Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

White Supremacy, Police Brutality, And Family Separation: Preventing Crimes Against Humanity Within The United States, Elena Baylis

Articles

Although the United States tends to treat crimes against humanity as a danger that exists only in authoritarian or war-torn states, in fact, there is a real risk of crimes against humanity occurring within the United States, as illustrated by events such as systemic police brutality against Black Americans, the federal government’s family separation policy that took thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the southern border, and the dramatic escalation of White supremacist and extremist violence culminating in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In spite of this risk, the United States does not have …

A Call To Dismantle Systemic Racism In Criminal Legal Systems, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Margaret C. Stevenson

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Objectives: In October 2021, APA passed a resolution addressing ways psychologists could work to dismantle systemic racism in criminal legal systems. The present report, developed to inform APA’s policy resolution, details the scope of the problem and offers recommendations for policy and psychologists to address the issue by advancing related science and practice. Specifically, it acknowledges the roots of modern-day racial and ethnic disparities in rates of criminalization and punishment for people of color as compared to White people. Next, the report reviews existing theory and research that helps explain the underlying psychological mechanisms driving racial and ethnic disparities …

Race And Reasonableness In Police Killings, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Alexis D. Campbell

Faculty Scholarship

Police officers in the United States have killed over 1000 civilians each year since 2013. The constitutional landscape that regulates these encounters defaults to the judgments of the reasonable police officer at the time of a civilian encounter based on the officer’s assessment of whether threats to their safety or the safety of others requires deadly force. As many of these killings have begun to occur under similar circumstances, scholars have renewed a contentious debate on whether police disproportionately use deadly force against African Americans and other nonwhite civilians and whether such killings reflect racial bias. We analyze data on …

Misdemeanors By The Numbers, Sandra G. Mayson, Megan T. Stevenson

All Faculty Scholarship

Recent scholarship has underlined the importance of criminal misdemeanor law enforcement, including the impact of public-order policing on communities of color, the collateral consequences of misdemeanor arrest or conviction, and the use of misdemeanor prosecution to raise municipal revenue. But despite the fact that misdemeanors represent more than three-quarters of all criminal cases filed annually in the United States, our knowledge of misdemeanor case processing is based mostly on anecdote and extremely localized research. This Article represents the most substantial empirical analysis of misdemeanor case processing to date. Using multiple court-record datasets, covering several million cases across eight diverse jurisdictions, …

The Prison-Televisual Complex, Allison Page, Laurie Ouellette

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

In 2016, the A&E cable network partnered with the Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, to incarcerate seven volunteers as undercover prisoners for two months. This article takes the reality television franchise 60 Days In as a case study for analyzing the convergence of prison and television, and the rise of what we call the prison-televisual complex in the United States, which denotes the imbrication of the prison system with the television industry, not simply television as an ideological apparatus. 60 Days In represents an entanglement between punishment and the culture industries, whereby carceral logics flow into the business and …

Beliefs About Police Error Leading To Wrongful Convictions And Attitudes On Police Legitimacy, Julia Melfi

Criminal Justice

This study investigates the relations between citizens’ perceptions of how police misconduct as a factor contributing to wrongful convictions is connected to attitudes towards police legitimacy. I hypothesized that there would be a negative correlation between the two variables such that the more individuals believe police error contributes to wrongful convictions, the less legitimate they perceive the police to be. I also examined how citizens’ race affects these perceptions and attitudes, too, and hypothesized that Black citizens are more likely than White citizens to believe police error leads to wrongful conviction and mistrust the police. To test the hypotheses data …

Motivations For Pursuing A Career In Law Enforcement: An Analysis Of A Local Law Enforcement Agency, Mark W. Thomas

Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)

Current law enforcement agencies are facing increasing pressure to hire more female and minority applicants. In addition to this, many agencies may be struggling to hire sufficient numbers of qualified candidates in general. This has created a need for understanding the individual factors that may motivate specific types of individuals towards a career in law enforcement. The current study assesses these motivations in a sample of currently employed law enforcement officers, current students enrolled in criminal justice programs, and undergraduate students unaffiliated with a law enforcement career. These motivations are then examined by demographic categories to explore the correlation between …

Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

In this Foreword, I make the case for an abolition constitutionalism that attends to the theorizing of prison abolitionists. In Part I, I provide a summary of prison abolition theory and highlight its foundational tenets that engage with the institution of slavery and its eradication. I discuss how abolition theorists view the current prison industrial complex as originating in, though distinct from, racialized chattel slavery and the racial capitalist regime that relied on and sustained it, and their movement as completing the “unfinished liberation” sought by slavery abolitionists in the past. Part II considers whether the U.S. Constitution is an …

Ethical Cannabis Lawyering In California, Francis J. Mootz Iii

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Cannabis has a long history in the United States. Originally, doctors and pharmacists used cannabis for a variety of purposes. After the Mexican Revolution led to widespread migration from Mexico to the United States, many Americans responded by associating this influx of foreigners with the use of cannabis, and thereby racializing and stigmatizing the drug. After the collapse of prohibition, the federal government repurposed its enormous enforcement bureaucracy to address the perceived problem of cannabis, despite the opposition of the American Medical Association to this new prohibition. Ultimately, both the states and the federal government classified cannabis as a dangerous …

Suspicion, Suspicion: Police Perceptions Of Juveniles As The “Symbolic Assailant”, Andrea R. Coleman

School of Criminal Justice Theses and Dissertations

Jerome Skolnick’s (2011) "symbolic assailant" is a result of police attributing particular demeanor, gestures, language, and a style of dress to people they believed were most likely to commit violent crimes. The challenge became when police applied these characteristics to specific groups such as juveniles. Literature published before and after Skolnick (2011) indicated police were more likely to stop, arrest, interrogate, or surveille juveniles based on their demeanor, gestures, style of dress, lack of respect, deference to authority, the severity, and remorse for their offenses in addition to race. However, current research indicated race, gender, and Socioeconomic Status (SES) determined …

Contact Is A Stronger Predictor Of Attitudes Toward Police Than Race: A State-Of-The-Art Review, Amy Alberton, Kevin M. Gorey

Social Work Publications

Purpose – This scoping review thoroughly scanned research on race, contacts with police and attitudes toward police. An exploratory meta-analysis then assessed the strength of their associations and interaction in Canada and the USA. Key knowledge gaps and specific future research needs, synthetic and primary, were identified. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach – A germinal methodological framework for conducting scoping reviews was used (Arksey and O’Malley, 2005). The authors searched for published or unpublished research over the past 15 years and retrieved 33 eligible surveys, 19 of which were included in a sample-weighted meta-analysis.

Findings – The …

Bias In, Bias Out, Sandra G. Mayson

All Faculty Scholarship

Police, prosecutors, judges, and other criminal justice actors increasingly use algorithmic risk assessment to estimate the likelihood that a person will commit future crime. As many scholars have noted, these algorithms tend to have disparate racial impacts. In response, critics advocate three strategies of resistance: (1) the exclusion of input factors that correlate closely with race; (2) adjustments to algorithmic design to equalize predictions across racial lines; and (3) rejection of algorithmic methods altogether.

This Article’s central claim is that these strategies are at best superficial and at worst counterproductive because the source of racial inequality in risk assessment lies …

Looking At Justice Through A Lens Of Healing And Reconnection, Annalise Buth, Lynn Cohn

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Panel Discussion: Expanding Our Conception Of Justice

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Criminal Justice And (A) Catholic Conscience, Leo E. Strine Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

This article is one person's reflections on how an important influence on his own sense of moral values -- Jesus Christ -- affects his thinking about his own approach to his role as a public official in a secular society, using the vital topic of criminal justice as a focal point. This article draws several important lessons from Christ's teachings about the concept of the other that are relevant to issues of criminal justice. Using Catholicism as a framework, this article addresses, among other things, capital punishment and denying the opportunity for redemption; the problem of racial disparities in the …

Stereotype Threat And Racial Differences In Citizens’ Experiences Of Police Encounters, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Bette L. Bottoms, Phillip Atiba Goff

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

We conducted 2 studies to investigate how cultural stereotypes that depict Blacks as criminals affect the way Blacks experience encounters with police officers, expecting that such encounters induce Blacks to feel stereotype threat (i.e., concern about being judged and treated unfairly by police because of the stereotype). In Study 1, we asked Black and White participants to report how they feel when interacting with police officers in general. As predicted, Blacks, but not Whites, reported concern that police officers stereotype them as criminals simply because of their race. In addition, this effect was found for Black men but not Black …

Racial Justice Study: An Examination Of Ticket Citations In The City Of Mankato, Minnesota, Meagan Hammers, C. J. Hays, Hannah Laniado

Public Sociology Publications and Projects

This study examines if there is racial disparity in policing in the city of Mankato, Minnesota by examining all traffic ticket citations given for a six-month period in 2014. The authors created a data set and examined statistical relationships between the observed race of those receiving tickets and the types of tickets received. This study discovered statistically significant findings of over policing of minorities; while minorities represent roughly ten percent the population in Mankato, they make up approximately 22% of the population cited. Further, minorities were about three times more likely than whites to receive a ticket for administrative offenses, …

Testing Orthodox Utilitarian And Extrajudical Determinants Of Incarceration In The U.S. At The State-Level, 1980-2005, Pavel V. Vasiliev

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This project is a theory-driven secondary data analysis of state-level incarceration trends in the U.S. between 1980 and 2005. I replicate and advance Smith's (2004) study of the relationship between the socioeconomic, demographic, political, electoral, and criminal justice factors and incarceration rates at the state level. The purpose of this project is to determine the empirical validity of the major explanations of the incarceration trends in the U.S. I advance Smith's (2004) study using important novel elements. First, I extend the scrutinized historic period by a decade by compiling time-series data for 1980-2005. Second, I employ a more sophisticated analytic …

Examining The Role Of Race, Gender, And Class In African-American Police Perceptions In Rural Kentucky, Paul Maxwell Blackhurst

Online Theses and Dissertations

Prior research has consistently demonstrated the role of race in understanding racial and ethnic differences in perceptions of the police. This research has overwhelmingly shown that Blacks and Latinos hold lower levels of trust and confidence in the police than do Whites and other racial minorities. The increased skepticism of the police expressed by minority citizens is commonly associated with racial profiling and documented racial disparities in police behavior. Although policing research has empirically demonstrated the influence of race on perceptions of the police, few studies have explored police perceptions from a rural context. By employing the Citizen's Attitudes Towards …