Digital Commons Network^™

The Laws That Regulate Police: The Wilson Center’S Policing Legislation Database, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

To better understand lawmaking in response to calls for reform, the Wilson Center for Science and Justice began tracking the introduction of policing-related legislation. This report covers our database tracking policing legislation and our initial findings.

Helping The Helpers: The Role Of Organizational Support And Peer Influence On Police Officer Receptivity To Employee Assistance Programs, Kenneth Quick

Publications and Research

Purpose – This study aims to investigate critical differences between police officer willingness to use and recommend an employee assistance program (EAP) to a peer, including the relationship between officer perceptions of macro-level organizational support and micro-level EAP support.

Design/methodology/approach – A survey of 213 police officers from a large, urban police department in the Northeast United States of America is used to evaluate the relationship between officer perceptions of the EAP and the officers’ willingness to use and recommend the EAP to peers. Generalized linear regression models are used to evaluate the moderating effect of perceived organizational support (POS) …

Relations Between On-The-Job Stress, Mental And Physical Health, And Job Satisfaction Of Correction Officers, Sarah Chandebal

Theses and Dissertations

This research study aimed to examine the direct and indirect relationships between on-the-job stress, physical and mental health, and job satisfaction for correction officers. Correction officers have one of the most stressful jobs in law enforcement, however, they are one of the most understudied groups in their field. It is therefore important to examine how stress can affect these correction officers. In this study, the predictors of stress for correction officers were discussed, along with the impact that this stress can have on their physical and mental health. Ultimately, as their health declined, it was hypothesized that the job satisfaction …

First-Line Police Supervisors’ Utilization Of Criminal Justice Higher Education, Dennis George Hippert

Theses and Dissertations

A first-line police supervisor holds a large influence over street-level police officer behavior (Ingram, et al., 2014), but little consistency exists between police agencies regarding the minimum educational requirements necessary to successfully perform the functions of a first-line police supervisor. This study explored the experiences of criminal justice degree holding first-line police supervisors in using the content of their college curriculum to guide street-level officers in acceptable use of force practices, professional communication with the public, and discretionary decision-making. Employing a grounded theory method of inquiry with a constructivist approach, this study utilized semi-structured, one-on-one interviews to examine the ways …

Human Trafficking: The Impact Of Covid-19 On Labor Trafficking In The Us, Anthony A. Mottola

Theses and Dissertations

Human trafficking is a global phenomenon where traffickers prey upon their victims without discriminating against age, gender, ethnic background, or nationality. The United States (US) is not immune to the human rights violations of human trafficking. The victims of human trafficking are coerced into a life of exploitation through forced labor or sexual exploitation. Many victims are migrants from disadvantaged countries that travel to the US seeking employment but end up the victims of abuse, both physically and mentally, at the hands of traffickers. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic devastated the global economy, forcing quarantines, travel bans, and social distancing. …

Exploring The Influence Of School Location On School Resource Officers’ Perceptions Of Their Roles And Priorities, Larry A. Potts

Theses and Dissertations

Despite the widespread presence of school resource officers (SROs) in public schools for decades, their proper roles and priorities have remained unsettled because those roles are often varied, complex, conflicting, and ambiguous. The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand how SROs perceive their roles and priorities and whether school location influences those perceptions. Qualitative research methods provided opportunities for one-to-one interviews with SROs and their supervisors. Two elements embedded in the design consisted of a descriptive questionnaire provided to the SROs before their interviews, and a qualitative interview question designed to elicit a percentage estimate response from SROs. …

Perceptions Of School Resource Officers On Their Role In Southern Maryland Public Elementary Schools, Lori B. Lodge

Theses and Dissertations

This applied dissertation was designed to investigate the perceptions of school resource officers (SROs) in Southern Maryland regarding the support SROs could provide elementary schools to foster positive interpersonal relationships while maintaining school safety and what additional resources that the SROs needed to support their job.

The overall school climate and morale at some elementary schools have significantly decreased due to increased student-aggressive behaviors. The school climate is correlated to student academic success (Sanders et al., 2018). School climate can include safety, interpersonal relationships, teaching and learning, and the school environment.

There is a need for school resource officers in …

A Call To Abolish Determinate-Plus Sentencing In Washington, Rachel Stenberg

Washington Law Review

For certain incarcerated individuals who commit sex offenses, Washington State’s determinate-plus sentencing structure requires a showing of rehabilitation before release. This highly subjective “releasability” determination occurs after an individual has already served a standard sentence. A review of recent releasability determinations reveals sentences are often extended on arbitrary and inconsistent grounds—especially for individuals who face systemic challenges in prison due to their identity or condition. This Comment shows that the criteria to determine whether individuals are releasable is an incomplete picture of their actual experience in the carceral setting, using the distinct example of incarcerated individuals with mental illness. While …

Expanding Judicial Discretion To Grant Compassionate Release During Covid-19, Deborah Wang

Washington Law Review

In the 1980s, Congress introduced compassionate release to counteract the increased rigidity of our federal sentencing system. This mechanism allowed courts, through a motion filed by the Bureau of Prison’s director, to reduce a prisoner’s sentence if “extraordinary and compelling” circumstances warrant such a reduction. However, because the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) seldom brought these motions, few people were released early via compassionate release. At the same time, public discourse and concerns regarding mass incarceration have continued to grow, causing lawmakers to revisit and revise compassionate release through the First Step Act of 2018 to ensure that this mechanism’s potential …

Jail Health And Early Release Practices, Brandon L. Garrett, Deniz Ariturk, Jessica Carda-Auten, David L. Rosen

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

Local jails in the United States incarcerate millions of people each year. The COVID-19 pandemic made jail health a pressing public health concern nationally, where releasing individuals from jails occurred across the country in order to prevent pandemic spread. But releases also faced substantial resistance and exposed long-standing challenges in delivering adequate healthcare in jail settings. People in jail have substantially higher levels of medical need than individuals in the general population, with large numbers having serious mental illnesses and substance use disorders. Further, overcrowded conditions and poor healthcare standards and delivery make jails harmful to those already-vulnerable people. What …

Obstacles To Proving 24-Hour Lighting Is Cruel And Unusual Under Eighth Amendment Jurisprudence, Lauren Jaech

Washington Law Review

Twenty-four-hour lighting causes sleep deprivation, depression, and other serious disorders for incarcerated individuals, yet courts often do not consider it to be cruel and unusual. To decide if prison conditions violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, courts follow a two-part inquiry that requires examining the intent of prison officials (known as the subjective prong) as well as the degree of seriousness of the alleged cruel or unusual condition (the objective prong). Incarcerated individuals often file complaints challenging 24-hour lighting conditions. Whether they succeed on these claims may depend on the circuit in which they reside. Judges …

Judges And Mass Incarceration, Carissa Byrne Hessick

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

It seems to have fallen out of fashion to talk about judges as a source of criminal justice reform. Instead, the academic literature now focuses on the role that prosecutors and legislatures have played in mass incarceration. But judges have also played an important role in the phenomenon that has come to be known as mass incarceration. Perhaps more importantly, there are things that judges could do to help reverse that trend.

Judges will sometimes say our system is too harsh. But, in the same breath they tell us the decision to create such a system and the decision to …

Debiasing Criminal Justice, Sandra Guerra Thompson, Nicole Bremner Cásarez

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

The killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minnesota inspired a summer of protests in 2020, followed by a call for racial reckoning and a professed commitment to reform criminal justice. Many have condemned the “systemic racism” reflected in countless demographic measures. From killings of unarmed men by the police at the front end of the criminal justice system to incarceration rates at the back end, the statistics show stark disparities along racial lines. These disparities are held up as evidence of racial bias in the system.

Statements about racial bias may be intended as an indictment of a …

The Trump Clemencies: Celebrities, Chaos, And Lost Opportunity, Mark Osler

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

The presidency of Donald Trump may have produced the most chaotic use of the constitutional pardon power in American history. Trump granted clemency to war criminals, to close friends, to celebrities, and to the friends of celebrities, with much of it coming in a mad rush at the end of his single term. Buried beneath this rolling disaster was a brief moment of hope and a lost opportunity: the chance for a restructure of the clemency process in the fall of 2018, enabled by a rare alignment of factors, including Trump’s alienation from the Department of Justice. This Article will …

Damn The Torpedoes! An Unprincipled, Incorrect, And Lonely Approach To Compassionate Release, Christopher J. Merken, Barnett J. Harris

Cardozo Law Review

When Congress passed the First Step Act in 2018, it extended to federal prisoners the right to file their own motions for compassionate release under 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(A). As COVID-19 ravaged prisons, sentencing courts received a massive influx of prisoner-filed compassionate-release motions. But because the United States Sentencing Guidelines and the relevant Application Note predated the First Step Act, and therefore made no mention of prisoner-filed compassionate-release motions, sentencing courts were unsure whether they had discretion to determine whether a prisoner presented “extraordinary and compelling circumstances” warranting compassionate release.

Every United States Court of Appeals to consider whether sentencing …

Exploring Perceptions Of Control Within Offender Cognition And Recidivism Paradigms, Anistasha H. Lightning, Danielle Polage

Student Published Works

Elements of perceived control are associated with recidivism in offender populations. We investigated the application of locus of control to the frequency of personal involvement with the law and to beliefs surrounding the likelihood of future contact with the legal system. We hypothesized that, as the number of sentencings or legal experiences increased, locus of control would externalize. We also predicted that increased legal involvement would lead to greater belief in the likelihood of future involvement. A statistically significant path model suggests that locus of control appears to be a predictor of increased criminality, as opposed to the other way …

Why Do The Police Reject Counseling? An Examination Of Necessary Changes To Police Subculture., Noel Otu, Ntiense E. Otu

Journal of Health Ethics

Abstract

This paper reviews the concept of police subculture and examines its role in the management and acceptance of treatment for stress-related injury. In particular, we examine the impact of stigma that attaches to treatment within this subculture. The persistence of the dominant police subculture remains a significant obstacle to officers seeking treatment for stress-related illnesses. The subculture has historically resisted acknowledging the need for treatment in response to the occupational and/or organizational stress-related injury that results from frequent exposure to work-related trauma. Many police administrators are still embedded within and resist changes to the subculture, which results in an …

Algorithmic Governance From The Bottom Up, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are both a blessing and a curse for governance. In theory, algorithmic governance makes government more efficient, more accurate, and more fair. But the emergence of automation in governance also rests on public-private collaborations that expand both public and private power, aggravate transparency and accountability gaps, and create significant obstacles for those seeking algorithmic justice. In response, a nascent body of law proposes technocratic policy changes to foster algorithmic accountability, ethics, and transparency.

This Article examines an alternative vision of algorithmic governance, one advanced primarily by social and labor movements instead of technocrats and firms. …

Letting Offenders Choose Their Punishment?, Gilles Grolleau, Murat C. Mungan, Naoufel Mzoughi

Faculty Scholarship

Punishment menus allow offenders to choose the punishment to which they will be subjected from a set of options. We present several behaviorally informed rationales for why punishment menus may serve as effective deterrents, notably by causing people to refrain from entering a calculative mindset; reducing their psychological reactance; causing them to reconsider the reputational impacts of punishment; and reducing suspicions about whether the act is enforced for rent-seeking purposes. We argue that punishment menus can outperform the traditional single punishment if these effects can be harnessed properly. Our observations thus constitute a challenge, based on behavioral arguments, to the …

Sentencing After Stash Houses: Addressing Manipulation Of The Federal Sentencing Guidelines, Elizabeth Foy Gudgel

Fordham Law Review

In the realm of undercover work, law enforcement has broad discretion to define the contours of a criminal offense. Due to quantity-based provisions in the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, federal agents or their informants may coerce an individual into a higher sentencing range by escalating their behavior to align with mandatory minimums or quantifiable offense levels. Because this type of offense is police-initiated, law enforcement has discretion to select the individuals subject to these tactics and influence their eventual sentences. The defenses of sentencing entrapment and sentencing manipulation are meant to combat this discretion. However, these defenses are rarely invoked successfully …

Green Crimes In The Empire State: Analyzing The Criminal Enforcement Of Environmental Law In New York, Joshua Ozymy, Melissa Jarrell Ozymy

Pace Environmental Law Review

Ensuring compliance with federal and state environmental laws and deterring future offenses can require the application of criminal enforcement tools. Yet we have a limited understanding of how the criminal enforcement of environmental laws has progressed historically in The Empire State. To explore this phenomenon, we undertake content analysis of federal prosecution summaries for all environmental crime prosecutions stemming from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency criminal investigations from 1983 to 2019. We explore which federal environmental laws were violated, determine which charging statutes were used, analyze sentencing patterns, and illustrate the broader themes that emerge in such prosecutions over 37 years. …

Decarceration's Inside Partners, Seema Tahir Saifee

Fordham Law Review

This Article examines a hidden phenomenon in criminal punishment. People in prison, during their incarceration, have made important—and sometimes extraordinary—strides toward reducing prison populations. In fact, stakeholders in many corners, from policy makers to researchers to abolitionists, have harnessed legal and conceptual strategies generated inside the walls to pursue decarceral strategies outside the walls. Despite this outside use of inside moves, legal scholarship has directed little attention to theorizing the potential of looking to people on the inside as partners in the long-term project of meaningfully reducing prison populations, or “decarceration.”

Building on the change-making agency and revolutionary ideation inside …

An Algorithmic Assessment Of Parole Decisions, Hannah Lacqueur, Ryan W. Copus

Faculty Works

Objectives: Parole is an important mechanism for alleviating the extraordinary social and financial costs of mass incarceration. Yet parole boards can also present a major obstacle, denying parole to low-risk inmates who could safely be released from prison. We evaluate a major parole institution, the New York State Parole Board, quantifying the costs of suboptimal decision-making.

Methods: Using ensemble Machine Learning, we predict any arrest and any violent felony arrest within three years to generate criminal risk predictions for individuals released on parole in New York from 2012–2015. We quantify the social welfare loss of the Board’s suboptimal decisions by …

Atkins V. Virginia At Twenty: Still Adaptive Deficits, Still In The Developmental Period, Sheri Lynn Johnson, John H. Blume, Brendan Van Winkle

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Twenty years ago, in Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Eighth Amendment prohibited states from executing persons with intellectual disability. While the Court’s decision is laudable and has saved many of the most vulnerable persons from the executioner, its effect has been undermined by recalcitrant states attempting to exploit language in the opinion permitting states to create procedures to implement the (then) new categorical prohibition. In this article, we examine how some states have adopted procedures which are fundamentally inconsistent with the clinical consensus understanding of the disability and how one state, …

Police Vehicle Searches And Racial Profiling: An Empirical Study, Griffin Edwards, Stephen Rushin

Fordham Law Review

In 1981, the U.S. Supreme Court held in New York v. Belton that police officers could lawfully search virtually anywhere in a vehicle without a warrant after the arrest of any occupant in the vehicle. Then, in 2009, the Court reversed course in Arizona v. Gant, holding that police could only engage in vehicle searches after such arrests in a smaller number of extenuating circumstances. This series of cases became a flash point for the broader debate about the regulation of policing. Law enforcement groups argued that administratively complex rules, like those established in Gant, risk officer safety. …

Policing The Police: Personnel Management And Police Misconduct, Max Schanzenbach

Vanderbilt Law Review

Police misconduct is at the top of the public policy agenda, but there is surprisingly little understanding of how police personnel management policies affect police misconduct. Police-civilian interactions in large jurisdictions are, in principle at least, highly regulated. But these regulations are at least partially counteracted by union contracts and civil service regulations that constrain discipline and other personnel decisions, thereby limiting a city’s ability to manage its police force. This Essay analyzes police personnel management by bringing forth evidence from a variety of data sources on police personnel practices as well as integrating an existing, but relatively siloed, literature …

Falling Away Into Disease: Disability-Deviance Narratives In American Crime Control, Matt Saleh

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Who in society is predisposed to crime? Many of us are familiar with cultural narratives that trace criminal behavior to some cognitive defect in the perpetrator. For instance, we might recall the persistent media allusions to Adam Lanza’s Asperger Syndrome after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, despite evidence that individuals on the autism spectrum are, on average, not more likely, and are quite possibly less likely, to commit serious crime in their lifetime. Similarly, popular narratives about the relationship between “mental illness” and violence are pervasive, despite the broad meaning of the terminology and a deeply-misunderstood …

Race, Class, And Second Chances: The Impact Of Multiple Identities On Reentry And Reintegration, S. David Mitchell

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Race, class, and other identities directly impact the process of reentry and the successful reintegration back into society for individuals who have had prior involvement in the criminal justice system. Collectively, persons convicted of a crime face numerous legal barriers that interfere with or prevent successful reentry and reintegration back into society, such as being prevented from securing housing and obtaining employment among other collateral consequences. For many, the process of reentry and reintegration is made even more difficult because of prior discriminatory policies and practices that were based solely on demographic factors, some of which are innate or …

You Have The Right To Remain Powerless: Deprivation Of Agency By Law Enforcement And The Legal And Carceral Systems, Marco Maldonado, Michael Onah, Jennifer Merrigan

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

The charges against Philadelphia Police Officer Phillip Nordo read like an episode of The Shield. The grand jury presentment, should you have the stomach for it, is closer to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. For over twenty years, Officer Nordo groomed, sexually assaulted, and used crime reward funds to pay off vulnerable men in Philadelphia. Whether in his transport van, prison visiting rooms, or police interrogation rooms, he regularly exploited his unfettered access to and absolute control over vulnerable individuals. Though he was not convicted until 2022, the communities he stalked and preyed upon knew exactly …

The Paradox Of Salvation: Police-Perpetrated Sexual Violence Against Sex Workers In The United States, Aydan Murphy-Stanley

Student Theses

This study explores how sex workers in the United States are sexually victimized and potentially traumatized by sexual violence perpetrated by police officers, as well as the paradoxical implications of this violence. A qualitative meta-synthesis was conducted to examine and integrate qualitative literature pertaining to this phenomenon. 10 databases were used to execute the systematic literature search. Only studies that utilized qualitative methodologies, are published in peer-reviewed academic journals, and examined police-sex worker interactions were included. Data from relevant studies was analyzed according to the meta-synthesis method. Police-perpetrated sexual violence against sex workers was identified as a form of sexual …