Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons^™

Corrections, Margo Schlanger

Book Chapters

Over the past six years, the number of people in custody in the United States has continued to grow. By the middle of 2006, the nation's prison and jail population, including federal prisons, totaled 2,245,189 persons. The number of people under correctional supervision, including those incarcerated and on probation and parole, reached more than 7 million persons in 2006. For several years, corrections has been the fastest growing component of many states' budgets. The growing number of people in prison has begun to affect the apportionment of political power between urban and rural communities.

Decency, Dignity, And Desert: Restoring Ideals Of Humane Punishment To Constitutional Discourse, Eva Nilsen

Faculty Scholarship

American punishment today is degrading, indecent, and harsher than deserved despite a Constitution designed to protect people from cruel and unusual punishment. Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court’s response to the increasing inhumanity of contemporary punishment has been to reduce its Eighth Amendment jurisprudence to tidy categories, legal fictions, and hollow phrases. Absent from the discourse is any acknowledgement of the actual day-to-day experience facing the convicted person, or any suggestion that, although punishments can be degrading, they need not be. The case for treating a convicted person with respect for his human dignity, and for constitutional scrutiny of punishment as …

Reforming, Reclaiming Or Reframing Womanhood: Reflections On Advocacy For Women In Custody, Brenda V. Smith

Project on Addressing Prison Rape - Articles

Brenda V. Smith was asked to present one of the keynote addresses for the symposium, Behind Bars: The Impact of Incarceration on Women and Their Families, sponsored by the Women's Rights Law Reporter at Rutgers University School of Law in Newark. She then wrote the introductory essay for the publication which arose from that symposium. This essay addresses why it is imperative to reclaim the discourse about women in prison and discusses how the other papers that appear in this issue aid in that project.

Hiv-Positive Inmates Released From Nevada’S Prisons In 2001: Results From Matching Health Division And Corrections’ Databases, Paul G. Devereux, Kristen Clements-Nolle, Sharon Clodfelter, Jessey Bargmann-Losche, Miguel Feroro, Wei Yang

Nevada Journal of Public Health

It is estimated that about one quarter of all HIV-infected individuals in the United States are released from a correctional facility each year. To better understand the needs of inmates with HIV exiting the prison system, a partnership with the Nevada State Health Division (NSHD), the Nevada Department of Corrections (DOC), and the University of Nevada, Reno School of Public Health was formed to examine this population using information contained in existing databases. An analysis of DOC data matched with the data from the HIV/AIDS Reporting System (HARS) maintained by the NSHD identified 2,802 HIV-negative inmates (2,451 males and 350 …

The Political Market For Criminal Justice, Rachel E. Barkow

Michigan Law Review

In 2004, the number of individuals incarcerated in the United States exceeded the two million mark. The current incarceration rate in the United States is 726 per 100,000 residents, the highest incarceration rate in the Western world and a dramatic increase from just three decades ago. Not only are more people serving time, but sentences have markedly lengthened. What should we make of these trends? The answer has been easy for most legal scholars: to them, the incarceration rate in the United States is too high, and reforms are necessary to lower sentences. But many political leaders and voters reach …

Crime, Criminals, And Competitive Crime Control, Wayne A. Logan

Michigan Law Review

Given the negative consequences of crime, it should come as no surprise that states will endeavor to make their dominions less hospitable to potential criminal actors. This predisposition, when played out on a national stage, would appear ripe for a dynamic in which states will seek to "out-tough" one another, leading to a spiral of detrimental competitiveness. Doran Teichman, in an article recently appearing in these pages, advances just such a view. Teichman posits that the decentralized structure of America's federalist system provides states with "an incentive to increasingly harshen" their crime control efforts, with the net result being excessive …

Decentralizing Crime Control: The Political Economy Perspective, Doron Teichman

Michigan Law Review

In an article recently published on the pages of this Law Review, The Market for Criminal Justice: Federalism, Crime Control, and Jurisdictional Competition ("The Market"), I put forward a theory of crime control in a decentralized government. Specifically, I made three distinct claims. First, criminal justice policies affect the geographic decision of criminals as to where to commit their crimes. Other things being equal, criminal activity will tend to shift to areas in which the expected sanction is lower. Second, local jurisdictions attempting to lower their crime rates will react to policies adopted by neighboring jurisdictions and try …

Turning Jails Into Prisons—Collateral Damage From Kentucky's War On Crime, Robert G. Lawson

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The primary purpose of this article is to scrutinize Kentucky's ever-increasing reliance on local jails for the incarceration of state prisoners. This objective cannot be achieved without an examination of the problems that compel counties and cities to allow (and even encourage) the state to capture their jails for this use. The first half of the article (Parts I-IV) provides general information about jails (including some pertinent history), contains a detailed description of jail functions (including some that have descended upon jails by default), and concludes with a discussion of what the state has done over two decades to convert …

Lessons Unlearned: Women Offenders, The Ethics Of Care, And The Promise Of Restorative Justice, Marie Failinger

Faculty Scholarship

The steep rise in female offenders since the 1960s has finally caused criminologists, lawyers, judges, and others to consider why they have not learned more about women offenders’ lives, in order to better understand and explain why they enter, and how they proceed through the criminal system. This article focuses on the reality that women’s relationality, and particularly their relationships with men in their lives, profoundly affect the behavior that lands them in the criminal justice system. This article argues that restorative justice, which is essentially grounded on an ethical understanding of crime and treats the offender as an interacting …

From The Asylum To The Prison: Rethinking The Incarceration Revolution, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

The incarceration revolution of the late twentieth century fueled ongoing research on the relationship between rates of incarceration and crime, unemployment, education, and other social indicators. In this research, the variable intended to capture the level of confinement in society was conceptualized and measured as the rate of incarceration in state and federal prisons and county jails. This, however, fails to take account of other equally important forms of confinement, especially commitment to mental hospitals and asylums.

When the data on mental hospitalization rates are combined with the data on imprisonment rates for the period 1928 through 2000, the incarceration …

Federal Mandatory Minimum Drug Sentences: Weapon In The War On Drugs Or War On Blacks, Crystal S. Byrd

McCabe Thesis Collection

This study will attempt to determine the direct and indirect consequences of Federal mandatory minimum drug sentences and drug policy to African Americans. It will examine statistics on drug use, arrest, convictions, and incarceration of African Americans. These statistics will be gathered from several government agencies and will be used to determine if American drug policy discriminates against African Americans. The purpose of this study is to inform and educate African Americans about Federal mandatory minimum drug sentences and the impact they are having on Black communities and to provide links to resources that can be used to promote drug …

Murder, Meth, Mammon & Moral Values: The Political Landscape Of American Sentencing Reform (In Symposium On White Collar Crime), Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

This Article examines the ongoing American experiment in mass incarceration and considers the prospects for meaningful sentencing reform.

Difficult Times In Kentucky Corrections--Aftershocks Of A "Tough On Crime" Philosophy, Robert G. Lawson

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Burdens Of Representing The Accused In An Age Of Harsh Punishment, Abbe Smith

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The crimes are not any worse than they used to be. They run, as crimes do, from the banal to the barbarous. But punishment seems to have taken on a life of its own.

There are people serving more than twenty years for nonviolent drug offenses. There are people serving more than thirty years for car theft, burglary, and unarmed robbery--crimes for which a harsh sentence used to be ten years. One Oklahoma woman is serving a thirty-five year sentence for "till-tapping"--stealing money out of cash registers--when she was in the throes of a heroin addiction. It is impossible to …

Mental Health And Incarceration: What A Bad Combination, Olinda Moyd

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

The District of Columbia has one of the highest per capita incarceration and criminal justice supervision rates in the United States1 and among the highest in the world. The local prison population has risen dramatically over the past decade for a variety of reasons including increased rates of re-incarceration for parole violations and the imposition of longer sentences for drug offenses. Recent acts of Congress have seriously impacted the sentencing laws in the District including determination of where persons sentenced for violating local D.C. laws will serve such sentences. On August 5, 1997, President Clinton signed into law The National …

The Role Of Discrimination And Drug Policy In Excessive Incarceration In The United States, Steven J. Boretos

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Life-Without-Parole: An Alternative To Death Or Not Much Of A Life At All?, Julian H. Wright, Jr.

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Note will discuss the relatively recent development and current prevalence of one alternative: the life sentence without benefit of parole, commonly called life-without-parole (LWOP). Life-without-parole is the penultimate penalty, meaning in theory the incarceration of convicts for their natural lives without the possibility of release on parole. In practice, LWOP generally means what it says, although various states do retain some release mechanisms for LWOP inmates, like executive commutation or a set term of years. The idea of jailing individuals for the rest of their lives is at least as old in the Western legal tradition as the Tower …

Where To Draw The Guideline: Factoring The Fruits Of Illegal Searches Into Sentencing Guidelines Calculations, Cheryl G. Bader, David S. Douglas

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Corrections In Crisis : Report Of The Governor's Blue Ribbon Commission On Corrections, Maine Governor's Blue Ribbon Commission On Corrections

Maine Collection

Corrections In Crisis : Report of the Governor's Blue Ribbon Commission on Corrections.

Augusta, Me., The Commission, December 1985

"This Commission was funded through the 1984 Appropriations Act, P.L. 1983, Ch. 824, Pt. A."

Contents: Preamble / Summary of Recommendations / Community Corrections Recommendations / Sentencing Recommendations / Correctional Management Recommendations / Selected Legislative Issues / Conclusion

The Prisoner's Dilemma And Mutual Trust: Comment, Robert L. Birmingam

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Bail Reform In The State And Federal Systems, Law Review Staff

Vanderbilt Law Review

The origin of the institution of bail is not entirely known, but it is believed to have originated in medieval England as a device to free untried prisoners. The definitive structure of the process seems to have been first codified in 1275 in the Statute of Westminster. The institution developed gradually and eventually became so well established that the English Bill of Rights of 1688 provided that "excessive bail ought not to be required."' The factors contributing to the development of the institution of bail were primarily matters of practical importance. Disease-ridden jails, delayed trials by traveling justices, and insecure …

Probation And The Law, Angelo J. Gagliardo

Cleveland State Law Review

Probation, the most modern concept in the administration of criminal justice, has been characterized as the correctional procedure and most worthy of a democracy because it recognizes basic human values. As such, it constitutes a democratic faith in the ability to the average offender to solve his difficulties within the framework of our democracy. While the aim of any probation system is to protect society, it has become apparent that society can best be protected by efforts which are aimed at conserving its human resources. Advances in the understanding of human behaviour and motivation have provided new and challenging principles …