Law Commons^™

Rethinking Constitutionally Impermissible Punishment, Nadia Banteka

Scholarly Publications

Prisons and jails endanger the health and wellbeing of incarcerated individuals and their communities. These facilities are often overcrowded and unsanitary,1 with limited access to medical care, 2 and no basic sanitation and personal hygiene products unless a person can pay the spiked prices of the jail's commissary.3 Public health emergencies compound these dangers. Most recently, the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic created a crisis for people in detention, their families, and the communities surrounding jails and prisons. For over a year, there were no vaccines against COVID-19, new strains of the virus continue to evade vaccine-induced immunity, and there …

Specter Of Reform: Understanding The Violent Crime Control And Law Enforcement Act Of 1994 And Its Role In Expanding The Modern Prison Industrial Complex, Timothy Nii-Okai Welbeck

Arlen Specter Center Research Fellowship

The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other nation in recorded history, and currently houses roughly 25% of the world’s prison population. Though the US prison population dipped in 2016 to its lowest rate since 1993, the sheer number of people under the supervision of the criminal justice system within the country is staggering. As of 2012, one in one hundred adults in the US are in jail or prison, which makes the US the nation with the world’s largest prison population. The US also leads the world in rate of incarceration. Thus, the nation’s prisons teem …

Handle With Care: Constitutional Standards For Information Sharing In Medical-Correctional Transition, Andrew R. Hayes

Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy Sidebar

Correctional institutions have an Eighth Amendment obligation to provide healthcare to inmates. In practice though, jails and prisons struggle to provide adequate care to millions of incarcerated individuals, roughly half of whom have at least one chronic health condition. As a result, harsh conditions of confinement routinely threaten the health of inmates who require specific medical accommodations. Recognizing this risk, the courts hold corrections institutions liable for harm when government officials are “deliberately indifferent” to prisoner medical needs.

Beginning with the HITECH Act of 2009, mainstream medicine embraced tools that eliminate gaps in medical communication. Today, most Americans rely on …

Prison Theocracy, Athena Gainey

Charles Rice Post-Graduate Research Fellowship

This research hopes to understand justice by inquiring about control over definitions of justice. Further questions also include if and how justice works in America’ criminal justice system; who does it define as inclusive/exclusive to society; and how does the system and those who run it choose to protect inclusive members of society? Examples of the Prison Industrial Complex- such as mass incarceration and police brutality- exist as proof that American facilities of law & order lack justice in equity for all its citizen. Both religious and non-religious based grassroots organizations have developed instrumental changes that push to reform and …

Women’S Votes, Women’S Voices, And The Limits Of Criminal Justice Reform, 1911–1950, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

Deriving its vigor from the work of grassroots organizations at the state and local levels, the League of Women Voters (LWV) sought, in the first half of the twentieth century, to provide newly enfranchised women with a political education to strengthen their voice in public affairs. Local branches like the San Francisco Center learned from experience—through practical involvement in a variety of social welfare and criminal justice initiatives. This Article, written for a symposium commemorating the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, assesses the role of LWV leaders in California and especially San Francisco in reforming three aspects of the criminal …

Understanding Violent-Crime Recidivism, J.J. Prescott, Benjamin Pyle, Sonja B. Starr

Articles

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 …

Cannabis And Its Historical Role In America’S Intentional Segregation Of Race, William E. Kelley

Student Publications

One of the more dramatic shifts in attitudes towards a particular trend or culture we have seen during the turn of the century is none other than attitudes towards marijuana. The Cannabis plant, commonly known as marijuana, has been illegal in the United States for a while now. In the past ten years, we have seen an influx of states and countries relaxing their attitudes towards marijuana, and it's potential benefits. While this shift in attitude towards a relatively harmless drug is a step in the right direction, many are unaware of the sinister and racist history behind outlawing the …

Death By Virus: Why The Prison Litigation Reform Act Should Be Suspended, Divya Sriharan

Center for Health Law Policy and Bioethics

In order to save the lives of inmates, as well as redress some of the harms the prison system and the pandemic have caused them, Congress must pass a bill to temporarily suspend the Prison Litigation Reform Act. As of August 13, 2020, 95,398 inmates have contracted COVID-19. Prisons refuse to adapt or implement measures to save lives. Because of the Prison Litigation Reform Act, it is near impossible for inmates to take their cases to court. The Prison Litigation Reform Act’s requirements include: exhausting all internal administrative remedies before filing in court, not allowing suits based on mental or …

Why The Policy Failures Of Mass Incarceration Are Really Political Failures, John F. Pfaff

Faculty Scholarship

In his forthcoming book, The Insidious Momentum of Mass Incarceration, Franklin Zimring argues that the most effective way to end mass incarceration is to target the policy failures that drive it. He focuses in particular on the “prosecutorial free lunch”: prosecutors are county-funded officials who can send as many people as they like to state-funded prisons, which is a classic moral hazard problem. While Zimring is correct to focus on how relatively technocratic issues have posed outsized and underappreciated problems, his analysis suffers from some important shortcomings. In particular, he gives too little attention to the politics that have …

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 …

Five Myths About Prison, John F. Pfaff

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reforming Restrictive Housing: The 2018 Asca-Liman Nationwide Survey Of Time-In-Cell, Judith Resnik, Anna Vancleave, Kristen Bell, Alexandra Harrington, Gregory Conyers, Catherine Mccarthy, Jenny Tumas, Annie Wang

Other Scholarship

Reforming Restrictive Housing: The 2018 ASCA-Liman Nationwide Survey of Time-in-Cell is the fourth in a series of research projects co-authored by the Association of State Correctional Administrators (ASCA) and the Arthur Liman Center at Yale Law School. These monographs provide a unique, longitudinal, nationwide database. The topic is “restrictive housing,” often termed “solitary confinement,” and defined as separating prisoners from the general population and holding them in cells for an average of 22 hours or more per day for 15 continuous days or more.

The 2018 monograph is based on survey responses from 43 prison systems that held 80.6% of …

Written Testimony On Correctional Oversight Of The Nys Doccs, Michael B. Mushlin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

I am testifying today on behalf of both myself and my co-chair Michele Deitch, who has submitted written testimony for your consideration. My comments here reflect both the key points in her testimony as well as some of my own thoughts about the importance of external oversight and comments about the critical role played by the Correctional Association of New York, the failure of the State Commission on Correction to provide meaningful regulation of New York’s prisons, and the need to improve access by the media to the public and to the state’s prisons.

Does The Provision For Irish Prisoners To Keep In Contact With The Outside Environment Require Reform?, Adrian Berski

Reports

The law of the Republic of Ireland provides that prisoners’ maintain rights in order to conduct connections with the outside world. It is important to mention that currently they are 3,747 people in Irish prisons[1]. This population have rights before the law and they shouldn’t be unreasonable deprived of rights or liberties.

By maintaining a connection with the outside world means that normal elements of the reintegration process can be maintained. This has a significant impact for further prisoner reintegration. It includes rights to visits, correspondence, voting, etc.

The main sources of law, which regulates prisoners’ rights in …

Reducing Racial And Ethnic Disparities In Jails: Recommendations For Local Practice, Jessica M. Eaglin, Danyelle Solomon

Articles by Maurer Faculty

People of color are overrepresented in our criminal justice system. One in three African American men born today will be incarcerated in his lifetime. In some cities, African Americans are ten times more likely to be arrested when stopped by police. With the national debate national focused on race, crime, and punishment, criminal justice experts are examining how to reduce racial disparities in our prisons and jails, which often serve as initial entry points for those who become entangled in the criminal justice system.

This report, which relies on input from 25 criminal justice leaders, pinpoints the drivers of racial …

Beyond The Visiting Room: A Defense Counsel Challenge To Conditions In Pretrial Confinement, Amber Baylor

Faculty Scholarship

The Housing Part of the Civil Court was established by statute in Defense attorneys are well acquainted with the ill-considered and extreme use of solitary confinement in local jails. Isolation is one of many problems clients face while locked up in jail awaiting trial. Other common conditions of pretrial confinement include lack of mental health treatment, inadequate medical care, violence from corrections staff, and lack of protection from the violence of others. "Owing time", a recently dismantled practice, is just one example of jails' frivolous use of extreme isolation practices. At times, youth in the juvenile facility at Rikers were …

Economic Interest Convergence In Downsizing Imprisonment, Spearit

Articles

This Essay employs a variation of the “interest convergence” concept to examine the competing interests at stake in downsizing imprisonment in the United States. In the last few decades, the country has become the world leader in both incarceration rates and number of inmates. Reversing these trends is a common goal of multiple parties, who advocate prison reform under different rationales. Some advocate less imprisonment as a means of tempering the disparate effects of imprisonment on individual offenders and the communities to which they return. Others support downsizing based on conservative values that favor reduced government size, spending, and interference …

Against Neorehabilitation, Jessica M. Eaglin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In the face of severe budget constraints, bipartisan calls for reform, dropping crime rates, and judicial intervention, states are seriously considering and implementing criminal justice reform to manage prison populations for the first time in three decades. Scholars agree that states need a guiding theory to transform emergency and short-term reforms into a long-term shift in policy and practice away from mass incarceration. Numerous scholars advocate for a return to an improved theory of rehabilitation to guide the states in implementing such reform. This return-through neorehabilitation, or the rehabilitation of rehabilitation-centers on the use of evidence-based programming and predictive tools …

Neorehabilitation And Indiana's Sentencing Reform Dilemma, Jessica M. Eaglin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Plata V. Brown And Realignment: Jails, Prisons, Courts, And Politics, Margo Schlanger

Articles

The year 2011 marked an important milestone in American institutional reform litigation. That year, a bare majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, in an opinion in Brown v. Plata by Justice Anthony Kennedy, affirmed a district court order requiring California to remedy its longstanding constitutional deficits in prison medical and mental health care by reducing prison crowding. Not since 1978 had the Court ratified a lower court's crowding-related order in a jail or prison case, and the order before the Court in 2011 was fairly aggressive; theoretically, it could have (although this was never a real prospect) induced the release …

The Dangers Of Reform: Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, And The Limits Of Law, Jennifer L. Levi, Giovanna Shay

Faculty Scholarship

Professors Jennifer Levi and Giovanna Shay review Dean Spade's new book "Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law." They argue that Professor Spade's theoretical approach, which he describes as "critical trans politics," is most useful when employed to analyze issues relating to criminal punishment and mass incarceration, and that it is less appropriate as a critique of the marriage equality movement. Despite some areas of disagreement with Professor Spade, the Authors conclude that the book makes an important contribution.

Children, Parents & The State: The Construction Of A New Family Ideology, Deseriee A. Kennedy

Scholarly Works

More than twenty-five states allow courts to consider parental incarceration or conviction of a crime in determining whether to terminate parental rights. This problem is of increasing significance as a result of dramatic growth in incarceration rates, particularly among women who were often the primary and sole caretaker of their children before their imprisonment. Social scientists have recognized that the reality for parents in many communities is one of widespread and repeated incarceration, which has a devastating effect on families and communities. The problem is magnified by a failed drug policy and the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which, in …

Introduction: Symposium On Remedies For Exonerated Prisoners, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

Exoneration of wrongfully convicted prisoners is not a new thing, but it seems to be more common with advances in the availability and utility of DNA evidence. Given the number of exonerations that have occurred in recent years, it is increasingly difficult to dismiss inmates’ ubiquitous claims of innocence. Is it still a safe assumption that the vast majority of claims of innocence are false? Do we trust that post-conviction and appellate procedures will sort the wheat from the chaff?

Regardless of how we answer the questions raised above, there is one question society must answer—how should the wrongfully convicted …

Preserving The Rule Of Law In America's Jails And Prisons: The Case For Amending The Prison Litigation Reform Act, Margo Schlanger, Giovanna Shay

Articles

Prisons and jails pose a significant challenge to the rule of law within American boundaries. As a nation, we are committed to constitutional regulation of governmental treatment of even those who have broken society’s rules. And accordingly, most of our prisons and jails are run by committed professionals who care about prisoner welfare and constitutional compliance. At the same time, for prisons—closed institutions holding an ever-growing disempowered population—most of the methods by which we, as a polity, foster government accountability and equality among citizens are unavailable or at least not currently practiced. In the absence of other levers by which …

More Stories Of Jurisdiction-Stripping And Executive Power: Interpreting The Prison Litigation Reform Act (Plra), Giovanna Shay, Johanna Kalb

Faculty Scholarship

In the last several years, the Supreme Court has decided a number of important challenges to the government’s conduct of its “War on Terror.” Brought on behalf of persons alleged to be “enemy combatants,” many of whom were detained at Guantánamo Bay, these suits challenged the prisoners’ indefinite detention, asserted their right to access federal courts, and questioned the legality of the tribunals created to adjudicate the charges against them. The debate about the detainees’ access to federal courts has continued in Congress, with the passage of the Military Commissions Act (MCA), and in the lower courts, with challenges to …

Turning Jails Into Prisons—Collateral Damage From Kentucky's War On Crime, Robert G. Lawson

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The primary purpose of this article is to scrutinize Kentucky's ever-increasing reliance on local jails for the incarceration of state prisoners. This objective cannot be achieved without an examination of the problems that compel counties and cities to allow (and even encourage) the state to capture their jails for this use. The first half of the article (Parts I-IV) provides general information about jails (including some pertinent history), contains a detailed description of jail functions (including some that have descended upon jails by default), and concludes with a discussion of what the state has done over two decades to convert …

Prison Reform Revisited: The Unfinished Agenda, Michael B. Mushlin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Prison Reform Revisited: The Unfinished Agenda, which was held at Pace Law School from October 16-18, 2003, was a remarkable event. At this conference--a summit really--leading academics, attorneys, prison reformers, judges, prison officials and international prison reformers gathered at Pace Law School and the New York State Judicial Center in White Plains, New York to discuss how to advance the cause of prison reform in the U.S. This issue of the Pace Law Review is devoted to the papers presented in connection with that important conference.

Beyond The Hero Judge: Institutional Reform Litigation As Litigation, Margo Schlanger

Reviews

In 1955, in its second decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court suggested that federal courts might be called upon to engage in long-term oversight of once-segregated schools. Through the 1960s, southern resistance pushed federal district and appellate judges to turn that possibility into a reality. The impact of this saga on litigation practice extended beyond school desegregation, and even beyond the struggle for African-American equality; through implementation of Brown, the nation’s litigants, lawyers, and judges grew accustomed both to issuance of permanent injunctions against state and local public institutions, and to extended court oversight of compliance. …

Freeing Prisoners' Labor, Stephen P. Garvey

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Although labor was central to the internal life of the early penitentiary, it has virtually vanished from today's prison. In this article, Professor Garvey proposes making labor once again a key part of the prison regime. During the decades surrounding the turn of the century, organized labor and business successfully lobbied for protectionist state and federal legislation that prohibited private firms from contracting for prison labor and selling prison-made goods on the open market. This legislation abolished the old "contract" system of prison labor and replaced it with the "state-use" system. Under the state-use system, inmates work only for the …

An Analysis Of The California Department Of Corrections' Planning Process: Strategies To Reduce The Cost Of Incarcerating State Prisoners, Assembly Office Of Research

California Assembly

This report will show how California's prison operations can become more cost effective in light of the increased prison population and the phenomenon of short-term offenders. It will trace the issues of overcrowding and the conflict within CDC over determining appropriate security placement and rehabilitative programming for the inmate population.