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Analyses of crime and justice in an unprecedented time

While COVID-19 lockdowns affected nearly everyone worldwide, feelings of anxiety and fear were exacerbated for those already entangled in the criminal justice system. Scholars recognized the unique opportunity to study crime and the justice system’s response during this period, though they soon realized that determining the pandemic’s effects would be a complicated, nuanced process.

Crime, Corrections, and the COVID-19 Pandemic features analyses and findings from more than thirty contributors in eleven essays. The collection examines the multifaceted social, economic, cultural, legislative, and policy responses to COVID-19 and their impacts on crime and justice. It also explores how professionals across the criminal justice system—police officers, campus police officers, attorneys, judges, correctional staff, and community supervision agents—adapted to unprecedented challenges.

The book provides real-world evidence of how unconventional solutions and groundbreaking practices were implemented in response to a global crisis. Contributors analyze how incarcerated individuals, their families, and their supervisors dealt with the fear of transmission, medical care, and death. Their findings, which are necessarily dependent on timing, place, measurement, and operationalization, include both change and stasis, both negative and positive outcomes. For instance, while minor and property-related offenses initially declined, violent crimes like homicide and intimate partner violence increased. Drug usage patterns changed, leading to a rise in opioid overdoses, and despite the rise in digital interactions, there was no significant difference in self-reported cybervictimization. Furthermore, rates of gang-related crimes did not decrease. Policy and public health responses reshaped criminal activities, influencing the methods and motivations behind theft, child and elder abuse, and other offenses. This volume includes in-depth examinations of certain often-overlooked crimes, such as labor trafficking, and provides direct insights into the job challenges faced by criminal justice professionals, from probation personnel to labor rights advocates.

Emerging innovations in health risk management within correctional facilities led to increased awareness and focus on specific types of crime. Responses to the pandemic revealed significant challenges, such as burnout among justice system personnel, difficulties in adapting and innovating, and challenges in providing services to vulnerable populations.

Through diverse perspectives and empirical approaches ranging from advanced statistical analysis to qualitative interviews, Crime, Corrections, and the COVID-19 Pandemic offers a comprehensive exploration of the complexities that affect research results.  It showcases the resilience and innovation within the criminal justice field and details the challenges professionals in this area tackled during a universally trying time, presenting valuable lessons for future crises. 

A doctor, a disinvested neighborhood, and a radical experiment to close America’s death gap. 

Two girls are born in the same Chicago hospital. Their neighborhoods—just seven train stops apart—will shape their futures and help determine how long they live. One will celebrate her eighty-fifth birthday. The other will die before sixty-five.

This is the death gap: lives lost too soon. Crossing the Gap asks how a city with world-class hospitals can tolerate an epidemic of premature death—and tells the story of the people fighting to end it.

In his landmark book The Death Gap, physician and health equity leader David A. Ansell exposed how structural racism and poverty shorten lives. He moves beyond diagnosis in Crossing the Gap to explore what happens when a major medical center joins forces with pastors, community organizers, residents, and young leaders on Chicago’s West Side to redefine what a hospital owes its neighbors. Part medical memoir and part urban chronicle, Crossing the Gap follows groundbreaking initiatives such as West Side United and the Sankofa Wellness Village as they confront decades of disinvestment and work to build healthier communities. 

Through stories of collaboration, courage, conflict, and community leadership, Ansell shows how neighborhood voices, rigorous data, and moral imagination can transform health systems from bystanders into partners for change—not just in one city but throughout the nation. 

South Africa’s private fertility clinics promise hope: expert care, measurable success rates, and the possibility of long-desired children. While seemingly insulated from the legacies of apartheid and the stark inequalities of the present, these clinics operate within a society still shaped by racial stratification and uneven access to care. But what happens once patients step through the clinic doors? Based on fieldwork conducted over a decade, Curating Conception offers the first book-length study of IVF in sub-Saharan Africa. Tessa Moll turns to the polished, private clinics of Cape Town and Johannesburg to show how racial hierarchies are quietly sustained through everyday decisions—about donor selection, embryo grading, success statistics, and patient eligibility—that shape ideas of legitimate parenthood and belonging in the post-apartheid era. Introducing the concept of curating, Moll shows how medical authority, patient desire, and enduring social orders work together to shape which reproductive futures are seen as natural and desirable. In doing so, Curating Conception demonstrates how racial imaginaries—and the normalization of whiteness as the default family form—are woven into the intimate and technological processes of IVF. Blending vivid storytelling with careful analysis, it invites readers to rethink fertility care not simply as a technology of hope, but as a powerful site where history, inequality, and aspiration converge.