Law Commons^™

Reflecting On The Subject: A Critique Of The Social Influence Conception Of Deterrence, The Broken Windows Theory, And Order-Maintenance Policing New York Style, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

In 1993, New York City began implementing the quality-of-life initiative, an order-maintenance policing strategy targeting minor misdemeanor offenses like turnstile jumping, aggressive panhandling, and public drinking. The policing initiative is premised on the broken windows theory of deterrence, namely the hypothesis that minor physical and social disorder, if left unattended in a neighborhood, causes serious crime. New York City's new policing strategy has met with overwhelming support in the press and among public officials, policymakers, sociologists, criminologists and political scientists. The media describe the "famous" Broken Windows essay as "the bible of policing" and "the blueprint for community policing." Order-maintenance …

Taking The Fifth: Reconsidering The Origins Of The Constitutional Privilege Against Self-Incrimination, Eben Moglen

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this essay is to cast doubt on two basic elements of the received historical wisdom concerning the privilege as it applies to British North America and the early United States. First, early American criminal procedure reflected less tenderness toward the silence of the criminal accused than the received wisdom has claimed. The system could more reasonably be said to have depended on self-incrimination than to have eschewed it, and this dependence increased rather than decreased during the provincial period for reasons intimately connected with the economic and social context of the criminal trial in colonial America.

Second, …

Brutality In Blue: Community, Authority, And The Elusive Promise Of Police Reform, Debra A. Livingston

Faculty Scholarship

In January 1994, President Clinton invited Kevin Jett, a thirtyone-year-old New York City police officer who walks a beat in the northwest Bronx, to attend the State of the Union Address. Jett stood for Congress's applause as the President called for the addition of 100,000 new community police officers to walk beats across the nation. The crime problem faced by Officer Jett and community police officers like him, the President said, has its roots "in the loss of values, the disappearance of work, and the breakdown of our families and communities." According to the Clinton administration, however, the police – …

The Future Of Sentencing Reform: Emerging Legal Issues In The Individualization Of Justice, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

The dilemma of the American sentencing judge is qualitatively unique. Because our system of criminal justice has embraced to a degree unequaled elsewhere the rehabilitative ideal that punishment should fit not the crime, but the particular criminal, the sentencing judge must labor to fulfill the dual and sometimes conflicting roles of judge and clinician. Entrusted with enormous discretion, he is expected to "individualize" the sentence he imposes to suit the character, social history, and potential for recidivism of the offender before him. Yet, because of the general absence in our Sentencing Reform system of meaningful procedures for the appellate review …