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Full-Text Articles in Law

Aba Criminal Justice Standards On The Treatment Of Prisoners, Margo Schlanger, Margaret C. Love, Carl Reynolds Jun 2010

Aba Criminal Justice Standards On The Treatment Of Prisoners, Margo Schlanger, Margaret C. Love, Carl Reynolds

Articles

or more than i O years, corrections professionals and others concerned about the treatment of prisoners have despaired over conditions in California's prisons. Crowding, violence, racial segregation, abysmal medical care, an obstructionist corrections union. and a state budget crisis have combined to bring the system to the point of constitutional meltdov,n. In 2008. a state appellate court found conditions of "'extreme peril to the safety of persons and property,'' and a three-judge federal court confirmed the existence of a "substantial risk to the health and safety of the men and women who work inside these prisons and the inmates housed …


Preventive Detention, Character Evidence, And The New Criminal Law, Ted Sampsell-Jones Jan 2010

Preventive Detention, Character Evidence, And The New Criminal Law, Ted Sampsell-Jones

Faculty Scholarship

A new criminal law has emerged in the last quarter century. The dominant goal of the new criminal law is preventive detention-incarceration to incapacitate dangerous persons. The emergence of the new criminal law has remade both sentencing law and definitions of crimes themselves. The new criminal law has also begun to remake the law of evidence. As incapacitation has become an accepted goal of criminal punishment, the rationale of the character rule has become less compelling, and the rule itself has begun to wane in criminal practice. These changes have been subtle, but they have also been both radical and …


Drug Law Reform—Retreating From An Incarceration Addiction, Robert G. Lawson Jan 2010

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 …


Why Care About Mass Incarceration?, James Forman Jr. Jan 2010

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 …