Digital Commons Network^™

Remaking Carceral Policy: A Response To Littman, Keramet Reiter

Vanderbilt Law Review

No abstract provided.

‘The Good English’: The Ideological Construction Of The Target Language In Adult Esol, Kelsey Swift

Publications and Research

This project problematizes hegemonic conceptions of language by looking at the construction of ‘English’ in a nonprofit, community-based adult ESOL program in New York. I use ethnographic observation and interviews to uncover the discursive and pedagogical practices that uphold these hegemonic conceptions in this context. I find that the structural conditions of the program perpetuate a conception of ‘English’ shaped by linguistic racism and classism, despite the program’s progressive ideals. Linguistic authority is centralized through the presentation of a closed linguistic system and a focus on replication of templatic language. This allows for the drawing of linguistic borders by pathologizing …

A Refined Experimentalist Governance Approach To Incremental Policy Change: The Case Of Process-Tracing China’S Central Government Infrastructure Ppp Policies Between 1988 And 2017, Huanming Wang, Bin Chen, Joop Koppenjan

Publications and Research

This article was originally published in Journal of Chinese Governance, available at https://doi.org/10.1080/23812346.2021.1898151

This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

Marijuana Legalization Effect On Opioid Abuse: A Synthetic Control Approach, Elisha Kwaku Denkyirah

Agribusiness and Applied Economics

The opioid epidemic constitutes one of the worst drug crises in the history of U.S. State-level policies, in general, have done little to prevent prescription opioid abuse. A noteworthy exception to other clinical efforts to curb opioid abuse is marijuana. Despite preliminary evidence, many states are hesitant to introduce legislation to expand access to medicinal marijuana or liberalize laws on the recreational use of marijuana, fearing additional research is needed. Utilizing a synthetic control method and annual state-level data from 2006 to 2018, this study examines the effect of recreational marijuana legalization on opioid abuse. The findings strongly indicate marijuana …

Research Justice: A 25 Year Reflection On Critical Participatory Action Research Behind Bars, Michelle Fine, María Elena Torre, Kathy Boudin, Cheryl Wilkins

Publications and Research

In this chapter, we introduce the notion of research collaboratories where critical inquiry-based collaboration – not experimentation – flourishes; where critical participatory action research (CPAR) projects are conceived and implemented across universities and communities/movements to build theory, transform policy, support social change and forge new solidarities. In these spaces, academics, policy makers, community members, students and activists design research projects together, pool intentionally diverse standpoints, integrate qualitative, quantitative, archival and historic evidence to probe questions of (in)justice, enacting - No Research on Us, Without Us!

Talking Back In Court, M. Eve Hanan

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Incarcerated Activism During Covid-19, M. Eve Hanan

Scholarly Works

Incarcerated people have a notoriously difficult time advocating for themselves. Like other authoritarian institutions, prisons severely curtail and often punish speech, organizing, and self-advocacy. Also, like other authoritarian institutions, prison administrators are inclined to suppress protest rather than respond to the grounds for protest. Yet, despite impediments to their participation, incarcerated people have organized during the pandemic, advocating for themselves through media channels, public forums, and the courts. Indeed, a dramatic increase in incarcerated activism correlates with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Just as the COVID-19 pandemic highlights injustice in other areas of criminal legal practices, it reveals both …

Evaluation Of Substance Abuse Measures In Identifying Drug Seeking Behavior, Dylan M. Songer

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The opioid crisis consuming the U.S. has resulted in approximately 115 daily deaths that may be partially due to prescribing practices of opioid-based medications. Screeners used to assess for opioid abuse are often dichotomous, face-valid, and allow individuals to easily hide their substance abuse. The current study examined if brief screeners can be used to detect opioid abuse that is intentionally hidden, and proposed that modifying dichotomous response sets to Likert-scales will increase variability in responses, resulting in better detection of hidden substance abuse. It was hypothesized that individuals instructed to malinger will have lower scores on the original and …

Restorative Justice And The Challenge Of Perpetrator Accountability, Margaret Walker

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Dual Panics: A Media Analysis Of Narratives On The Role Of Unauthorized Migration In America's Overdose Crisis, Morgan Godvin

University Honors Theses

Background: The realms of drug policy and immigration policy have long been fueled by misinformation, where sensationalism and panics help shore up political support. Most recently, the "border crisis" has been invoked to explain the "overdose crisis" in mass media narratives. Although the increase in migration is being blamed for illicit drug flows, drug importation occurs primarily through legal points-of-entry. The extent and excess visibility of false narratives linking overdose to migration in mainstream media is unknown.

Methods: We used the Media Cloud ecosystem to compile and characterize mainstream media content published between June 2021 and July 2021 regarding the …

Cybercrime Vs. Cyberwar: Paradigms For Addressing Malicious Cyber Activity, Mieke Eoyang, Chimene Keitner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Virtual Reality: Prospective Catalyst For Restorative Justice, Kate Bloch

Faculty Scholarship

A 2018 U.S. Department of Justice report assessing data from thirty states found that eighty-three percent of those individuals released from state prisons in 2005 were rearrested within nine years.** When a revolving door ushers five of six individuals back into custody and decimates communities, more effective approaches to criminal justice demand attention. In countries around the world, restorative justice has been emerging as a promising candidate. It generally involves an interactive process in which stakeholders identify and grapple with harms caused by the crime. But many environments lack the resources to invoke its benefits. While restorative justice takes various …

Bad Role Models? American Influence On Israeli Criminal Justice Policy, Hadar Aviram

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article I rely on the public policy concept of "policy transfer" to examine the impact of U.S. legislation, litigation, and politics on the Israeli criminal justice landscape. The Article identifies four eras: 1. The Great Light from the West - the ascent of U.S. criminal justice as British influence fades; 2. The Decade of Rights - a misperception of America as a paragon of criminal justice rights and protections that results in influences on Israeli jurisprudence; 3. The Law-and-Order Enchantment Period - a time at which Israeli scholars and policymakers import punitive trends from the U.S., particularly in …

More Than A Mask: Stay-At-Home Orders And Religious Freedom, Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, Madeline Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

School Police Reform: A Public Health Imperative, Thalia Gonzalez, Emma Kaeser

Faculty Scholarship

Out of the twin pandemics currently gripping the United States—deaths of unarmed Black victims at the hands of police and racialized health inequities resulting from COVID- 19—an antiracist health equity agenda has emerged that identifies racism as a public health crisis. Likewise, calls for reform of school policing by those advocating for civil rights, racial justice, and Black Lives Matter have simultaneously intensified. Yet each remains siloed, despite the natural connection and implicit overlap between these separate movements and debates. Indeed, there are documented negative health effects of school policing for Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) youth. But these …

Restorative Justice, School Reopenings And Educational Equity: A Contemporary Mapping And Analysis Of State Law, Thalia Gonzalez, Rebecca Epstein, Claire Krelitz, Rhea Shinde

Faculty Scholarship

The opportunity to use restorative justice practices to address structural inequalities and reimagine school structures has become increasingly important in the wake of twin social and public health pandemics. As research-based restorative practices continue to grow across the country with the aim of fostering supportive, safe, and anti-racist learning environments, calls to codify school-based restorative justice are spreading. Despite the prevalence of on-the-ground practices since the 1990s and a growing evidence base for school-based restorative practices, there is little understanding of the effect of the legalization of restorative justice on individual- or school-level outcomes. This study is the first analysis …

Race, School Policing, And Public Health, Thalia Gonzalez

Faculty Scholarship

The ever-growing list of names of Black victims who have died at the hands ofpolice has emboldened a new public narrative that frames police violence—and other more commonplace, though less lethal, disparate policing practices—as a public health crisis rooted in this country’s history of racism and anti-Blackness. This public narrative in turn has spawned a diverse set of responsive actions in both the public and private sectors directed at addressing the effects of individual and structural racism on health. Yet missing from this linkage between police violence and racialized health disparities is any focus on the educational system, despite the …

Prescription-Drug Policing: The Right To Health Information Privacy Pre-And Post-Carpenter, Jennifer D. Oliva

Faculty Scholarship

This Article operates at the intersection of privacy law, Fourth Amendment doctrine, and prescription-drug surveillance instigated by the U.S. drug-overdose crisis. Reputable reporting sources frequently frame that ongoing crisis as a prescription-drug-overdose “epidemic.” Current epidemiological data, however, indicate that the majority of American overdose deaths are now a result of illicit and polysubstance drug use and not prescription-opioid misuse. The prescription-opioid- centric frame has nonetheless sparked the rapid rise of surveillance of prescribers and patients in the form of state prescription-drug monitoring program (“PDMP”) databases. State PDMPs, which maintain and analyze significant data concerning every dispensed controlled substance, surreptitiously collect …

The Library As An Inspiring Space For Learning And Innovation, Noor Abutayeh

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Managing the modern library means seizing upon this technological and cultural shift, and transforming these challenges into positive opportunities. The success of this evolution will be contingent on the creation of inspiring and attractive services for libraries’ collections, activities, and spaces. Thus, this study seeks to investigate these new inspiring services and non-traditional activities through the web portals of libraries from different countries all around the world. The research follows the documentary approach based on subject-related studies, and navigating libraries’ web portals, to determine their activities. The study focused on many concepts related to innovative services, sustainable information development and …

Strategies Adopted By Library Science Research Scholars To Cope With Challenges In Dissertation-Writing, Sana Ul Haq, Khurram Shahzad, Muhammad Naeem

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The objective of this study was to explore the strategies adopted by Library and Information Science (LIS) Postgraduate M. Phil. and Ph.D. Students to cope with challenges in dissertation-writing. Firstly, an in-depth analysis of the relevant literature was done. A quantitative approach followed by a survey research design was followed to meet the set objective of the study. The population of the study was 98 research scholars of which 72 were enrolled in M.Phil. Program and 26 in Ph.D. Program. The findings of the study show that researchers face several problems during dissertation writing and they adopt different strategies to …

Developing Entrepreneurial Potential In Information Science Students: A Critical Review Of Lis Training Programs In Kenya, Arnold Mwanzu, Dickens Rodriguez Wendo

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the state of entrepreneurial education in library and information science programs and the influence that entrepreneurial education has on LIS students. The study adopted a descriptive research design approach. Both primary and secondary data was collected through questionnaires, observation and data review. The study population comprised of diploma and undergraduate students as well as alumni of LIS. The research data was analyzed through descriptive statistics and the results presented in tables. The findings showed that only basic entrepreneurship education was offered in LIS programs and not incorporated across all the years of …

Abolish Municipal Courts: A Response To Professor Natapoff, Brendan Roediger

All Faculty Scholarship

If we are serious about disrupting the generational reproduction of the racial social order, we are going to have to learn to let go. Taking up the legacy of criminal municipal courts and racial control, this Response argues against the practice of prescribing from the traditional “medication list” of liberal reforms (substantive, procedural, and “democratizing”) without grappling with whether a system or apparatus is so inextricably bound up with the maintenance of race and class hierarchy that it should be demolished. I assert that we should always ask whether something is redeemable before we ask whether it is reformable. In …

“One Of The Greatest Human Tragedies Of Our Time”: The U.N., Biden, And A Missed Opportunity To Abolish Immigration Prisons, Lauren E. Bartlett

All Faculty Scholarship

Children in cages, rampant sexual abuse, lack of access to life-saving medical treatment, and more. These human rights violations continue to occur in immigration prisons in the United States today, and given the scope, many, including the United Nations, are pushing the United States to abolish immigration prisons altogether. However, the Biden administration has demonstrated that is not interested in supporting the abolition of immigration prisons, not even in the international human rights arena.

After providing a brief overview of international human rights law prohibiting immigration prisons, this essay explores U.N. recommendations on immigration prisons from each of the Universal …

Cultivation Theory: Media Effects Toward Consumer Evaluations Of The Criminal Courts, Lindsey Dale Elliott

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

A substantial body of literature connects media effects to consumer perceptions of the criminal justice system. Research on the topic of cultivation theory has highlighted that an increased fear of crime within the general populace, due to an exaggeration of violence and criminal activity in the mass media, has spurred increased support for punitive policing, harsher sentencing, and positive feelings toward capital punishment. However, no research exists to explicate the cultivation of consumer perceptions toward the criminal courts. This study examines the impact of media consumption through television, the internet, and social media on consumer evaluations of the criminal courts. …

Strange Fruit: The Forgotten Lynchings Of Northwest Tennessee And Southwestern Kentucky, 1869-1931, Melinda Meador

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

In the 50 years between 1869 and 1918, 50 African Americans were lynched in a sparsely populated three-county area, far removed from the Cotton Belt and outside the ambit of the Tobacco Black Patch, along the state line in northwest Tennessee and southwestern Kentucky. The characteristics of lynchings identified in previous studies have little relevance to the lynchings carried out in this three-county area where the African American population seldom exceeded twenty percent of the overall population. Unlike the Deep South, the practice appears not to have been driven by socio-economic and political factors but primarily by a lust for …