Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons^™

The Ohio Model For Combatting Debtors' Prisons, Jocelyn Rosnick, Mike Brickner

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

In 2013, the ACLU of Ohio released a report titled The Outskirts of Hope: How Ohio’s Debtors’ Prisons Are Ruining Lives and Costing Communities. The report exposed the blatantly unconstitutional practice in courts across Ohio of jailing people who were too poor to pay their court fines and fees, and along with our ongoing advocacy efforts, resulted in sweeping change across the state. This Essay looks at the destruction modern debtors’ prisons have on individuals, families, and communities and overviews the research, advocacy, and communications tools the ACLU of Ohio has used to successfully combat debtors’ prisons. The goal is …

Apples-To-Fish: Public And Private Prison Cost Comparisons, Alex Friedmann

Fordham Urban Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Has All Heck Broken Loose? Examining Heck's Favorable-Termination Requirement In The Second Circuit After Poventud V. City Of New York, John P. Collins

Fordham Urban Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Are Private Prisons To Blame For Mass Incarceration And Its Evils? Prison Conditions, Neoliberalism, And Public Choice, Hadar Aviram

Fordham Urban Law Journal

One of the frequently criticized aspects of American mass incarceration, privatized incarceration, is frequently considered worse, by definition, than public incarceration for both philosophical ethical reasons and because its for-profit structure creates a disincentive to invest in improving prison conditions. Relying on literature about the neoliberal state and on insights from public choice economics, this Article sets out to challenge the distinction between public and private incarceration, making two main arguments: piecemeal privatization of functions, utilities, and services within state prisons make them operate more like private facilities, and public actors respond to the cost/benefit pressures of the market just …

Prison Privatization And Inmate Labor In The Global Economy: Reframing The Debate Over Private Prisons, Alfred C. Aman Jr., Carol J. Greenhouse

Fordham Urban Law Journal

No abstract provided.

We Don't Come From A Land Down Under: How Adopting Australia's Gun Laws Would Violate The Second Amendment Of The U.S. Constitution, Jonathan Weg

Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law

The note examines the legal and policy implications of adopting Australia's strict gun laws in the United States, arguing that such measures would likely violate the Second Amendment, which guarantees the right to bear arms. While Australia's National Firearms Agreement (NFA) has successfully reduced gun violence, the U.S. constitutional framework, particularly the Second Amendment, poses significant legal barriers to replicating similar laws. The analysis highlights the cultural and legal differences between the two countries, emphasizing that compulsory gun buybacks and restrictions on firearms for self-defense would face constitutional challenges in the U.S.

Mass Incarceration: An Annotated Bibliography, Nicole Dyszlewski, Lucinda Harrison-Cox, Raquel Ortiz

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

From Garner To Graham And Beyond: Police Liability For Use Of Deadly Force — Ferguson Case Study, Kyle J. Jacob

Chicago-Kent Law Review

On August 9, 2014, an unarmed black teenager was shot to death by a white police officer in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri. Just over a year later, the dust has yet to settle. Since that fateful afternoon, tensions between law enforcement and segments of American society seem to have reached a critical mass. Far, far too many tragedies have ensued. The wildfire that is social media has led to a polarization and politicization of what unfortunately seem to have become competing movements. “Black Lives Matter” and “Police Lives Matter” have somehow become competing socio-political battle cries. While …

Policing In The Era Of Permissiveness: Mitigating Misconduct Through Third-Party Standing, Julian A. Cook Iii

Brooklyn Law Review

On April 4, 2015, Walter L. Scott was driving his vehicle when he was stopped by Officer Michael T. Slager of the North Charleston, South Carolina, police department for a broken taillight. A dash cam video from the officer’s vehicle showed the two men engaged in what appeared to be a rather routine verbal exchange. Sometime after Slager returned to his vehicle, Scott exited his car and ran away from Slager, prompting the officer to pursue him on foot. After he caught up with Scott in a grassy field near a muffler establishment, a scuffle between the men ensued, purportedly …

The Jim Crow Effect: Denial, Dignity, Human Rights, And Racialized Mass Incarceration, 29 J. Civ. Rts. & Econ. Dev 15 (2016), Cecil J. Hunt Ii

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

The overarching theme of this paper is that the racialization of mass incarceration in America, which has been taking place since the latter part of the last century, and continues to this very day, is characterized by what I term, the “Jim Crow effect".

"Lord Forgive Me, But He Tried To Kill Me": Proposing Solutions To The United States’ Most Vexing Racial Challenges, André Douglas Pond Cummings

Law Faculty Scholarship

While great progress has been made in the United States in the past fifty years in connection with race relations, three critical issues continue to vex our nation. The United States, despite its progress, continues to struggle mightily with (a) the police killing of unarmed black men; (b) racially disproportionate mass incarceration; and (c) violent homicides of black men and boys. Nightly newscasts detail seemingly weekly killings of unarmed African American men by law enforcement officers. Mass incarceration, while plateauing in the last several years, continues to see millions of United States citizens incarcerated at rates unmatched by any other …

Procedural Justice And Policing: Four New Directions, Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff

Washington University Journal of Law & Policy

This Article, by Professor Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff from Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, analyzes the concept of procedural justice within the frame of contemporary policing. Using the shooting of Michael Brown as a catalyst, Hollander-Blumoff advocates for four potential areas of future development in procedural justice: (1) the interaction between the research on self-control and procedural justice; (2) research on the tools most effective in creating positive perceptions of fairness by police; (3) the implications of treating procedural justice not as a dynamic interchange; and (4) the role of reactive devaluation as it might affect reaction to procedural …

Frontlines: Policing At The Lexus Of Race And Mental Health, Camille Nelson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

he last several years have rendered issues at the intersection of race, mental health, and policing more acute. The frequency and violent, often lethal, nature of these incidents is forcing a national conversation about matters which many people would rather cast aside as volatile, controversial, or as simply irrelevant to conversations about the justice system. It seems that neither civil rights activists engaged in the work of advancing racial equality nor disability rights activists recognize the potent combination of negative racialization and mental illness at this nexus that bring policing practices into sharp focus. As such, the compounding dynamics and …

Testing Racial Profiling: Empirical Assessment Of Disparate Treatment By Police, Sonja B. Starr

Articles

In this Article, I explore why measuring disparate-treatment discrimination by police is so difficult, and consider the ways that researchers' existing tools can make headway on these challenges and the ways they fall short. Lab experiments have provided useful information about implicit racial bias, but they cannot directly tell us how these biases actually affect real-world behavior. Meanwhile, for observational researchers, there are various hurdles, but the hardest one to overcome is generally the absence of data on the citizen conduct that at least partially shapes policing decisions. Most crime, and certainly most noncriminal "suspicious" or probable-cause-generating behavior, goes unreported …

Confronting The Carceral State, Allegra M. Mcleod

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Values And Assumptions In Criminal Adjudication, Benjamin Levin

Publications

This Response to Andrew Manuel Crespo's Systemic Facts: Toward Institutional Awareness in Criminal Courts proceeds in two Parts. In Part I, I argue that Crespo presents a compelling case for the importance of systemic factfinding to the task of criminal court judges. If, as a range of scholars has argued, criminal courts are increasingly serving a quasi-administrative function, then shouldn’t they at least be administrating accurately? Systemic Facts provides a novel account of how — with comparatively little institutional reform — courts might begin to serve as more effective administrators. However, in Part II, I also argue that Crespo’s account …

Transforming The System, India Thusi, Robert L. Carter

Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty

Our criminal justice system must keep all communities safe, foster prevention and rehabilitation, and ensure fair and equal justice. But in too many places, and in too many ways, our system is falling short of that mandate and with devastating consequences. The United States is saddled with an outdated, unfair, and bloated criminal justice system that drains resources and disrupts communities.

The U.S. prison population has swelled to unprecedented levels and unequal, unjustified treatment based on race and ethnicity is well documented. People of color, particularly Native American, African American, and Latino people, have felt the impact of discrimination within …

Stops And Stares: Street Stops, Surveillance, And Race In The New Policing, Jeffrey Fagan, Anthony A. Braga, Rod K. Brunson, April Pattavina

Faculty Scholarship

The use of proactive tactics to disrupt criminal activities, such as Terry street stops and concentrated misdemeanor arrests, are essential to the "new policing." This model applies complex metrics, strong management, and aggressive enforcement and surveillance to focus policing on high crime risk persons and places. The tactics endemic to the "newpolicing"gave rise in the 1990s to popular, legal, political, and social science concerns about disparate treatment of minority groups in their everyday encounters with law enforcement. Empirical evidence showed that minorities were indeed stopped and arrested more frequently than similarly situated Whites, even when controlling for local social and …

Terry'S Original Sin, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

In Mapp v. Ohio, the U.S. Supreme Court extended the due process protections of the exclusionary rule to include all "constitutionally unreasonable searches" that were done without a basis of probable cause. In the seven years after Mapp, when homicide rates in the U.S. nearly doubled, riots broke out in at least forty-seven U.S. cities. During the same era, a heroin epidemic gripped the nation's urban centers, giving rise to street drug markets and associated violence and pressures on law enforcement to curb those markets. As violence increased, a turn in the nation's political culture questioned Mapp's restraints on …

#Sayhername Captured: Using Video To Challenge Law Enforcement Violence Against Women, Amber Baylor

Faculty Scholarship

Recorded encounters between women of color and police officers have been invaluable in bringing the reality of these interactions into the living rooms of otherwise unknowing Americans. The recordings are instrumental pieces of documentation and evidence, with the power to impact verdicts and galvanize the domestic struggle for human rights outside of the courtroom. They also are fraught with ethical issues that must be addressed by attorneys and activists hoping they effect change. Complexities such as implicit biases, editing and sourcing of videos, anonymity for those attacked and bystanders, and vicarious trauma on affected communities complicate use of violent police …

Group Threat, Police Officer Diversity And The Deadly Use Of Police Force, Joscha Legewie, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Officer-involved killings and racial bias in policing are controversial political issues. Prior research indicates that (perceived) group threat related to political mobilization, economic competition, and the threat of black crime are is an important explanations for variations in police killings across cities in the United States. We argue that a diverse police force that proportionally represents the population it serves mitigates group threat and thereby reduces the number of officer-involved killings. Count models support our argument. They show that group threat is largely driven by the threat of black crime. Black-on-white homicides increase officer-involved killings of African Americans but black-on-black …

One Significant Step: How Reforms To Prison Districts Begin To Address Political Inequality, Erika L. Wood

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Skyrocketing rates of incarceration over the last three decades have had profound and lasting effects on the political power and engagement of local communities throughout the United States. Aggressive enforcement practices and mandatory sentencing laws have an impact beyond the individuals who are arrested, convicted, and incarcerated. These policies have wide-ranging and enduring ripple effects throughout the communities that are most heavily impacted by criminal laws, predominantly urban and minority neighborhoods. Criminal justice policies broadly impact everything from voter turnout and engagement, to serving on juries, participating in popular protests, census data, and the way officials draw legislative districts. The …

Police Body Cameras: Implementation With Caution, Forethought, And Policy, Dru S. Letourneau

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Violence And Police Diversity: A Call For Research, Mary D. Fan

BYU Law Review

Deaths and protests in places where predominantly-white police forces patrol majority-black communities have focused the national spotlight on concerns over unrepresentative police forces. Responding to the controversy, mayors and police chiefs in cities across the nation are announcing goals to hire more minority officers. But does police diversification actually reduce the risk of violence in police encounters? This Article addresses this timely question of legal and practical import to communities seeking to prevent violence and pursue policies that survive constitutional scrutiny.

Drawing on restricted-access Centers for Disease Control data and social-psychological insights, this Article shows that there is a good …

Mens Rea, Criminal Responsibility, And The Death Of Freddie Gray, Michael Serota

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

Who (if anyone) is criminally responsible for the death of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old African-American man who died from injuries suffered while in the custody of Baltimore police? This question has been at the forefront of the extensive coverage of Gray’s death, which has inspired a national discussion about law enforcement’s relationship with black communities. But it is also a question that may never be fairly resolved for reasons wholly unrelated to the topic of community policing, with which Gray’s death has become synonymous. What may ultimately hamper the administration of justice in the prosecution of the police officers involved …

Strip Searching In The Age Of Colorblind Racism: The Disparate Impact Of Florence V. Board Of Chosen Freeholders Of The County Of Burlington, André Keeton

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

In 2012, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of the County of Burlington. The Court held that full strip searches, including cavity searches, are permissible regardless of the existence of basic reasonable suspicion that the arrestee is in possession of contraband. Further, the Court held that law enforcement may conduct full strip searches after arresting an individual for a minor offense and irrespective of the circumstances surrounding the arrest. These holdings upended typical search jurisprudence. Florence sanctions the overreach of state power and extends to law enforcement and corrections officers the unfettered …

Schooling The Police: Race, Disability, And The Conduct Of School Resource Officers, Amanda Merkwae

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

On March 25, 2015, police officers effectuated a violent seizure of a citizen in Kenner, Louisiana: [T]he police grabbed her by the ankles and dragged her away [from the tree]. . . . [She was] lying face down on the ground, handcuffed with her face pressed so closely to the ground that she was having difficulty breathing due to the grass and dirt that was so close to her nose and mouth. An officer was kneeling on top of her, pinning her down with a knee squarely in [her] back. Several other officers, as well as several school administrators, stood …

Newsroom: Yeluri '07 On Baltimore Protests, Swapna Yeluri

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Evolving Standards Of Domination: Abandoning A Flawed Legal Standard And Approaching A New Era In Penal Reform, Spearit

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This article critiques the evolving standards of decency doctrine as a form of Social Darwinism. It argues that evolving standards of decency provided a system of review that was tailor-made for Civil Rights opponents to scale back racial progress. Although as a doctrinal matter, evolving standards sought to tie punishment practices to social mores, prison sentencing became subject to political agendas that determined the course of punishment more than the benevolence of a matur-ing society. Indeed, rather than the fierce competition that is supposed to guide social development, the criminal justice system was consciously deployed as a means of social …

Symposium: Sounding The Alarm On Mass Incarceration: Moving Beyond The Problem And Toward Solutions, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.