You’ve gathered a strong list of sources, and many of them are solid empirical studies. That is exactly what you need for a methods-focused literature review, so you are off to a good start in terms of research. At this point, the draft includes only about five pages of substantive content, which means you still have plenty of room to develop your argument and deepen your analysis. One area to work on is narrowing your focus. Right now, the paper covers a wide range of topics, including first-time versus repeat offenders, sentencing disparities, drug courts, and historical policy shifts. What is missing is a clear, testable hypothesis that ties everything together. A good example would be something like, “Mandatory minimum sentencing increases recidivism among first-time drug offenders.”
With your strong set of empirical sources, the next step is to use them to examine how researchers define and measure recidivism, what types of research designs they rely on, and how well those studies support a causal interpretation. That kind of methodological focus is at the heart of this assignment. You are on the right track-this is a matter of refining your structure and digging deeper into the research methods used in the literature you have already found.