Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons^™

The Relationship Between Police Stress And Officer Misconduct, Leobardo Lopez-Cristobal

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Recent high-profile and controversial police-related incidents have sparked an intensified public discourse on police misconduct. This has resulted in increasing calls for greater accountability and transparency within U.S. police agencies. Much of the existing research on police misconduct centers around two competing explanations: the "bad apples" perspective, which attributes misconduct to individual officers, and the "bad barrels" perspective, which points to systemic or organizational factors (Rojek, Decker, & Wagner, 2015). However, one factor that has been underexplored in the literature is the role of police stress in influencing deviant police behavior. Previous studies suggest a potential link between police-related stress …

Will Bruen Kill Cops?, Peter N. Salib, Guha Krishnamurthi

Fordham Law Review Online

Criminal procedure is a balancing act. On one hand, it must allow law enforcement officers to protect the public and themselves. On the other hand, criminal procedure must safeguard citizens’ individual constitutional rights—privacy, physical liberty, and bodily integrity. And now, the right to bear arms.

There is a serious tension here. Landmark Fourth Amendment cases like Terry v. Ohio, Pennsylvania v. Mimms, and Chimel v. California give the police wide latitude to seize firearms on the assumption that guns are dangerous. But these doctrines largely evolved before the Second Amendment’s ascendance. In District of Columbia v. Heller, …

Clemency For The Common Good: An Argument To Release Incarcerated Persons In The General Public Interest, Deborah M. Ahrens

Brooklyn Law Review

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were reminded of several terrible truths about the modern mass incarceration state: namely, that it collects vulnerable people, places them in conditions where they are unable to protect themselves against many forms of ordinary and extraordinary risks, incubates suffering amongst them, and then spreads that suffering to surrounding communities. The ghastly consequences of these realities during the COVID pandemic led to piecemeal efforts to release moderate numbers of incarcerated people for public policy reasons largely unrelated to the kinds of individualized factors that have traditionally motivated most acts of clemency. This Article …

The Impact Of Adverse Childhood Experiences On Later Desistance Among Serious Juvenile Offenders From A Broken Family Composition, Olivia Franklin

Master's Theses

The current study aimed to contribute to the overall knowledge of desistance patterns among juveniles by exploring them among serious juvenile offenders who come from a broken home. Utilizing the Pathways to Desistance (PTD) dataset, this study used logistic regression to examine the impact of family composition on later desistance while controlling for various adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) one might experience. Two research questions guide this study: (1) Does family composition (i.e., “broken homes”) impact later desistance among serious adolescent offenders, while controlling for important criminological predictors (i.e., self-control and antisocial peer influence)? (2) Is the quality of one’s home …

Fbi Crime Reporting: Overcoming Challenges For A Safer Future, Alan Saquella

Publications

Accurate crime reporting is essential for effective law enforcement, evidence-based policymaking, and building trust between communities and their local police departments. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program has served as a vital source of crime statistics for decades. However, its data collection process faces hurdles that, when addressed, could lead to even greater transparency and safety improvements. These challenges—such as inconsistent participation, voluntary reporting, and varying crime classifications—have contributed to underreporting, leading to gaps in our understanding of crime trends. The good news is that these are surmountable challenges, and focusing on improvements can foster a clearer picture of …

"Legally Magic" Words: An Empirical Study Of The Accessibility Of Fifth Amendment Rights, Roseanna Sommers, Kate Weisburd

Northwestern University Law Review

Fifth Amendment case law (including Miranda v. Arizona) requires that individuals assert their right to counsel or silence using “explicit,” “clear,” and “unambiguous” statements—or, as some dissenting judges have lamented, using “legally magic” words. Through a survey of 1,718 members of the U.S. public, we investigate what ordinary people believe it takes to assert the right to counsel and the right to silence. We then compare their perceptions against prevailing legal standards governing invocation.

With respect to the right to counsel, the survey results indicate that members of the public have a uniformly lower threshold for invocation than do …

Rising Temperatures, The Prison Litigation Reform Act, And The Heat Death Of Human Dignity In Texas Prisons, Brianne Wylie

Northwestern University Law Review

This Note seeks to shed light on the life-threatening danger of extreme heat in un-air-conditioned Texas prisons. The Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) starkly limits the relief available to those suffering and dying in these prisons. This Note proposes an amendment to the legislation that could create a path toward lasting relief for incarcerated people. After analyzing the effects of increasing heat on the particularly vulnerable prison population, this Note analyzes how the Supreme Court and the Fifth Circuit have handled claims alleging constitutionally violative prison conditions under the Eighth Amendment—in short, ineffectively, if at all. This Note then details …

Criminal Juror Challenges And Csli: A Rule 16 Revision To Maintain Impartial Juries, Ivy Kaplan

Northwestern University Law Review

The Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees criminal defendants “the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury of the State.” Voir dire, the procedure during which the prosecution and the defense may challenge prospective jurors for cause or exercise peremptory challenges, purports to uphold this right. When the prosecution has access to cellular geolocation data on prospective jurors that the defense lacks, however, it may jeopardize the defendant’s Sixth Amendment rights.

This Note proposes a solution to that problem in the form of an addition to Rule 16 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. …

A Gendered Perspective On Policing Violence In Happy Valley And Fargo, T. Allen Culpepper

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Portrayal of a police officer determined to fight crime and execute justice in a harsh, isolated environment has become a television and film subgenre, often featuring women facing gender-related challenges. The issues raised in Sally Wainwright’s British television series Happy Valley, can be made more accessible, particularly to American undergraduate students, via its commonalities with the Coen brothers film Fargo. In both, a tough but compassionate policewoman pursues the more sociopathic of a pair of criminals involved in a botched kidnapping attempt instigated by an inept businessman, taking on the case for personal and professional honor, and as …

Burnout And Employee Satisfaction Of Mental Health Clinicians In Corrections, Jeremy C. Capuyon, Lindsay Gietzen

Pacific Journal of Health

Approximately 1.9 million individuals are currently incarcerated within the United States. Rehabilitation and preparation for parole back into the community is common goal amongst correctional facilities. Mental health clinicians (social workers and psychologists) within the correctional facilities are providers who assist in the rehabilitation of inmates. Unfortunately, mental health clinicians in correctional facilities experience high rates of burnout and low levels of job satisfaction, resulting in an increase in turnover rates. This research project looks to investigate the impact burnout and employee satisfaction has on mental health clinicians who work in correctional settings. Furthermore, this research project compares burnout and …

The Punishment Of Cruel And Unusual Conditions: Extending The Purely Objective Standard Adopted In Kingsley V. Hendrickson To Claims Of Deliberate Indifference, Samantha M. Davis

Touro Law Review

In 2015, the Supreme Court in Kingsley v. Hendrickson held that a pretrial detainee claiming excessive force on the part of the state must only show that the force used was objectively unreasonable. Prior to the adoption of the purely objective standard, many courts around the country were analyzing such cases through a subjective standard to determine whether the officers subjectively knew that the force used against a pretrial detainee was unreasonable. The absence of this objective standard essentially allowed state officials to use excessive force against pretrial detainees without violating an individual’s Constitutional rights. The Supreme Court reasoned that …

Abortion Access For Incarcerated People Post-Dobbs, Kate Bock

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has fundamentally altered the legal landscape regarding abortion access. Though abortion rights for all people across the United States have now been eliminated or are in jeopardy, incarcerated people are a particularly vulnerable group, given the way carceral institutions restrict autonomy and the drastic health implications of an unwanted pregnancy while confined. Before Dobbs, detained people retained the constitutional right to an elective abortion while incarcerated. To remedy violations of this right, women brought claims under the Fourteenth Amendment and the Eighth Amendment. In a post-Roe world, however, incarcerated folks denied abortion …

Formalizing Fairness: Statistical Measures Of Parity For Recidivism Prediction Instruments, Joshua Song

Michigan Technology Law Review

Recidivism prediction instruments (RPI) are increasingly employed as an algorithmic arm of the criminal justice system to assist in bond, sentencing, and probation determinations. Due process and ethics guidelines require that RPIs, such as the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS), apply a fair assessment in making recidivism predictions. To establish fair RPIs, we must first define standards of fairness and methods to measure bias in RPI outputs. However, defining algorithmic fairness can be cryptic and context-dependent. Scholars have proposed different criteria for what defines a fair RPI. Unfortunately, these criteria are conflicting and mutually exclusive; it is …

The Consequences And Constitutionality Of Training Police To Blame Victims, Margareth Etienne, Richard H. Mcadams

William & Mary Law Review

A common technique in American interrogations is “moral minimization,” in which investigators excuse or justify the suspect’s criminal behavior on moral grounds. A surprising type of moral minimization is explicit victim-blaming, which includes blaming the victim by endorsing negative stereotypes on the basis of gender, race, religion, or sexual orientation, what we call victim-blaming-bystereotype. No one has previously considered the policy wisdom or constitutionality of this technique. We explore the unintended consequences. One cost is the secondary victimization of those who suffer from crime, especially when they discover how detectives have disparaged them. The second is the effect on the …

Rights And Redress For Transgender Survivors Of Prison Rape: The Failures Of The Prison Rape Elimination Act, Natalie Hatton

William & Mary Law Review

This Note will argue that PREA [Prison Rape Elimination Act] provides meager protection and insufficient relief to transgender individuals who have been victims of sexual violence while incarcerated and that the existing mechanisms for relief are insufficient. Because PREA contains no private cause of action to allow survivors of rape to sue for violations of PREA, transgender rape survivors’ pain remains unredressed. To address this problem, this Note puts forth a combination of solutions to remove barriers to redress for transgender survivors of prison rape, including amending PREA to include a private cause of action and repealing provisions of the …

Reconstructing Citizenship, Jenny E. Carroll, James Jeter

Faculty Scholarship

In our republican democracy, voting is a central right of citizenship. Yet millions of voters are routinely disenfranchised as a result of convictions or because their carceral status creates barriers to voting. In the past decade, academic scholarship has focused on the impact of disenfranchisement based on conviction. This work has mapped the legal and social implications of policies that deny voting rights to over five million otherwise eligible voters nationwide. Yet this work has some gaps. First, by focusing solely on conviction-based disenfranchisement, the existing scholarship has largely ignored fatal barriers to voting created (and at times perpetuated) by …

The Courts, Congress, And The Bureau Of Prisons: Using The First Step Act As An Impetus For Accountability And Legal Reform Of The Federal Carceral System, Sarah E. Ryan

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

On December 18, 2018, the Formerly Incarcerated Reenter Society Transformed Safely Transitioning Every Person Act, or First Step Act, became law. The Act reflected decades of social, racial, and economic justice advocacy and years of legislative work. In the five years preceding the Act’s passage, lawmakers built a new case for criminal justice reform.

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From 2018 to today, the First Step Act has galvanized discussions about what comes next in criminal justice reform. Most observers have criticized the limited architecture and implementation of the Act, but some have hailed the Act’s utility during the COVID-19 pandemic and …

Dictionaries Denied: Information Poverty In Michigan Prison Libraries, Nicholas Norton, Meghan Mcgowan

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

In June of 2022, the Michigan Department of Corrections (“MDOC”) made national news when NPR reported that non-English language dictionaries were banned in state prisons. The rationale for this policy was specious—with an MDOC spokesperson stating: “If certain prisoners all decided to learn a very obscure language, they would be able to then speak freely in front of staff and others about introducing contraband or assaulting staff or assaulting another prisoner.” For instance, Spanish and Swahili dictionaries were restricted or banned based on safety, even though both languages are spoken by millions of people. Dictionaries and other reference materials …

Referenda To Secure The Rights Of Incarcerated People, Jaclyn Kurin

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

In May 2021, Allegheny County became the first jurisdiction in U.S. history to ban solitary confinement at a jail by voter referendum. This article covers the drafting, passing, implementing, and litigating of voter referenda to ban solitary confinement and the use of weapons in correctional facilities in Pennsylvania. The benefits of voter referenda extend beyond recognizing the legal rights of those incarcerated and reducing mistreatment. This article explains how prior community engagement with key issues involving the Allegheny County Jail (“ACJ”) paved the way for the referendum’s success. Specifically, in the year leading up to the Allegheny County referendum, …

Equalizing Disproportionate Death And Punishment In Black And Brown Communities: An Emergency Shutdown On Death, Inequality, And Deliberate Indifference, Angela Dixon

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

According to an old saying, “death is the great equalizer.” But is it? It may be in the sense that absent a contravening force, it is an appointment that all must keep. Yet data indicates that all do not die equally. Socioeconomic status (“SES”), which includes levels of occupation, education, income, and wealth, all delay or advance mortality. People of a higher SES outlive, generally, people of a lower SES; moreover, such disparities continue to widen as trends of income inequality intensify.

Perhaps predictably, race, just like class, exacerbates inequities. Black Americans in the United States remain the pivotal …