Stuti Kokkalera

• Ph.D; LLM
• Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Sam Houston State University

Due to the growing concerns of mass incarceration, coupled with the recent global pandemic of COVID-19, parole is in the spotlight as an avenue for early release. At the start of COVID-19, the elderly incarcerated population received attention due to their vulnerabilities. In this article, the likelihood of parole release and the amount of time can...

In the 2012 decision in Miller v. Alabama, the U.S. Supreme Court directed states to provide a “meaningful opportunity to obtain release” to juvenile lifers—one that acknowledges their lesser culpability and rehabilitative potential. In the state examined, the parole board revised its decision-making guidelines in 2014 by incorporating the Miller r...

Prior research has examined the prevalence of mental health diagnosis among incarcerated individuals. However, there is little research that has explored the link between having a mental health diagnosis and receiving write-ups (i.e., notice of disciplinary infractions) during incarceration. To better understand the relationship between having a me...

Restorative justice practices are popular alternatives for youth conflict resolutions in the juvenile justice system and in schools. However, we do not know the extent to which states have formalized the use of restorative justice. This study reviews state legislation to identify whether restorative justice has been codified in juvenile justice and...

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Jones v. Mississippi reignited interest in the constitutionality of lengthy prison sentences for juveniles. A substantial proportion of juveniles convicted of homicide and nonhomicide are currently serving “virtual life” or “ de facto life” sentences. De facto life sentences are lengthy sentences that may be con...

While there is a growing body of research on parent-child visitation among the general carceral population, less attention has been paid to examining parent-child contact practices among parents with mental health illness diagnoses. The current study uses a sample from the 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates to analyze the associations between mental hea...

Concerns over state and federal correctional budgets and the motivation to undo decades of mass incarceration have placed the institution of parole under the spotlight. While there is research on the correlates of parole decision-making, there has not been much examination of whether these correlates vary by age group. A critical segment of the inc...

In this chapter, we focus on the aging American prison population to highlight the humanitarian, social, and economic costs of lengthy incarceration. To explain the challenges posed by an aging prison population, this chapter draws on the risk, needs, and responsivity model (Andrews & Bonta, 2006; Bonta & Andrews, 2007). Existing literature suggest...

Crime & Delinquency invited submissions for a special issue on Qualitative Criminology and Victimology in 2021. This double special issue aimed to amplify qualitative methodologies in criminology, criminal justice, and victimology research. The diverse range of articles and commentaries draw on a variety of qualitative methods to advance the discip...

Although the number of incarcerated individuals has been slowly declining, the consequences of policies enacted to fight the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Crime” of the 1980s and 1990s have not abated. Crucially, “tough on crime” policies have expanded the country’s correctional population, especially evidenced in the incarceration rate of individ...

This book examines how attorneys enable a meaningful opportunity for release for individuals sentenced to life as juveniles. The work provides a detailed overview of how legal representation facilitates opportunities for release for juveniles sentenced to life: “juvenile lifers”. It contributes to the broader literature on the importance of legal r...

A juvenile lifer’s parole can be revoked and justified for technical or new crime violations of supervision conditions. We analyze narratives contained in revocation decisions issued to juvenile lifer candidates by one state parole board. Our qualitative content analysis reveals that most parole revocations stem from technical violations rather tha...

Parole is one of the least visible decision-making processes in the criminal justice system. We consider decision statements that support or reject release as symbolic of organizational concerns beyond the candidate's individual attributes. To draw out the symbolic, we focus on decision statements issued to 33 juvenile lifers previously ineligible...

This article distinguishes juvenile crime from delinquency and delinquents. It reports that juveniles are more likely to be identified as having committed an act of crime when the act is a violent one and they reside in impoverished inner cities. The article further highlights the demographics of juvenile crime, and the various explanations for its...

This study examines whether Situational Action Theory (SAT) can explain variation in delinquent offending between countries grouped along shared moral values. Thirteen countries were categorised in terms of “contextual morality” according to results from the World Values Survey. Then, survey data from a cross-section of 12 to 16-year-old youths in...

Based on U.S. Supreme Court decisions recognizing adolescence, we examined the likelihood of parole in one state for a population of candidates whose ages ranged from 14 to 21 at time of offense. Logistic regressions tested age on release, controlling for offense, adolescence-related, and rehabilitative variables. Contrary to expectations, a parole...

The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act of 2015 was introduced with the intention of strengthening the Indian juvenile justice system. The law, passed primarily in response to the Nirbhaya incident in 2012, was intended to propagate the welfare and rehabilitation of children in conflict with the law. However, certain provisions o...

The felony murder rule applies when a killing occurs during the commission of a felony offense. Youth under the age of 18 years can be charged with felony murder even if they did not commit the killing or intend the death of the victim, and subsequently sentenced to an adult maximum sentence, including life in prison. This study examines how states...

Courts and scholars have advocated for the right to legal representation in the parole process. The state examined in this study qualified that juvenile lifer parole candidates have the right to an attorney at their initial parole board hearing. Data drawn from written decisions issued by the state parole board were analyzed to determine the associ...

This study examines the empirical research on legal representation in delinquency proceedings and situates it in the broader investigation of how states provide legal assistance to juvenile defendants. Our review of empirical studies found that attorney presence was an aggravating factor in dispositional decisions. After closely examining state sta...

This study explores the generalizability of Situational Action Theory (SAT) in India by testing hypotheses related to the person–environment interaction in explaining offending. Drawing on data from a sample of 872 students between the ages of 14 and 17 from an Indian city collected as part of the International Self-Report Delinquency Study (ISRD3)...

This chapter reviews discretionary release practices impacting juveniles sentenced to adult maximums of life. First, we relate how late 20th century automatic waiver and determinate sentencing policies led to a rapid rise in the juvenile lifer population. A segment of the juvenile lifer population was sentenced to life without the possibility (LWOP...

In this article, we examine the role of parental maltreatment and parental social control in violent delinquency in two different countries: Indonesia and the U.S. but we go further by asking if gender makes a difference. We use a sample of Indonesian and U.S. youths from ISRD3 data, a self-reported survey instrument administered across multiple co...