Law Commons^™

How The Ada Regulates And Restricts Solitary Confinement For People With Mental Disabilities, Margo Schlanger

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In a landmark decision two decades ago, United States District Judge Thelton Henderson emphasized the toxic effects of solitary confinement for inmates with mental illness. In Madrid v. Gomez, a case about California’s Pelican Bay prison, Judge Henderson wrote that isolated conditions in the Special Housing Unit, or SHU, while not amounting to cruel and unusual punishment for all prisoners, were unconstitutional for those “at a particularly high risk for suffering very serious or severe injury to their mental health . . . .” Vulnerable prisoners included those with pre-existing mental illness, intellectual disabilities, and brain damage. Henderson concluded that …

Juvenile Justice Reform And The Myth Of The Superpredator, Frank E. Vandervort

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In the 1980s and 1990s, driven to a moral panic by a sudden escalation in juvenile homicide rates, Michigan lawmakers enacted tougher laws with the intention of cracking down on all juvenile crime. That was the era of the “superpredator” (a term that has recently resurfaced in the presidential contest), a term coined by John Dilulio ,a Princeton professor who later became the Director of Faith Based Initiatives in George W. Bush’s administration, and was spread far and wide by a number of self-serving reform advocates who predicted an onslaught of psychopathic juvenile predators.

Here in Michigan, then-Governor John Engler …

Commentary On The Ongoing Indigenous Political Enterprise: What's Law Got To Do With It?, Monica Hakimi

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Professor Hakimi reviews Dalee Sambo Dorough's article, The Ongoing Indigenous Political Enterprise: What's Law Got to Do with It?, highlighting three tensions she defines within the article and the strengths and weaknesses of Dorough's examination of these three tensions.