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On The Role Of Cost-Benefit Analysis In Criminal Justice Policy: A Response To The Imprisoner's Dilemma, Sonja B. Starr

Articles

With one in 100 adult Americans behind bars, and prison budgets consuming an increasing share of state budgets, few social policy issues compare in significance to the debate over which criminal offenders should be incarcerated and for how long. David Abrams' article, The Impriasoner's Dilemma: A Cost-Benefit Approach to Incarceration,' makes an important contribution to that debate, offering an economic approach to assessing the net benefits of holding or freeing prisoners on the incarceration margin. In this short Response, I first highlight several strengths of Abrams' piece and discuss the possible case that could be made for incorporating formal cost-benefit …

Incarceration And The Economic Fortunes Of Urban Neighborhoods, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Valerie West

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter turns to the response of the criminal justice system to neighborhood violence, in particular examining to what extent persistently high levels of incarceration can depress economic well-being and human capital in disadvantaged and racially segregated communities. A panel analysis of New York City neighborhoods between 1985 and 1996, a period in which the city's violent-crime rates both rose and fell sharply, provides evidence that high incarceration rates reduce income growth, educational attainment, and work experience in disadvantaged and racially segregated neighborhoods. To rectify this, targeted micro investment and housing development in such areas can break the connection between …

Neorehabilitation And Indiana's Sentencing Reform Dilemma, Jessica M. Eaglin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Black Male Incarceration And The Preservation Of Debilitating Habits Of Judgment: An Examination Of Mississippi, Teah Monique Hairston

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abstract: the purpose of this research is to discover how mass incarceration and other historical methods of racialized social control in the south have preserved and reinforced habits of judgment that adversely affect the social mobility of black males in Mississippi. A historical research method was employed to locate and analyze recurring themes of habitual judgment patterns justifying age-old systems of social control and how those patterns have influenced the current trend of black male incarceration at disproportionate rates. Questionnaires were administered to professional employees from the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) in attempt to gather useful data about the …

Visiting Room: A Response To Prison Visitation Policies: A Fifty-State Survey, Giovanna Shay

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay responds to Boudin, Stutz & Littman, Prison Visitation Policies: A Fifty State Survey, by placing American visitation policies in a global context. American prison visitation polices are unique among advanced democracies. Other nations, particularly in Western Europe, have far more liberal policies. Prisons in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Finland feature mother/baby units and family visitation centers. In Denmark and Norway, prisoners are granted passes to visit family. These policies encourage visitation. Increased visitation is linked to lower recidivism, so adopting such policies would potentially lower prison populations in the United States. The Essay acknowledges that following …

Parenting And Parole: The Effects Of Incarceration On Motherhood, Latoya Ledyard

All ETDs from UAB

The female prison population is the fastest growing prison population in the United States. The rise in female incarceration over the past several years has become a growing concern partly due to the damaging effects on the family; a phenomenon largely attributed to mandatory sentencing guidelines and gender-neutral policies. Research literature on the unique challenges faced by parenting women and the development of reentry programs that foster family reunification has emerged in recent years, but there is still much work to be done. Using in-depth interviews with 14 residents of a transitional center for women in Alabama, I seek to …

Life And Health Outside Prison, Tiffany Amorette Young

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This qualitative study explores the subjective understandings of formerly incarcerated individuals' experiences of health and healthcare prior to, during, and post release. The study incorporates in depth ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and life charting to formulate a holistic understanding of how incarceration has impacted the health and lives of the participants recruited for this study. All participants were incarcerated for a minimum of one year in the U.S. prison system. This interdisciplinary study contributes to the fields of sociology, criminology, and public health, and builds on the literature of race, health, and corrections in the United States.

Against Neorehabilitation, Jessica M. Eaglin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In the face of severe budget constraints, bipartisan calls for reform, dropping crime rates, and judicial intervention, states are seriously considering and implementing criminal justice reform to manage prison populations for the first time in three decades. Scholars agree that states need a guiding theory to transform emergency and short-term reforms into a long-term shift in policy and practice away from mass incarceration. Numerous scholars advocate for a return to an improved theory of rehabilitation to guide the states in implementing such reform. This return-through neorehabilitation, or the rehabilitation of rehabilitation-centers on the use of evidence-based programming and predictive tools …

Vagrant Masculinity : A Process Of Masculine Self-Conceptualization In Formerly Incarcerated Black Men, Le'brian Alexander Patrick

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This qualitative study explores the reorientation of masculine identities of formerly incarcerated Black men. Analysis is based on 20 in-depth interviews with 17 former inmates from the Louisiana prison system. This research investigates the impact of incarceration on the construction of masculinity. I explore the processes by which formerly imprisoned African American men construct, negotiate, and experience masculinity. My findings present how the way these men define masculinity and see themselves post-incarceration is influenced by not only their prison experience, but also by the reentry programs that they are affiliated. These men’s identities have been reformulated post-incarceration and are profoundly …

Mass Incarceration At Sentencing, Anne R. Traum

Scholarly Works

Courts can address the problem of mass incarceration at sentencing. Although some scholars suggest that the most effective response may be through policy and legislative reform, judicial consideration of mass incarceration at sentencing would provide an additional response that can largely be implemented without wholesale reform. Mass incarceration presents a difficult problem for courts because it is a systemic problem that harms people on several scales-individual, family, and community-and the power of courts to address such broad harm is limited. This Article proposes that judges should consider mass incarceration, a systemic problem, in individual criminal cases at sentencing. Sentencing is …

Mass Incarceration: Triple Jeopardy For Women In A "Color-Blind" And Gender-Neutral Justice System, Sandra Enos

Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought

This article will explore the growth in the incarceration of women over the past three decades. Recent scholarship has examined the impact of the war on crime on men, the poor and persons of color and characterized this movement as the New Jim Crow. This strain of research has focused on men. In this article, I will explore the impact of the war on crime on women, their families and their children. I will also explore the so-called gender neutral sentencing reforms and demonstrate the impact of these protocols on women. Finally, I will map the array of social control …

Racial And Ethnic Health Disparities In Incarcerated Populations, Meghan E. Borysova, Ojmarrh Mitchell, Dawood H. Sultan, Arthur R. Williams

Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice

Alarming disparities in population health and wellness in the United States have led to multi-disciplinary research efforts to create health equity. Identifying disparities, elucidating the etiological bases of disparities, and implementing solutions to eliminate disparities are part of the U.S. national health agenda. Racial and ethnic disparities have been identified throughout the cancer control continuum, in cardiovascular disease, diabetes and a multitude of other conditions. The causes of disparities are complex, condition specific, and conjectured to result from combinations of biological and socio-behavioral factors. Racial and ethnic health disparities within the vast incarcerated communities have been excluded from most studies, …

Racism In The Criminal Justice System, Nichole Griffith

Social Sciences

This paper examines racism in the criminal justice system. The criminal justice system creates and perpetuates racial hierarchy in the United States. African Americans are criminalized and targeted because of their skin color. I analyze the Reagan administration, the War on Drugs, corrupt police practices, media, inner city enforcement, police discretion, racial profiling, and sentencing to reveal this racism and unfair treatment of African Americans. These victims of racism face lifelong marginalization and exclusion because they were criminalized. I also draw a link between the criminal justice system and slavery and Jim Crow. This racism explains why there are so …

Reducing The Incarceration Of The Homeless : An Examination Of Multi-Service Use And The Utilization Of Institutional Services., Christopher Hughes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the link between various aspects of service utilization and the institutionalization of homeless individuals. The researcher wished to determine whether participation in various therapeutic, medical, and housing programs have an influence on recidivism, number of admissions to jail, and the number of admissions for psychiatric hospitalization. The current study examined administrative data from agencies which routinely provide services to homeless individuals and included a sample of 7,180 homeless individuals in Louisville, KY during 2004 and 2005. The current study posited four hypotheses related to the utilization of community-based services to reduce the …

Die Frauen, Der Strafvollzug, Und Der Staat: Incarceration And Ideology In Post-Wwii Germany, Andrea Moody Kozak

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores how the material reality of Germany's women's prisons has been largely determined by their ideological foundations, and by the historical developments that have produced these ideologies. The German women's prison system is complex and imperfect, yet in many ways very progressive. It is the result of the last sixty years of tumultuous German history, and has been uniquely shaped by the capitalist and communist histories of the once-divided state. In its current state, it seems to have incorporated elements of a supposedly “rational” or individualistic conception of humanity as well as one that is relational and interdependent, …

Reducing Recidivism In Returning Offenders With Alcohol And Drug Related Offenses: Contracts For The Delivery Of Authentic Peer Based Recovery Support Services, Sarah Scarbrough

Theses and Dissertations

In collaboration with Sheriff C. T. Woody, the Deputies and other jail personnel, Kingdom Life Ministries (KLM) operates in the City of Richmond Jail. Aimed at serving individuals who suffer from alcoholism and other drug addictions, KLM’s programs offer peer-to-peer recovery support services; meaning people who are successful in their recovery deliver the recovery message. On any given day, rehabilitation and recovery services are provided to 120 men in what used to be the worst tier of the Richmond City Jail. A large portion of these men battle substance abuse disorders and have exhibited habitual criminal behavior over an extended …

Brief For Prof. Leslie C. Griffin As Amica Curiae In Support Of Appellant, Scott V. Pierce, Leslie C. Griffin

Supreme Court Briefs

No abstract provided.

Illich (Via Cayley) On Prisons, Giovanna Shay

Western New England Law Review

This Article considers whether, more than a dozen years after publication of Cayley’s book The Expanding Prison: The Crisis in Crime and Punishment and the Search for Alternatives, Illich’s theories help us to make sense of America’s “prison-industrial complex.” The Author concludes that our current situation reflects in part the dynamics of his theory of “counterproductivity,” but that Illich did not take sufficient account of the salience of race and class in American criminal punishment.

How Porous Are The Walls That Separate Us?: Transformative Service-Learning, Women’S Incarceration, And The Unsettled Self, Coralynn V. Davis, Carol Wayne White

Faculty Journal Articles

In this article, we refine a politics of thinking from the margins by exploring a pedagogical model that advances transformative notions of service learning as social justice teaching. Drawing on a recent course we taught involving both incarcerated women and traditional college students, we contend that when communication among differentiated and stratified parties occurs, one possible result is not just a view of the other but also a transformation of the self and other. More specifically, we suggest that an engaged feminist praxis of teaching incarcerated women together with college students helps illuminate the porous nature of fixed markers that …

Juvenile Justice Reform: Now Is The Moment, Judith S. Kaye

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Can Drug Court Results Be Predicted? Completion And Termination Of Drug Court Participants, Christopher D. Geisler

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

The substantial growth in Kentucky’s prison population since the 1980s has resulted in increased spending on corrections, both the total amount and as a percentage of total general fund spending. The sustained growth in corrections spending combined with shrinking budgetary realities has created an incentive to explore ways to reduce costs without compromising public safety. Community supervision programs are one alternative to addressing this problem. They are an attractive approach to dealing with certain types of criminals because the cost is significantly lower than incarceration. Drug courts are an example of community supervision that allows drug offenders to avoid imprisonment …

The Influence Of Past Racism On Criminal Injustice: A Review Of The New Jim Crow And The Condemnation Of Blackness, Jelani Jefferson Exum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

There are books that, on their own, are informative and moving. But, oftentimes, reading books together—one right after the other—compounds each works’ transformative power. Michelle Alexander’s much-needed report (calling it simply a book hardly does it justice), The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, can certainly stand on its own as an important statement about the current use of mass incarceration to maintain a racial caste system in the United States. The same strength can be found in The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, Khalil Gibran …

Exploring Military Service As An Alternative Sanction: Evidence From Inmates' Perspectives, Travis Wade Milburn

Online Theses and Dissertations

A large body of research exists that examines the punitiveness of prison compared to a wide variety of alternative sanctions. Generally, this research finds that there are numerous demographic and contextual differences in the way that people experience the punitiveness of prison. In this paper, I expand that research by using data from over 900 inmates to examine whether they view military service as more punitive than incarceration.

The research suggests females, Blacks, and those who have not had prior military service are more likely to desire imprisonment as opposed to military service. However, Whites and veterans appear to embrace …

Response: One Market We Do Not Need, Giovanna Shay

Faculty Scholarship

The Author responds to Alexander Volokh’s, Prison Vouchers, 160 U. Pa. L. Rev. 779 (2012). She argues that Professor Volokh is right that American prisons are considered to be “low quality,” and that they suffer from “high violence rates, bad medical care, [and] overuse of highly punitive measures like administrative segregation . . . .” But his proposed solution—a system of “prison vouchers” that would permit prisoners to choose their facilities and thus create a market for prison services—would provide only an illusion of choice. Even worse, such a system runs the risk of strengthening the self-interested forces that drive …

Illich (Via Cayley) On Prisons, Giovanna Shay

Faculty Scholarship

This Article considers whether, more than a dozen years after publication of Cayley’s book "The Expanding Prison: The Crisis in Crime and Punishment and the Search for Alternatives," Illich’s theories help us to make sense of America’s “prison-industrial complex.” The Author concludes that our current situation reflects in part the dynamics of his theory of “counterproductivity,” but that Illich did not take sufficient account of the salience of race and class in American criminal punishment.

Gender & Sexuality In The Aba Standards On The Treatment Of Prisoners, Margaret Colgate Love, Giovanna Shay

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past three decades, commentators, advocates, and corrections experts have focused increasingly on issues of gender and sexuality in prison. This is due in part to the growing number of women in a generally burgeoning American prison population. It is also attributable to efforts to end custodial sexual abuse and prison sexual violence, which have focused attention on issues relating to women and LGBT prisoners. Also, in part, this heightened attention reflects the influence of growing free-world social movements emphasizing the "intersectionality" of multiple forms of subordination and seeking to secure fair treatment of gay and transgender people.

This …

"The Good Mother": Mothering, Feminism, And Incarceration, Deseriee A. Kennedy

Scholarly Works

As the rates of incarceration continue to rise, women are increasingly subject to draconian criminal justice and child welfare policies that frequently result in the loss of their parental rights. The intersection of an increasingly carceral state and federally imposed timelines for achieving permanency for children in state care has had a negative effect on women, their children, and their communities. Women, and their ability to parent, are more adversely affected by the intersection of these gender-neutral provisions because they are more likely than men to be the primary caretaker of their children. In addition, incarcerated women have higher rates …

Juvenile Justice In Louisiana: An Exploratory Study Of Trends Surrounding Juvenile Incarceration, Sabrina Michelle Whitney

LSU Master's Theses

In the State of Louisiana, one of the major problems surrounding youth is juvenile delinquency. Several studies have been conducted regarding juvenile delinquency, however, actual research pertaining to recidivism among youth offenders who were later incarcerated as an adult vs. those who were not incarcerated as an adult are limited. For this study, chi-square analyses were conducted to analyze the association between six variables and recidivism. The age of first OJJ contact was the only variable that was not statistically significant. Such knowledge is crucial for research and policy formation at the local, state, and national levels for positive progression …

Using International Human Rights Law To Combat Racial Discrimination In The U.S. Criminal Justice System., Terrence Rogers

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Statistics tend to show Black people commit most of the crime in the United States. Those statistics fail to account for unequal treatment of minorities at each stage of the criminal justice system. This unequal treatment may take the form of buy-and-bust operations, racial profiling, street sweeps, and other police activities which target people in low-income communities populated mainly by minorities. The American criminal justice system contains a cyclical, self-perpetuating aspect to the treatment of certain minorities. These perceptions direct a disproportionate amount of law enforcement attention on minorities, which leads to disproportionate arrests of minorities. The result shows racial …

A Content Analysis Of Statutory Grounds For Involuntary Termination Of Parental Rights: The Impacts And Susceptibility Of Incarcerated Mothers And Their Children, Holly Marie Duke

Master's Theses

As the myriad of complex circumstances surrounding incarceration and foster care debilitate the parent-child relationship, the likelihood of legal severance between an incarcerated parent and their child increases. Despite the nation’s mounting prison population over the last three decades, the growing interaction between the prison and foster care populations has received minimal attention in the literature. To date, the influence of the statutory grounds for involuntary termination of parental rights on the legal severance between incarcerated parents and their children has been largely ignored. The purpose of this research is to determine the susceptibility of incarcerated parents to the involuntary …