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Full-Text Articles in Law and Race
Working On The Other Side Of The Fence: Relief For Incarcerated Individuals After Employment Discrimination, Hannah C. Merrill
Working On The Other Side Of The Fence: Relief For Incarcerated Individuals After Employment Discrimination, Hannah C. Merrill
William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice
One of America’s largest workforces, comprised of 1.5 million incarcerated workers, remains unprotected by employment discrimination statutes and vulnerable to abuse from a system designed to exploit their labor. This Note highlights the effects of the lack of protection against employment discrimination for incarcerated workers. This Note will analyze the circuit split regarding the application of employment discrimination statutes to prisoners based on varying understandings of the term “employee” and explain why both approaches fail incarcerated workers. Although one approach bars suit from incarcerated employees altogether, the other only allows suit when the incarcerated individual is working in an “optional” …
"Not For Human Consumption": Prison Food's Absent Regulatory Regime, Amanda Chan, Anna Nathanson
"Not For Human Consumption": Prison Food's Absent Regulatory Regime, Amanda Chan, Anna Nathanson
William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal
Prison food is poor quality. The regulations which govern prison food are subpar and unenforceable by prisoners, due in large part to Sandin v. Conner and the Prison Litigation Reform Act. This Article aims to draw attention to the dire food conditions in prisons, explain the lax federal administrative law that permits these conditions, highlight the role of Sandin v. Conner and the Prison Litigation Reform Act in curtailing prisoners’ rights, and criticize the role of the private entity American Correctional Association in enabling mass neglect of prison food. The authors recommend that the Prison Litigation Reform Act be repealed, …
The Methodology Of Social Adaptation Following The Liberation Of A Wrongful Conviction, Ashantwa Jackman
The Methodology Of Social Adaptation Following The Liberation Of A Wrongful Conviction, Ashantwa Jackman
Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity
No abstract provided.
The Price Of Carceral Citizenship: Punishment, Surveillance, And Social Welfare Policy In An Age Of Carceral Expansion, Reuben Jonathan Miller, Amanda Alexander
The Price Of Carceral Citizenship: Punishment, Surveillance, And Social Welfare Policy In An Age Of Carceral Expansion, Reuben Jonathan Miller, Amanda Alexander
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
The unprecedented rise in the number of people held in U.S. jails and prisons has garnered considerable attention from policy makers, activists, and academics alike. Signaled in part by Michelle Alexander’s New York Times bestseller, The New Jim Crow, and the unlikely coalition of activists, policy makers, celebrities, and business leaders on both sides of the political aisle who have pledged to end mass incarceration in our lifetime, the prison system has returned to public policy discourse in a way that was unforeseen less than a decade ago. On any given day in 2014, just over 2.3 million people were …
One Significant Step: How Reforms To Prison Districts Begin To Address Political Inequality, Erika L. Wood
One Significant Step: How Reforms To Prison Districts Begin To Address Political Inequality, Erika L. Wood
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
Skyrocketing rates of incarceration over the last three decades have had profound and lasting effects on the political power and engagement of local communities throughout the United States. Aggressive enforcement practices and mandatory sentencing laws have an impact beyond the individuals who are arrested, convicted, and incarcerated. These policies have wide-ranging and enduring ripple effects throughout the communities that are most heavily impacted by criminal laws, predominantly urban and minority neighborhoods. Criminal justice policies broadly impact everything from voter turnout and engagement, to serving on juries, participating in popular protests, census data, and the way officials draw legislative districts. The …
What The Sentencing Commission Ought To Be Doing Reducing Mass Incarceration, Lynn Adelman
What The Sentencing Commission Ought To Be Doing Reducing Mass Incarceration, Lynn Adelman
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
Beginning in the 1970s, the United States embarked on a shift in its penal policies, tripling the percentage of convicted felons sentenced to confinement and doubling the length of their sentences. This shift included a dramatic increase in the prosecution and incarceration of drug offenders. As a result of its move toward long prison sentences, the United States now incarcerates so many people that it has become an outlier; this is not just among developed democracies, but among all nations, including highly punitive states such as Russia and South Africa, and also in comparison to the United States' own long-standing …
Isolated Confinement In Michigan: Mapping The Circles Of Hell, Elizabeth Alexander, Patricia Streeter
Isolated Confinement In Michigan: Mapping The Circles Of Hell, Elizabeth Alexander, Patricia Streeter
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
For the past twelve months, there has been a burgeoning campaign to abolish, or greatly reduce, the use of segregated confinement in prisons. Advocates for the campaign call such classifications "solitary confinement" despite the fact that in some states, like New York, prisoners in these cells are often double-celled. The Michigan Department of Corrections, as well as other prison systems, uses labels such as "segregation," "special management," "special housing," and "observation" for these classifications. Prisoners ordinarily use traditional terms, such as "the hole." In this Essay we will refer to such restrictive classifications as "segregation" or "segregated confinement." Our perspective …
The Federal Bureau Of Prisons: Willfully Ignorant Or Maliciously Unlawful?, Deborah Golden
The Federal Bureau Of Prisons: Willfully Ignorant Or Maliciously Unlawful?, Deborah Golden
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
The Federal Bureau of Prisons ("BOP") and the larger U.S. government either purposely ignore the plight of men with serious mental illness in the federal prison system or maliciously act in violation of the law. I have no way of knowing which it is. In a complex system comprising many individual actors, motivations are most likely complex and contradictory. Either way, uncontrovertibly, the BOP and the U.S. government, against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, continuously assert that there are no men with serious mental illnesses housed in the federal supermax prison, the Administrative Maximum facility in Florence, Colorado, also known …
It Could Happen To "You": Pay-To-Stay Jail Upgrades, Kim Shayo Buchanan
It Could Happen To "You": Pay-To-Stay Jail Upgrades, Kim Shayo Buchanan
Michigan Law Review First Impressions
In the jails of Los Angeles County, about 21,000 detainees are held in filthy cells so overcrowded—four men in a cell built for two, six to a four-man cell—that, as federal judge Dean D. Pregerson observed in 2006, inmates must stay in their bunks at all times because there is not enough room for them to stand. These men—ninety percent of whom are pretrial detainees— are held in these conditions twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week, and are typically allowed only a single three-hour exercise period weekly. Other inmates are held for days in a county “reception center” …
Discrimination In Sentencing On The Basis Of Afrocentric Features, William T. Pizzi, Irene V. Blair, Charles M. Judd
Discrimination In Sentencing On The Basis Of Afrocentric Features, William T. Pizzi, Irene V. Blair, Charles M. Judd
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
This Article does not challenge the prior research on sentencing discrimination between racial categories that found no significant difference in sentences given to similarly-situated African Americans and Whites. In fact, in the jurisdiction investigated- Florida- no discrimination between African Americans and Whites was found in the sentences imposed on defendants, looking only at racial category differences. Rather, the research suggests that in focusing exclusively on discrimination between racial groups, the research has missed a type of discrimination related to race that is taking place within racial categories: namely, discrimination on the basis of a person's Afrocentric features. By Afrocentric features, …