Digital Commons Network^™

Race And Reasonableness In Police Killings, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Alexis D. Campbell

Faculty Scholarship

Police officers in the United States have killed over 1000 civilians each year since 2013. The constitutional landscape that regulates these encounters defaults to the judgments of the reasonable police officer at the time of a civilian encounter based on the officer’s assessment of whether threats to their safety or the safety of others requires deadly force. As many of these killings have begun to occur under similar circumstances, scholars have renewed a contentious debate on whether police disproportionately use deadly force against African Americans and other nonwhite civilians and whether such killings reflect racial bias. We analyze data on …

Immigration Policy As A Defense Of White Nationhood, Juan F. Perea

Faculty Publications & Other Works

President Trump's vilification and expulsion of undocumented Latino migrants is only the latest episode of the mass expulsion of Latinos. This essay places Trump's border enforcement policies into historical context as a defense of white national identity. Despite many asserted justifications for this mistreatment of migrants and refugees, the only justification that survives scrutiny is the need to reassure anxious whites that their racial status is being defended.

Utilizing A Community-Based Doula Care Intervention To Reduce Race-Based Perinatal Health Inequities In Jefferson County, Kentucky, Brendan Mathews

Theses and Dissertations--Public Health (M.P.H. & Dr.P.H.)

Target Population and Need

The United States is currently the only industrialized nation in the world experiencing increasing rates of

pregnancy-related mortality.

1,2

Black women die at 3-4 times the rate of their white counterparts.

1-5

This disparity

is likely caused by the experience of systemic racism, which increases allostatic load and produces epigenetic

modifications linked to higher likelihood for poor birth outcomes. Biases perpetuated by health care providers

result in black women being less likely to receive quality healthcare and more likely to experience poor perinatal

1-7 to all pregnant women.

health outcomes.

The provision of doula-based care can …

Are Opinions On Abortion Based On Racial Attitudes?, Ashley Mueller

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

My specific research question that I will be addressing through my Honors Research Project is; Does one’s race influence their opinions and criminalization of abortion in the United States? In addition to this question I will be discussing if these views have changed over time depending on race, and how their backgrounds, due to their race, may differentiate these views.

The Impact Of A Candidates [Sic] Race On Voter Opinion, Yssis Patterson

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

INTRODUCTION: Race has always played a significant role in politics. Identifying what degree race and/or political party identification has will help to further determine and explain the outsized significance of these factors in modern American politics.

HYPOTHESIS: We hypothesized that a candidate's race would have a significant impact on the way that a voter votes. Based on a candidate’s initial appearance and biographer, a voter may prefer one candidate over another simply based on an isolated variable.

METHODS: For this study, we conducted two surveys through Amazon M Turk. We asked a series of questions based on two candidates of …

Comparing Students' Perspectives On A Rural University's Special District Police Department And Student's Traditional Hometown Police Departments, Angela Pierce

All Master's Theses

Understanding the public perceptions of police is not a new topic, but it is one that has not focused on that of university students. This current study aims to fill the gap in knowledge by comparing student’s perceptions of two different police departments; traditional hometown police departments and special district police. This study targeted a specific population, college students, that needs additional research to understand what factors contribute to their perceptions of police. This study gathered students’ perceptions of police using an email survey of all on-campus students in a regional state university. Using OLS regression, I was able to …

Fines, Fees, And Filing Bankruptcy, Pamela Foohey

Scholarly Works

This essay was written in conjunction with the “Court Debt”: Fines, Fees, and Bail, Circa 2020 symposium held during the Association of American Law Schools' 2019 annual meeting. The essay details the extent to which "court debt" -- civil and criminal fines, fees, and interest -- can be dealt with by filing bankruptcy. In short, although filing bankruptcy on balance may help people deal with court debt and other debts, the barriers that people face to filing raise questions about the accessibility of civil courts and suggest that the consumer bankruptcy system itself is yet another place in which race …

What's Wrong With Police Unions?, Benjamin Levin

Publications

In an era of declining labor power, police unions stand as a rare success story for worker organizing—they exert political clout and negotiate favorable terms for their members. Yet, despite broad support for unionization on the political left, police unions have become public enemy number one for academics and activists concerned about race and police violence. Much criticism of police unions focuses on their obstructionist nature and how they prioritize the interests of their members over the interests of the communities they police. These critiques are compelling—police unions shield officers and block oversight. But, taken seriously, they often sound like …

What’S Wrong With Police Unions?, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

In an era of declining labor power, police unions stand as a rare success story for worker organizing—they exert political clout and negotiate favorable terms for their members. Yet, despite broad support for unionization on the political left, police unions have become public enemy number one for academics and activists concerned about race and police violence. Much criticism of police unions focuses on their obstructionist nature and how they prioritize the interests of their members over the interests of the communities they police. These critiques are compelling—police unions shield officers and block oversight. But, taken seriously, they often sound like …

More Than Just A Rapper: Mainstream And Alternative Media’S Depiction Of Nipsey Hussle, Jonathan Hazlewood

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Mainstream and alternative media depict individuals differently from one another. In stories covering African American rappers and homicide victims, mainstream and alternative stories use images, phrases, and people to portray certain ideas to their audience. In terms of mainstream news outlets, stories associate criminality onto African American homicide victims and rappers through labeling them as brutes, focusing on the crimes they commit, and highlighting criminal associations (Aquil, 2018; Cochran, 2015; Dukes & Gaither 2018; Wright & Washington, 2019). While alternative outlets have offered sympathetic and well-rounded representations that depict the life, personal accomplishments, and good deeds of an African American …

Gang Policing: The Post Stop-And-Frisk Justification For Profile-Based Policing, K. Babe Howell

University of Denver Criminal Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Cost Of Colorado's Death Penalty, Justin F. Marceau, Hollis A. Whitson

University of Denver Criminal Law Review

No abstract provided.

Centering Race At The Medical-Legal Partnership In Hawai’I, Dina Shek

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

No abstract provided.

Black Aesthetics And Relative Autonomy, Michael Kelly

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

There has been a recent revival of black aesthetics unprecedented since the 1960s. Some is happening inside academic philosophy, including in this journal (Volume 7, 2009). But there are more examples of black esthetics across other disciplines. A key, controversial concept in transdisciplinary black aesthetics is autonomy. Modern Western aesthetics was racist when it was established in the eighteenth century because blacks were not considered to be capable of autonomy, necessary to have taste. Now that this anti-black racism has been exposed, but until critics are convinced that aesthetics today is free of such racism, autonomy will be viewed as …

In For A Shock?: Discretion And Disparity In Program Assignment, Brianna Mathis

Honors Theses

Due to the massive prison population in America, correctional agencies are considering alternatives to standard incarceration. These programs are designed to redirect individuals from serving a prison sentence, and are instead assigned to a program specifically targeted at reducing offenders’ likelihood at recidivating. Typically, the main focus of these programs centers on education, job training, and various types of counseling. The Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) has implemented two programs that aim at reducing recidivism: the first was the Regimented Inmate Discipline Program (RID), which was later replaced with the Recidivism Reduction Program (RRP). While both programs were intended to …

Race And Class: A Randomized Experiment With Prosecutors, Christopher Robertson, Shima Baradaran Baughman, Megan Wright

Faculty Scholarship

Disparities in criminal justice outcomes are well known, and prior observational research has shown correlations between the race of defendants and prosecutors’ decisions about how to charge and resolve cases. Yet causation is questionable: other factors, including unobserved variation in case facts, may account for some of the disparity. Disparities may also be driven by socio-economic class differences, which are highly correlated with race.
/="/">
/="/">This article presents the first blinded, randomized controlled experiment that tests for race and class effects in prosecutors’ charging decisions. Case-vignettes are manipulated between-subjects in five conditions to test effects of defendants’ race and …

Racial Differences In Conceptualizing Legitimacy And Trust In Police, Erin M. Kearns, Emma Ashooh, Belen Lowrey-Kinberg

Criminology and Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

Scholarly debate on how best to conceptualize legitimacy and trust in police has generally assumed these conceptualizations are stable across demographics. Recent evidence, however, suggests that this may not be the case. We examine how the public conceptualizes legitimacy and trust in police, how public conceptualizations relate to academic debate on these terms, and how public views differ between and within racial groups. This work is exploratory, though it is rooted in differences found in theoretically driven empirical work on the subject. Data are from online, national samples of White (N = 650), Black (N = 624), and …

The Noisy "Silent Witness": The Misperception And Misuse Of Criminal Video Evidence, Aaron M. Williams

Indiana Law Journal

This Note examines recent developments in the research of situational video evidence biases. Part I examines the current and growing body of psychological research into the various situational biases that can affect the reliability of video evidence and the gaps in this research that require further attention from researchers and legal academics. Because these biases do not “operate in a vacuum,” Part I also examines some of the recent and exciting research into the interaction between situational and dispositional biases. Part II examines the development of camera and video processing technology and its limitations as a means of mitigating such …

Talking About Black Lives Matter And #Metoo, Bridget J. Crawford, Linda S. Greene, Lolita Buckner Inniss, Mehrsa Baradaran, Noa Ben-Asher, I. Bennett Capers, Osamudia R. James, Keisha Lindsay

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This essay explores the apparent differences and similarities between the Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movements. In April 2019, the Wisconsin Journal of Gender, Law and Society hosted a symposium entitled “Race-Ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Black Lives Matter and the Role of Intersectional Legal Analysis in the Twenty-First Century.” That program facilitated examination of the historical antecedents, cultural contexts, methods, and goals of these linked equality movements. Conversations continued among the symposium participants long after the end of the official program. In this essay, the symposium’s speakers memorialize their robust conversations and also dive more deeply into the phenomena, …

Teaching Social Justice Through “Hip Hop And The Law”, André Douglas Pond Cummings

Law Faculty Scholarship

This article queries whether it is possible to teach law students about social justice through a course on hip hop and its connection to and critique of the law. We argue, in these dedicated pages of the North Carolina Central Law Review, that yes, hip hop and the law offer an excellent opportunity to teach law students about social justice. But, why publish an article advocating that national law schools offer a legal education course on Hip Hop and the Law, or more specifically, Hip Hop & the American Constitution? Of what benefit might a course be that explores hip …

Gender Disparities In Plea Bargaining, Carlos Berdejo

Indiana Law Journal

Across wide-ranging contexts, academic literature and the popular press have identified pervasive gender disparities favoring men over women in society. One area in which gender disparities have conversely favored women is the criminal justice system. Most of the empirical research examining gender disparities in criminal case outcomes has focused on judges’ sentencing decisions. Few studies have assessed disparities in the steps leading up to a defendant’s conviction, where various actors make choices that constrain judges’ ultimate sentencing discretion. This Article addresses this gap by examining gender disparities in the plea-bargaining process. The results presented in this Article reveal significant gender …

Exonerees In Black And White: The Influence Of Race On Perceptions Of Those Who Falsely Confessed To A Crime, Simon Howard

Psychology Faculty Research and Publications

Black Americans account for 61% of those who have been released from prison through DNA exoneration. In the present study, we explored the influence of race on perceptions of wrongfully convicted individuals who have been exonerated. Participants (N = 121) were randomly assigned to read a fictional newspaper article about a Black or White individual who was wrongfully convicted due to a false confession and then report their perceptions of the exoneree’s guilt, warmth, competence and aggression, how deserving the exoneree was of government assistance and the likelihood that once released, the exoneree would commit a crime resulting in …

An Analytical History Of Black Female Lynchings In The United States, 1838-1969, David V. Baker, Gilbert Garcia

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Narratives on the lynching of black females in the United States have rarely commanded much more than minor postscripts in the lynching scholarship, thus leaving the historical picture of lynching violence incomplete and distorted. To correct for this unfinished portrait of American lynchings, the present work provides a contextual history on black females victimized largely by white male terrorists. To distinguish black female lynchings and bring into sharper focus the wretched horror suffered by black women and young black girls, this work constructs an inventory of 188 confirmed cases of black females lynched mostly by white mobsters from 1838 to …

The Prison-Televisual Complex, Allison Page, Laurie Ouellette

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

In 2016, the A&E cable network partnered with the Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, to incarcerate seven volunteers as undercover prisoners for two months. This article takes the reality television franchise 60 Days In as a case study for analyzing the convergence of prison and television, and the rise of what we call the prison-televisual complex in the United States, which denotes the imbrication of the prison system with the television industry, not simply television as an ideological apparatus. 60 Days In represents an entanglement between punishment and the culture industries, whereby carceral logics flow into the business and …

“We Are Still Citizens, Despite Our Regrettable Past” Why A Conviction Should Not Impact Your Right To Vote, Jaime Hawk, Breanne Schuster

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Pre-Service Teachers' Implicit Bias: Impacts Of Confrontation, Reflection, And Discussion, Katherine E. Batchelor, Kendra Dewater, Kennedy Thompson

Journal of Educational Research and Innovation

Abstract: Although there is much research regarding implicit bias in numerous fields, such as criminal justice, psychology, and health, little research has examined pre-service teachers’ attitudes and beliefs regarding implicit biases they carry, especially when it comes to race. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to fill the gap in qualitative research regarding how pre-service teachers address, confront, and talk about biases. We begin by defining implicit bias. Next, we situate our research within sociocultural theory with an emphasis on critical literacy practices. Then, we share our findings, which centered on the course environment, students’ reactions to their results …

Bias In, Bias Out, Sandra G. Mason

AI-DR Collection

Police, prosecutors, judges, and other criminal justice actors increasingly use algorithmic risk assessment to estimate the likelihood that a person will commit future crime. As many scholars have noted, these algorithms tend to have disparate racial impact. In response, critics advocate three strategies of resistance: (1) the exclusion of input factors that correlate closely with race, (2) adjustments to algorithmic design to equalize predictions across racial lines, and (3) rejection of algorithmic methods altogether.

This Article’s central claim is that these strategies are at best superficial and at worst counterproductive, because the source of racial inequality in risk assessment lies …

Chitown Loves Youhip Hop’S Alternative Spatializing Narratives And Activism To Trump’S Hatefulcampaign Rhetoric About Chicago, George Villanueva

School of Communication: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign rhetoric about violence in Chicago spatialized a narrative that branded the city as the poster child of urban disarray. His bombast lacked any contextual understanding of the issue and offered no productive pathways for collective solutions. Alternatively, I argue in this paper that a rising collection of Chicago hip hop artists were producing musical discourses in 2016 that not only challenged Trump’s negative rants, but also spatialized a multilayered narrative of the intersections between hip hop and activism in the city. Through textual analysis of three tracks from three breakout artists in 2016, my goal …

'Race, Racism, And American Law': A Seminar From The Indigenous, Black, And Immigrant Legal Perspectives, Eduardo R.C. Capulong, Andrew King-Ries, Monte Mills

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

Flagrant racism has characterized the Trump era from the onset. Beginning with the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump has inflamed long-festering racial wounds and unleashed White supremacist reaction to the nation’s first Black President, in the process destabilizing our sense of the nation’s racial progress and upending core principles of legality, equality, and justice. As law professors, we sought to rise to these challenges and prepare the next generation of lawyers to succeed in a different and more polarized future. Our shared commitment resulted in a new course, “Race, Racism, and American Law,” in which we sought to explore the roots …

School-To-Prison Pipeline And Its Infestation In Black And Brown Communities, Sofia Goetz

Augsburg Honors Review

In the United States there is the belief that a quality education, and education as a whole, is child’s ticket to a prosperous and successful life. It was Thomas Jefferson who went as far as to say that it is incredibly important to “Educate and inform the whole mass of the people...they are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty”.1 Jefferson’s belief about the United States was meant to extend into the future, but this moral value and commitment was never extended to low income communities, and especially communities of color - almost as if the privilege …