Law Commons^™

When Clemency Is A Lifeline, Shehzil Zahid

Capstones

In 1982, Yohannes Johnson was convicted for the murder of Errol Blackwood. He has spent the last 40 years behind bars and today, he is seeking clemency. This is a profile on potential clemency recipient Yohannes Johnson.

The Female Face Of Misogyny: A Review Of Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: A Balanced Policy Approach To Intimate Partner Violence By Leigh Goodmark And The Feminist War On Crime: The Unexpected Role Of Women's Liberation In Mass Incarceration By Aya Gruber, Dianne L. Post

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Habeas Corpus, Conditions Of Confinement, And Covid-19, Allison Wexler Weiss

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Incarcerated individuals, worried about contracting the disease in prison without adequate healthcare and often serious health risks, have filed lawsuits challenging their incarceration in the age of COVID-19. Overall, very few have been successful. This virus has changed our world and the reality for those in prison. The traditional legal avenues available to incarcerated individuals to challenge their continued confinement are often ill-equipped to allow for comprehensive and expedited review. The author argues that during these unprecedented times, courts should recognize that the “duty to defend the Constitution” requires them to grant motions for habeas corpus by the most vulnerable …

Caregivers’ Expectations, Reflected Appraisals, And Arrests Among Adolescents Who Experienced Parental Incarceration, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Melissa Noel

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

This research sought to identify a potential process by which intergenerational crime occurs, focusing on the effect of parental incarceration on adolescents’ subsequent arrests. We drew from Matsueda’s work on reflected appraisals as an explanatory mechanism for this effect. Thus, the present research examined whether caregivers’ and adolescents’ expectations for adolescents’ future incarceration sequentially mediated the effect of parental incarceration on adolescents’ actual arrest outcomes. Propensity score matching was used to examine this effect in a sample of 1,735 15- to 16-year-olds using NLSY97 data. Parental incarceration was positively related to caregivers’ expectations of adolescents’ future arrest. Moreover, caregivers’ expectations …

Emergency Parole Release For Older Parole-Eligible Doc Inmates, David I. Bruck

Scholarly Articles

Professor Bruck writes to Secretary Moran and Chairwoman Bennett to urge them to protect elderly Virginia prison inmates from the risk of death from COVID-19 by granting immediate parole release to as many over-60 parole-eligible prisoners as possible, upon a showing that they are at low risk to re-offend, and have a supportive home to go to once released.

Controlled Observation: The Challenges Of Therapy For The Mentally Ill Incarcerated Population, Esther Tingué

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Popular perception and objective of incarceration is confinement, brutality and in some cases inhumane conditions. But what about the incarcerated population who suffer from the additional burden of mental illness? How does confinement affect mentally ill inmates? This capstone project asks: (1) how do individuals/organizations provide rehabilitative services in this evolved culture of crime and punishment? And (2) how is therapy provided in a restricted environment? I examine these questions from the perspective of the therapist, the person who (in a restricted environment) takes on the responsibility of treating and managing the effects of mental illness for this population.

Reimagining Reentry: A Vision For Transformative Justice Beyond The Carceral State, Kemiya Nutter

Ethnic Studies Senior Capstone Papers

Throughout the past decade, mass incarceration has emerged as a buzzword within academic scholarship and public policy discourse that seeks to examine the unparalleled expansion of the contemporary carceral state. With 2.2 million Americans imprisoned and over 7 million under various forms of penal control, the United States maintains the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The unprecedented inflation in the nation’s incarceration rate is a direct manifestation of the 1970’s War on Drugs, which enabled the legislative transformations that permeate modern sentencing policy and procedure. Institutions of policing, surveillance, and incarceration are constitutive features of the carceral system’s …

State Prosecutors At The Center Of Mass Imprisonment And Criminal Justice Reform, Nora V. Demleitner

Scholarly Articles

State prosecutors around the country have played a crucial role in mass imprisonment. Little supervision and virtually unsurpassed decision making power have provided them with unrivaled influence over the size, growth, and composition of our criminal justice system. They decide which cases to prosecute, whether to divert a case, whether to offer a plea, and what sentence to recommend. Their impact does not stop at sentencing. They weigh in on alternative dockets, supervision violations, parole release, and even clemency requests. But they are also part of a larger system that constrains them. Funding, judicial limits on their power, and legislative …

Underlying Racism Within The Opioid Epidemic, Hannah L.A.S. Wilson

Brigham Young University Prelaw Review

Within the past century, the United States attempted different legal

avenues to address drug abuse. Some of these efforts made access

to drugs punishable and illegal. Others encouraged research to look

at underlying issues of drug abuse and implement those findings.

Within the past fifty years, these laws tended to treat drug addicts

as criminals instead of as persons suffering from a health crisis.

According to the FBI and Uniform Crime Reports, from the 1980’s

to the 2000’s, drug arrests rose by 1.5 million per year, while drug

usage rates stayed the same.3 The severe increase in the criminalization

and …

Debt Bondage: How Private Collection Agencies Keep The Formerly Incarcerated Tethered To The Criminal Justice System, Bryan L. Adamson

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

This Article examines the constitutionality of statutes which allow courts to transfer outstanding legal financial obligations to private debt collection agencies. In Washington State, the clerk of courts can transfer the legal financial obligation of a formerly incarcerated person if he or she is only thirty days late making a payment. Upon transfer, the debt collection agencies can assess a “collection fee” of up to 50% of the first $100.000 of the unpaid legal financial obligation, and up to 35% of the unpaid debt over $100,000. This fee becomes part of the LFO debt imposed at sentencing, and like that …

Law School News: 'Injustice Dehumanizes Everyone It Touches' 1-31-2020, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The 15th Annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Keynote Address 1-28-2020, Roger Williams University School Of Law, Michael M. Bowden, Andrea Hansen

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Pretrial Detention In A Criminal System Looking For Justice, Gabrielle Costa

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

Remorse, Not Race: Essence Of Parole Release?, Lovashni Khalikaprasad

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

Judicial Elections, Public Opinion, And Their Impact On State Criminal Justice Policy, Travis N. Taylor

Theses and Dissertations--Political Science

This dissertation explores whether and how the re-election prospects faced by trial court judges in many American states influence criminal justice policy, specifically, state levels of incarceration, as well as the disparity in rates of incarceration for Whites and Blacks. Do states where trial court judges must worry about facing reelection tend to encourage judicial behavior that results in higher incarceration rates? And are levels of incarceration and racial disparities in the states influenced by the proportion of the state publics who want more punitive policies? These are clearly important questions because they speak directly to several normative and empirical …

The New Debt Peonage In The Era Of Mass Incarceration, Timothy Black, Lacey Caporale

Cultural Encounters, Conflicts, and Resolutions

In 1867, Congress passed legislation that forbid the practices of debt peonage. However, the law was circumvented after the period of Reconstruction in the south and debt peonage became central to the expansion of southern agriculture through sharecropping and industrialization through convict leasing, practices that forced debtors into new forms of coerced labor. Debt peonage was presumable ended in the 1940s by the Justice Department. But was it? The era of mass incarceration has institutionalized a new form of debt peonage through which racialized poverty is governed, mechanisms of social control are reconstituted, and freedom is circumscribed. In this paper, …

Constitutionally Unaccountable: Privatized Immigration Detention, Danielle C. Jefferis

Indiana Law Journal

For-profit, civil immigration detention is one of this nation’s fastest growing industries. About two-thirds of the more than 50,000 people in the civil custody of federal immigration authorities find themselves at one point or another in a private, corporate-run prison that contracts with the federal government. Conditions of confinement in many of these facilities are dismal. Detainees have suffered from untreated medical conditions and endured months, in some cases years, of detention in environments that are unsafe and, at times, violent. Some have died. Yet, the spaces are largely unregulated. This Article exposes and examines the absence of a constitutional …

Replacing Death With Life? The Rise Of Lwop In The Context Of Abolitionist Campaigns In The United States, Michelle Miao

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

On the basis of fifty-four elite interviews[1] with legislators, judges, attorneys, and civil society advocates as well as a state-by-state data survey, this Article examines the complex linkage between the two major penal trends in American society during the past decades: a declining use of capital punishment across the United States and a growing population of prisoners serving “life without the possibility of parole” or “LWOP” sentences. The main contribution of the research is threefold. First, the research proposes to redefine the boundary between life and death in relation to penal discourses regarding the death penalty and LWOP. LWOP …

The Hard Truths Of Progressive Prosecution And A Path To Realizing The Movement’S Promise, Seema Gajwani, Max G. Lesser

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Feeding The Machine: The Commodification Of Black Bodies From Slavery To Mass Incarceration, Cecil J. Hunt Ii

University of Baltimore Law Review

No abstract provided.

Linked Fate: Justice And The Criminal Legal System During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Susan P. Sturm, Faiz Pirani, Hyun Kim, Natalie Behr, Zachary D. Hardwick

Faculty Scholarship

The concept of “linked fate” has taken on new meaning in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. People all over the world – from every walk of life, spanning class, race, gender, and nationality – face a potentially deadly threat requiring cooperation and sacrifice. The plight of the most vulnerable among us affects the capacity of the larger community to cope with, recover, and learn from COVID-19’s devastating impact. COVID-19 makes visible and urgent the need to embrace our linked fate, “develop a sense of commonality and shared circumstances,” and unstick dysfunctional and inequitable political and legal systems.

Nowhere is …

To Keep That Bond: Navigating Black Motherhood Under A Parental State, Anaisa T. Tenuta

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

The Rise And (Potential) Fall Of U.S. Cartel Enforcement, Vivek Ghosal, D. Daniel Sokol

UF Law Faculty Publications

Government enforcement against collusion, now viewed by the Supreme Court as the “supreme evil” in antitrust, has gone through various phases of enforcement in the United States. There have been periods in which cartels have been able to collude more or less effectively given various institutional tools at the disposal of the government. By analyzing enforcement and prosecutions data over a long time horizon, 1969–2016, this Article examines the attributes of cartel enforcement over time and the changing use of tools to assist with detection and punishment. We provide a comprehensive description of critical cartel enforcement events and institutional developments …

Is Solitary Confinement A Punishment?, John F. Stinneford

UF Law Faculty Publications

The United States Constitution imposes a variety of constraints on the imposition of punishment, including the requirements that the punishment be authorized by a preexisting penal statute and ordered by a lawful judicial sentence. Today, prison administrators impose solitary confinement on thousands of prisoners despite the fact that neither of these requirements has been met. Is this imposition a “punishment without law,” or is it a mere exercise of administrative discretion? In an 1890 case called In re Medley, the Supreme Court held that solitary confinement is a separate punishment subject to constitutional restraints, but it has ignored this holding …

Supporting Intervention For Adolescents Of Incarcerated Parents In Rural Areas, Jeanette Kathleen Loudy

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

This study was focused on the challenges experienced by children who had a parent incarcerated during their adolescence. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of adult child survivors of parental incarceration in a rural community and to describe the impact that parental incarceration had on children during adolescence and into young adulthood. The research questions were designed to examine the perceived challenges facing adult children of parental incarceration in rural areas and policy intervention programs that would be most effective at supporting children of parental incarceration during adolescence and the transition into adulthood. …

Understanding Violent-Crime Recidivism, J. J. Prescott, Benjamin David Pyle, Sonja B. Starr

Faculty Scholarship

People convicted of violent crimes constitute a majority of the imprisoned population but are generally ignored by existing policies aimed at reducing mass incarceration. Serious efforts to shrink the large footprint of the prison system will need to recognize this fact. This point is especially pressing at the time of this writing, as states and the federal system consider large-scale prison releases motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Those convicted of violent crimes constitute a large majority of older prisoners, who are extremely vulnerable to the spread of the virus behind bars. Excluding them from protective measures will deeply undermine those …

Traumatized To Death: The Cumulative Effects Of Serial Parole Denials, Richard Rivera

City University of New York Law Review

Content warning: discussion of suicide. If you are thinking about suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255).

Urge To Reform Life Without Parole So Nonviolent Addict Offenders Never Serve Lifetime Behind Bars, Johanna Poremba

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Misdemeanors By The Numbers, Sandra G. Mayson, Megan T. Stevenson

All Faculty Scholarship

Recent scholarship has underlined the importance of criminal misdemeanor law enforcement, including the impact of public-order policing on communities of color, the collateral consequences of misdemeanor arrest or conviction, and the use of misdemeanor prosecution to raise municipal revenue. But despite the fact that misdemeanors represent more than three-quarters of all criminal cases filed annually in the United States, our knowledge of misdemeanor case processing is based mostly on anecdote and extremely localized research. This Article represents the most substantial empirical analysis of misdemeanor case processing to date. Using multiple court-record datasets, covering several million cases across eight diverse jurisdictions, …

Covid-19 And Prisoners’ Rights, Gregory Bernstein, Stephanie Guzman, Maggie Hadley, Rosalyn M. Huff, Alison Hung, Anita N.H. Yandle, Alexis Hoag, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

As COVID-19 continues to spread rapidly across the country, the crowded and unsanitary conditions in prisons, jails, juvenile detention, and immigration detention centers leave incarcerated individuals especially vulnerable. This chapter will discuss potential avenues for detained persons and their lawyers seeking to use the legal system to obtain relief, including potential release, during this extraordinary, unprecedented crisis.