Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons^™

Street Stops And Police Legitimacy: Teachable Moments In Young Urban Men's Legal Socialization, Tom Tyler, Jeffrey Fagan, Amanda Geller

Faculty Scholarship

An examination of the influence of street stops on the legal socialization of young men showed an association between the number of police stops they see or experience and a diminished sense of police legitimacy. This association was not primarily a consequence of the number of stops or of the degree of police intrusion during those stops. Rather, the impact of involuntary contact with the police was mediated by evaluations of the fairness of police actions and judgments about whether the police were acting lawfully. Whether the police were viewed as exercising their authority fairly and lawfully shaped the impact …

The Salience Of Social Contextual Factors In Appraisals Of Police Interactions With Citizens: A Randomized Factorial Experiment, Anthony A. Braga, Christopher Winship, Tom Tyler, Jeffrey Fagan, Tracey L. Meares

Faculty Scholarship

Objectives: Prior research indicates that public assessments of the manner in which the police exercise their authority are a key antecedent of judgments about the legitimacy of the police. In this study, the importance of context in influencing people’s assessment of police wrongdoing is examined.

Methods: A randomized factorial experiment was used to test how respondents perceive and evaluate police–citizens interactions along a range of types of situations and encounters. 1,361 subjects were surveyed on factors hypothesized to be salient influences on how citizens perceive and evaluate citizen interactions with police. Subjects viewed videos of actual police – citizen encounters …

Probabilities, Perceptions, Consequences And "Discrimination": One Puzzle About Controversial "Stop And Frisk", Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

A troubling aspect of the practice of "stop and frisk" in New York and other cities is the evidence that this police tactic is employed predominantly against young men in racial minorities. On August 12, 2013, the federal district court ruled in Floyd v. City of New York that New York's practices and policies regarding stop and frisk violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and its Due Process Clause, which makes the Fourth Amendment ban on "unreasonable searches and seizures" applicable against the states. Judge Shira A. Scheindlin found that a number of specific stops and subsequent …

Policing, Crime, And Legitimacy In New York And Los Angeles: The Social And Political Contexts Of Two Historic Crime Declines, Jeffrey Fagan, John Macdonald

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter tells the story of policing, crime, and the search for legitimacy over the past two decades in Los Angeles and New York City. Throughout this complex political, normative, and legal landscape, crime rates dropped dramatically in each city to levels not seen since the early 1960s. The chapter begins with a discussion of the evolution of policing in the two cities, assessing reciprocal and dynamic changes that reflected both the crises of crime epidemics and crises within the police. Next, it examines the role of litigation on the evolution of policing. Policing regimes in each city were challenged …

Punitive Preventive Justice: A Critique, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter identifies the origins of contemporary preventive endeavour in the work of the RAND Corporation in America, which developed highly technical studies of crime prevention based upon systems analysis. It suggests that RAND promoted a decidedly punitive style of prevention based upon policing and punishment that is replicated in modern ‘punitive preventive measures’. It criticizes these measures, emphasizing the perils they pose and the weakness of their empirical foundations. Most worryingly, these measures typically claim an apolitical, neutral emphasis on efficiency that fails to engage with the political values underlying them. In so doing, it tends to displace much …

Keynote: The Crisis And Criminal Justice, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

There has been a lot of recent debate over whether the economic crisis presents an opportunity to reduce prison populations and improve the state of criminal justice in this country. Some commentators suggest that the financial crisis has already triggered a move towards reducing the incarcerated population. Some claim that there is a new climate of bipartisanship on punishment. Kara Gotsch of the Sentencing Project, for example, suggests that we are now in a unique political climate embodied by the passage of the Second Chance Act under President George W. Bush – a climate that is substantially different than the …

The Law And Economics Of Fluctuating Criminal Tendencies And Incapacitation, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

Economic analyses of criminal law are frequently and heavily criticized for being unable to explain many criminal law rules and doctrines that people find intuitively just. Existing economic models cannot properly explain, for instance, why criminal law distinguishes between (i) repeat offenders and first-time offenders, (ii) murder and voluntary manslaughter, and (iii) remorseful and non-remorseful offenders.

In this Article, I propose a new and richer economic theory of crime that captures the rationales behind these practices, and potentially behind many other important criminal law principles and doctrines. Unlike an overwhelming majority of previous economic analyses, my theory accounts not only …

Efficient Enforcement In International Law, Anu Bradford, Omri Ben-Shahar

Faculty Scholarship

Enforcement is a fundamental challenge for international law. Sanctions are costly to impose, difficult to coordinate, and often ineffective at accomplishing their goals. Rewards are likewise costly and domestically unpopular. Thus, efforts to address pressing international problems-such as reversing climate change and coordinating monetary policy-often fall short. This Article offers a novel approach to international enforcement and demonstrates the advantages of such an approach over traditional sanctions or rewards. It develops a mechanism of Reversible Rewards, which combines sticks and carrots in a unique, previously unexplored way. Reversible Rewards require that a sum of money be offered as a reward …

From Private Violence To Mass Incarceration: Thinking Intersectionally About Women, Race, And Social Control, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

The structural and political dimensions of gender violence and mass incarceration are linked in multiple ways. The myriad causes and consequences of mass incarceration discussed herein call for increased attention to the interface between the dynamics that constitute race, gender, and class power, as well as to the way these dynamics converge and rearticulate themselves within institutional settings to manufacture social punishment and human suffering. Beyond addressing the convergences between private and public power that constitute the intersectional dimensions of social control, this Article addresses political failures within the antiracism and antiviolence movements that may contribute to the legitimacy of …

Race And Selective Enforcement In Public Housing, Jeffrey Fagan, Garth Davies, Adam Carlis

Faculty Scholarship

Drugs, crime and public housing are closely linked in policy and politics, and their nexus has animated several intensive drug enforcement programs targeted at public housing residents. In New York City, police systematically conduct “vertical patrols” in public housing buildings, making tens of thousands of Terry stops each year. During these patrols, both uniformed and undercover officers systematically move through the buildings, temporarily detaining and questioning residents and visitors, often at a low threshold of suspicion, and usually alleging trespass to justify the stop. We use a case-control design to identify the effects of living in one of New York …

National Security Federalism In The Age Of Terror, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

National security law scholarship tends to focus on the balancing of security and liberty, and the overwhelming bulk of that scholarship is about such balancing on the horizontal axis among branches at the federal level. This Article challenges that standard focus by supplementing it with an account of the vertical axis and the emergent, post-9/11 role of state and local government in American national security law and policy. It argues for a federalism frame that emphasizes vertical intergovernmental arrangements for promoting and mediating a dense array of policy values over the long term. This federalism frame helps in understanding the …

Reversible Rewards, Omri Ben-Shahar, Anu Bradford

Faculty Scholarship

This article offers a new mechanism of private enforcement, combining sanctions and rewards into a scheme of “reversible rewards.” The enforcing party sets up a precommitted fund and offers it as reward to another party to refrain from violation. If the violator turns down the reward, the enforcer can use the money in the fund for one purpose only – to pay for punishment of the violator. The article shows that this scheme doubles the effect of funds invested in enforcement and allows the enforcer to stop violations that would otherwise be too costly to deter. It argues that reversible …

On The American Paradox Of Laissez Faire And Mass Incarceration, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

In The Illusion of Free Markets (Harvard 2011), Professor Bernard Harcourt analyzes the evolution of a distinctly American paradox: in the country that has done the most to promote the idea of a hands-off government, we run the single largest prison complex in the entire world. Harcourt traces this paradox back to the eighteenth century and demonstrates how the presumption of government incompetence in economic affairs has been coupled with that of government legitimacy in the realm of policing and punishing. Harcourt shows how these linked presumptions have fueled the expansion of the carceral sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth …

Crime And Enforcement In Immigrant Neighborhoods: Evidence From New York City, Garth Davies, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Immigration and crime have received much popular and political attention in the past decade, and have been a focus of episodic social attention for much of the history of the U.S. Recent policy and legal discourse suggests that the stigmatic link between immigrants and crime has endured, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. This study addresses the relationship between immigration and crime in urban settings, focusing on areal units where immigrants tend to cluster spatially as well as socially. We ask whether immigration creates risks or benefits for neighborhoods in terms of lower crime rates. The question …

Wrongful Convictions Do Lower Deterrence, Nuno Garoupa, Matteo Rizzolli

Faculty Scholarship

The conventional result of the theory of the public enforcement of law is that wrongful convictions of innocents are detrimental to deterrence. This proposition has been challenged recently. In some cases, wrongful convictions do not jeopardize deterrence, because they influence equally the innocent and the guilty. Therefore deterrence does not change. We show that, in general, wrongful convictions do lower deterrence. We prove that wrongful convictions do not jeopardize deterrence only in very limited circumstances or under unlikely assumptions.

The Anatomy Of A Search: Intrusiveness And The Fourth Amendment, Renée Mcdonald Hutchins

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

An Institutionalization Effect: The Impact Of Mental Hospitalization And Imprisonment On Homicide In The United States, 1934-2001, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Previous research suggests that mass incarceration in the United States may have contributed to lower rates of violent crime since the 1990s but, surprisingly, finds no evidence of an effect of imprisonment on violent crime prior to 1991. This raises what Steven Levitt has called “a real puzzle.” This study offers the solution to the puzzle: the error in all prior studies is that they focus exclusively on rates of imprisonment, rather than using a measure that combines institutionalization in both prisons and mental hospitals. Using state-level panel-data regressions over the 68-year period from 1934 to 2001 and controlling for …

Pot As Pretext: Marijuana, Race, And The New Disorder In New York City Street Policing, Amanda Geller, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Although possession of small quantities of marijuana has been decriminalized in New York State since the late 1970s, arrests for marijuana possession in New York City have increased more than tenfold since the mid-1990s, and remain high more than 10 years later. This rise has been a notable component of the city’s “Order Maintenance Policing” strategy, designed to aggressively target low-level offenses, usually through street interdictions known as “stop, question, and frisk” activity. We analyze data on 2.2 million stops and arrests carried out from 2004 to 2008, and identify significant racial disparities in the implementation of marijuana enforcement. These …

Incarceration And The Economic Fortunes Of Urban Neighborhoods, Jeffrey Fagan, Valerie West

Faculty Scholarship

New research has identified the consequences of high rates of incarceration on neighborhood crime rates, but few studies have looked beyond crime to examine the collateral effects of incarceration on the social and economic well being of the neighborhoods themselves and their residents. We assess two specific indicia of neighborhood economic well-being, household income and human capital, dimensions that are robust predictors of elevated crime, enforcement and incarceration rates. We decompose incarceration effects by neighborhood racial composition and socio-economic conditions to account for structural disadvantages in labor force and access to wealth that flow from persistent patterns of residential segregation. …

The Paradox Of Law Enforcement In Immigrant Communities: Does Tough Immigration Enforcement Undermine Public Safety?, David Kirk, Andrew V. Papachristos, Jeffrey Fagan, Tom R. Tyler

Faculty Scholarship

Frustrated by federal inaction on immigration reform, several U.S. states in recent years have proposed or enacted laws designed to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into the U.S. and to facilitate their removal. An underappreciated implication of these laws is the potential alienation of immigrant communities – even law abiding, cooperative individuals – from the criminal justice system. The ability of the criminal justice system to detect and sanction criminal behavior is dependent upon the cooperation of the general public, including acts such as the reporting of crime and identifying suspects. Cooperation is enhanced when local residents believe that …

Reducing Mass Incarceration: Lessons From The Deinstitutionalization Of Mental Hospitals In The 1960s, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

In a message to Congress in 1963, President John F. Kennedy outlined a federal program designed to reduce by half the number of persons in custody. The institutions at issue were state hospitals and asylums for the mentally ill, and the number of such persons in custody was staggeringly large, in fact comparable to contemporary levels of mass incarceration in prisons and jails. President Kennedy's message to Congress – the first and perhaps only presidential message to Congress that dealt exclusively with the issue of institutionalization in this country – proposed replacing state mental hospitals with community mental health centers, …

The Brady Rule May Hurt The Innocent, N. Garoupa, Matteo Rizzolli

Faculty Scholarship

Mandatory disclosure of evidence (the so-called Brady rule) is considered to be among the most important bulwarks against prosecutorial misconduct. While protecting the generality of defendants in the criminal process, we show that under certain reasonable assumptions this procedural mechanism may hurt innocent defendants by inducing prosecutors to adjust their behavior to their detriment. The main rationale for our thesis is that, if forced to reveal exculpatory information, the prosecutor might not look for that information in the first place, and in turn this could harm the innocent under certain reasonable conditions. We extensively discuss our results in the context …

The Origins Of The American Military Coup Of 2012, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

From Harmelin To Graham - Justice Kennedy Stakes Out A Path To Proportional Punishment, Eva Nilsen

Faculty Scholarship

Graham v. Florida³ is a groundbreaking decision because it revives punishment doctrine on two issues that have lain dormant since Harmelin v. Michigan⁴: proportionality and individualized sentencing. Although it doesn't overrule Harmelin, by recognizing the continued vitality of Weems⁵ and Solem ⁶ the Graham decision appears to acknowledge that the Court's approach to proportionality since Harmelin may be too restrictive for the U.S. justice system today. In Solem, the Court affirmed its Constitutional role in ensuring just punishment; in Graham, the Court reaffirms that role.

Harmelin has had an enormous and regrettable impact …

Strategic Enforcement, Margaret H. Lemos, Alex Stein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Durability Of Prison Populations, John F. Pfaff

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Liberty Lost: The Moral Case For Marijuana Law Reform, Eva Nilsen

Faculty Scholarship

Marijuana policy analyses typically focus on the relative costs and benefits of present policy and its feasible alternatives. This Essay addresses a prior, threshold issue: whether marijuana criminal laws abridge fundamental individual rights, and if so, whether there are grounds that justify doing so. Over 700, 000 people are arrested annually for simple marijuana possession, a small but significant proportion of the 100 million Americans who have committed the same crime. In this Essay, we present a civil libertarian case for repealing marijuana possession laws. We put forward two arguments corresponding to the two distinct liberty concerns implicated by laws …

Profiling And Consent: Stops, Searches And Seizures After Soto, Jeffrey Fagan, Amanda Geller

Faculty Scholarship

Following Soto v State (1999), New Jersey was among the first states to enter into a comprehensive Consent Decree with the U.S. Department of Justice to end racially selective enforcement on the state’s highways. The Consent Decree led to extensive reforms in the training and supervision of state police troopers, and the design of information technology to monitor the activities of the State Police. Compliance was assessed in part on the State’s progress toward the elimination of racial disparities in the patterns of highway stops and searches. We assess compliance by analyzing data on 257,000 vehicle stops on the New …

Meditaciones Postmodernas Sobre El Castigo: Acerca De Los Límites De La Razón Y De Las Virtudes De La Aleatoriedad (Una Polémica Y Un Manifiesto Para El Siglo Xxi), Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Abstract in Spanish
Durante la Modernidad, el discurso sobre la pena ha girado circularmente en torno a tres grupos de interrogantes. El primero, surgido de la propia Ilustración, preguntaba: ¿En qué basa el soberano su derecho de penar? Nietzsche con mayor determinación, pero también otros, argumentaron que la propia pregunta implicaba ya su respuesta. Con el nacimiento de las ciencias sociales, este escepticismo hizo surgir un segundo conjunto de interrogantes: ¿Cuál es, entonces, la verdadera función de la pena? ¿Qué es lo que hacemos cuando penamos? Una serie de críticas ulteriores – de metanarrativas, funcionalistas o de objetividad científica – …

Street Stops And Broken Windows Revisited: The Demography And Logic Of Proactive Policing In A Safe And Changing City, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Amanda Geller, Garth Davies, Valerie West

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter examines the development of “order maintenance policing” in New York City. It studies the stop-and-frisk activities of New York City police officers by examining temporal and spatial patterns of stops from 1999, 2003, and 2006. Findings reveal that stop rates have increased by 500 percent since 1999 despite little change in crime rates Stop activity was greatest in poor and minority communities, and stop patterns were more closely tied to demographic and social conditions than to disorder or crime. The efficiency of stops, measured as “hit rates,” dropped considerably, with the sharpest declines occurring in minority neighborhoods. Overall, …