Digital Commons Network^™

Are Collateral Consequences Deserved?, Brian M. Murray

Notre Dame Law Review

While bipartisan passage of the First Step Act and state reforms like it will lead to changes in sentencing and release practices, they do little to combat the collateral consequences that exoffenders face upon release. Because collateral consequences involve the state’s infliction of serious harm on those who have been convicted or simply arrested, their existence requires justification. Many scholars classify them as punishment, but modern courts generally diverge, deferring to legislative labels that classify them as civil, regulatory measures. This label avoids having to address existing constitutional and legal constraints on punishment. This Article argues that although collateral consequences …

On Beauty And Policing, India Thusi

Articles by Maurer Faculty

“To protect and serve” is the motto of police departments from Los Angeles to Cape Town. When police officers deviate from the twin goals of protection and service, for example by using excessive force or by maintaining hostile relations with the community, scholars recommend more training, more oversight, or more resources in policing. However, police appear to be motivated by a superseding goal in the area of sex work policing. In some places, the policing of sex workers is connected to police officers’ perceptions of beauty, producing a hierarchy of desirable bodies as enforced by those sworn to protect and …

Incarcerated Parents And Child Welfare In Washington, Sayer Rippey

Washington Law Review

From 2006 to 2016, 32,000 incarcerated parents in the United States permanently lost their parental rights without ever being accused of child abuse.1 Of these, approximately 5,000 lost their parental rights solely because of their incarceration.2 This “family separation crisis”3 followed on the heels of the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), a federal law which directs states to initiate parental termination proceedings against parents when their children have been in foster care for fifteen of the last twenty-two months.4 Some states, including Washington, attempted to mitigate ASFA’s devastating impact on incarcerated parents by adding exceptions for incarceration.5 This Comment …

Evaluating The Facilitating Attuned Interactions (Fan) Approach: Vicarious Trauma, Professional Burnout, And Reflective Practice, Katherine Hazen, Matthew W. Carlson, Holly Hatton-Bowers, Melanie Fessinger, Jennie Cole-Mossman, Jamie Bahm, Kelli Hauptman J.D., Eve Brank, Linda Gilkerson

Center on Children, Families, and the Law: Faculty Publications

Background: This evaluation examined the use of the Facilitated Attuned Interaction (FAN) approach to reflective practice among child welfare and early childhood professionals working with vulnerable children and families.

Objective: The aims of the current evaluation were to test (a) the role of vicarious trauma in predicting professional burnout, (b) the effect of reflective practice quality in decreasing professional burnout, and (c) the ability of reflective practice quality to lessen the relationship between vicarious trauma and professional burnout.

Participants and Setting: The sample included sixty-three professionals across diverse professions including child welfare social workers, early childhood educators, and child welfare …

Blue Lives & The Permanence Of Racism, India Thusi

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In true dystopian form, the killing of unarmed Black people by the police has sparked a national narrative about the suffering of police officers. “Blue Lives Matter” has become the rallying call for those offended by the suggestion that we should hold police officers accountable for killing unarmed Black people. According to a December 2016 poll, 61% of Americans believed that there was a “war on police,” and 68% of Whites had a favorable view of the police as compared to 40% of Blacks. Lawmakers around the country have been proposing Blue Lives Matter laws that make it a hate …

Justices Make The Tough-- But Right-- Call In Cross-Border Shooting Case, A. Benjamin Spencer

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Does Bail Reform Increase Crime? An Empirical Assessment Of The Public Safety Implications Of Bail Reform In Cook County, Illinois, Paul Cassell, Richard Fowles

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Recently bail reform issues have been in the news across the country, as concerns about fair treatment of defendants and possible public safety risks from expanding pretrial release have collided. These issues involve important empirical questions, including whether releasing more defendants before trial leads to additional crimes. An opportunity to investigate this public safety issue has developed in Chicago, our nation’s third largest city. There, the Office of the Chief Judge of the Cook County Courts adopted new bail reform measures in September 2017 and reviewed them empirically in May 2019. Cook County’s Bail Reform Study concluded that the new …

In Re Cook And The Franklin Proceeding: New Door, Same Dilapidated House, Christopher Hawthorne, Marisa Sacks

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

The California Supreme Court’s decision in In re Cook was supposed to bring about a sea change in the way trial courts conduct Franklin mitigation hearings for youthful offenders. In fact, while Cook changed the procedure for initiating a post-conviction Franklin proceeding, little else has changed, including the lack of agreement among attorneys concerning best practices in these proceedings, and a less than less-than-enthusiastic response from the criminal defense bar. Absent any guidance from higher courts, the Franklin proceeding is limited by the personal and institutional energies and preferences of judges, prosecutors, public defenders and private defense counsel. The authors …

Stingray Cell-Site Simulator Surveillance And The Fourth Amendment In The Twenty-First Century: A Review Of The Fourth Amendment In An Age Of Surveillance, And Unwarranted, Harvey Gee

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

This Review discusses two timely and insightful books examining the changing relationship between privacy and the Fourth Amendment in the digital era. Part I discusses the tensions between the need to protect privacy rights and the slowly evolving legal landscape during a time of rapidly changing technology, to introduce David Gray’s The Fourth Amendment in an Age of Surveillance. His book explains how the Fourth Amendment, though embattled, can have a prominent role in twenty-first century discussions of privacy, technology, and surveillance. Gray’s analysis is engaged to broaden the conversation about Stingray technology. This section analyzes a sampling of …

Race, Surveillance, Resistance, Chaz Arnett

Faculty Scholarship

The increasing capability of surveillance technology in the hands of law enforcement is radically changing the power, size, and depth of the surveillance state. More daily activities are being captured and scrutinized, larger quantities of personal and biometric data are being extracted and analyzed, in what is becoming a deeply intensified and pervasive surveillance society. This reality is particularly troubling for Black communities, as they shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden and harm associated with these powerful surveillance measures, at a time when traditional mechanisms for accountability have grown weaker. These harms include the maintenance of legacies of state …

Abolishing Racist Policing With The Thirteenth Amendment, Brandon Hasbrouck

Scholarly Articles

This Essay was also published online at 67 UCLA L. Rev. Disc. 200 (2020).

Policing in America has always been about controlling the Black body. Indeed, modern policing was birthed and nurtured by white supremacy; its roots are found in slavery. Policing today continues to protect and serve the racial hierarchy blessed by the Constitution itself. But a string of U.S. Supreme Court rulings involving the Thirteenth Amendment offers Congress a tool with which to target institutions that have preserved social, political, and official norms associated with slavery. In those cases, the Supreme Court held that Congress has broad enforcement …

Nondelegating Death, Alexandra L. Klein

Scholarly Articles

Most states’ method of execution statutes afford broad discretion to executive agencies to create execution protocols. Inmates have challenged this discretion, arguing that these statutes unconstitutionally delegate legislative power to executive agencies, violating the state’s nondelegation and separation of powers doctrines. State courts routinely use the nondelegation doctrine, in contrast to the doctrine’s historic disfavor in federal courts. Despite its uncertain status, the nondelegation doctrine is a useful analytical tool to examine decision-making in capital punishment.

This Article critically evaluates responsibility for administering capital punishment through the lens of nondelegation. It analyzes state court decisions upholding broad legislative delegations to …

Revenue Policing, Social Control, And Neoliberalism, Nathaniel Graulich

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

A variety of studies have examined the role of economic structures in policing. These inquiries offer insight into revenue-based law enforcement activities but are simultaneously limited by blind spots in theorization. Reviewing these studies, it is apparent the criminal justice system can and is used to gain revenue for a multitude of public and private organizations. Furthermore, it is clear this is not a new phenomenon in the United States. Nor is the disparate impact of criminal justice activity on segments of U.S. society such as poor or homeless citizens, minority populations including black and latinx populations, and LGBTQ+ communities. …

Incarcerated Women: Reproductive Healthcare Concerns Silenced By The Prison Litigation Reform Act, Amanda Feldman

Upper Level Writing Requirement Research Papers

No abstract provided.

The Wandering Officer, Ben Grunwald, John Rappaport

Faculty Scholarship

“Wandering officers” are law-enforcement officers fired by one department, sometimes for serious misconduct, who then find work at another agency. Policing experts hold disparate views about the extent and character of the wandering-officer phenomenon. Some insist that wandering officers are everywhere—possibly increasingly so—and that they’re dangerous. Others, however, maintain that critics cherry-pick rare and egregious anecdotes that distort broader realities. In the absence of systematic data, we simply do not know how common wandering officers are or how much of a threat they pose, nor can we know whether and how to address the issue through policy reform.

In this …

The Categorical Imperative As A Decarceral Agenda, Jessica M. Eaglin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In his forthcoming book, The Insidious Momentum of Mass Incarceration, Frank Zimring proposes two alternative methods to decarcerate: states can adopt a categorical imperative to reduce prison populations or states can reform the governance of sentencing. This symposium Essay focuses on the first of these options, as proposed in his tentative Chapter Six, wherein Zimring calls for categorically removing drug-addicted offenders from eligibility for prison sanctions and expanding use of jails for categories of offenses or offenders.

These methods, I suggest, exist in tension with numerous popular sentencing reforms being implemented in the states right now. Popular reforms, including the …

Boots And Bail On The Ground: Assessing The Implementation Of Misdemeanor Bail Reforms In Georgia, Andrea Woods, Sandra G. Mayson, Lauren Sudeall, Guthrie Armstrong, Anthony Potts

Georgia Law Review

This Article presents a mixed-methods study of misdemeanor bail practice across Georgia in the wake of reform. We observed bail hearings and interviewed system actors in a representative sample of fifty-five counties to assess the extent to which pretrial practice conforms to legal standards clarified in Senate Bill 407 and Walker v. Calhoun. We also analyzed jail population data published by county jails and by the Georgia Department of Community Affairs. We found that a handful of counties have made promising headway in adhering to law and best practices, but that the majority have some distance to go. Most counties …

Buried Alive: The Need To Establish Clear Durational Standards For Solitary Confinement, 53 Uic J. Marshall L. Rev. 235 (2020), Ruth Chan

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Other Side Of The Door: The Art Of Compassion In Policing, Rachel Parish, Jack J. Cambria

DRI Press

The Other Side of the Door is an account of an extraordinary experiment by a remarkable group, jointly headed by contemporary artist Rachel Parish and Jack Cambria, the longtime commander of the New York Police Department's elite Hostage Negotiation Team. The group also included law enforcement professionals and students, performance poets, an emergency medicine physician, conflict management experts, a sociologist and two psychologists.

With the unprecedented combination of viewpoints and talents the group set out to create a new approach to police training form emotional competence. They learned as much from what did not work as from what did. Both …

Promise Amid Peril: Prea's Efforts To Regulate An End To Prison Rape, Brenda V. Smith

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This Article discusses the modest aspirations of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (“PREA”) that passed unanimously in the United States Congress in 2003. The Article posits that PREA created opportunities for holding correctional authorities accountable by creating a baseline for safety and setting more transparent expectations for agencies’ practices for protecting prisoners from sexual abuse. Additionally, the Article posits that PREA enhanced the evolving standards of decency for the Eighth Amendment and articulated clear expectations of correctional authorities to provide sexual safety for people in custody.

Replacing Death With Life? The Rise Of Lwop In The Context Of Abolitionist Campaigns In The United States, Michelle Miao

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

On the basis of fifty-four elite interviews[1] with legislators, judges, attorneys, and civil society advocates as well as a state-by-state data survey, this Article examines the complex linkage between the two major penal trends in American society during the past decades: a declining use of capital punishment across the United States and a growing population of prisoners serving “life without the possibility of parole” or “LWOP” sentences. The main contribution of the research is threefold. First, the research proposes to redefine the boundary between life and death in relation to penal discourses regarding the death penalty and LWOP. LWOP …

Why Use A Hammer When A Scalpel Will Do? Suggestions For Fairer Juvenile Plea Bargaining In Kentucky, Aaron Wallace Meek

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Mandatory, Fast, And Fair: Case Outcomes And Procedural Justice In A Family Drug Court, Melanie Fessinger, Katherine Hazen, Jamie Bahm, Jennie Cole-Mossman, Roger Heideman, Eve Brank

Center on Children, Families, and the Law: Faculty Publications

Objectives: Problem-solving courts are traditionally voluntary in nature to promote procedural justice and to advance therapeutic jurisprudence. The Family Treatment Drug Court (FTDC) in Lancaster County, Nebraska, is a mandatory dependency court for families with allegations of child abuse or neglect related to substance use. We conducted a program evaluation examining parents’ case outcomes and perceptions of procedural justice to examine whether a mandatory problem-solving court could replicate the positive outcomes of problem-solving courts. Methods: We employed a quasi-experimental design that compared FTDC parents to traditional dependency court parents (control parents). We examined court records to gather court orders, compliance …

Stepping Into The Shoes Of The Department Of Justice: The Unusual, Necessary, And Hopeful Path The Illinois Attorney General Took To Require Police Reform In Chicago, Lisa Madigan, Cara Hendrickson, Karyn L. Bass Ehler

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Police Funding, Stephen Rushin, Roger Michalski

Faculty Articles

A number of civil rights activists have called for the defunding or abolition of American police departments. These activists claim that the United States overinvests in police, leaving fewer scarce resources to support other government services. Activists also claim that overinvestment in policing contributes to higher rates of police misconduct and unnecessary criminalization, particularly in communities of color. This Article considers these calls for the defunding of police. It ultimately cautions against widespread defunding of police and offers an alternative proposal. Part I brings together multiple national databases on local government expenditures to evaluate empirically how states and municipalities fund …

Have Problem-Solving Courts Changed The Practice Of Law?, Cynthia Alkon

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

No abstract provided.

Title Ix & The Civil Rights Approach To Sexual Harassment In Education, Nancy Chi Cantalupo

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Unpacking The Untapped Potential Of First-Line Supervisors : Sergeants' Role In Managing Police Discretion, Danielle Leigh Reynolds

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The operational uncertainties for police work—e.g. isolation, ambiguity, contextually contingent decision-making—force police departments to push discretion down to its lowest level employees. Consequently, officers are expected to exercise independent thought and judgment in response to the challenges confronted. Yet public criticism of police often breeds from officers’ “poor” decisions and the inordinate amount of discretion they are granted. Police organizations rarely experience crises for failing to control crime, rather it is failure to control police discretion that most often threatens a department’s legitimacy. Consequently, police departments rely on supervision to limit, constrain or shape officers’ discretion so that it mirrors …

A New Era: Digital Curtilage And Alexa-Enabled Smart Home Devices, Johanna Sanchez

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Solitary Confinement Continues In Canada Under A Different Name, Adelina Iftene

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Abusive uses of Structured Intervention Units and the Correctional Service’s conduct mean Parliament must get rid of SIUs or adopt Senate amendments.