Law Commons^™

Centering Women In Prisoners' Rights Litigation, Amber Baylor

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article consciously employs both a dignity rights-based framing and methodology. Dignity rights are those rights that are based on the Kantian assertion of “inalienable human worth.”29 This framework for defining rights spans across a number of disciplines, including medicine and human rights law.30 Disciplinary sanctions like solitary confinement or forced medication might be described as anathema to human dignity because of their degrading effect on an individual’s emotional and social well-being.

This Article relies on first-person oral histories where possible. Bioethics scholar Claire Hooker argues that including narratives in work on dignity rights “is both a moral and an …

Prosecuting Rape Victims While Rapists Run Free: The Consequences Of Police Failure To Investigate Sex Crimes In Britain And The United States, Lisa Avalos

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Imagine that a close friend is raped, and you encourage her to report it to the police. At first, she thinks that the police are taking her report seriously, but the investigation does not seem to move forward. The next thing she knows, they accuse her of lying and ultimately file charges against her. You and your friend are in shock; this outcome never entered your minds. This nightmare may seem inconceivable, but it has in fact occurred repeatedly in both the United States and Britain—countries that are typically lauded for their high levels of gender equality. In Britain, where …

Of Sexual Bondage: The 'Legitimate Penological Interest' In Restricting Sexual Expression In Women's Prisons, Joanna E. Saul

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Despite its prevalence, sexual expression among inmates is currently prohibited in United States prisons. Recent scholarship, however, has advocated allowing certain types of sexual expression in women's prisons. The advocates of such a position differentiate between different types of sex within the correctional system: sexual expression that the system has no interest in prohibiting and should not bar, and sex acts that the system does have an interest in prohibiting and should continue to regulate. This position is based on the dual assumptions that, first, women in prison as a collective unit would benefit from some types of sexual expression, …

Unusual Suspects: Recognizing And Responding To Female Staff Perpetrators Of Sexual Misconduct In U.S. Prisons, Lauren A. Teichner

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Despite the general public's ignorance of this issue of sexual misconduct perpetrated by female prison staff against male inmates, such stories are remarkably familiar to those who study or work in the world of prisons. The Prison Rape Elimination Act ("PREA") of 2003 mandated that the Bureau of Justice Statistics ("the Bureau") undertake new studies of sexual violence in prisons. Accordingly, the Bureau released a report in July 2006 revealing some groundbreaking data. Of the 344 substantiated allegations of staff-on-inmate sexual violence made in federal, state, and private prisons in 2005, 67% of the overall victims were male inmates and …

"Trapped" In Sing Sing: Transgendered Prisoners Caught In The Gender Binarism, Darren Rosenblum

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article first summarizes gender, transgendered identity, and legal issues facing transgendered people to contextualize the lives of transgendered prisoners. Parts II and III explore respectively the placement and treatment issues that complicate the incarceration of the transgendered. Corrections authorities, through indifference or incompetence, foster a shockingly inhumane daily existence for transgendered prisoners. In Part V, I examine the plight of transgendered prisoners through the metaphor of the miners' canary. Transgendered prisoners signal the grave dangers facing all of us in a wide array of social structures, elucidating the apparently intractable problems of gender. This Article simultaneously explores a human …

Be Careful What You Wish For: An Examination Of Arrest And Prosecution Patterns Of Domestic Violence Cases In Two Cities In Michigan, Andrea D. Lyon

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article will examine six months of data on arrests for domestic violence in the cities of Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor. In order to be able to interpret what the data means Lyon did some other research. The results were surprising- for example, although women tend to be injured most severely by domestic violence, they use violence in intimate relationships a little more often than men. Part I of this Article traces a brief history of domestic violence and discusses the issue of who commits domestic violence, Part II discusses the "must arrest" and "should arrest" policies and their history, …