Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
-
- Roger Williams University (6)
- American University Washington College of Law (4)
- Washington and Lee University School of Law (4)
- Columbia Law School (3)
- University of Pittsburgh School of Law (3)
-
- Boston University School of Law (2)
- University of Kentucky (2)
- Antioch University (1)
- City University of New York (CUNY) (1)
- La Salle University (1)
- Montclair State University (1)
- New York Law School (1)
- Salve Regina University (1)
- St. John's University School of Law (1)
- Texas A&M University School of Law (1)
- University of Michigan Law School (1)
- University of Missouri School of Law (1)
- University of Nevada, Las Vegas -- William S. Boyd School of Law (1)
- University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School (1)
- Yeshiva University, Cardozo School of Law (1)
- Publication Year
- Publication
-
- Faculty Scholarship (6)
- Life of the Law School (1993- ) (4)
- Project on Addressing Prison Rape - Articles (4)
- Scholarly Articles (4)
- Articles (3)
-
- Faculty Publications (2)
- Law Faculty Scholarly Articles (2)
- All Faculty Scholarship (1)
- Antioch University Dissertations & Theses (1)
- Articles & Chapters (1)
- Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works (1)
- Faculty Articles (1)
- Law & Economics Working Papers (1)
- Law School Blogs (1)
- Pell Scholars and Senior Theses (1)
- Publications and Research (1)
- Scholarly Works (1)
- School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events (1)
- Undergraduate Research (1)
Articles 1 - 30 of 37
Full-Text Articles in Law
Abolition, And A Mule: Guest Lecturer In Race And The Foundations Of American Law Course 09-28-2022, Paul Butler, Roger Williams University School Of Law
Abolition, And A Mule: Guest Lecturer In Race And The Foundations Of American Law Course 09-28-2022, Paul Butler, Roger Williams University School Of Law
School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events
No abstract provided.
Brief Of Professor Brandon Hasbrouck As Amicus Curiae In Support Of Appellant: Bell V. Streeval, Brandon Hasbrouck
Brief Of Professor Brandon Hasbrouck As Amicus Curiae In Support Of Appellant: Bell V. Streeval, Brandon Hasbrouck
Scholarly Articles
The core question raised by this case is whether a federal prisoner serving an unconstitutional sentence can be foreclosed from post-conviction habeas relief by the gatekeeping provisions of § 2255. The Constitution answers that question in the negative through the Suspension Clause. “[F]reedom from unlawful restraint [i]s a fundamental precept of liberty,” and the writ of habeas corpus “a vital instrument to secure that freedom.” Boumediene, 553 U.S. at 739. The importance of the common law writ was such that the Framers specified that it could be suspended only in the most exigent circumstances. U.S. Const. art. I, § …
Prison And Jail Civil Rights/Conditions Cases: Longitudinal Statistics, 1970-2021, Margo Schlanger
Prison And Jail Civil Rights/Conditions Cases: Longitudinal Statistics, 1970-2021, Margo Schlanger
Law & Economics Working Papers
These tables relating to prison and jail civil rights litigation in federal court update prior-published versions, using data available as of April 6, 2022.
The Tables show longitudinal statistics about case filings, features, and outcomes, for jail/prison civil rights and conditions cases and for the entire federal civil docket, grouped by case category.
List of tables:
Table A: Incarcerated Population and Prison/Jail Civil Rights Filings, FY1970–FY2021
Table B: Pro Se Litigation in U.S. District Courts by Case Type, Cases Terminated Fiscal Years 1996–2021
Table C: Outcomes in Prisoner Civil Rights Cases in Federal District Court, Fiscal Years 1988–2021
Table D: …
Reimagining Public Safety, Brandon Hasbrouck
Reimagining Public Safety, Brandon Hasbrouck
Scholarly Articles
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, abolitionists were repeatedly asked to explain what they meant by “abolish the police”—the idea so seemingly foreign that its literal meaning evaded interviewers. The narrative rapidly turned to the abolitionists’ secondary proposals, as interviewers quickly jettisoned the idea of literally abolishing the police. What the incredulous journalists failed to see was that abolishing police and prisons is not aimed merely at eliminating the collateral consequences of other social ills. Abolitionists seek to build a society in which policing and incarceration are unnecessary. Rather than a society without a means of protecting public safety, …
The U.S. Sentencing Commission’S Recidivism Studies: Myopic, Misleading, And Doubling Down On Imprisonment, Nora V. Demleitner
The U.S. Sentencing Commission’S Recidivism Studies: Myopic, Misleading, And Doubling Down On Imprisonment, Nora V. Demleitner
Scholarly Articles
Recidivism has now replaced rehabilitation as the guiding principle of punishment. It is increasingly used to steer criminal justice policy despite research limitations. It serves as a stand-in for public safety, even though lengthy incarceration may have criminogenic and other negative ramifications for family members and communities. Yet the U.S. Sentencing Commission emphasizes recidivism. It emphasizes what amounts to preemptive imprisonment for those with long criminal records to prevent future offending.
The Commission’s work should come with a warning label. First, its recidivism studies should not be consumed on their own. Instead they must be read in conjunction with U.S. …
Pretrial Detention In The Time Of Covid-19, Jenny E. Carroll
Pretrial Detention In The Time Of Covid-19, Jenny E. Carroll
Faculty Scholarship
It is hard to overstate the impact of COVID-19. When it comes to the criminal justice system, the current COVID-19 crisis has shone a light on pre-existing flaws. Long before the first confirmed case in Seattle or elsewhere, America’s jails and prisons were particularly susceptible to contagions, exacerbated by problems from overcrowding to over policing to lack of reentry programs. This Essay focuses on one aspect of the challenges the criminal justice system faces in light of COVID-19 and beyond—that of a pretrial detention system that falls more harshly on poor and minority defendants, has swollen local jail populations, and …
Emergency Parole Release For Older Parole-Eligible Doc Inmates, David I. Bruck
Emergency Parole Release For Older Parole-Eligible Doc Inmates, David I. Bruck
Scholarly Articles
Professor Bruck writes to Secretary Moran and Chairwoman Bennett to urge them to protect elderly Virginia prison inmates from the risk of death from COVID-19 by granting immediate parole release to as many over-60 parole-eligible prisoners as possible, upon a showing that they are at low risk to re-offend, and have a supportive home to go to once released.
Law School News: Rwu Law Professors, Aclu Seek Release For All Ice Detainees At Wyatt 05-18-2020, Roger Williams University School Of Law
Law School News: Rwu Law Professors, Aclu Seek Release For All Ice Detainees At Wyatt 05-18-2020, Roger Williams University School Of Law
Life of the Law School (1993- )
No abstract provided.
Law School News: Rwu Law Professors Win Release For Two Immigrants At Risk For Covid-19 04-24-2020, Roger Williams University School Of Law
Law School News: Rwu Law Professors Win Release For Two Immigrants At Risk For Covid-19 04-24-2020, Roger Williams University School Of Law
Life of the Law School (1993- )
No abstract provided.
From The Legal Literature: Disentangling Prison And Punishment, Francesca Laguardia
From The Legal Literature: Disentangling Prison And Punishment, Francesca Laguardia
Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works
No abstract provided.
Understanding Violent-Crime Recidivism, J. J. Prescott, Benjamin David Pyle, Sonja B. Starr
Understanding Violent-Crime Recidivism, J. J. Prescott, Benjamin David Pyle, Sonja B. Starr
Faculty Scholarship
People convicted of violent crimes constitute a majority of the imprisoned population but are generally ignored by existing policies aimed at reducing mass incarceration. Serious efforts to shrink the large footprint of the prison system will need to recognize this fact. This point is especially pressing at the time of this writing, as states and the federal system consider large-scale prison releases motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Those convicted of violent crimes constitute a large majority of older prisoners, who are extremely vulnerable to the spread of the virus behind bars. Excluding them from protective measures will deeply undermine those …
Judicious Imprisonment, Gregory Jay Hall
Judicious Imprisonment, Gregory Jay Hall
All Faculty Scholarship
Starting August 21, 2018, Americans incarcerated across the United States have been striking back — non-violently. Inmates with jobs are protesting slave-like wages through worker strikes and sit-ins. Inmates also call for an end to racial disparities and an increase in rehabilitation programs. Even more surprisingly, many inmates have begun hunger strikes. Inmates are protesting the numerous ills of prisons: overcrowding, inadequate health care, abysmal mental health care contributing to inmate suicide, violence, disenfranchisement of inmates, and more. While recent reforms have slightly decreased mass incarceration, the current White House administration could likely reverse this trend. President Donald Trump’s and …
Solitary Troubles, Alexander A. Reinert
Solitary Troubles, Alexander A. Reinert
Faculty Articles
Solitary confinement is one of the most severe forms of punishment that can be inflicted on human beings. In recent years, the use of extreme isolation in our prisons and jails has been questioned by correctional officials, medical experts, and reform advocates alike. Yet for nearly the entirety of American history, judicial regulation of the practice has been extremely limited. This Article explains why judges hesitate to question the use of solitary confinement, while also providing a path forward for greater scrutiny of the practice.
The Effects Of Mental Health Treatment In Correctional Facilities, Victoria Ziemek
The Effects Of Mental Health Treatment In Correctional Facilities, Victoria Ziemek
Undergraduate Research
The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of mental healthcare in the criminal justice system on post-release recidivism of people with serious mental illness (PSMI). It can be noted that mental illness is not the cause of criminal behavior, but there is a significant negative relationship between mental health services available while incarcerated and successful community reentry. A review of previous research on this topic was used to develop the hypotheses and questions tested in this study. The review provides evidence that PSMI who have been involved with more community based outpatient services have been more susceptible …
Trending @ Rwu Law: Dean Yelnosky's Post: "Getting Proximate": October 22, 2016, Michael Yelnosky
Trending @ Rwu Law: Dean Yelnosky's Post: "Getting Proximate": October 22, 2016, Michael Yelnosky
Law School Blogs
No abstract provided.
Keeping It Real: Why Congress Must Act To Restore Pell Grant Funding For Prisoners, Spearit
Keeping It Real: Why Congress Must Act To Restore Pell Grant Funding For Prisoners, Spearit
Articles
In 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (VCCLEA), a provision of which revoked Pell Grant funding “to any individual who is incarcerated in any federal or state penal institution.” This essay highlights the counter-productive effects this particular provision has on penological goals. The essay suggests Congress acknowledge the failures of the ban on Pell Grant funding for prisoners, and restore such funding for all qualified prisoners.
Newsroom: A Closer Look At Mass Incarceration, Roger Williams University School Of Law
Newsroom: A Closer Look At Mass Incarceration, Roger Williams University School Of Law
Life of the Law School (1993- )
No abstract provided.
Symposium: Sounding The Alarm On Mass Incarceration: Moving Beyond The Problem And Toward Solutions, Roger Williams University School Of Law
Symposium: Sounding The Alarm On Mass Incarceration: Moving Beyond The Problem And Toward Solutions, Roger Williams University School Of Law
Life of the Law School (1993- )
No abstract provided.
Powerlessness Within A Budget-Driven Paradigm: A Grounded Theory Leadership Study From The Perspective Of Michigan Corrections Officers, Timothy Michael Eklin
Powerlessness Within A Budget-Driven Paradigm: A Grounded Theory Leadership Study From The Perspective Of Michigan Corrections Officers, Timothy Michael Eklin
Antioch University Dissertations & Theses
This study explored the lived-experiences of 15 correctional officers and 5 sergeants working in adult state-operated prison facilities in Michigan. In particular, this qualitative grounded theory study revealed the impact that budget driven decision-making had on the lives of correctional officers: its effect on institutional custody, security, and safety. The study finds that many recent policy changes resulted in a sense of powerlessness expressed by the participants of the study. Participants found themselves in a precarious position, situated in between the prison population and the administration. Having an understanding of how correctional officers make meaning of their work in relation …
The Growth Of Incarceration In The United States: Exploring Causes And Consequences, Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western, F. Stevens Redburn
The Growth Of Incarceration In The United States: Exploring Causes And Consequences, Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western, F. Stevens Redburn
Publications and Research
After decades of stability from the 1920s to the early 1970s, the rate of incarceration in the United States more than quadrupled in the past four decades. The Committee on the Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration in the United States was established under the auspices of the National Research Council, supported by the National Institute of Justice and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, to review evidence on the causes and consequences of these high incarceration rates and the implications of this evidence for public policy.
Our work encompassed research on, and analyses of, the …
Prison Health Care After The Affordable Care Act: Envisioning An End To The Policy Of Neglect, Evelyn Malave
Prison Health Care After The Affordable Care Act: Envisioning An End To The Policy Of Neglect, Evelyn Malave
Faculty Publications
Inadequate prison health care has created a health crisis for reentering prisoners and their communities—a crisis that is exacerbated by barriers to employment and other collateral consequences of release. This Note will first examine how current Eighth Amendment doctrine has failed to sufficiently regulate prison health care so as to have any significant effect on the crisis. Next, it will argue that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) alters the Eighth Amendment analysis by triggering a change in the “evolving standards of decency” that guide the doctrine. Specifically, this Note will argue that, after the passage of the ACA, releasing sick, …
Legal Punishment As Civil Ritual: Making Cultural Sense Of Harsh Punishment, Spearit
Legal Punishment As Civil Ritual: Making Cultural Sense Of Harsh Punishment, Spearit
Articles
This work examines mass incarceration through a ritual studies perspective, paying explicit attention to the religious underpinnings. Conventional analyses of criminal punishment focus on the purpose of punishment in relation to legal or moral norms, or attempt to provide a general theory of punishment. The goals of this work are different, and instead try to understand the cultural aspects of punishment that have helped make the United States a global leader in imprisonment and execution. It links the boom in incarceration to social ruptures of the 1950s and 1960s and posits the United States’ world leader status as having more …
A Failing Correctional System: State Prison Overcrowding In The United States, Susan M. Campers
A Failing Correctional System: State Prison Overcrowding In The United States, Susan M. Campers
Pell Scholars and Senior Theses
State prison overcrowding has grown into a detrimental problem within our American penal system, such that after decades of being ignored by politicians, media outlets, and the lower court system, it has resulted in an ineffective and overcrowded correctional system that craves reformation.
Religion As Rehabilitation? Reflections On Islam In The Correctional Setting, Spearit
Religion As Rehabilitation? Reflections On Islam In The Correctional Setting, Spearit
Articles
This essay is the keynote lecture from the Muslims in the United States and Beyond symposium at Whittier Law School. The work reflects on the state of research into Islam in prison, including the religion's historic role in supporting inmate rehabilitation and providing a means for coping with life as a prisoner and on the outside.
On The American Paradox Of Laissez Faire And Mass Incarceration, Bernard E. Harcourt
On The American Paradox Of Laissez Faire And Mass Incarceration, Bernard E. Harcourt
Faculty Scholarship
In The Illusion of Free Markets (Harvard 2011), Professor Bernard Harcourt analyzes the evolution of a distinctly American paradox: in the country that has done the most to promote the idea of a hands-off government, we run the single largest prison complex in the entire world. Harcourt traces this paradox back to the eighteenth century and demonstrates how the presumption of government incompetence in economic affairs has been coupled with that of government legitimacy in the realm of policing and punishing. Harcourt shows how these linked presumptions have fueled the expansion of the carceral sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth …
An Institutionalization Effect: The Impact Of Mental Hospitalization And Imprisonment On Homicide In The United States, 1934-2001, Bernard E. Harcourt
An Institutionalization Effect: The Impact Of Mental Hospitalization And Imprisonment On Homicide In The United States, 1934-2001, Bernard E. Harcourt
Faculty Scholarship
Previous research suggests that mass incarceration in the United States may have contributed to lower rates of violent crime since the 1990s but, surprisingly, finds no evidence of an effect of imprisonment on violent crime prior to 1991. This raises what Steven Levitt has called “a real puzzle.” This study offers the solution to the puzzle: the error in all prior studies is that they focus exclusively on rates of imprisonment, rather than using a measure that combines institutionalization in both prisons and mental hospitals. Using state-level panel-data regressions over the 68-year period from 1934 to 2001 and controlling for …
Less Than We Might: Meditations On Life In Prison Without Parole, Robert Blecker
Less Than We Might: Meditations On Life In Prison Without Parole, Robert Blecker
Articles & Chapters
Today, death penalty opponents mostly claim life without parole (LWOP) as their genuinely popular substitute punishment for the worst of the worst. These abolitionists embrace LWOP as cheaper, equally just, and equally effective - a punishment that eliminates the state’s exercise of an inhumane power to kill helpless human beings who pose no immediate threat. Furthermore, they insist, LWOP allows the criminal justice system to reverse sentencing mistakes. Some even characterize it as a punishment worse than death.
Thousands of hours in several states, interviewing and observing more than a hundred convicted killers, along with dozens of correctional officers who …
Reducing Mass Incarceration: Lessons From The Deinstitutionalization Of Mental Hospitals In The 1960s, Bernard Harcourt
Reducing Mass Incarceration: Lessons From The Deinstitutionalization Of Mental Hospitals In The 1960s, Bernard Harcourt
Faculty Scholarship
In a message to Congress in 1963, President John F. Kennedy outlined a federal program designed to reduce by half the number of persons in custody. The institutions at issue were state hospitals and asylums for the mentally ill, and the number of such persons in custody was staggeringly large, in fact comparable to contemporary levels of mass incarceration in prisons and jails. President Kennedy's message to Congress – the first and perhaps only presidential message to Congress that dealt exclusively with the issue of institutionalization in this country – proposed replacing state mental hospitals with community mental health centers, …
Analyzing Prison Sex: Reconciling Self Expression With Safety, Brenda V. Smith
Analyzing Prison Sex: Reconciling Self Expression With Safety, Brenda V. Smith
Project on Addressing Prison Rape - Articles
This article examines the complexity of prison sex and the challenges that it raises in the context of recently enacted United States legislation, specifically the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). It begins by identifying a range of prisoner interests in enhanced sexual expression. These interests are described below in an attempt to disentangle prisoners’ rights in sexual expression from states’ legitimate interests in regulating that expression. This article also directs policymakers and decision makers to mine international documents and human rights norms that recognize the necessity of punishment and at the same time outline a standard for the safety of …
Sexual Abuse Of Women In Prison: A Modern Corollary Of Slavery, Brenda V. Smith
Sexual Abuse Of Women In Prison: A Modern Corollary Of Slavery, Brenda V. Smith
Project on Addressing Prison Rape - Articles
This paper addresses the sexual abuse of women in custody as a more contemporary manifestation of slavery and discusses the congruencies and the differences that exist between the sexual abuse of women in custody and slavery. The paper charts the history of the parallel abolition and prison reform movements and examines their divergent paths arguing that the women's movement abandonment of prison advocacy has harmed the women in prison movement. The article concludes that the embrace of human rights norms has assisted in providing new avenues for redressing the sexual abuse of women in custody.