Biases in decision-making based on race, ethnicity, social class, gender, sexual orientation, and other social identities are pervasive in the criminal justice and legal systems. Likewise, the positionality of legal actors and lay people from diverse groups both influences and constrains legally relevant judgments. This chapter uses a case study of racially biased judgments in the criminal justice and legal systems to illustrate how judgment processes can lead to unequal outcomes across social groups. It then describes ways in which law-psychology can expand research on diversity in legal decision-making, addressing issues related to social class, discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, and reproductive decision-making by women. It also discusses frameworks and perspectives that provide valuable insights on legal decision-making but which often are overlooked by psycholegal scholars, including intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, and the abolition movement. The chapter concludes by examining the limits of a decision-making framework for understanding unequal outcomes in legally relevant contexts, which frequently are the result of structural and implicit biases in addition to deliberate judgments.

In this chapter, we presented Black youth’s reflections on summer 2020 and the powerful protest movement for Black lives that reverberated about the globe. Young Black changemakers saw summer 2020 as a watershed moment in which real changes toward racial justice were happening. Summer 2020 connected Black youth’s personal experiences of racism to a historic movement for racial justice, continuing a legacy of fighting for racial justice. Alongside profound joy, inspiration, and hope, Black youth experienced sadness, frustration, numbness, anger, and fear. We captured these youth’s feelings while they were living through this momentous time, and they were still in the midst of processing the moment, their feelings, and their role in the movement. Summer 2020 activated agency, critical knowledge, and action for some, and for others, the movement advanced and solidified their purposeful commitments to racial justice for now and into the future.

This chapter first summarizes eight threats to racial equity in health and healthcare identified in previous chapters. It then presents potential solutions to reduce their impact on Black Americans’ health. Two solutions involve lessening the impact of racial disparities in socioeconomic status on access to healthcare. The first involves broad-based efforts to improve the quality of education available to Black students, which should increase their future economic potential and thus ultimately improve their health. The second one is to establish comprehensive, single-payer insurance programs, making healthcare more available to everyone. Other proposed solutions address health threats caused by specific kinds of anti-Black racism. These solutions include programs to systematically reduce unfair and dangerous law enforcement practices and targeted investments in intentionally segregated communities to improve residents’ quality of life. A solution to the threat of inequitable healthcare is changing healthcare facilities’ focus from treating to preventing illnesses and dramatically increasing the number Black healthcare providers. Finally, a solution to the undue influence of patients’ race in healthcare outcomes is to develop interventions that reduce the impact of racial bias on healthcare professionals’ actions and equip Black Americans with the information and strategies that would make healthcare more accessible and supportive of them.

Traditionally there has been a reflexive assumption that democratic regimes have more accountable and less violent policing practices than those in authoritarian regimes. Yet modern authoritarian regimes have pursued policies of police professionalization while democratic regimes continue to often suffer from comparatively higher levels of police violence. This chapter argues that an examination of policing in Japan, the Philippines, and China supports the growing irrelevance of regime-type for understanding police violence and accountability. While modern policing has been subject to increased empirical study, a technocratic emphasis on policing practices has been unable to overcome both the core sociogenic drivers of crime and the intransigent moralism through which publics evaluate police action. Consequently, historical and cultural factors are the primary drivers of how any given society perceives the legitimate objects of police violence, and thus police violence strongly resists reduction through technical revisions or the reform of formal police institutions.

Chapter 4 describes the Maidan events – the start of the war. Mass social mobilization began when the government rejected an EU trade agreement. It ended with a regime change. These protests marked the first time since independence that police used excessive force against protesters in a significant way. A radical subset of protesters then used violence strategically against the police. The Party of Regions imploded and power transferred to the opposition. This created a crisis of political legitimacy and two opposing narratives. In one narrative, the illegitimate police violence against protesters finished the regime (“Revolution of Dignity”). In the other, the street violence against the police created an illegitimate political outcome (“fascist coup”). Anti-Maidan protesters in the East formed militias, acting on the second narrative. The roots of Ukraine’s war – whatever one calls it – can thus be traced to Maidan.

The court trials of the Scottsboro Nine, young African Americans falsely accused of raping two young white women, galvanized a generation and helped precipitate Hughes’s leftward shift. In 1931, he published Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play in Verse, collecting an eponymous play and the poems “The Town of Scottsboro,” “Justice,” “Scottsboro,” and “Christ in Alabama” alongside images by Prentiss Taylor. Its themes – the lethal policing of a racially and economically vulnerable group – no less than the conflicts among different factions surrounding the trial, seem tailor-made to contemporary concerns. This chapter reads Hughes and Taylor together to shift the focus from the prospect of death to imprisonment itself as unjust. Then it asks what it means that its poems circulate as memes, absent their original context, to protest the seemingly endless instances of judicial and extrajudicial, state-sanctioned murder. If the question of a grievable death has taken on renewed urgency since 2014, Hughes’s Scottsboro writing urges readers to reconsider what we collectively recognize as death.

This chapter explains why Rio de Janeiro endured a nearly uninterrupted confrontation between drug gangs and the state’s Military Police since redemocratization in the 1980s. High fragmentation withered multiple initiatives to professionalize the police while recurrent political turnover generated successive police reform cycles. The dispersal of political power also decentralized rents from police corruption. Police thus regulated drug trafficking through splintered corruption deals and rampant violence, reinforcing criminal retaliation, gang invasions and successional struggles. The Pacification program that began in 2008 briefly disrupted this pattern, ushering a temporary coexistence arrangement that significantly decreased both police and criminal violence. However, the state’s fiscal and political crises and the end of the international events that promoted Pacification not only sparked a return to grim normalcy but increased police violence to unprecedented heights in the ensuing decade.

Chapter 5 explores the prolonged institutional decay of the Colombian National Police, particularly during the 1980s and early 1990s, and considers the factors that impeded comprehensive structural reform. Following a period of generalized loss of legitimacy across the Colombian state resulting from widespread political and criminal violence, the early 1990s saw a range of transformative policy reforms – from health and education to fiscal policy – and an institutional overhaul in the form of an ambitious new Constitution. Reform of the National Police, however, did not gain much traction, despite widespread authoritarian coercive structures and practices, weak institutional capacity, and inefficiency in fighting crime. I demonstrate how the National Police leveraged its structural power – flowing from its primary role in fighting the country’s war against drug cartels and its institutional and financial ties to the United States – to constrain the policy agenda and thwart reform attempts, even in a political environment that was highly conducive to a range of institutional and policy reforms. I then show how fragmented societal preferences over policing and security, often divided along class lines, generated conflicting demands and provided little electoral incentive for politicians to push for police reform, reinforcing institutional persistence.

Chapter 4 traces the development of the Police of Buenos Aires Province since Argentina’s transition to democracy and accounts for its institutional persistence in the face of extensive extralegal violence and predation of the citizenry. Despite the integral role of police in the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s, the transition to democracy in 1983 did not entail efforts to reform the country’s police institutions in accordance with democratic principles, as occurred with the military. As crime rates and societal demands for improved security increased, structural police reform was not on the agenda, and countless short-term efforts to root out corruption largely floundered. While other provincial institutions, such as the judiciary, underwent structural reform, the police strategically used its control over coercion to raise the cost to politicians of constraining police authority. The resulting accommodation between police and politicians largely kept police reform off the public agenda and allowed the provincial police to thwart external accountability efforts. I demonstrate that societal demands regarding policing and security were largely fragmented and often contradictory, such that politicians saw little electoral incentive to address police violence, corruption, and poor performance.

In 1970, a senior civil servant in the British Home Office published The Conquest of Violence, which chronicled what he considered to be a social triumph within the United Kingdom. The book was an expression of the way that many felt in the European liberal democracies a generation after the Second World War. It built on perceptions apparent during the nineteenth century that violence, especially criminal violence and harsh responses by those in authority were alien to what were essentially progressive and humanitarian developments within European culture and society. The aims of this chapter are to probe such beliefs particularly with reference to criminal violence and responses to it. It assesses the ways in which the media have provided vicarious thrills since the early nineteenth century, the construction of a criminal class as a separate social group, and the ways in which eyes were closed to violence by agents of the state who were perceived as disciplining the uncivilized.