The twenty-five-year epidemic of opioid misuse in the United States, which has taken at least 750,000 lives through overdose, has had another lethal toll: violence associated with the street market for these drugs. In this HFG Research and Policy in Brief, Joel Wallman, Richard Rosenfeld, and Randolph Roth present the results of county-level studies that assessed the association between levels of transactions in the illicit market, measured by overdose rates, and homicide. They found that the growth in opioid abuse, arguably a reflection of growth in the illicit market, exerted upward pressure on homicide rates in both the U.S. Black and White populations, but especially in the latter and especially in Appalachia.

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As jurisdictions throughout the U.S. consider reducing or eliminating the use of pretrial detention and cash bail, criminologists Don Stemen and David Olson of Loyola University Chicago examine whether crime has increased in places that have implemented bail reforms since 2017.

In Is Bail Reform Causing an Increase in Crime?, the authors examine eleven jurisdictions that constrained or ended use of these long-established practices and found “no clear or obvious pattern” connecting bail reforms and violent crime. 

They conclude that “reducing pretrial detention and eliminating money considerations from decisions about detention have had minimal negative effects on public safety” and that, considering the harmful effects of pretrial detention on defendants, bail reforms might, in fact, “improve the well-being of communities most impacted by crime.”

In International Sanctions against Violent Actors, Dursun Peksen, Professor of Political Science at the University of Memphis, examines the extent to which international sanctions affect political violence committed by state and nonstate actors in sanctioned countries. In this research synthesis, he observes that sanctions are effective only about 30 percent of the time and are likely to create incentives for targeted governments to employ repressive means against their citizenry and rival groups. Sanctions are most likely to succeed when focused on the military capability of one or more parties to a civil war, Peksen concludes. Paired with other forms of intervention, sanctions can amplify the pressure on targeted actors and contribute to peace and stability.