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Full-Text Articles in Law
Can Prosecutors End Mass Incarceration?, Rachel E. Barkow
Can Prosecutors End Mass Incarceration?, Rachel E. Barkow
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration. by Emily Bazelon.
Rethinking The Reasonable Response: Safeguarding The Promise Of Kingsley For Conditions Of Confinement, Hanna Rutkowski
Rethinking The Reasonable Response: Safeguarding The Promise Of Kingsley For Conditions Of Confinement, Hanna Rutkowski
Michigan Law Review
Nearly five million individuals are admitted to America’s jails each year, and at any given time, two-thirds of those held in jail have not been convicted of a crime. Under current Supreme Court doctrine, these pretrial detainees are functionally protected by the same standard as convicted prisoners, despite the fact that they are formally protected by different constitutional amendments. A 2015 decision, Kingsley v. Hendrickson, declared that a different standard would apply to pretrial detainees and convicted prisoners in the context of use of force: consistent with the Constitution’s mandate that they not be punished at all, pretrial detainees …
The Consensus Myth In Criminal Justice Reform, Benjamin Levin
The Consensus Myth In Criminal Justice Reform, Benjamin Levin
Michigan Law Review
It has become popular to identify a “consensus” on criminal justice reform, but how deep is that consensus, actually? This Article argues that the purported consensus is much more limited than it initially appears. Despite shared reformist vocabulary, the consensus rests on distinct critiques that identify different flaws and justify distinct policy solutions. The underlying disagreements transcend traditional left/right political divides and speak to deeper disputes about the state and the role of criminal law in society.
The Article maps two prevailing, but fundamentally distinct, critiques of criminal law: (1) the quantitative approach (what I call the “over” frame); and …
Rationing Criminal Justice, Richard A. Bierschbach, Stephanos Bibas
Rationing Criminal Justice, Richard A. Bierschbach, Stephanos Bibas
Michigan Law Review
Of the many diagnoses of American criminal justice’s ills, few focus on externalities. Yet American criminal justice systematically overpunishes in large part because few mechanisms exist to force consideration of the full social costs of criminal justice interventions. Actors often lack good information or incentives to minimize the harms they impose. Part of the problem is structural: criminal justice is fragmented vertically among governments, horizontally among agencies, and individually among self-interested actors. Part is a matter of focus: doctrinally and pragmatically, actors overwhelmingly view each case as an isolated, short-term transaction to the exclusion of broader, long-term, and aggregate effects. …
The Complicated Economics Of Prison Reform, John F. Pfaff
The Complicated Economics Of Prison Reform, John F. Pfaff
Michigan Law Review
Two recent books on prison growth directly address the relationship between penal change and economic conditions: Hadar Aviram’s Cheap on Crime and Marie Gottschalk’s Caught. Aviram’s is the more optimistic of the two accounts, arguing that there is at least some potential in an economic-based reform effort. Gottschalk, on the other hand, fears not only that economic-based efforts could fail to lead to significant reforms, but that they could actually make prison life worse for inmates if states cut funding and support without cutting populations. Both books make many provocative points, but both also suffer from some surprising omissions. …
The Political Market For Criminal Justice, Rachel E. Barkow
The Political Market For Criminal Justice, Rachel E. Barkow
Michigan Law Review
In 2004, the number of individuals incarcerated in the United States exceeded the two million mark. The current incarceration rate in the United States is 726 per 100,000 residents, the highest incarceration rate in the Western world and a dramatic increase from just three decades ago. Not only are more people serving time, but sentences have markedly lengthened. What should we make of these trends? The answer has been easy for most legal scholars: to them, the incarceration rate in the United States is too high, and reforms are necessary to lower sentences. But many political leaders and voters reach …
Crime, Criminals, And Competitive Crime Control, Wayne A. Logan
Crime, Criminals, And Competitive Crime Control, Wayne A. Logan
Michigan Law Review
Given the negative consequences of crime, it should come as no surprise that states will endeavor to make their dominions less hospitable to potential criminal actors. This predisposition, when played out on a national stage, would appear ripe for a dynamic in which states will seek to "out-tough" one another, leading to a spiral of detrimental competitiveness. Doran Teichman, in an article recently appearing in these pages, advances just such a view. Teichman posits that the decentralized structure of America's federalist system provides states with "an incentive to increasingly harshen" their crime control efforts, with the net result being excessive …
Decentralizing Crime Control: The Political Economy Perspective, Doron Teichman
Decentralizing Crime Control: The Political Economy Perspective, Doron Teichman
Michigan Law Review
In an article recently published on the pages of this Law Review, The Market for Criminal Justice: Federalism, Crime Control, and Jurisdictional Competition ("The Market"), I put forward a theory of crime control in a decentralized government. Specifically, I made three distinct claims. First, criminal justice policies affect the geographic decision of criminals as to where to commit their crimes. Other things being equal, criminal activity will tend to shift to areas in which the expected sanction is lower. Second, local jurisdictions attempting to lower their crime rates will react to policies adopted by neighboring jurisdictions and try …
Facing Evil, Joseph E. Kennedy
Facing Evil, Joseph E. Kennedy
Michigan Law Review
It is no earthshaking news that the American public has become fascinated- some would say obsessed-with crime over the last few decades. Moreover, this fascination has translated into a potent political force that has remade the world of criminal justice. Up through the middle of the 1960s crime was not something about which politicians had much to say. What was there to say? "Crime is bad." "We do what we can about crime." "Crime will always be with us at one level or another." Only a hermit could have missed the transformation of crime over the last couple of decades …
The Pathological Politics Of Criminal Law, William J. Stuntz
The Pathological Politics Of Criminal Law, William J. Stuntz
Michigan Law Review
Substantive criminal law defines the conduct that the state punishes. Or does it? If the answer is yes, it should be possible, by reading criminal codes (perhaps with a few case annotations thrown in), to tell what conduct will land you in prison. Most discussions of criminal law, whether in law reviews, law school classrooms, or the popular press, proceed on the premise that the answer is yes. Law reform movements regularly seek to broaden or narrow the scope of some set of criminal liability rules, always on the assumption that by doing so they will broaden or narrow the …
Benign Neglect* Of Racism In The Criminal Justice System, Angela J. Davis
Benign Neglect* Of Racism In The Criminal Justice System, Angela J. Davis
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Michael Tonry, Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in America
The Punishment Of Hate: Toward A Normative Theory Of Bias-Motivated Crimes, Frederick M. Lawrence
The Punishment Of Hate: Toward A Normative Theory Of Bias-Motivated Crimes, Frederick M. Lawrence
Michigan Law Review
This article explores how bias crimes differ from parallel crimes and why this distinction makes a crucial difference in our criminal law. Bias crimes differ from parallel crimes as a matter of both the resulting harm and the mental state of the offender. The nature of the injury sustained by the immediate victim of a bias crime exceeds the harm caused by a parallel crime. Moreover, bias crimes inflict a palpable harm on the broader target community of the crime as well as on society at large, while parallel crimes do not generally cause such widespread injury.
The distinction between …
New Perspectives On Prisons And Imprisonment, Michigan Law Review
New Perspectives On Prisons And Imprisonment, Michigan Law Review
Michigan Law Review
A Review of New Perspectives on Prisons and Imprisonment by James B. Jacobs
Punishment By Imprisonment: Placing Ideology Into Concrete, David A. Ward
Punishment By Imprisonment: Placing Ideology Into Concrete, David A. Ward
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Imprisonment in America: Choosing the Future by Michael Sherman and Gordon Hawkins
In The Belly Of The Beast: Letters From Prison, Michigan Law Review
In The Belly Of The Beast: Letters From Prison, Michigan Law Review
Michigan Law Review
A Review of In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison by Jack Henry Abbott
The Rise Of Prisons And The Origins Of The Rehabilitative Ideal, Carl E. Schneider
The Rise Of Prisons And The Origins Of The Rehabilitative Ideal, Carl E. Schneider
Michigan Law Review
A Review of The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic by David J. Rothman
The Future Of Imprisonment: Toward A Punitive Philosophy, Norval Morris
The Future Of Imprisonment: Toward A Punitive Philosophy, Norval Morris
Michigan Law Review
Proper use of imprisonment as a penal sanction is of primary philosophical and practical importance to the future of society. With the increasing vulnerability of our social organization and the growing complexity and interdependence of governmental structures, reassessment of appropriate limits on the power that society should exercise over its members becomes increasingly important. Perhaps if the "prison problem" is solved, many of the uneasy tensions between freedom and power in postindustrial society will diminish. The effort made here will, I hope, contribute to the solution of the "prison problem" by offering a new model of imprisonment that recognizes fundamental …
Evidence-Police Regulation By Rules Of Evidence, John Barker Waite
Evidence-Police Regulation By Rules Of Evidence, John Barker Waite
Michigan Law Review
The judicial rules of Evidence, said their great expounder, "were never meant to be an indirect process of punishment." Yet twice the Supreme Court has promulgated new rules of evidence for precisely that purpose. The rule that evidence is inadmissible, regardless of its relevance and materiality, if it was obtained by unreasonable search was first suggested by Justice Bradley, who wrote the majority opinion in Boyd v. United States in 1886. The other rule was voiced in 1943 by Justice Frankfurter, writing the majority opinion in McNabb v. United States. And each rule demonstrates the inherent evil of judicial …
Due Process And Punishment, Clarence E. Laylin, Alonzo H. Tuttle
Due Process And Punishment, Clarence E. Laylin, Alonzo H. Tuttle
Michigan Law Review
To threaten such a man with punishment," wrote Sir James .LFitzjames Stephen,' "is like threatening to punish a man for not lifting a weight which he cannot move."