Introduction

To some, empirically seeking to understand the relationship between race and justice is an overdone exercise. Still, research continues to grapple with the realities of systemic disparities faced by racial and ethnic minoritized groups. This issue contributes to the scholarly conversation around race and justice by examining a range of issues across the criminal justice system.

The differences in systemic outcomes that marginalized groups face and vast across policing, courts, and corrections, and the disparities found throughout the criminal justice system persist. Taken together, the articles in this issue demonstrate that race continues to shape perceptions, decision-making, lived experiences of confinement, and outcomes after release. This collection highlights not only the breadth of these disparities but also the mechanisms through which they are reproduced and, in some cases, challenged.

Individual perceptions of race and justice have real implications for crime and punishment. Ashley B. Barr, Tucker Reyes, and Mary Nell Trautner rely on quantitative and qualitative methods to explore how young adults perceive appropriate punishment for juvenile offenders in their article titled Race, Gender, and Juvenile Determinism: A Mixed Methods Approach to Understanding Punishment Attitudes Toward Juvenile Offenders. Their quantitative findings demonstrate that Black respondents and male respondents are less supportive of punitive treatment than their white and female counterparts. The qualitative interview data complements these findings by providing a deeper understanding of the justifications young adults have for their beliefs. White men, for instance, detail the degree of sameness that shapes their understanding. White women, in contrast, are consistently punitive, disregarding sameness narratives completely. This study suggests that intersectional examinations of perceptions are critical, as the degree to which one can identify with offenders relates to perceived deservingness of a punitive or rehabilitative response to delinquent behavior. Perceptions of dialect are the focus of Dialect on Trial: An Experimental Examination of Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Character Judgements. In this study, Adam Dunbar, Sharese King, and Charlotte Vaughn examine differences in perceived character in criminality when an individual speaks African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and Mainstream American English (MAE). Participants related AAVE speakers as having worse character, greater propensity for crime, being more stereotypically Black, less educated, and having a lower socioeconomic status than those who spoke MAE. The authors put these findings in the context of criminal justice processing, discussing profound implications for AAVE speakers.

Although criminal justice processing consists of processes and procedures dictated by law and policy, practitioner discretion plays a large role in outcomes. The article Seigneurial Hermeneutics and Judicial Truth: The Impact of Race on the Decision-Making Standards of the Brazilian Judiciary tackles judicial discretion. By first providing a rich understanding of Brazilian law and race relations, connection to racialized history, and anti-Black interpretations that exist in legal culture, the reader is well-prepared to join the authors in a mixed-methods investigation of judicial lawsuits where the Black population has been victimized. The authors find that the judicial truth regime engages with Black victims in three ways: (a) devaluation of Black suffering, (b) disregarding the word of Black people, and (c) erasing racial violence. In this way, Evandro Piza Duarte, Marcos Querioz, and Fernando Nasciemento dos Santos identify the judiciary as a critical player in the association of Black Brazilian population with the zone of nonbeing. Shifting from judges, Belen Lowrey-Kinberg, Hillary Mellinger, and Jon Gould take a qualitative approach to understanding how prosecutors discuss race. Their analysis finds the regular reliance on several linguistic features that allow prosecutors to perpetuate colorblind discourse by acknowledging racial disparities in a general way, a strategy the authors refer to as buffering. This buffering strategy is depicted even in the title of the article, “It's Hard for Me to Answer That”: Prosecutors’ Race Talk in the Age of Colorblindness, a direct quote from a participant. The study digs deeper, finding that prosecutors with defense experience and male prosecutors were less likely to engage in buffering than their counterparts. Implications for this study resonate in terms of training for prosecutors and courtroom actors more broadly, as well as the advantages of shifting from a colorblind frame to one that is race conscious.

For those convicted, detention in a corrections facility is the next phase of processing by the system. This issue contains several articles focused on how race relates to experiences of confinement. In Ethnoracial Dynamics Experienced by Incarcerated Youth and Staff in a Male Juvenile Prison, Brandon Dan, YuTing Situ, and Rebecca L. Fix analyze data from 25 interviews with incarcerated youth and staff members to understand how the social organization of juvenile prisons is shaped by race and ethnicity. Results demonstrate that when staff and youth share racial/ethnic identity there is more leniency, trust, and favoritism. Furthermore, Black youth reported being overpoliced while white youth described experiencing bullying tied to their race. Staff members also reported inequities based on race. These results demonstrate that race is playing a pivotal role in the social organization of men's facilities, as experienced by youth and staff members. Focused solely on confined racially-marginalized men, Rachael Floyd, Rachel McKail, Adonis Akra, and Tessa Saunders undertake a review of 10 studies in Racially-Marginalised Men's Experiences of Prison in the United Kingdom: A Systemic Literature Review. Thematic analysis revealed incarcerated men who identified as racially marginalized report: (a) feeling powerless in a powerful system, (b) racism, and (c) feeling disconnected from cultural identity. The authors rightly argue for racist policies and practices to be replaced by antiracist approaches to coproduce meaningful prison reform. Timely and critical, Javier Ramos, Sylwia J. Piatkowska, and Cristal N. Hernandez's study focuses on how those born outside of the United States experience the carceral system in An Empirical Examination of the In-Prison Behaviors of Foreign-Born Individuals: Does Nationality Predict Misconduct? Comparing a diverse group of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Jamaicans, Mexicans, and immigrants from other countries to U.S.-born detainees, they find the greatest difference is among foreign-born groups rather than between foreign-born and native-born. The study also finds that these differences are muted when the foreign-born carceral population are analyzed as a homogenous group, signaling the importance of future research to treat differences in nationality beyond the United States as heterogenous. Although many race-related studies in the carceral space focus on negative outcomes and disparities, Marin R. Wenger, Corey Whichard, and Jacob T.N. Young take a novel approach by focusing on friendship. In the article, An Unbridgeable Gap? Racial Attitudes and Friendship in Prison, a network approach is used to explore how friendship and racial attitudes operate in a good behavior prison unit. Results find that those who hold negative racial attitudes are less likely to be chosen to be friends by individuals from other races.

This issue also focuses on the impact of race and justice towards the end of a carceral sentence (parole hearings), reoffending upon release (recidivism), and reintegrating into society (reentry). Parole hearings are critical points in being processed by the criminal justice system as the outcome not only determines release and its conditions but also accesses to resources upon release. Liora G. Avnaim-Pesso and Joshua Guetzkow focus on these critical decision points as they occur in Israel in Access to Justice via Parole: Exploring Ethnoracial Bias in Parole Hearings. By analyzing over 2300 parole cases in Israel, they examine factors that contribute to disparate parole outcomes. Their results find that minoritized groups are significantly less likely to be paroled. The results signal that judges make decisions about incarcerated racial minorities by relying more on individual-level characteristics, signaling ethnic bias. In contrast, when the incarcerated person is a racial majority, judges tend to rely on procedural characteristics which signal familiarity bias. Using an intersectional analysis, Alyssa M. Sheeran finds disparities in the likelihood of individuals reoffending upon release from jail. According to The Joint Effects of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Age on the Likelihood of Recidivism from a Local Jail, non-Hispanic Blacks, males, and younger individuals have the highest odds of receiving an additional charge after release. Considering age, race, ethnicity, and gender simultaneously, results show that younger, non-Hispanic Black males were the most disadvantaged population in terms of jail recidivism. The relationship between race and justice does not end when an individual is released. As Ariel L. Roddy examines in The Social and Spatial Mismatch of Women Returning from Jail Contexts: An Intersectional Mixed-Methods Analysis, individuals who live far from job opportunities and lack social connections and/or capital face significant barriers to successful reentry. Roddy finds that women of color in her 56-person qualitative sample were more likely to experience unique obstacles with employment and social support, thereby suggesting another point of inequity related to race and justice.

Although being processed by and working for the criminal justice system is a large and crucial focus of criminological research, G.D. Breetzke encourages disciplinary reflexivity in his article Editorial Board Representation in Criminology: A Call to Address Racial Disparities. Breetzke examines all journals in the Web of Science database categorized as Criminology and Penology findings that nearly 90% of all editorial board members across the field were white. The author urges criminology as a discipline to act against the systemic marginalization of groups that perpetuate in the academy, including in our field, and lists actionable strategies to make this critical change.

This issue brings together scholarships that examine how race operates across multiple stages of the criminal justice process. From perceptions of punishment and raciolinguistic bias, to discretionary decision-making in courts, to lived experiences inside prisons, and finally to outcomes related to parole, recidivism, and reentry, the articles collectively demonstrate that race remains a central organizing force in justice outcomes.

Importantly, this issue also highlights variation, across identities, institutional actors, and national contexts, showing that race does not operate in isolation but intersections with gender, age, nationality, and professional roles. At the same time, the inclusion of reflexive work on the discipline itself reminds us that these patterns are not confined to the system we study but are also embedded within criminology as a field.

Taken together, this issue underscores the persistence of racial inequality while also pointing to opportunities for more intentional, race-conscious approaches to research, policy, and practice.