justice Lab will accelerate this transformation through a multi-pronged initiative that will: