Digital Commons Network^™

Changing Fortunes Or Changing Attitudes: Sentencing And Corrections Reforms In 2003, Jon Wool, Don Stemen

Criminal Justice & Criminology: Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Getting The Mentally Ill Misdemeanant Out Of Jail., James R. Walker

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

This Comment advocates for the release of jailed persons arrested for nonviolent crimes due to the symptomology associated with their mental illnesses. Mentally ill misdemeanants suffer from severe and persistent mental disorders, usually either a psychotic or mood disorder, without symptoms or a diagnosis of a personality disorder. Due to the increase in arrests of individuals with mental illnesses, jail and prison populations are drastically increasing. These institutions have turned into modern mental hospitals or asylums. Criminalization of the mentally ill occurs because increasing numbers of mentally ill persons who commit minor crimes are subject to more frequent arrests. The …

Neighborhood, Crime, And Incarceration In New York City, Jeffery Fagan, Valerie West, Jan Holland

Faculty Scholarship

Several new studies suggest that social and spatial incarceration of young males has become part of the developmental ecology of adolescence in the nation's poorest neighborhoods. This concentration began in the 1970s, and has grown steadily through the last quarter century.The story of young men such as Cesar in Random Family illustrates the pervasive effects of both direct and vicarious prison experiences for young men and women in poor neighborhoods. Studies of street life such as Random Family, Code of the Streets, and American Project show how these experiences are now internalized in the social and psychological fabric of neighborhood …

Difficult Times In Kentucky Corrections--Aftershocks Of A "Tough On Crime" Philosophy, Robert G. Lawson

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Families And The Moral Economy Of Incarceration, Donald Braman

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This chapter examines the moral economy of incarceration from the perspective of one family. Derrick and Londa's story, neither one of flagrant injustice nor triumph against the odds, shows a family facing addiction, the criminal justice system's response to it, and the mixture of hardship and relief that incarceration brings to many families of drug offenders. Stories like theirs are almost entirely absent from current debates over incarceration rates and accountability. Indeed, the historical lack of the familial and community perspective of those most affected by incarceration can help to explain the willingness of states to accept mass-incarceration as a …

The Burdens Of Representing The Accused In An Age Of Harsh Punishment, Abbe Smith

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The crimes are not any worse than they used to be. They run, as crimes do, from the banal to the barbarous. But punishment seems to have taken on a life of its own.

There are people serving more than twenty years for nonviolent drug offenses. There are people serving more than thirty years for car theft, burglary, and unarmed robbery--crimes for which a harsh sentence used to be ten years. One Oklahoma woman is serving a thirty-five year sentence for "till-tapping"--stealing money out of cash registers--when she was in the throes of a heroin addiction. It is impossible to …

Piercing The Prison Uniform Of Invisibility For Black Female Inmates, Michelle S. Jacobs

UF Law Faculty Publications

In Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women In Prison, Professor Paula Johnson has written about the most invisible of incarcerated women — incarcerated African American women. The number of women incarcerated in the United States increased by seventy-five percent between 1986 and 1991. Of these women, a disproportionate number are black women. The percentages vary by region and by the nature of institution (county jail, state prison or federal facility), but the bottom line remains the same. In every instance, black women are incarcerated at rates disproportionate to their percentage in the general population. In Inner Lives, …