Criminal Justice

Second-generation immigrants are just “catching up” with the rest of us, a new study says.

Black men were more than six times as likely as white men in 2010 to be incarcerated in federal and state prisons, and local jails.

Roughly three–in-four Americans say government efforts to enforce marijuana laws cost more than they are worth.

A study finds that female white-collar crooks face the same glass ceiling as their law-abiding peers in the corporate world: they typically hold inferior positions to men, rarely are in charge and make significantly less money for their dirty deeds than their male accomplices.

Prison overcrowding is a problem for countries around the world, including the United States, where 30,000 California prison inmates initiated a hunger strike in July to protest solitary confinement policies at the state’s prisons. Now in its fourth week, nearly 500 inmates are still refusing meals. In May, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the state to reduce […]

Overview The public is divided over the not guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman trial and over the conversation about race that has surrounded it. The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted July 17-21 among 1,480 adults nationwide finds roughly as many satisfied with the verdict in the case (39%) as dissatisfied […]

Overview The final days of the trial of George Zimmerman, which concluded July 13 with a verdict of not guilty, attracted relatively modest public interest overall. In a weekend survey, 26% say they were following news about the trial very closely. This is lower than interest in the initial controversy over Trayvon Martin’s shooting when […]

Last week, Sesame Street added a new character -- Alex, a child whose father is in prison. The new feature was meant to deal with the reality of a sharp increase in the number of incarcerated adults in the U.S.

Overview A substantial majority of Americans (81%) view sexual assault in the military as an extremely or very important issue. But the public does not believe the problem of sexual assault is a bigger problem in the military than outside it: Just 11% say it is more of a problem inside the military, 23% say […]

National rates of gun homicide and other violent gun crimes are strikingly lower now than during their peak in the mid-1990s, paralleling a general decline in violent crime, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of government data. Beneath the long-term trend, though, are big differences by decade: Violence plunged through the 1990s, but has declined less dramatically since 2000.