Annual Review of Criminology

This review examines the contributions of bioarchaeological research to criminological understandings of violence, focusing on the structural conditions that influence variations in violence across different societies and historical periods. Bioarchaeology offers an expansive temporal and geographical perspective, analyzing skeletal trauma to interpret diverse forms of violence—including warfare, ritual practices, and structural oppression—beyond the conventional criminological focus on crime. Contrary to narratives suggesting a linear decline in violence with the rise of state societies, bioarchaeological findings indicate fluctuating patterns of violence, often linked to the quality and stability of state institutions. Resource scarcity and climate stress are also identified as significant factors influencing violence, paralleling criminological theories that associate violence with poverty, marginalization, and social instability. The review advocates for interdisciplinary collaboration to deepen our understanding of violence as a context-dependent phenomenon shaped by ecological, institutional, and social dynamics.

In 2022, the US Supreme Court affirmed the constitutional right of most civilians to carry concealed firearms in public for self-defense, overturning restrictive concealed carry laws in several states. Concealed carry regulations have evolved substantially through four waves of reforms, beginning with prohibitions of the practice in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to today's permitless-carry regimes in more than half of US states. In recent decades, competing claims about whether permissive concealed carry regulations deter or exacerbate criminal violence have been studied with increasing rigor, with the weight of evidence now showing that such laws cause increases in homicide and violent crime rates. We review the limited available research examining the mechanisms by which permissive concealed carry laws increase violence and the evidence that specific law provisions may contribute to those effects. This review is intended to inform ongoing decisions and debates about concealed carry regulations and their impact on violence in America.

This review critically examines long-term trends of lethal violence in England and Wales. Notably, the timing, character, and distribution of the homicide drop here deviates from trends observed in other forms of violence and comparable jurisdictions. Drawing on extensive research and multidecade data from the Homicide Index (1977–2020), this review explores key theoretical frameworks, disaggregates offender and victim profiles, and investigates the structural, cultural, and interpersonal factors shaping lethal violence. Particular attention is given to the gendered and racialized dimensions of homicide, the increasing proportion of unsolved cases, and the importance of developing bespoke models. The review identifies critical data gaps, especially around ethnicity, and outlines priorities for future research. It argues for recognizing homicide as a distinct phenomenon in England and Wales, requiring tailored theoretical and empirical attention.

After George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2013, three women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, created, in their words, “a Black-centered, political-movement-building project called #BlackLivesMatter.” Just over a decade later, this movement has grown into a powerful, decentralized coalition catalyzed by the protest actions following the deaths of Ferguson teen Michael Brown and New Yorker Eric Garner at the hands of police officers and by the worldwide response to police violence following George Floyd's choking death by Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis. This edition of Perspectives is an effort to take stock of how these events and attendant social movements have inspired change in criminal justice research, policy, and law. In particular, we were interested in how the past decade's events have influenced how we teach. We asked noted Yale Law School scholar and professor, James Forman, author of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize winning book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, to select a group for and to guide a conversation on this topic. Professor Forman is joined by Bennett Capers (Fordham School of Law), Angela Davis (American University Washington College of Law), Erin Murphy (NYU School of Law), and Shaun Ossei-Owusu (University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School).