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Police killings of Black civilians have brought unprecedented attention to racial and ethnic discrimination in the criminal justice and legal systems. However, these topics have been underexamined in the field of law-psychology, both in research and forensic-clinical practice. We discuss how a racial justice framework can provide guidance for advancing psycholegal research and forensic-clinical practice related to race, ethnicity, culture, and their intersections. A racial justice framework centers the goal of increasing fair and responsive treatment and just outcomes for the most vulnerable populations involved with the criminal justice, legal, and carceral systems and ending existing disparities. We argue that the framework should include the use of transparent nonobjectivity, in which racial justice is an explicit and acknowledged goal of research and practice that exists alongside a commitment to open and rigorous science and evidence-based practice. We then use the racial justice framework as a backdrop for discussing the articles and broader themes that appear in the special issue, which include racial biases in policing, public views of the police and use of force, expanding research on racial bias in lay judgments, understanding disparities in sentencing and corrections, and improving forensic practice. Finally, we look to the future, discussing practices and perspectives that can facilitate a racial justice approach in psycholegal research and forensic-clinical practice. Our recommendations include engaging in reflexivity and addressing positionality; expanding research questions and methods, especially qualitative and community-based participatory action research; centering and engaging with communities of color; greater emphasis on intersectionality; shifting toward structural and adaptive interventions; and greater integration of work from other fields. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Violence risk instruments are used in numerous countries to estimate an individual's risk of reoffending. The racial fairness of violence risk instruments has received increasing attention due to ostensible differences among Anglo populations and racial minorities (e.g. African Americans and Indigenous populations). Fairness, which has numerous definitions (sensitivity fairness, error rate balance, calibration, predictive parity, statistical parity), can affect a risk instrument's utility in varying ways. This literature review explored how notions of fairness are discussed in the risk instrument literature with a specific focus on racial fairness. It also examined and critiqued the varying proposed resolutions to increase fairness. Many of these forms of fairness were found to be rarely satisfied in the literature. Further, the complications in achieving multiple forms of fairness simultaneously and the challenges of optimising both fairness and accuracy are discussed. Last, proposed solutions to increase racial fairness were often found to encompass significant limitations. Future directions for racial fairness in risk instruments are discussed, with a focus on exploring the trade-offs among varying fairness definitions and among fairness and accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]