Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons^™

Rubbing Salt Into The Wound: Environmental Injustices In Prisons And The Difficulties Of Obtaining Relief, Savannah Markel

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

American prisons are often built near or on environmentally hazardous lands. Not only do prison locations affect prisoners’ health and well-being, but deteriorating confinement conditions exacerbate such safety and wellness risks. In seeking justice for these environmental violations, prison litigants often choose to raise claims under the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause. However, the Clause requires litigants to meet an extremely high—indeed, near-impossible—bar to succeed on their claims. Environmental justice advocates have proposed an alternative remedy which calls on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate environmental injustices in prisons. This Comment analyzes the difficulties of raising an …

Passing The Buck: The Perils Of Oklahoma V. Castro-Huerta, Adam Crepelle, Timothy Purdon, Brendan Johnson

Faculty Publications & Other Works

The Supreme Court's 2022 decision in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta upended federal Indian law by allowing states to prosecute crimes involving Indians committed in Indian country. Castro-Huerta created a concurrent jurisdiction over Indian country crimes involving non-Indians. While concurrent jurisdiction increases the number of law enforcement agents with jurisdiction, it also creates opportunities for those law enforcement agents to shirk responsibility. Neither state nor federal law enforcement is accountable to tribes, so Castro-Huerta is likely to create a pass the buck mentality among non-Indian law enforcement. Moreover, there is little to indicate expanding state authority over tribes will benefit Indians. In …

The Effect Of Police Quota Laws, Stephen Rushin, Griffin Sims Edwards

Faculty Publications & Other Works

This Article examines the effect of state laws restricting the use of police quotas. Police quotas describe the establishment of a predetermined number of traffic stops, citations, or arrests that officers must make within a particular time period. Some police supervisors have historically used quotas to ensure adequate productivity by officers. However, critics argue that quotas incentivize officers to engage in unnecessary, and in some cases, unconstitutional, coercive behavior. Numerous states across the country have enacted laws banning or limiting the use of police quotas.

This Article analyzes a dataset of traffic and pedestrian stops from eleven law enforcement agencies …

The Importance Of Policing, Stephen Rushin

Faculty Publications & Other Works

This Article argues that, if effectively regulated, policing represents a fundamentally important social institution that advances the community interest in public safety, justice, equality, and the rule of law.

In recent years, a significant and growing body of legal scholarship has called for the shrinking of police responsibilities, the defunding of police budgets, or the complete abolition of local police departments. A countervailing body of scholarly literature has questioned the wisdom of some of these proposals, arguing that they could unintentionally make policing worse or have unintended public safety effects.

This Article enters this debate by affirmatively defending the importance …

Reprieves Return: Minnesota's Decision To Awaken The Reprieve, Mary Fee, Monica Shaffer

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

From Streets To Stats: A Statistical Analysis Of The Quantity Of Illegal Narcotics Seized In The United States, Zachary T. Strickland

Tenor of Our Times

This study aims to determine how seven different variables affect the total quantity of illegal narcotics seized. These seven variables include four dichotomous and three continuous variables, each striving to teach readers how they relate to the quantity of narcotics seized across specific states. My goal for this project is to figure out if there is any relationship to help law enforcement fight the war on drugs. With the continuing apparent rise of this war, this study is crucial in determining potential relationships between a state's characteristics and the quantity of illegal narcotics they forcibly take possession of. I further …

Police Vigilantism, Nadia Banteka

Scholarly Publications

This Article uncovers a critical yet unexplored dimension of policing: the strategic oscillation of police officers between their roles as state actors and private individuals, and its significant implications for police accountability frameworks. As officers toggle between these two roles to their legal advantage, they exploit a deep, systemic flaw in the structural design of policing. Tracing the trajectory of policing from its vigilante origins to its institutionalized form today, this Article argues that contemporary policing merges state-sanctioned power with vestiges of vigilantism to blur the public-private divide. This duality enables a form of state-sanctioned vigilantism through which officers exploit …

Expecting Medication Surveillance, Jennifer D. Oliva

Fordham Law Review

In response to federal financial incentives and mandates, all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and three U.S. territories administer electronic prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs). Federal and state policymakers justified the implementation and enhancement of ubiquitous prescription drug monitoring by contending that expansive state drug surveillance was a necessary weapon in the war against the American drug overdose crisis. As is often the case with tools designed for law enforcement surveillance, however, PDMPs have proven susceptible to mission creep. Although pioneer PDMPs were paper-based systems that limited their surveillance to a narrow class of heavily regulated controlled substances, modern …

Distorted Narratives In The Treatment Program Complex, Evelyn Lia Malavé

Faculty Publications

Problem-solving courts and alternatives to incarceration have been both celebrated as successful attempts to address the factors that lead to defendants’ involvement in the criminal legal system and critiqued as ineffective reforms that worsen mass incarceration. Specifically, critiques of the “treatment program complex” have tended to focus on how it harms defendants by exposing them to higher levels of incarceration if they fail to complete court mandates. But these critiques have failed to account for another way the treatment program complex harms defendants: by suppressing their voices regarding what kind of help they need and how they are affected by …

We Shall Overcome: The Evolution Of Quotas In The Land Of The Free And The Home Of Samba, Stella Emery Santana

Seattle University Law Review

When were voices given to the voiceless? When will education be permitted to all? When will we need to protest no more? It’s the twenty-first century, and the fight for equity in higher education remains a challenge to peoples all over the world. While students in the United States must deal with the increase in loans, in Brazil, only around 20% of youth between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four have a higher education degree.

The primary objective of this Article is to conduct an in-depth comparative analysis of the development, implementation, and legal adjudication of educational quota systems within …

Pacific Islands And The U.S. Military: The Legal Borderlands Of The Environmental Movement, Sonia Lei

Seattle University Law Review

Climate change remains an urgent, ongoing global issue that requires critical examination of institutional polluters. This includes the world’s largest institutional consumer of petroleum: the United States military. The Department of Defense (DoD) is a massive institution with little oversight, a carbon footprint spanning the globe, a budget greater than the next ten largest nations combined, and overly generous exemptions to environmental regulations and carbon reduction targets. This Comment examines how this lack of accountability and oversight plays out in the context of three Pacific islands that have hosted U.S. military bases for decades. By considering the environmental impact of …

Progressive Facade: How Bail Reforms Expose The Limitations Of The Progressive Prosecutor Movement, Sarah Gottlieb

Washington and Lee Law Review

Progressive prosecutors have been acclaimed as the new hope for change in the criminal legal system. Advocates and scholars touting progressive prosecution believe that progressive prosecutors will use their power and discretion to address systemic racism and end mass incarceration. Just as this hope has arisen, however, so have concerns that meaningful change cannot be enacted within the criminal system by the very actors whose job it is to incarcerate. This Article highlights these concerns by looking at the bail reforms enacted by four different progressive prosecutors and analyzes the initial promises made, the actions taken to reform and eliminate …

Punishing Gender, Erin Collins

Law Faculty Publications

As jurisdictions across the country grapple with the urgent need to redress the impact of mass incarceration, there has been renewed interest in reforms that reduce the harms punishment inflicts on women. These "gender-responsive" reforms aim to adapt traditional punishment practices that, proponents claim, were designed "for men." The push to change how we punish based on gender, while perhaps well intentioned, is misguided. As abolition feminist principles reveal, these gender-responsive practices not only reify traditional gender norms, but also strengthen the operation of the carceral state. This Article catalogs the ways in that the gender-responsive approach currently influences various …

Music, Mayhem, And A Mississippi: Still Burning-The Hope Of Smothering The Deleterious Effects Of Deliberate Indifference, Angela Dixon

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The article argues that the deliberate indifference standard, as applied in Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, fails to adequately address inhumane and unconstitutional prison conditions, particularly in Mississippi. It critiques the standard for prioritizing prison officials' intent over objective conditions, allowing systemic neglect and racial disparities to persist. The analysis advocates for a shift toward an objective standard to better protect human dignity and hold prison administrators accountable.

Mandatory Sentences As Strict Liability, William W. Berry Iii

Washington and Lee Law Review

Strict liability crimes—crimes that do not require a criminal intent—are outliers in the world of criminal law. Disregarding criminal intent risks treating the blameworthy the same as the blameless.

In a different galaxy far, far away, mandatory sentences—sentences automatically imposed upon a criminal conviction—are unconstitutional in certain contexts for the exact same reason. Mandatory death sentences risk treating those who do not deserve death the same as those that might.

Two completely separate contexts, two parallel rules of law. Yet courts and commentators have failed to see the similarities between these two worlds, leaving an analytical black hole. Indeed, equity …

Criminal Law's Hidden Consensus, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

American criminal law is facing a crisis of meaning. On one hand, the “traditional school” invokes the archetype of the violent criminal—a murderer, rapist, or thief—who must be prosecuted and punished. On the other hand, the “critical school” invokes the archetype of the low-level drug offender, sentenced to a draconian prison term for mere possession of low levels of marijuana. On this account, the criminal legal system is itself systemically pathological, perhaps even warranting abolition. Like ships passing in the night, the two schools appear irreconcilable. This Article helps break this impasse and builds toward a justification for criminal law …

The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions: Deinstitutionalization And Mass Incarceration Nation, Corinna Barrett Lain

Law Faculty Publications

They say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and our failed implementation of deinstitutionalization inthe 1970s is a prime example of the point. In this symposium contribution-a response to Jeffrey Bellin's book MassIncarceration Nation-I offer a historical account of deinstitutionalization of state mental hospi­ tals, tracing how severelymentally ill patients were discharged from state hospitals and eventually made their way back to secure beds, but in our nation's jails and prisons instead. Mental health and mass incarceration are not separate crises, I argue, but rather inter­ connected problems with an interconnected past that require an interconnected …

Can Policing Be Purged Of White Supremacy? A First Amendment Inquiry, Jessica Tilton

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.

The Importance Of Gender Diversity On Police Culture, Haley Vasko

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This paper outlines the problem of historical underrepresentation of women in the police force and its potential impact on police culture, effectiveness, and community relations. This paper aims to investigate the importance of gender diversity within law enforcement.

The research framed the context of organizational behavior and diversity management, exploring how gender diversity affects group dynamics, organizational culture, and policing. The literature review covered historical trends in gender diversity in policing, challenges faced by women in the profession, and the influence of gender diversity on police culture.

The methodology involved an extensive literature review, case studies from different regions, and …

The Consumer’S Choice To Boycott, Agnes Bresee

Seattle University Law Review

In the wake of employees losing their jobs upon voicing their political opinions concerning Israel, Harvard and Columbia law students’ job offers being rescinded upon expressing support for Palestine, and the names and social media profiles of individuals who support Palestine being collected and listed on Canary Mission, such backlash may leave many Americans wondering what form of resistance to settler-colonialist apartheid is acceptable in the twenty-first century. Recently, the movement to collectively boycott brands like Starbucks, which sued its Worker’s Union for a tweet expressing support for Palestine; Disney, which donated money to Israel; and McDonald’s, where a location …