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The gap between public perception of immigrant criminality and the research consensus on immigrants’ actual rates of criminal participation is persistent and cross-cultural. While the available evidence shows that immigrants worldwide tend to participate in criminal activity at rates slightly lower than the native-born, media and political discourse portraying immigrants as uniquely crime-prone remains a pervasive global phenomenon. This apparent disconnect is rooted in the dynamics of othering, or the tendency to dehumanize and criminalize identifiable out-groups. Given that most migration decisions are motivated by economic factors, othering is commonly used to justify subjecting immigrants to exploitative labor practices, with criminalization often serving as the rationale for excluding immigrants from full participation in the social contract. When considered in the context of social harm, immigrants’ relationship to crime and criminality becomes more complex, especially where migration decisions are forced or made under coercive circumstances involving ethnic cleansing, genocide, or other state crimes; many recent examples of these dynamics have rendered large numbers of migrants effectively stateless. Experiencing the direct or collateral effects of state crimes can, in turn, affect immigrants’ participation in a wide range of crime types, from status crimes such as prostitution or survival theft to terrorism and organized criminal activity such as drug trafficking or human trafficking. While there is no available research evidence indicating that immigrants participate in any given crime type at higher rates than the native-born, the dynamics of transnational criminal activity—reliant on multinational social networks, multilingual communication, and transportation across borders—favor immigrant participation, though such crimes are often facilitated by multinational corporations.

The spread of crimmigration policies, practices, and rhetoric represents an "economically rational" strategy and has significant implications for the lived experience of noncitizen immigrants. This study draws up in-depth interviews of immigrants with a range of legal statuses to describe the mechanics through which immigrants internalize and respond to the fear of deportation, upon which crimmigration strategies rely. The fear of deportation and its behavioral effects extend beyond undocumented or criminally convicted immigrants, encompassing lawful permanent residents and naturalized citizens alike. This fear causes immigrants to refuse to use public services, endure labor exploitation, and avoid public spaces, resulting in social exclusion and interrupted integration, which is detrimental to US society as a whole.

Neoliberal economics play a significant role in US social organization, imposing market logics on public services and driving the cultural valorization of free market ideology. The neoliberal ‘project of inequality’ is upheld by an authoritarian system of punishment built around the social control of the underclass—among them unauthorized immigrants. This work lays out the theory of the punishment marketplace: a conceptualization of how US systems of punishment both enable the neoliberal project of inequality, and are themselves subject to market colonization. The theory describes the rescaling of federal authority to local centers of political power. Criminal justice policy activism by local governments is punishment entrepreneurship: an accumulative approach to securing fiscal gain, political hegemony, security, and capitalized power. Local immigration enforcement entrepreneurship targets unauthorized and other deportable immigrants. This punitive immigration control reinforces racially structured social relations by obscuring the diminishing returns neoliberal globalization provides working class whites.

In April of 2016, National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement (NACOLE) and John Jay College partnered to sponsor the Academic Symposium “Building Public Trust: Generating Evidence to Enhance Police Accountability and Legitimacy.” This essay introduces the Criminal Justice Policy Review Special Issue featuring peer-reviewed, empirical research papers first presented at the Symposium. We provide context for the Symposium in relation to contemporary national discourse on police accountability and legitimacy. In addition, we review each of the papers presented at the Symposium, and provide in-depth reviews of each of the manuscripts included in the Special Issue.

How can an individual reenter a society of which he has never truly been a member? What does the PRI miss in assuming that the individual offender is the only potentially successful site for intervention? Drawing on his personal experience as an educator in prisons, public schools, and the PRI, the author argues that education in the PRI can best be understood in relation to educational segregation in society as a whole. As such, any successful approach to reentry must begin with a consideration of entry, and a renewed commitment by established institutions of the dominant culture to address racial segregation and the segregation of former prisoners alike.

Contemporary popular discourse linking immigration and immigrants to crime has proved extremely difficult to dislodge, despite clear evidence that immigrant labor provides broad and direct economic benefits to a significant proportion of the US population. The criminalizing discourse directed at immigrants may in part be functional, by leading to restrictionist immigration policies and practices and subjecting immigrants to intensified economic exploitation.

The pressure to research and evaluate successful programs is certainly not news to faculty and professionals responsible for community-based learning, prison education, or—in the case of Inside-Out—the nexus between the two. Diverse stakeholders are interested in better understanding program impacts, from funders and administrators who want to know about the effects of their financial and institutional investments, to staff who may use program evaluation to improve training or curriculum, to faculty and campus professionals who want to understand and improve community-engagement practices and pedagogies. Others see campus-community partnerships as fertile ground to advance knowledge in a range of disciplines (and perhaps to add to their own publication records as well), and view community-engaged work not as the focus of but as a site or context for research.