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Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Columbia Law School

Criminal Law

SSRN

2004

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

Managing A Correctional Marketplace: Prison Privatization In The United States And The United Kingdom, David Pozen Jan 2004

Managing A Correctional Marketplace: Prison Privatization In The United States And The United Kingdom, David Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

This paper traces the recent history and development of privately operated prisons in the United States and the United Kingdom, and it compares their current role in the countries' correctional systems. The privatization movements of the U.S. and the U.K. were driven by similar factors, but the relative weight of these factors varied between the two. In the U.S., legal pressures to alleviate prison overcrowding and fiscal incentives to contract out prison construction were stronger, while in the U.K. the ideological and political aims of the governing party exerted more influence in stimulating privatization. America's experience with private prisons in …


Be Careful What You Wish For: Legal Sanctions And Public Safety Among Adolescent Offenders In Juvenile And Criminal Court, Jeffrey Fagan, Aaron Kupchik, Akiva Liberman Jan 2004

Be Careful What You Wish For: Legal Sanctions And Public Safety Among Adolescent Offenders In Juvenile And Criminal Court, Jeffrey Fagan, Aaron Kupchik, Akiva Liberman

Faculty Scholarship

Three decades of legislative activism have resulted in a broad expansion of states' authority to transfer adolescent offenders from juvenile to criminal (adult) courts. At the same time that legislatures have broadened the range of statutes and lowered the age thresholds for eligibility for transfer, states also have reallocated discretion away from judges and instituted simplified procedures that permit prosecutors to elect whether adolescents are prosecuted and sentenced in juvenile or criminal court. These developments reflect popular and political concerns that relatively lenient or attenuated punishment in juvenile court violates proportionality principles for serious crimes committed by adolescents, and is …