Digital Commons Network^™

Maths In Prison, Catherine Byrne, Michael Carr

Articles

I teach maths to all levels in an adult male remand prison in Ireland and am also studying for a PhD in maths in prison education in Technological University Dublin (DIT). This paper describes recent initiatives piloted by maths teachers and school management to increase attendance, engagement and certification in maths. It assesses the effects of the initiatives and looks at future potential in this setting and in others. To set the paper in context, I begin by describing a typical day as a prison maths teacher.

Examining The Use Of Community Service Orders As Alternatives To Short Prison Sentences In Ireland, Kate O'Hara, Mary Rogan

Articles

Ireland’s highly discretionary sentencing system provides a rare opportunity to study the behaviour of judges when relatively free of externally imposed constraints. While this is so, few studies have investigated sentencing trends.

Occupy Judaism: Religion, Digital Media, And The Public Sphere, Ayala Fader, Owen Gottlieb

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This article provides an analysis of Occupy Judaism, an explicitly religious expression of Jewish protest, which occurred simultaneously with Occupy Wall Street, the direct-democracy movement of 2011. Occupy Judaism, like Occupy Wall Street, took place both in physical spaces of protest in New York City and digitally, through mobilizing and circulating debate. The article focuses on the words and actions of Daniel Sieradski, the public face and one of the key founders of Occupy Judaism, supplemented by the experiences of others in Occupy Judaism, Occupy Wall Street, and Occupy Faith (a Protestant clergy-led initiative). We investigate what qualified as religion …

Yes, It's Equality, But It's Not What It Used To Be, Edward Brennan

Articles

No abstract provided.

Developing An Elite Formation Index For Comparative Elite Studies: The Schooling Of Irish And Uk Cabinet Ministers, Brendan O'Rourke, John Hogan, Paul Donnelly

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Elites and their formation have become a matter of increasing public concern and research interest in recent years. The lessons from such research can be made more generalisable if a measure of elite formation could be developed that is comparable across different elite formation systems, whether they differ by elite, time or country. But, the nature of elite formation renders this a complex task. Nevertheless, in this article, by building upon measures employed in other fields such as industrial economics, indices are constructed that facilitate the comparison of elite formation systems. This is illustrated through a comparison of the schooling …

Avenging Carlota In Africa: Angola And The Memory Of Cuban Slavery, Myra Ann Houser

Articles

Fidel Castro’s meta-narrative of Cuban history emphasizes the struggle – and eventual triumph – of the oppressed over their oppressors. This was epitomized in Nelson Mandela’s 1991 visit to the island, when his host took him to the northwestern city of Matanzas, and the pair gave speeches titled “Look How Far We Slaves Have Come!” The use of Matanzas as a site of public political memory began in 1843, and the memory of slavery soon became a surrogate for Cuba’s flawed liberation movement. One-hundred and fifty years after the execution of Carlota, one of the enslaved leaders of the Triumvirato …

Social Services Will Not Touch Us With A Barge Pole’: Social Care Provision For Older Prisoners, Kate O'Hara, Katrina Forsyth, Jane Senior, Caroline Stevenson, Adrian Hayes, David Challis, Jenny Shaw

Articles

Older prisoners are the fastest growing subgroup in the English and Welsh prison estate. Older prisoners have high levels of health and social care needs. This mixed method study involved the distribution of a questionnaire examining the availability of health and social care services for older prisoners to all prisons housing adult males in England and Wales, followed by qualitative telephone interviews with representatives from eight prisons. Over half of establishments had some contact with external social care services but reported significant difficulties in arranging care for individuals. A professional lead for older prisoners had been identified in 81% of …

Religion, Delinquency, And Drug Use: A Meta-Analysis, P. Elizabeth Kelly, Joshua R. Polanin, Sung Joon Jang, Byron R. Johnson

Articles

Contemporary research on adolescent involvement in religion and delinquency is generally traced to Hirschi and Stark’s 1969 study, titled ‘‘Hellfire and Delinquency.’’ Their study surprised many by reporting no significant relationship between religious involvement and delinquency. Subsequent replications provided mixed results, but multiple reviews, both traditional and systematic, found religious involvement to be inversely related to delinquency. However, meta-analysis of the relationship remains scant with only three studies published to date. To address this research need, we conducted a meta-analysis of 62 relevant studies over four decades, which provided 145 effect sizes from 193,656 adolescents. We examined six bivariate correlations …

Foreword Snx 2014: Challenges To Justice Education: South-North Perspectives, Sheila I. Velez Martinez

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“Towards an Education for Justice: South North Perspectives” was the theme of the XI LatCrit South North Exchange on Theory, Culture and Law, convened at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia in 2014. Scholars, students and activists from more than 10 countries encompassing the Global South and Global North engaged in a critical and animated exchange on the changing space of legal studies and how this change can be stirred towards acknowledging the need to integrate a concern for justice as part of legal education. The premise of the Conference was that the dominant model of legal education, …

Sonic Jihad — Muslim Hip Hop In The Age Of Mass Incarceration, Spearit

Articles

This essay examines hip hop music as a form of legal criticism. It focuses on the music as critical resistance and “new terrain” for understanding the law, and more specifically, focuses on what prisons mean to Muslim hip hop artists. Losing friends, family, and loved ones to the proverbial belly of the beast has inspired criticism of criminal justice from the earliest days of hip hop culture. In the music, prisons are known by a host of names like “pen,” “bing,” and “clink,” terms that are invoked throughout the lyrics. The most extreme expressions offer violent fantasies of revolution and …

Evolving Standards Of Domination: Abandoning A Flawed Legal Standard And Approaching A New Era In Penal Reform, Spearit

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This Article critiques the evolving standards of decency doctrine as a form of Social Darwinism. It argues that evolving standards of decency provided a system of review that was tailor-made for Civil Rights opponents to scale back racial progress. Although as a doctrinal matter, evolving standards sought to tie punishment practices to social mores, prison sentencing became subject to political agendas that determined the course of punishment more than the benevolence of a maturing society. Indeed, rather than the fierce competition that is supposed to guide social development, the criminal justice system was consciously deployed as a means of social …

On Not 'Having It Both Ways' And Still Losing: Reflections On Fifty Years Of Pregnancy Litigation Under Title Vii, Deborah L. Brake

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This article, published in the B.U. Law Review Symposium issue, “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 at 50: Past, Present and Future,” reflects on the past fifty years of conflict and struggle over how to treat pregnancy discrimination under Title VII. Pregnancy has played a pivotal role in debates among feminist legal scholars and women’s rights advocates about the limitations of both the equal treatment and special treatment anti-discrimination frameworks. The article’s title references the much-discussed Wendy W. Williams cautionary note that if we cannot have it “both ways” we need to decide which way we want to have it …

Bridging The Gap Between Unmet Legal Needs And An Oversupply Of Lawyers: Creating Neighborhood Law Offices - The Philadelphia Experiment, Jules Lobel, Matthew Chapman

Articles

In the United States there is, simultaneously, an abundance of unemployed lawyers and a significant unmet need for legal care among middle-class households. This unfortunate paradox is protected by ideological, cultural, and practical paradigms both inside the legal community and out. These paradigms include the legal chase for prestige, the consumer’s inability to recognize a legal need, and the growing mountain of debt new lawyers enter the profession with. This article will discuss a very successful National Lawyers Guild experiment from 1930s-era Philadelphia that addressed a similar situation, in a time with similar paradigms, by emphasizing community-connected lawyering. That is, …

Preparing For Service: A Template For 21st Century Legal Education, Michael J. Madison

Articles

Legal educators today grapple with the changing dynamics of legal employment markets; the evolution of technologies and business models driving changes to the legal profession; and the economics of operating – and attending – a law school. Accrediting organizations and practitioners pressure law schools to prepare new lawyers both to be ready to practice and to be ready for an ever-fluid career path. From the standpoint of law schools in general and any one law school in particular, constraints and limitations surround us. Adaptation through innovation is the order of the day.

How, when, and in what direction should innovation …

Normalizing Disability In Families, Mary Crossley

Articles

In “Selection against Disability: Abortion, ART, and Access,” Alicia Ouellette probes a particularly vexing point of intersection between ART (assisted reproductive technology) and abortion: how negative assumptions about the capacities of disabled persons and the value of life with disability infect both prospective parents’ prenatal decisions about what pregnancies to pursue and fertility doctors’ decisions about providing services to disabled adults. This commentary on Ouellette’s contribution to the symposium titled “Intersections in Reproduction: Perspectives on Abortion and Assisted Reproductive Technologies" first briefly describes Ouellette’s key points and her article’s most valuable contributions. It then suggests further expanding the frame of …