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Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons™

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Law Enforcement and Corrections

2009

Articles 1 - 8 of 8

Full-Text Articles in Civil Rights and Discrimination

Revisiting Beccaria's Vision: The Enlightenment, America's Death Penalty, And The Abolition Movement, John Bessler Oct 2009

Revisiting Beccaria's Vision: The Enlightenment, America's Death Penalty, And The Abolition Movement, John Bessler

All Faculty Scholarship

In 1764, Cesare Beccaria, a 26-year-old Italian criminologist, penned On Crimes and Punishments. That treatise spoke out against torture and made the first comprehensive argument against state-sanctioned executions. As we near the 250th anniversary of its publication, law professor John Bessler provides a comprehensive review of the abolition movement from before Beccaria's time to the present. Bessler reviews Beccaria's substantial influence on Enlightenment thinkers and on America's Founding Fathers in particular. The Article also provides an extensive review of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence and then contrasts it with the trend in international law towards the death penalty's abolition. It then discusses …

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Felon Disenfranchisement: A Call For Legislative Reform, Timothy P. Gilligan May 2009

Felon Disenfranchisement: A Call For Legislative Reform, Timothy P. Gilligan

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

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Felon Disenfranchisement As A Legitimate State Regulation, Boyoung Kang May 2009

Felon Disenfranchisement As A Legitimate State Regulation, Boyoung Kang

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

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"One Of The Dirty Secrets Of American Corrections": Retaliation, Surplus Power, And Whistleblowing Inmates, James E. Robertson May 2009

"One Of The Dirty Secrets Of American Corrections": Retaliation, Surplus Power, And Whistleblowing Inmates, James E. Robertson

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Retaliation is deeply engrained in the correctional office subculture; it may well be in the normative response when an inmate files a grievance, a statutory precondition for filing a civil rights action. This Article, the first to address comprehensively the sociological and constitutional aspects of retaliation, argues for protecting grievants through safeguards much like those accorded whistleblowers. Part I of the Article provides a socio-legal primer on correctional officer retaliation by addressing the frequency of retaliation, its causes, and its constitutional taxonomy. Part II describes the elements of a prima facie case of unconstitutional retaliation under § 1983. Part III …

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Promoting Civil Rights Through Proactive Policing Reform, Rachel A. Harmon Jan 2009

Promoting Civil Rights Through Proactive Policing Reform, Rachel A. Harmon

Rachel A. Harmon

Reducing police misconduct requires substantial institutional reform in our nation’s police departments. Yet traditional legal means for deterring misconduct, such as civil suits under § 1983 and the exclusionary rule, have proved inadequate to force departmental change. 42 U.S.C. § 14141 was passed in 1994 to allow the Justice Department to sue police departments to force institutional reform. Scholars initially hailed § 14141 as a powerful tool for reducing unconstitutional police abuse. The Justice Department, however, has sued few police departments. This Article contends that § 14141’s greatest potential has been overlooked. Limited resources will always mean that § 14141 …

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Strong Claims And Weak Evidence: Reassessing The Predictive Validity Of The Iat, Hart Blanton, James Jaccard, Jonathan Klick, Barbara Mellers, Gregory Mitchell, Philip Tetlock Jan 2009

Strong Claims And Weak Evidence: Reassessing The Predictive Validity Of The Iat, Hart Blanton, James Jaccard, Jonathan Klick, Barbara Mellers, Gregory Mitchell, Philip Tetlock

All Faculty Scholarship

The authors reanalyzed data from 2 influential studies — A. R. McConnell and J. M. Leibold (2001) and J. C. Ziegert and P. J. Hanges (2005) — that explore links between implicit bias and discriminatory behavior and that have been invoked to support strong claims about the predictive validity of the Implicit Association Test. In both of these studies, the inclusion of race Implicit Association Test scores in regression models reduced prediction errors by only tiny amounts, and Implicit Association Test scores did not permit prediction of individual-level behaviors. Furthermore, the results were not robust when the impact of rater …

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How Accountability-Based Policing Can Reinforce - Or Replace - The Fourth Amendment Exclusionary Rule, David A. Harris Jan 2009

How Accountability-Based Policing Can Reinforce - Or Replace - The Fourth Amendment Exclusionary Rule, David A. Harris

Articles

In Hudson v. Michigan, a knock-and-announce case, Justice Scalia's majority opinion came close to jettisoning the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule. The immense costs of the rule, Scalia said, outweigh whatever benefits might come from it. Moreover, police officers and police departments now generally follow the dictates of the Fourth Amendment, so the exclusionary rule has outlived the reasons that the Court adopted it in the first place. This viewpoint did not become the law because Justice Kennedy, one member of the five-vote majority, withheld his support from this section of the opinion. But the closeness of the vote on …

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Orwell’S Vision: Video And The Future Of Civil Rights Enforcement, Howard M. Wasserman Jan 2009

Orwell’S Vision: Video And The Future Of Civil Rights Enforcement, Howard M. Wasserman

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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