Law Commons^™

Follow The Leader: The Advisability And Propriety Of Considering Cost And Recidivism Data At Sentencing, Lynn S. Branham

All Faculty Scholarship

The Missouri Sentencing Advisory Commission has begun to provide judges with information that enables them, before imposing a sentence, to compare the financial costs of several different sentencing options and the recidivism risks they pose. Although this initiative has sparked controversy, I, for one, favor taking steps like this one to help extricate us from the “same ole, same ole” sentencing box in which uninformed, and sometimes misinformed, sentencing decision making is the norm.

This article provides an overview of six of the primary reasons why providing judges some very basic facts about the financial cost of several sentencing options …

'The Devil Is In The Details': A Continued Dissection Of The Constitutionality Of Faith-Based Prison Units, Lynn S. Branham

All Faculty Scholarship

Faith-based prison units can afford prisoners who choose to be housed in them the concentrated and sustained spiritual nourishment that they believe they need to grow spiritually or in other ways. But critics claim that these units abridge the Establishment Clause. This Article debunks two of the arguments most frequently asserted against the constitutionality of faith-based units. The first is that prisoners cannot exercise a "true private choice" in the "inherently coercive" environment of a prison to live in such a unit. But court decisions confirm that confinement does not abnegate the voluntariness of other decisions made by prisoners, such …