Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Comparative Analysis Of Prosecutor-Led Diversion Programs: Insights To Japan’S Suspension Of Prosecution For Recidivism Prevention, Mio Hagino

LL.M. Essays & Theses

Around 60% of all crimes in Japan are committed by repeat offenders, and therefore preventing recidivism is a central concern in Japan. Recognizing the importance of early intervention, some prosecutors’ offices collaborate with social workers and provide necessary measures for recidivism prevention when prosecution is suspended. To promote prosecutor-led recidivism prevention, there is an ongoing discussion to legislate the approach currently taken by prosecutors’ offices. However, concerns remain about procedural fairness, transparency of prosecutorial discretion, and collaboration with other agencies. In the United States, prosecutor-led diversion programs are adopted in many states, with ongoing research on their effectiveness and challenges. …

Redistributing Justice, Benjamin Levin, Kate Levine

Scholarship@WashULaw

This article surfaces an obstacle to decarceration hiding in plain sight: progressives’ continued support for the carceral system. Despite increasingly prevalent critiques of criminal law from progressives, there hardly is a consensus on the left in opposition to the carceral state. Many left-leaning academics and activists who may critique the criminal system writ large remain enthusiastic about criminal law in certain areas—often areas where defendants are imagined as powerful and victims as particularly vulnerable. In this article, we offer a novel theory for what animates the seemingly conflicted attitude among progressives toward criminal punishment—the hope that the criminal system can …

After The Criminal Justice System, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

Since the 1960s, the “criminal justice system” has operated as the common label for a vast web of actors and institutions. But, as critiques of mass incarceration have entered the mainstream, academics, activists, and advocates increasingly have stopped referring to the “criminal justice system.” Instead, they have opted for critical labels—the criminal legal system, the criminal punishment system, the prison industrial complex, etc. What does this re-labeling accomplish? Does this change in language matter to broader efforts at criminal justice reform or abolition? Or, does an emphasis on labels and language distract from substantive engagement with the injustices of contemporary …

“Progressive” Prosecutors And “Proper” Punishments, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

After decades of relative inattention to prosecutorial elections, academics and activists recently have focused on “progressive prosecutors” as a promising avenue for criminal justice reform. That said, the growing literature on progressive prosecutors reflects little clarity about what makes a prosecutor “progressive.” Recent campaigns suggest disparate visions of how to operationalize “progressive prosecution.” In this chapter, I describe four ideal types of progressive prosecutor: (1) the progressive who prosecutes, (2) the proceduralist prosecutor, (3) the prosecutorial progressive, and (4) the anti-carceral prosecutor. Looking to sentencing policy as a case study, I examine how these different ideal types illustrate different visions …

Prosecuting The Crisis, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

Over the past decade, activists and academics have celebrated the rise of the so-called “progressive prosecutor” movement. District attorney candidates—often former public defenders or civil rights lawyers—have promised to use prosecutorial discretion to address the injustices of the criminal system. A proliferation of such campaigns, and the electoral successes of some of these candidates have raised questions about progressive prosecution: what does it actually mean to be a progressive prosecutor? Does progressive prosecution work? Do progressive candidates follow through on campaign promises? And, how enthusiastic should defense attorneys, reformers, and critics of the carceral state be about progressive prosecution? The …

My Three Criminal Justice Careers, Brisa Sanchez

Undergraduate Scholarly Works

This undergrad research paper is about the basics of the three components of criminal justice careers and the careers and salaries they do for a living.

Combating Recidivism, Shaylin Daley

Senior Honors Projects

SHAYLIN DALEY (Psychology) Combating Recidivism Sponsor: Lisa Holley (Political Science) Many people believe that criminals cannot be helped. It is evident that at least some of society shuns people who break laws and have negative views about the amount of money spent on detaining inmates. Thousands of individuals are released from United States prisons a day. Many of these individuals have no plan in place for their return home and are sent into the streets with nothing except for a jail ID. Most of these people will end up returning to prison. A good sum of these people face problems …

Victims’ Rights Revisited, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Essay responds to Bennett Capers's article, "Against Prosecutors." I offer four critiques of Capers’s proposal to bring back private prosecutions: (A) that shifting power to victims still involves shifting power to the carceral state and away from defendants; (B) that defining the class of victims will pose numerous problems; C) that privatizing prosecution reinforces a troubling impulse to treat social problems at the individual level; and (D) broadly, that these critiques suggest that Capers has traded the pathologies of “public” law for the pathologies of “private” law. Further, I argue that the article reflects a new, left-leaning vision of …

Criminal Law Exceptionalism, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

For over half a century, U.S. prison populations have ballooned and criminal codes have expanded. In recent years, a growing awareness of mass incarceration and the harms of criminal law across lines of race and class has led to a backlash of anti-carceral commentary and social movement energy. Academics and activists have adopted a critical posture, offering not only small-bore reforms, but full-fledged arguments for the abolition of prisons, police, and criminal legal institutions. Where criminal law was once embraced by commentators as a catchall solution to social problems, increasingly it is being rejected, or at least questioned. Instead of …

Checks And Balances In The Criminal Law, Daniel Epps

Scholarship@WashULaw

The separation of powers is considered essential in the criminal law, where liberty and even life are at stake. Yet the reasons for separating criminal powers are surprisingly opaque, and “the separation of powers” is often used to refer to distinct, and sometimes contradictory, concepts.

This Article reexamines the justifications for the separation of powers in criminal law. It asks what is important about separating criminal powers and what values such separation serves. It concludes that in criminal justice, the traditional Madisonian approach of separating powers between functionally differentiated political institutions—legislature, executive, and judiciary—bears no necessary connection to important values …

Decarceration And Default Mental States, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Essay, presented at “Guilty Minds: A Virtual Conference on Mens Rea and Criminal Justice Reform” at ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, examines the politics of federal mens rea reform legislation. I argue that current mens rea policy debates reflect an overly narrow vision of criminal justice reform. Therefore, I suggest an alternative frame through which to view mens rea reform efforts—a frame that resonates with radical structural critiques that have gained ground among activists and academics. Common arguments for and against mens rea reform reflect a belief that the problem with the criminal system is one of …

Wage Theft Criminalization, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

Over the past decade, workers’ rights activists and legal scholars have embraced the language of “wage theft” in describing the abuses of the contemporary workplace. The phrase invokes a certain moral clarity: theft is wrong. The phrase is not merely a rhetorical flourish. Increasingly, it has a specific content for activists, politicians, advocates, and academics: wage theft speaks the language of criminal law, and wage theft is a crime that should be punished. Harshly. Self-proclaimed “progressive prosecutors” have made wage theft cases a priority, and left-leaning politicians in the United States and abroad have begun to propose more criminal statutes …

Holding Both: Witness Aid Workers' Experiences Supporting Intimate Partner Violence Survivors In District Attorney Offices, Ovita Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Social workers and advocates practice in district attorney (DA) offices as witness or victim aid workers providing intimate partner violence (IPV) survivors counseling, advocacy, resources and information as they enter the criminal legal system (CLS). Their experiences, in particular how stress and vicarious trauma (VT) manifested for them in this unique setting within the criminal legal system, had not yet been examined. This phenomenological study sought to better understand (1) how social workers and advocates in a prosecutor’s office experience practice with intimate partner violence survivors, (2) their experiences of stress, secondary traumatic stress, vicarious trauma, and supports, and (3) …

Judicial Elections, Public Opinion, And Their Impact On State Criminal Justice Policy, Travis N. Taylor

Theses and Dissertations--Political Science

This dissertation explores whether and how the re-election prospects faced by trial court judges in many American states influence criminal justice policy, specifically, state levels of incarceration, as well as the disparity in rates of incarceration for Whites and Blacks. Do states where trial court judges must worry about facing reelection tend to encourage judicial behavior that results in higher incarceration rates? And are levels of incarceration and racial disparities in the states influenced by the proportion of the state publics who want more punitive policies? These are clearly important questions because they speak directly to several normative and empirical …

The Defender General, Daniel Epps, William Ortman

Scholarship@WashULaw

The United States needs a Defender General—a public official charged with representing the collective interests of criminal defendants before the Supreme Court of the United States. The Supreme Court is effectively our nation’s chief regulator of criminal justice. But in the battle to influence the Court’s rulemaking, government interests have substantial structural advantages. As compared to counsel for defendants, government lawyers—and particularly those from the U.S. Solicitor General’s office—tend to be more experienced advocates who have more credibility with the Court. Most importantly, government lawyers can act strategically to play for bigger long-term victories, while defense lawyers must zealously advocate …

Criminal Law In Crisis, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

In this Essay, I offer a brief account of how the COVID-19 pandemic lays bare the realities and structural flaws of the carceral state. I provide two primary examples or illustrations, but they are not meant to serve as an exhaustive list. Rather, by highlighting these issues, problems, or (perhaps) features, I mean to suggest that this moment of crisis should serve not just as an opportunity to marshal resources to address the pandemic, but also as a chance to address the harsh realities of the U.S. criminal system. Further, my claim isn’t that criminal law is in some way …

Mens Rea Reform And Iis Discontents, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

This article examines the debates over recent proposals for “mens rea reform.” The substantive criminal law has expanded dramatically, and legislators have criminalized a great deal of common conduct. Often, new criminal laws do not require that defendants know they are acting unlawfully. Mens rea reform proposals seek to address the problems of overcriminalization and unintentional offending by increasing the burden on prosecutors to prove a defendant’s culpable mental state. These proposals have been a staple of conservative-backed bills on criminal justice reform. Many on the left remain skeptical of mens rea reform and view it as a deregulatory vehicle …

The Consensus Myth In Criminal Justice Reform, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

It has become popular to identify a “bipartisan consensus” on criminal justice reform, but how deep is that consensus, actually? This article argues that the purported consensus is largely illusory. Despite shared reformist vocabulary, the consensus rests on distinct critiques that identify different flaws and justify distinct policy solutions. The underlying disagreements transcend traditional left/right political divides and speak to deeper disputes about the state and the role of criminal law in society. The article offers a typology of the two prevailing, but fundamentally distinct, critiques of the system: (1) the quantitative approach (what I call the “over” frame); and …

Are Hispanics Discriminated Against In The Us Criminal Justice System?, Maria A. Eijo De Tezanos Pinto

Graduate Research Posters

Recent publications have contributed to increase the perception among Hispanics of an unfair and unequal treatment of this community by the US Criminal Justice System. One of the major concerns was the claim that Hispanics are incarcerated before conviction nearly twice as often as Whites. Unfair treatment perception by the population reduces legitimacy of police and government, and thus, it is imperative to analyze these uninvestigated allegations. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to address said allegations of discrimination against Hispanics and analyze with updated and reliable statistics whether Hispanics are incarcerated before conviction more often than Whites. There …

Prison 2 Society, Heidi S. Collins

MSW Capstones

Abstract

Returning to the community from jail is a complex transition for most offenders, as well as for their families and communities. Upon reentering society, former offenders are likely to struggle with substance abuse, lack of adequate education and job skills, limited housing options, and mental health issues. This project illuminates the difficulties that adults face as they transition out of jails back to the community and presents a model of a one-stop-shop that is designed to include all the transition resources an adult may need to successfully re-integrate back to the community after incarceration, all housed at one, easily …

Kidnapping Incorporated: The Unregulated Youth-Transportation Industry And The Potential For Abuse, Ira Robbins

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Strangers come into a child's room in the middle of the night, drag her kicking and screaming into a van, apply handcuffs, and drive her to a behavior modification facility at a distant location. What sounds like a clear-cut case of kidnapping is complicated by the fact that the child's parents not only authorized this intervention, but also paid for it. This scarcely publicized practice-known as the youth-transportation industry-operates on the fringes of existing law. The law generally presumes that parents have almost unlimited authority over their children, but the youth-transportation industry has never been closely examined regarding exactly what …

Kidnapping Incorporated: The Unregulated Youth-Transportation Industry And The Potential For Abuse, Ira P. Robbins

Ira P. Robbins

An Exploratory Study Of Investment Compliance Management In The Enron Collapse, Valencia Tamir Johnson Dr.

Valencia T Johnson

This paper is to critique a thesis titled An Exploratory Study of Investment Compliance Management in the Enron Collapse (2013). This thesis can be found on the IBLS database, and on the Thomas Jefferson School of Law record database. This paper mentions the Enron scandal that played a major role in shaking investors’ and stakeholders’ confidence, in part because the corporation’s administrators were able to conceal its losses for nearly five years. This thesis examines the history of Enron and describes the circumstances leading up to its collapse in 2001, paying particular attention to the violation of corporate governance laws …

Promising Criminal Justice Practices In Human Trafficking Cases: A County-Level Comparitive Overview (2005-2010) With An Emphasis On Cases Involving Children, Angela Inzano

Center for the Human Rights of Children

The aim of the project is to review and analyze other similarly sized counties as Cook County, with large, metropolitan centers across the country, in order to identify best practice, challenges and efforts that have led to successful case outcomes. This research project identifies and synthesizes cases from 2005-2010 that involved human trafficking and developed at county-level law enforcement agencies and task forces across the United States. Where possible, cases involving minors will be high-lighted, in order to address distinct issues facing children who have been victimized by human trafficking. Best practices in victim identification, case investigation, perpetrator prosecution, and …

Forensic Science Evidence And Judicial Bias In Criminal Cases, Hon. Donald E. Shelton

Hon. Donald E. Shelton

Although DNA exonerations and the NAS report have raised serious questions about the validity of many traditional non-DNA forms of forensic science evidence, criminal court judges continue to admit virtually all prosecution-proferred expert testimony. It is is suggested that this is the result of a systemic pro-prosecution bias by judges that is reflected in admissibility decisions. These "attitudinal blinders" are especially prevalent in state criminal trial and appellate courts.

Examining The "Csi-Effect" In The Cases Of Circumstantial Evidence And Eyewitness Testimony: Multivariate And Path Analyses, Hon. Donald E. Shelton, Young S. Kim, Gregg Barak

Hon. Donald E. Shelton

As part of a larger investigation of the changing nature of juror behavior in the context of technology development, this study examined important questions unanswered by previous studies on the “CSI-effect.” In answering such questions, the present study applied multivariate and path analyses for the first time. The results showed that (a) watching CSI dramas had no independent effect on jurors' verdicts, (b) the exposure to CSI dramas did not interact with individual characteristics, (c) different individual characteristics were significantly associated with different types of evidence, and (d) CSI watching had no direct effect on jurors' decisions, and it had …

The Admissibility Of Social Science Evidence In Criminal Cases, Hon. Donald E. Shelton

Hon. Donald E. Shelton

The rapid development of emerging scientific methods, especially the increased understanding of deoxyribonucleic acid ("DNA"), has had, and will undoubtedly continue to have, an almost stunning impact on our justice system, particularly at the trial level. The forensic applications of these new scientific discoveries have been most dramatically seen in the criminal trial court. They have also caused us to re-examine other forms of forensic evidence that have been rather routinely admitted in our courts. Forensic evidence from social scientists is certainly one of those forms. Which of these forms of scientific forensic evidence have sufficient validity to be used …

An Indirect-Effects Model Of Mediated Adjudication: The Csi Myth, The Tech Effect, And Metropolitan Jurors' Expectations For Scientific Evidence, Hon. Donald E. Shelton, Young S. Kim, Gregg Barak

Hon. Donald E. Shelton

Part I of this article defines the "CSI effect", given that the phrase has come to have many different meanings ascribed to it. It emphasizes the epistemological importance of first describing the effect of the “CSI effect” as observed in juror behavior documented in a new study conducted in Wayne County (Detroit), Michigan, and then looking at causative factors that may be related to an explanation of those observed effects. Part II describes the methodology of the Wayne County study, provides a descriptive analysis of Wayne County jurors, and compares the jurors demographically to the Washtenaw County jurors who were …

Twenty-First Century Forensic Science Challenges For Trial Judges In Criminal Cases: Where The "Polybutadiene" Meets The "Bitumen", Hon. Donald E. Shelton

Hon. Donald E. Shelton

This artice discusses the challenges faced by trial judges in crimnal cases in fulfilling their Daubert "gatekeeping" role in the face of rapid advancements in forensic science. Admissibility questions for various forms of scientific evidence are reviewed, from DNA to fingerprints to social science "syndrome" evidence. The article discusses the pretrial issues presented by DNA databases, search issues and limitations problems as well as the impact of forensic science developments on juror expectations. Finally, forensic science issues regarding trial conduct are discussed, including voir dire, arguments and jury instructions,

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