Criminal Law Commons^™

“They Teach You How To Weather The Storm, But They Don’T Teach You How To Dance In The Rain:” Veterans’ Perspectives On The Pathways To Criminal Justice Involvement, Kelli E. Canada, Clark Peters

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Some veterans face elevated risk of mental illness, alcohol, and drug use, and difficulty adjusting post-deployment, which can increase the risk of homelessness and contact with the criminal justice system (Elbogen et al., 2012). This study adds to the limited and mixed findings regarding factors associated with criminal offending among veterans. It explores, from veterans’ perspectives, what contributes to their criminal justice involvement. In-depth interviews with 28 U.S. Veterans on probation or parole explored their military service, mental health, and the events surrounding arrests. Findings indicate that substance use was a significant contributor to arrests. Alcohol and drugs were used …

Conjectures, Refutations, And (Elusive) Resolution: An Exercise In The Sociology Of Knowledge Within Criminology, Brendan Dooley

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"An analysis of in-depth discussions (oral histories) with 17 leading criminologists on the seminal debates in which they each participated showcases the benefits of intellectual debate. Over the last half-century, the field’s understanding of crime and its control has experienced genuine gains through a vigorous exchange of conjectures and refutations. It stands to benefit from more of these. However, there is a tension between professional and scientific concerns that limits the expansion of this process. The insistence on open ended inquiry in advancing professional ends dulls the interest and opportunity for debating first principles. As a result, the field is …

Kitty Calavita And Valerie Jenness, Appealing To Justice: Prisoner Grievances, Rights, And Carceral Logic, Talisa J. Carter

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"In Appealing to Justice, by Kitty Calavita and Valerie Jenness explain the grievance system of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) in detail. Grievance systems are the formal internal process by which inmates contest prison conditions. Federal law requires that prisoners fully exhaust the grievance system before their claims can be heard in court. Although there may be an assumption that justice exists in systems that are charged with upholding standards of safe and humane conditions within confinement facilities, the authors find the grievance process to be riddled with inefficiencies and inequalities."

Waverly Duck, No Way Out: Precarious Living In The Shadow Of Poverty And Drug Dealing, Jascha Wagner

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing examines how the residents of “Lyford Street,” an impoverished Black neighborhood, organize for survival against the backdrop of “increasingly desperate circumstances.” Decades of deindustrialization and misguided social policies have left the neighborhood economically and socially isolated. Unemployment and poverty are rampant for young men of Lyford Street. Stripped of educational or economic opportunities, the drug trade has become their “principal employment.” However, against the “stereotypical image of the drug infested ghetto,” Waverly Duck compels us to see Lyford Street as a place with a unique social …

Aldo Civico, The Para-State: An Ethnography Of Colombia’S Death Squads, Elena Sciandra

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"On August, 24, 2016, the Colombian conflict returned to the spotlight. On this day the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the last active guerrilla group, the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionaria de Colombia), had been signed after decades of discontinuous peace talks. Such discontinuity, along with other peculiarities, have long piqued the interest of scholars in this conflict; not only is it one of the longest civil wars in recent history – its origin dating back to the end of the 1950s – it has also shaped the political, economic, and cultural life of the country. Started as sectarian …

Self-Motivation In Policing, Scott W. Phillips

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Research shows that the work shift of a patrol officer includes a large amount of “down time.” Occupational scholarship has validated that workers can reduce boredom by engaging in activities that are ancillary to normal duties. The autonomous work environment of police officers provides them a unique opportunity to minimize boredom by working in a way that makes their expected behavior interesting. To date the police motivation scholarship tends to examine “job satisfaction,” but the notion of boredom is missing from the research. This study used an observational research design to provide a qualitative examination of the techniques used by …

Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth Of The Prison, Trans. Alan Sheridan, Brian Sellers

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"For hundreds of years, criminologists and penologists alike have investigated the various functions and designs, as well as the policies and practices that regulate the effectiveness of prisons as correctional institutions. The ideological aims underpinning penal practice can be either myopically focused or quite diverse as they reflect the varying goals of retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation. However, as corrections continue to undergo numerous reforms, scholars and policymakers might do well to revisit, critically reflect upon, and reexamine the socio-historical origins of the prison and its close relationship to power structures operating in the wider society. French philosopher, Michel Foucault’s …

Playing Nice In The Sandbox: An Examination Into The Working Relationships Between Retail Store Detectives And Public Law Enforcement Officers, Ronald Floridia

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"This study explores the working relationship between store detectives and public law enforcement officers. Thirty semi-structured interviews were conducted with store detectives from two national retail chains. The results of this study indicate that store detectives have a positive working relationship with police and engage in active cooperation with them. In addition, the presence of community development units and organized retail crime task forces enhance active cooperation between the two parties. Findings from this study can be used by both academics and practitioners to promote strong relationships between law enforcement and the retail security industry."

Some Things Are Just Better Left As Secrets: Non-Transparency And Prosecutorial Decision Making In The Era Of Neoliberal Punitivism, Shanda Angioli, Paul Kaplan

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"This paper focuses on prosecutorial decision-making during the late-20th and early 21st century era of punitive American criminal justice. Qualitative semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 10 former prosecutors who worked in two large and diverse states to determine how they made their decisions regarding charging and plea bargaining. This study investigates how prosecutors consider legal and extra-legal factors when making decisions. The results suggest that prosecutors considered legal factors such as evidence/provability and elements of the crime, the defendant’s criminal history, and witness credibility and/or victim credibility, but also extra-legal factors such as, victim’s request, law enforcement priorities, relations …

Rwu First Amendment Blog: Andrew Horwitz's Blog: First Amendment Protects The Right To Give And To Receive 05-23-2017, Andrew Horwitz

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Theory For A Starving Obese, Ishai Shapira Kalter

Theses and Dissertations

Theory for a Starving Obese (2017) is both a book and an installation. During the years 2015-2017 I began writing Theory for a Starving Obese; a collection of essays and art criticism about exhibitions that took place in white cubes in New York. I was following my dissatisfaction, and hoped to delve deeper into the question “What is Contemporary Art?” At the end of a process, I sent seventeen envelopes to artists who exhibited solo shows in New York and whose works I have criticized. Each envelope consists of one digital drawing (שרבוט, pronounced Shirbut), DVD with the …

Newsroom: As Manning Released, Trial Attorney Coombs Looks Back On Case, Looks Forward To Teaching Again At Rwu Law 05-17-2017, Edward Fitzpatrick

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

True Crime As A Literature Of Advocacy, Leslie Rowen

Undergraduate Theses

True crime is often dismissed as a genre of cheap paperbacks with little literary merit and highly sensational, pornographic content. By contrast, my paper proposes an alternative literary history of true crime which merits further investigation because of its focus on advocating for justice where the justice system failed. I begin with Catharine Williams’ 1833 piece Fall River: An Authentic Narrative, an early example from true crime literature. The text disputes the acquittal of a Methodist preacher for the murder of a female mill worker, arguing that the trial was unfairly slanted in the defendant’s favor. More than a century …

Criminal Law As Family Law, Andrea L. Dennis

Georgia State University Law Review

The criminal justice system has morphed dramatically over the last several decades, achieving more pervasive control over the lives of individuals than ever before. The expansion began with the proliferation of criminal statutes, generating the now well-known concept of over-criminalization. The expansion also encompassed increasing the range of possible sanctions for criminal misbehavior and creating overlapping enforcement regimes. Two more instances of criminal justice expansion include mass surveillance and policies and practices that swept youth out of the juvenile justice system and into the criminal justice system. A product of the expansion has been mass incarceration; more individuals than at …

Crimmigration: The Missing Piece Of Criminal Justice Reform, Yolanda Vazquez

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Over the last decade, a new push for criminal justice reform has taken hold. While the moral and fiscal costs have been exorbitant over the last forty years, failing state budgets and bipartisan recognition of the “broken” system have finally caused legislatures, politicians, and advocates to reassess the costs and benefits of the criminal justice system. Breaking the “tough on crime/soft on crime” binary, the “smart on crime” motto has become a helpful tool in reform efforts aimed at reducing the number of individuals incarcerated and ensuring its fairness, regardless of race and socioeconomic status. Little attention, however, has been …

How Should Justice Policy Treat Young Offenders?: A Knowledge Brief Of The Macarthur Foundation Research Network On Law And Neuroscience, Bj Casey, Richard J. Bonnie, Andre Davis, David L. Faigman, Morris B. Hoffman, Owen D. Jones, Read Montague, Stephen J. Morse, Marcus E. Raichle, Jennifer E. Richeson, Elizabeth S. Scott, Laurence Steinberg, Kim Taylor-Thompson, Anthony Wagner

Faculty Scholarship

The justice system in the United States has long recognized that juvenile offenders are not the same as adults, and has tried to incorporate those differences into law and policy. But only in recent decades have behavioral scientists and neuroscientists, along with policymakers, looked rigorously at developmental differences, seeking answers to two overarching questions: Are young offenders, purely by virtue of their immaturity, different from older individuals who commit crimes? And, if they are, how should justice policy take this into account?

A growing body of research on adolescent development now confirms that teenagers are indeed inherently different from adults, …

Punishment, Liberalism, And Public Reason, Chad Flanders

All Faculty Scholarship

The article argues for a conception of the justification of punishment that is compatible with a modern, politically liberal regime. Section I deals with what some have thought are the obvious social interests society has in punishing criminals, and tries to develop those possible interests somewhat sympathetically. Section II suggests that many of those reasons are not good ones if punishment is regarded (as it should be) from the perspective of political philosophy. Social responses to bad things happening to people cannot be grounded in controversial metaphysical views about what is good for people or what people deserve, but many …

Understanding Recent Spikes And Longer Trends In American Murders, Jeffery Fagan, Daniel Richman

Faculty Scholarship

On September 7, 2016, four of the nation’s newspapers of record weighed in on the connected crises in crime and policing. The New York Times revealed the tensions between the Mayor’s office in Chicago and several community and professional groups over a plan to overhaul Chicago’s police disciplinary board – a plan developed in the wake of the shooting of an unarmed teenager, Laquan McDonald, and the release of a video of that killing. The Wall Street Journal related a vigorous defense of New York City’s “broken windows” policing strategy – a strategy that has been a recurring source of …

The School-To-Prison Pipeline: How Roles Of School-Based Law Enforcement Officers May Impact Disciplinary Actions, Kathy Martinez-Prather, Joseph M. Mckenna, Scott W. Bowman

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"The presence of law enforcement officers in schools has generated an overwhelming amount of concern among educators, parents, researchers, and policy-makers. It is believed their mere presence in schools is associated with the school-to-prison pipeline (STPP), which suggests that the use of police criminalizes minor student behavior and pushes them into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. However, it remains unclear as to what impact law enforcement officers truly have on this phenomenon. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of law enforcement officers on the STPP in relation to the roles they are assigned. We argue …

The Emergence Of Contemporary Bestiality Law: Applying The Integrative Conflict Model To The Enumclaw Case, Jason S. Ulsperger, Kristen L. Ulsperger, Cole Smith

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"This article examines the social construction of bestiality law in the United States using the Integrative Conflict Model of law formation. With qualitative findings from a media content study including newspaper articles, a documentary transcript, and a variety of online data sources, it explores the dynamics behind the formation of bestiality law in the state of Washington. The research specifically uses the circumstances surrounding the death of Kenneth Pinyan, and the subsequent Enumclaw horse sex scandal that took place in the summer of 2005, to support the idea that bestiality law can emerge due to specific factors: structural foundations, perceptions …

Lois Presser And Sveinung Sandberg (Eds), Narrative Criminology: Understanding Stories Of Crime, Adam Veitch

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Over the last two decades there has been an epistemological push in the social sciences to bring narrative into the methodological fold. Narrative social science is steeped in theories of humans as story tellers. The foreword to Narrative Criminology argues that this theoretical line of thought originates in Jean-Paul Sartre’s belief that people are fundamentally storytelling creatures, or “homo narrativus.” The guiding thought here is that stories are central to understanding how and why we act in society. We are all storytellers, and we enjoy sharing tales with an audience. Furthermore, the way that we construct stories of our social …

Fugitive Safe Surrender: A Qualitative Analysis Of Participants’ Reasons For Surrender And Anticipated Outcomes To Inform Program Evaluation, Joseph D. Galanek, Janelle Duda, Daniel J. Flannery, Jeff Kretschmar, Frederick Butcher

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"The Fugitive Safe Surrender (FSS) program is a means for individuals with outstanding warrants to turn themselves in at a non-law-enforcement setting. Challenges remain in evaluating FSS program outcomes. Based on n = 211 participants’ demographic data and qualitative, open-ended written responses collected during an FSS event in a mid-sized Midwestern city, we analyze participants’ reasons for surrendering and anticipated outcomes of surrendering. Utilizing inductive thematic analysis of participants’ responses, we identify individual-level program outcomes that can be used for evaluating FSS. We additionally identify the intersection of codes amongst participant responses to demonstrate the inter-connectedness of FSS participants’ reasons …

Framing Legitimacy: A Qualitative Analysis Examining Local Print-Media Portrayals Of An Immigrant Family Detention Center In Texas, Layne Dittmann, Jurg Gerber

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Research suggests that media portrayals can impact the opinions of adults (Dizard, 2000). However, media reports on aspects of our criminal justice system, such as corrections, are an understudied topic (Marsh, 1989), especially regarding the use of private prisons. The current study examines a sample of 12 local Texas newspapers that reported on the T. Don Hutto Facility in Taylor, Texas, between January 1, 2000, and December 31, 2013. This facility was once a state prison for males and local jail inmates before being converted into an undocumented immigrant family detention facility and later into a detention center for undocumented …

“Explaining Similarities And Variations In Program Structures And Professional Roles In Midwestern Mental Health Courts” By Monte D. Staton And Arthur J. Lurigio, Monte D. Staton, Arthur J. Lurigio

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"For nearly twenty years, legal and mental health professionals have created mental health courts (MHCs) for responding to the increasing numbers of criminally involved people with severe mental illnesses (PSMI) who are entering the criminal justice system. This article presents findings from qualitative analysis of survey and ethnographic data collected at nine MHCs established in a Midwestern state between 2004 and 2008, exploring how professionals who operated the MHCs organized the programs and conducted roles at the work sites. Findings revealed that professionals established very similar models of mental health court organization at each of the nine sites. The data …

Andrea S. Boyles, Race, Place, And Suburban Policing: Too Close For Comfort, Brian P. Schaefer

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"The struggles of African Americans with police in urban environments are well documented in criminological and sociological research. Andrea Boyles in Race, Place, and Suburban Policing offers new perspectives by introducing readers to the relationship between African Americans and the police in Meacham Park, a suburban enclave of affluent Kirkwood, Missouri. The focus on suburbia depicts how race and place shapes interactions and sheds doubt that African Americans can escape the harms associated with living in low-income urban environments by relocating to the suburbs. Boyles spent two years conducting fieldwork and interviewed over thirty adults at length. Her findings provide …

Susan J. Terrio, Whose Child Am I? Unaccompanied, Undocumented Children In U.S. Immigration Custody, Francisco J. Alatorre

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Whose Child Am I? is by Susan Terrio, Professor of Anthropology at Georgetown and author of two other books about issues of juvenile delinquency. Focusing on the wretched and dangerous experiences of Latino youth desperately traveling to and reaching El Norte, and then experiencing detention and incarceration, Terrio interrogates the American dream and American ideals of inclusion, as both are seriously abused in this international transborder tragedy. Terrio conducts her inquiry into how undocumented children are sent north, how they survive, and what happens to them by relating the process chronologically. She describes the children finding their way “home” …

Criminal Law And Procedure, Aaron J. Campbell

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Law Library Blog (June 2016): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

The Pro Bono Collaborative: Celebrating 10 Years Of Pro Bono Partnerships, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Pro Bono Collaborative Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Newsroom: Horwitz, Vorenberg On Expungement 5-18-2016, Roger Williams University School Of Law, Jack Brook

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.