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Full-Text Articles in Law and Race

Visualizing Abolition: Two Graphic Novels And A Critical Approach To Mass Incarceration For The Composition Classroom, Michael Sutcliffe Sep 2015

Visualizing Abolition: Two Graphic Novels And A Critical Approach To Mass Incarceration For The Composition Classroom, Michael Sutcliffe

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This article outlines two graphic novels and an accompanying activity designed to unpack complicated intersections between racism, poverty, and (d)evolving criminal-legal policy. Over 2 million adults are held in U.S. prison facilities, and several million more are under custodial supervision, and it has become clearly unsustainable. In the last decade, there has been a shift in media conversations about criminality, yet only a few suggest decreasing our reliance upon incarceration. In meaningfully different ways, the two novels trace the development of incarceration from its roots in slavery to its contemporary anti-democratic iteration and offer an underpublicized alternative.

Critical and community …


Institutionalized Racism And The Death Penalty, Ashleigh Ellis May 2015

Institutionalized Racism And The Death Penalty, Ashleigh Ellis

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Overtime, support for capital punishment has evolved. Compared to previous decades, support has changed amongst different variables such as: age, race, gender, and political perspective; therefore, today, these variables have changed the amount of support for it. For example, as of today, 6 states have repealed the death penalty with New Jersey being the first in 2007 to do so in 40 years. As memories of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era have faded due to generational replacement, American society today still has this racial gap, however it is due to this racial resentment or symbolic resentment that the …


U.S. Police Officers Kill Primarily Because They Are Attacked, Not To Disrupt Crime, Alev Dudek Mar 2015

U.S. Police Officers Kill Primarily Because They Are Attacked, Not To Disrupt Crime, Alev Dudek

Alev Dudek

In spite of the steady decline in violent crimes, law enforcement in the U.S.A. is becoming significantly more violent. Compared to other developed countries, such as Germany or Great Britain, disproportionately more arrest-related deaths occur in the U.S. Additionally, in the treatment of suspects, a racial disparity is evident; disproportionately more black males get killed by white police officers. Political exploitation of “crime” and militarization of law enforcement are factors that contribute to the status-quo and may explain why most arrest-related killings by the police are not a result of attempting to disrupt crime, but in defense of attacks, perceived …


Preventing Balkanization Or Facilitating Racial Domination: A Critique Of The New Equal Protection, Darren L. Hutchinson Jan 2015

Preventing Balkanization Or Facilitating Racial Domination: A Critique Of The New Equal Protection, Darren L. Hutchinson

Faculty Articles

The Supreme Court requires that equal protection plaintiffs prove defendants acted with discriminatory intent. The intent rule has insulated from judicial invalidation numerous policies that harmfully impact racial and ethnic minorities. Court doctrine also mandates that state actors generally remain colorblind. The colorblindness doctrine has led to the judicial invalidation of policies designed to ameliorate the conditions of racial inequality. Taken together, these two equality doctrines facilitate racial domination. The Court justifies this outcome on the ground that the Constitution does not protect "group rights. "

Constitutional law theorists have criticized these aspects of equal protection doctrine. Recently, however, some …