Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons^™

Can Our Shameful Prisons Be Reformed?, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

The Harmful Side Effects Of Drug Prohibition, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Some drugs make people feel good. That is why some people use them. Some of these drugs are alleged to have side effects so destructive that many advise against their use. The same may be said about statutes that attempt to prohibit the manufacture, sale, and use of drugs. Advocating drug prohibition makes some people feel good because they think they are “doing something” about what they believe to be a serious social problem. Others who support these laws are not so altruistically motivated. Employees of law enforcement bureaus and academics who receive government grants to study drug use, for …

Talvi, Women Behind Bars: The Crisis Of Women In The U.S. Prison System, Giovanna Shay

Pace Law Review

No abstract provided.

Predisposition Or Socialization? A Study Of Law Enforcement Values, Everett O. Doolittle Dr.

School of Business Student Theses and Dissertations

This research was intended to contribute to this debate and its policy implications by examining whether students entering a law enforcement degree program hold predetermined beliefs and values that are significantly different from their classmates not entering law enforcement careers and that vary among themselves according to age, race, or gender. Over 5 years, a 30-question survey of 28 classes regarding current criminal justice issues and debates was conducted among 833 students taking an introductory-level criminal justice course at a mid-western university.

The data strongly supported the research hypothesis that beginning law enforcement students held different beliefs and values than …

Never Too Late To Go Home Again, David Spratt

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Where The Home In The Valley Meets The Damp Dirty Prison: A Human Rights Perspective On Therapeutic Jurisprudence And The Role Of Forensic Psychologists In Correctional Settings, Astrid Birgden, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

The roles of forensic psychologists in coerced environments such as corrections include that of treatment provider (for the offender) and that of organizational consultant (for the community). This dual role raises ethical issues between offender rights and community rights; an imbalance results in the violation of human rights. A timely reminder of a slippery ethical slope that can arise is the failure of the American Psychological Association to manage this balance regarding interrogation and torture of detainees under the Bush administration. To establish a “bright-line position” regarding ethical practice, forensic psychologists need to be cognizant of international human rights law. …

It’S Doom Alone That Counts: Can International Human Rights Law Be An Effective Source Of Rights In Correctional Conditions Litigation?, Michael L. Perlin, Henry A. Dlugacz

Articles & Chapters

Over the past three decades, the US judiciary has grown increasingly less receptive to claims by convicted felons about the conditions of their confinement while in prison. Although courts have not articulated a return to the 'hands off' policy of the 1950s, it is clear that it has become significantly more difficult for prisoners to prevail in constitutional correctional litigation. The passage and aggressive implementation ofthe Prison Litigation Reform Act has been a powerful disincentive to such litigation in many areas ofprisoners' rights law.

From the perspective of the prisoner, the legal landscape is more hopeful in matters that relate …

Honesty Is The Best Policy: A Case For The Limitation Of Deceptive Police Interrogation Practices In The United States, Irina Khasin

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

In the United States, police officers regularly employ deceptive interrogation tactics to extract confession evidence from suspects. Despite widespread recognition of the harm caused by police deception, courts in the United States have consistently condoned the practice, refusing to exclude confessions obtained through manipulative and deceitful means. The British Parliament has recognized that deceptive police practices yield false confessions and, thus, wrongful convictions. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 addresses this concern by establishing clear rules for the police to follow and by empowering courts to enforce those rules. In evaluating the need for reform in American police …

We Can Do Better: The State Of Custodial Misconduct By Correctional Staff In New York, Tanyika Brime

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The note examines a class action lawsuit filed by female inmates against the New York Department of Correctional Services (DOCS), alleging widespread sexual misconduct by correctional staff and constitutional violations. The court ultimately dismissed most claims due to procedural issues, such as failure to exhaust administrative remedies, except for one plaintiff. The analysis highlights systemic failures in addressing prison sexual abuse and advocates for comprehensive legal reforms and external oversight to protect vulnerable inmates.

The Death Penalty In Florida, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article summarizes the findings and recommendations of the ABA Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project's Florida Assessment Team, which I chaired. Relying on an analysis of caselaw, studies, news reports, and interviews, the article describes significant flaws in Florida's death penalty law and practice in nine areas: the police investigative process; the analysis of scientific evidence; the conduct of prosecutors; the qualifications, reimbursement and competence of defense attorneys; the decision-making process of judges; the structure and decision-making process of capital sentencing juries; clemency; the system's reaction to the race of the victim; and the treatment of people with mental disability. …

Managing Performance [In Child Welfare Supervision], Megan E. Paul, Michelle Graef, Erika J. Robinson, Kristin Saathoff

Center on Children, Families, and the Law: Faculty Publications

One of the primary roles of a supervisor is to manage worker performance. Performance management is the "continuous process of identifying, measuring, and developing the performance of individuals and teams and aligning performance with the strategic goals of the organization" (Aguinis, 2007, p. 2). Supervisors must regularly assess current performance levels and take steps to improve performance in a way that is congruent with agency goals. The ultimate goal is to achieve agency objectives through individual and team performance.

To effectively manage performance, supervisors must know what the performance expectations are for workers and clearly communicate these expectations to workers. …

Evaluating Punishment In Purgatory: The Need To Separate Pretrial Detainees' Conditions-Of-Confinement Claims From Inadequate Eighth Amendment Analysis, David C. Gorlin

Michigan Law Review

The Due Process Clause prohibits all "punishment" of pretrial detainees- individuals that are held by the Government, but not adjudged guilty of any crime. The Eighth Amendment only prohibits the infliction of "cruel and unusual punishments" upon convicted individuals. Despite the Supreme Court's insistence that the Due Process Clause, and not the Eighth Amendment, protects pretrial detainees from deplorable and harmful conditions of confinement, most federal circuits now assess pretrial detainees' claims under Eighth Amendment standards. Under the Eighth Amendment framework, pretrial detainees must establish that conditions subjected them to a substantial risk of serious harm, and that jailers were …

Police And National Security: American Local Law Enforcement And Counter-Terrorism After 9/11, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines three national security law challenges resulting from greater involvement of state and local police agencies in protecting national security, especially in combating terrorism: organizational challenges, accountability challenges, and institutional tensions with traditional local police functions. Each threatens the balance of security and civil liberties.

Police Violence In Brazil, Kyra Moon

Human Rights & Human Welfare

“This was just the beginning. They want war, and they‟ll get war. The problem of trafficking will only be resolved with blood. It is the only language they understand.” This was the response of Mario Azevedo, chief delegate of the 21st police precinct in the Bonsucsso neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, after drug traffickers killed three police officers. Three days after that assault, one hundred and twenty heavily armed police officers stormed into the Nova Brasilia favela (the Brazilian term for slum or shantytown) and killed thirteen residents, four of which were minors. Press reports initially described this incident in …

Violence Against Sex Workers In Latin America: Pervasiveness, Impunity, And Implications, Stephanie A. Bell

Human Rights & Human Welfare

On December 17, 2005, two transgendered sex workers in Guatemala City were shot in the head, one fatally. Witnesses—including the survivor—alleged that police forces shot the victims. Human rights advocates have argued that the attack was part of a broader social cleansing campaign that has targeted all sex workers.

Sex workers in Latin America are subjected to violence regularly. This violence varies greatly, but its pervasiveness and the impunity for perpetrators are two common themes. Violence against sex workers comes from many different sources: police, pimps, johns, serial killers, gang members and others. The violence also takes many forms, including …

Bound By Injustice: Challenging The Use Of Shackles On Incarcerated Pregnant Women, Dana Sussman

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The use of shackles to restrain a pregnant woman during the birthing process is a barbaric practice that needlessly inflicts excruciating pain and humiliation. It is widely condemned by members of the international community, including leading medical and public health associations. Although human rights advocates have effected significant policy change in the past ten years to eliminate the use of shackles on women in labor, it remains routine practice in many American prisons and jails. Reproductive rights advocates should consider this a reproductive justice issue and build on the gains of the human rights community to bring legal claims challenging …

Henry Louis Gates And Racial Profiling: What's The Problem?, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

A string of recent studies has documented significant racial disparities in police stops, searches, and arrests across the country. The issue of racial profiling, however, did not receive national attention until the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., at his home in Cambridge. This raises three questions: First, did Sergeant Crowley engage in racial profiling when he arrested Professor Gates? Second, why does it take the wrongful arrest of a respected member of an elite community to focus the attention of the country? Third, why is racial profiling so pervasive in American policing?

The answers to these questions are …

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 ten 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 …

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

Faculty Scholarship

The contributions of order-maintenance policing and broken windows theory to New York City’s remarkable crime decline have been the subject of contentious debate. The dominant policing tactic in New York since the 1990s has been aggressive interdiction of citizens through street encounters in the search for weapons or drugs. Research showed that minority citizens in the 1990s were disproportionately stopped, frisked and searched at rates significantly higher than would be predicted by their race-specific crime rates, and that this excess enforcement was explained by the social structure of predominantly minority neighborhoods than by either their disorder or their crime rates. …

Neoliberal Penality: A Brief Genealogy, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

The turn of the twenty first century witnessed important shifts in punishment practices. The most shocking is mass incarceration – the exponential rise in prisoners in state and federal penitentiaries and in county jails beginning in 1973. It is tempting to view these developments as evidence of something new that emerged in the 1970s – of a new culture of control, a new penology, or a new turn to biopower. But it would be a mistake to place too much emphasis on the 1970s since most of the recent trends have antecedents and parallels in the early twentieth century. It …

Post-Modern Meditations On Punishment: On The Limits Of Reason And The Virtues Of Randomization, Bernard E. Harcourt, Alon Harel, Ken Levy, Michael M. O'Hear, Alice Ristroph

Faculty Scholarship

In this Criminal Law Conversation (Robinson, Ferzan & Garvey, eds., Oxford 2009), the authors debate whether there is a role for randomization in the penal sphere - in the criminal law, in policing, and in punishment theory. In his Tanner lectures back in 1987, Jon Elster had argued that there was no role for chance in the criminal law: “I do not think there are any arguments for incorporating lotteries in present-day criminal law,” Elster declared. Bernard Harcourt takes a very different position and embraces chance in the penal sphere, arguing that randomization is often the only way to avoid …

Executions, Deterrence And Homicide: A Tale Of Two Cities, Franklin Zimring, Jeffrey Fagan, David T. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

We compare homicide rates in two quite similar cities with vastly different execution risks. Singapore had an execution rate close to 1 per million per year until an explosive twentyfold increase in 1994-95 and 1996-97 to a level that we show was probably the highest in the world. Then over the next 11 years, Singapore executions dropped by about 95%. Hong Kong, by contrast,has no executions all during the last generation and abolished capital punishment in 1993. Homicide levels and trends are remarkably similar in these two cities over the 35 years after 1973, with neither the surge in Singapore …

Eighth Amendment Gaps: Can Conditions Of Confinement Litigation Benefit From Proportionality Theory, Alexander A. Reinert

Articles

No abstract provided.

From The Chair, Lela P. Love

Articles

No abstract provided.