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Crime And Punishment: Insitutional Sanctions And Other Characteristics That Effect Campus Crime, Aldon Givens

All Theses

Crime, has and continues to be, a major issue in the world of institutions of higher education. Colleges and universities are constantly working on ways to prevent and improve crime on their respective campuses, which in most occasions includes collecting and reporting crime data to law enforcement agencies and the general public. By setting up punishment schemes and sanctions to deter criminal activity at their institution, administrators and faculty are looking for better, more efficient ways to influence the behavior or their students and steer them away from a life of criminal activity.
By studying existing literature, crime definitions, and …

Punishment As Suffering, David Gray

Vanderbilt Law Review

When it comes to punishment, should we be subjectivists or objectivists? That is, should we define, measure, and justify punishment based on the subjective experiences of those who are punished or should we instead remain objective, focusing our attention on acts, culpability, and desert? In a recent series of high- profile articles, a group of contemporary scholars has taken up the mantle of subjectivism. In their view, criminal punishment is a grand machine for the production of negative subjective experiences-suffering. The machine requires calibration, of course. According to these scholars, the main standard we use for ours is comparative proportionality. …

The Cultural Dynamics Of Rewarding Honesty And Punishing Deception, Cynthia S. Wang, Angela K. Y. Leung

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Recent research suggests that individuals reward honesty more than they punish deception. Five experiments showed that different patterns of rewards and punishments emerge for North American and East Asian cultures. Experiment 1 demonstrated that Americans rewarded more than they punished, whereas East Asians rewarded and punished in equivalent amounts. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that these divergent patterns by culture could be explained by greater social mobility experienced by Americans. Experiments 4 and 5 examined how certain consequences of social mobility, approach—avoidance behavioral motivations and trust and felt obligation, can lead to disparate reward and punishment decisions within the two …

Do Judges Vary In Their Treatment Of Race?, David S. Abrams, Marianne Bertrand, Sendhil Mullainathan

All Faculty Scholarship

Are minorities treated differently by the legal system? Systematic racial differences in case characteristics, many unobservable, make this a difficult question to answer directly. In this paper, we estimate whether judges differ from each other in how they sentence minorities, avoiding potential bias from unobservable case characteristics by exploiting the random assignment of cases to judges. We measure the between-judge variation in the difference in incarceration rates and sentence lengths between African-American and White defendants. We perform a Monte Carlo simulation in order to explicitly construct the appropriate counterfactual, where race does not influence judicial sentencing. In our data set, …

Criminal Procedure - The Robert Alton Harris Decision: Federalism, Comity, And Judicial Civil Disobedience, Deirdre J. Cox

Golden Gate University Law Review

This article touches on only three of the many issues raised by the Harris case. First, it explores the appropriateness of Harris' section 1983 class action filed on behalf of all California death row inmates. Specifically, Harris argued that death by lethal gas constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Supreme Court characterized the section 1983 action as an attempt to avoid the application of McCleskey v. Zant, which bars successive claims for relief. By way of an extensive historical analysis of each, this article examines the respective roles of …

What The Public Thinks About Sentencing, Marisela Velazquez, Robyn Lincoln

Robyn Lincoln

Extract: There is a relatively long tradition by legal scholars of gauging public perceptions about sentencing in Canada, the UK and the USA, along with limited research in Australia. This research is significant because 'the importance of public attitudes to sentencing lies in their potential to influence the development of policy guiding the criminal justice system'. Public confidence is essential for the effective functioning of justice. While it is the case that politicians and legislators make the laws, and judges and other justice agents (eg, police and prosecutors) apply them, the public has a role to play in guiding the …

The Perceptions Of Elite Male Gymnasts Of The Effects Of Punishment On Self-Efficacy And Athletic Performance, Jason David Selk

Dissertations

Existing literature suggests that coaches should use rewards rather than punishment for motivational purposes with athletes. The greatest argument against punishment lies in the evidence that the short-term positive effects on skill achievement are outweighed by the longterm negative effects on self-efficacy. Still, punishment is widely practiced within the coaching world; however, little research on coaching practices exists addressing the possibility that punishment could be utilized more effectively. As a beginning exploration of this topic, twelve elite male gymnasts were interviewed to determine what reinforcement their coaches used to motivate them. The results of the interviews seemed to reveal five …

Regulating Student Speech: Suppression Versus Punishment, Emily Gold Waldman

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Sexting: Risky Or [F]Risky? An Examination Of The Current And Future Legal Treatment Of Sexting In The United States, Krupa A. Shah

Krupa A. Shah

No abstract provided.

Modal Retributivism: A Theory Of Sanctions For Attempts And Other Criminal Wrongs, Anthony M. Dillof

Anthony M. Dillof

How much punishment, in terms of size and severity, should a person get committing for a given offense? Operating in a deontological framework, the article attempts to answer the question of criminal punishment severity in a unified, principled manner. There is a wide-spread intuition that when it comes to figuring out what punishment a person deserves, &#;harm matters.&#; The idea that Aharm matters@ is the basis for harm-based retributivism. The article begins by critiquing harm-based retributivism. Proponents of harm-based retributivism believe that attempts should be punished less than completed offenses, but how much less? One-half? Three-quarters? The problem with harm-based …

The Dance Of Death Or (Almost) No One Here Gets Out Alive: The Fourth Circuit's Capital Punishment Jurisprudence, John H. Blume

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Book Review - When Brute Force Fails: How To Have Less Crime And Less Punishment, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

Two of the most dramatic social phenomena of the last half century in the United States are the substantial rise in crime that occurred during the 1960s and the equally dramatic drop in crime that began roughly contemporaneously with the advent of the Clinton Administration. The good news is that we have improved things from the violent and crime-filled days of the late 1980s and early 1990s; the bad news is that we have increased our prison population immensely in the effort. We may now be enjoying the return to the crime levels of the early 1960s, but we also …

Statewide Capital Punishment: The Case For Eliminating Counties’ Role In The Death Penalty, Adam M. Gershowitz

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Modal Retributivism: A Theory Of Sanctions For Attempts And Other Criminal Wrongs, Anthony M. Dillof

Anthony M. Dillof

How much punishment, in terms of size and severity, should a person get committing for a given offense? Operating in a deontological framework, the article attempts to answer the question of criminal punishment severity in a unified, principled manner. There is a wide-spread intuition that when it comes to figuring out what punishment a person deserves, harm matters. The idea that “harm matters” is the basis for harm-based retributivism. The article begins by critiquing harm-based retributivism. Proponents of harm-based retributivism believe that attempts should be punished less than completed offenses, but how much less? One-half? Three-quarters? The problem with harm-based …

The Crime Of Coming Home: British Convicts Returning From Transportation In London, 1720-1780, Christopher Teixeira

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines convicts who were tried for the crime of 'returning from transportation' at London's Old Bailey courthouse between 1720 and 1780. While there is plenty of historical scholarship on the tens of thousands of people who endured penal transportation to the American colonies, relatively little attention has been paid to convicts who migrated illegally back to Britain or those who avoided banishment altogether. By examining these convicts, we can gain a better understanding of how transportation worked, how convicts managed to return to Britain, and most importantly, what happened to them there. This thesis argues that convicts resisted …

Drug Law Reform—Retreating From An Incarceration Addiction, Robert G. Lawson

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Now, thirty years into the "war on drugs," views about the law's reliance on punishment to fix the drug problem are less conciliatory and more absolute: "[t]he notion that 'the drug war is a failure' has become the common wisdom in academic ... circles." Those who have most closely studied the results of the "war" believe that it has "accomplished little more than incarcerating hundreds of thousands of individuals whose only crime was the possession of drugs." More importantly, they believe that it has had little if any effect on the drug problem: "Despite the fact that the number of …

Killing, Letting Die, And The Case For Mildly Punishing Bad Samaritanism, Ken M. Levy

Journal Articles

For over a century now, American scholars (among others) have been debating the merits of “bad-samaritan” laws – laws punishing people for failing to attempt “easy rescues.” Unfortunately, the opponents of bad-samaritan laws have mostly prevailed. In the United States, the “no-duty-to-rescue” rule dominates. Only four states even have bad-samaritan laws, and these laws impose only the most minimal punishment – either sub-$500 fines or short-term imprisonment.

This Article argues that this situation needs to be remedied. Every state should criminalize bad samaritanism. For, first, criminalization is required by the supreme value that we place on protecting human life, a …

Retributivism For Progressives: A Response To Professor Flanders, David C. Gray, Jonathan Huber

Faculty Scholarship

In his engaging article "Retributivism and Reform," published in the Maryland Law Review, Chad Flanders engages two claims he ascribes to James Q. Whitman: 1) that American criminal justice is too "harsh," and 2) that Americans’ reliance on retributivist theories of criminal punishment is implicated in that harshness. In this invited response, to which Flanders subsequently replied, we first ask what "harsh" might mean in the context of a critique of criminal justice and punishment. We conclude that the most likely candidate is something along the lines of "disproportionate or otherwise unjustified." With this working definition in hand, we measure …

Criminal Alternative Dispute Resolution: Restoring Justice, Respecting Responsibility, And Renewing Public Norms, Maggie T. Grace

Student Articles and Papers

This Article explores theoretical concerns underlying contemporary appeals to Alternative Dispute Resolution ("ADR") in the criminal justice system. Analyzing literature on free will and responsibility and leading work on transitional justice, I argue that a restorative justice approach to criminal ADR better accommodates the realities of social conditions that correlate with criminality while respecting deeply-held concepts of responsibility. I further argue that this approach provides a useful response to critics, such as Owen Fiss, who argue that ADR privatizes disputes, thereby failing to produce and reinforce essential public norms.

Intuitions Of Punishment, Owen D. Jones, Robert Kurzban

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Recent work reveals, contrary to wide-spread assumptions, remarkably high levels of agreement about how to rank order, by blameworthiness, wrongs that involve physical harms, takings of property, or deception in exchanges. In The Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice (http://ssrn.com/abstract=952726) we proposed a new explanation for these unexpectedly high levels of agreement.

Elsewhere in this issue, Professors Braman, Kahan, and Hoffman offer a critique of our views, to which we reply here. Our reply clarifies a number of important issues, such as the interconnected roles that culture, variation, and evolutionary processes play in generating intuitions of punishment.

Desert, Deontology, And Vengeance First Annual Edward J. Shoen Leading Scholars Symposium: Paul H. Robinson, Youngjae Lee

Faculty Scholarship

In a series of recent writings, Paul Robinson has defended “empirical desert” as the way of deriving distributive principles for determining who should be punished and by how much. Desert is, of course, an idea with a long history, and its precise role in criminal law has been much debated. In addressing various criticisms of desert in criminal law, Robinson distinguishes empirical desert from what he calls “deontological desert” and “vengeful desert.” Robinson’s strategy, which I call “divide and deflect,” fights off various objections traditionally leveled against the use of desert in criminal law by arguing that most of those …

Retribution And The Experience Of Punishment, John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco, Jonathan S. Masur

Articles

In a prior article, we argued that punishment theorists need to take into account the counterintuitive findings from hedonic psychology about how offenders typically experience punishment. Punishment generally involves the imposition of negative experience. The reason that greater fines and prison sentences constitute more severe punishments than lesser ones is, in large part, that they are assumed to impose greater negative experience. Hedonic adaptation reduces that difference in negative experience, thereby undermining efforts to achieve proportionality in punishment. Anyone who values punishing more serious crimes more severely than less serious crimes by an appropriate amount - as virtually everyone does …

Retributivism Refined - Or Run Amok?, Kenneth Simons

Faculty Scholarship

What would the criminal law look like if we took retributivist principles very seriously? In their book, Crime and Culpability: A Theory of Criminal Law, the authors - Larry Alexander and Kimberly Kessler Ferzan, with contributions by Stephen J. Morse - provide a controversial set of answers. Whether a criminal act does ordoes not result in harm should not affect the actor’s punishment. Only the last act of risk creation should suffice for liability. Conscious awareness of risk should always be necessary. And all of criminal law, each and every category of mens rea and actus reus, should be reduced …

Retribution And The Experience Of Punishment, John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco, Jonathan S. Masur

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Meditaciones Postmodernas Sobre El Castigo: Acerca De Los Límites De La Razón Y De Las Virtudes De La Aleatoriedad (Una Polémica Y Un Manifiesto Para El Siglo Xxi), Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Abstract in Spanish
Durante la Modernidad, el discurso sobre la pena ha girado circularmente en torno a tres grupos de interrogantes. El primero, surgido de la propia Ilustración, preguntaba: ¿En qué basa el soberano su derecho de penar? Nietzsche con mayor determinación, pero también otros, argumentaron que la propia pregunta implicaba ya su respuesta. Con el nacimiento de las ciencias sociales, este escepticismo hizo surgir un segundo conjunto de interrogantes: ¿Cuál es, entonces, la verdadera función de la pena? ¿Qué es lo que hacemos cuando penamos? Una serie de críticas ulteriores – de metanarrativas, funcionalistas o de objetividad científica – …

Why Care About Mass Incarceration?, James Forman Jr.

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other nation in the world. Paul Butler’s Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hip Theory of Justice makes an important contribution to the debate about the crime policies that have produced this result. Butler began his career as a federal prosecutor who believed that the best way to serve Washington, D.C’s low-income African-American community was to punish its law-breakers. His experiences—including being prosecuted for a crime himself—eventually led him to conclude that America incarcerates far too many nonviolent offenders, especially drug offenders. Let’s Get Free offers a set of reforms for reducing …