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Full-Text Articles in Law
Senseless Sentencing: The Uneven Application Of The Career Offender Guidelines, Christopher Ethan Watts
Senseless Sentencing: The Uneven Application Of The Career Offender Guidelines, Christopher Ethan Watts
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
Federal appellate courts are currently split on the definition of “controlled substance” in the career offender guideline, with one side using federal law to define the phrase, and the other side allowing standalone state law offenses to trigger the guideline. Allowing state law to define the phrase allows countless substances Congress never intended to penalize to be able to trigger one of the most severe penalties in the Sentencing Guidelines. This Note assesses the landscape of the circuit split and analyzes the arguments for and against federally defining “controlled substance offense.” This Note then proposes a novel way to resolve …
As Fires Blaze Through California, Could They Blaze A New Path For Incarcerated Individuals: A Model For Back-End Abolition, Jacquelyn Kelsey Arnold
As Fires Blaze Through California, Could They Blaze A New Path For Incarcerated Individuals: A Model For Back-End Abolition, Jacquelyn Kelsey Arnold
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
This Note provides a critique on the current system of prison labor through the lens of the California wildfires and the lack of inmate labor due to early release in the wake of COVID-19. This Note provides an overview of the relevant history of the Thirteenth Amendment, contextualizes mass incarceration as a product of the “War on Drugs” in the United States, and consequently, discusses the significant and dramatic expansion of the prison industrial complex and the use of prison labor as a growing source of production labor. It concludes with a recommendation for a provisional back-end abolition model that …