Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons^™

Enhancing The Representation Of Women: How Gender Diversity Signals And Acknowledgement Affect Attraction To Men-Dominated Professions, Thomas P. Depatie, Anmol Sachdeva, Comila Shahani-Denning, Rebecca Grossman, Kevin P. Nolan

Personnel Assessment and Decisions

While organizations around the world recognize the importance of gender diversity and inclusion, many struggle to reach gender parity (Sneader & Yee, 2020). Particularly, women account for less than 15% of all sworn police officers (Donohue Jr, 2020). Considering signaling theory and novel research in organizational impression management, we examined the utility of various recruitment messaging techniques for attracting women job seekers to professions dominated by men, at both a consulting firm and law enforcement agency. Women evaluating consulting firm materials perceived greater behavioral integrity and were subsequently more attracted to the organization if recruitment messages included both high gender …

Using Workplace Personality To Guide Improvement Of Law Enforcement Selection, Chase A. Winterberg, Michael A. Tapia, Bradley J. Brummel

Personnel Assessment and Decisions

Recurrent police-public conflict suggests misalignment in desired police behavior between police and the public. We explored differences in desired police characteristics between police and members of the American public. Although racial minorities endorsed more negative attitudes of police overall, we found no meaningful differences in desired police characteristics between police and the public or between racial minority and majority participants. Second, we combined multiple criterion-related validation studies in similar jobs via meta-analyses and synthetic validity analyses to identify personality predictors of police performance dimensions. Third, we assessed base rates and adverse impact of these personality characteristics in police. Incumbent officers …

Why Do The Police Reject Counseling? An Examination Of Necessary Changes To Police Subculture., Noel Otu, Ntiense E. Otu

Journal of Health Ethics

Abstract

This paper reviews the concept of police subculture and examines its role in the management and acceptance of treatment for stress-related injury. In particular, we examine the impact of stigma that attaches to treatment within this subculture. The persistence of the dominant police subculture remains a significant obstacle to officers seeking treatment for stress-related illnesses. The subculture has historically resisted acknowledging the need for treatment in response to the occupational and/or organizational stress-related injury that results from frequent exposure to work-related trauma. Many police administrators are still embedded within and resist changes to the subculture, which results in an …

Algorithmic Governance From The Bottom Up, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are both a blessing and a curse for governance. In theory, algorithmic governance makes government more efficient, more accurate, and more fair. But the emergence of automation in governance also rests on public-private collaborations that expand both public and private power, aggravate transparency and accountability gaps, and create significant obstacles for those seeking algorithmic justice. In response, a nascent body of law proposes technocratic policy changes to foster algorithmic accountability, ethics, and transparency.

This Article examines an alternative vision of algorithmic governance, one advanced primarily by social and labor movements instead of technocrats and firms. …

Letting Offenders Choose Their Punishment?, Gilles Grolleau, Murat C. Mungan, Naoufel Mzoughi

Faculty Scholarship

Punishment menus allow offenders to choose the punishment to which they will be subjected from a set of options. We present several behaviorally informed rationales for why punishment menus may serve as effective deterrents, notably by causing people to refrain from entering a calculative mindset; reducing their psychological reactance; causing them to reconsider the reputational impacts of punishment; and reducing suspicions about whether the act is enforced for rent-seeking purposes. We argue that punishment menus can outperform the traditional single punishment if these effects can be harnessed properly. Our observations thus constitute a challenge, based on behavioral arguments, to the …

High Time For Change: The Legalization Of Marijuana And Its Impact On Warrantless Roadside Motor Vehicle Searches, Molly E. O'Connell

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

The proliferation of marijuana legalization has changed the relationship between driving and marijuana use. While impaired driving remains illegal, marijuana use that does not result in impairment is not a bar to operating a motor vehicle. Scientists have yet to find a reliable way for law enforcement officers to make this distinction. In the marijuana impairment context, there is not a scientifically proven equivalent to the Blood Alcohol Content standard nor are there reliable roadside assessments. This scientific and technological void has problematic consequences for marijuana users that get behind the wheel and find themselves suspected of impaired driving. Without …

The Impermissibility Of Police Deception In Juvenile Interrogations, Gina Kim

Fordham Law Review

Although perjury is a criminal offense in all states and a felony in many, law enforcement may routinely lie to suspects during interrogations. This widespread, judicially authorized practice consists of interrogators making false promises of leniency that the suspect will receive a lighter sentence in exchange for a confession, and making misrepresentations about the evidence against the suspect. Police deception in interrogations becomes even more problematic when used against juvenile suspects because the psychological vulnerability of minors may lead them to succumb to deceptive pressures and even to falsely confess.

This Note explores the debate surrounding the use of police …

Sentencing After Stash Houses: Addressing Manipulation Of The Federal Sentencing Guidelines, Elizabeth Foy Gudgel

Fordham Law Review

In the realm of undercover work, law enforcement has broad discretion to define the contours of a criminal offense. Due to quantity-based provisions in the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, federal agents or their informants may coerce an individual into a higher sentencing range by escalating their behavior to align with mandatory minimums or quantifiable offense levels. Because this type of offense is police-initiated, law enforcement has discretion to select the individuals subject to these tactics and influence their eventual sentences. The defenses of sentencing entrapment and sentencing manipulation are meant to combat this discretion. However, these defenses are rarely invoked successfully …

Green Crimes In The Empire State: Analyzing The Criminal Enforcement Of Environmental Law In New York, Joshua Ozymy, Melissa Jarrell Ozymy

Pace Environmental Law Review

Ensuring compliance with federal and state environmental laws and deterring future offenses can require the application of criminal enforcement tools. Yet we have a limited understanding of how the criminal enforcement of environmental laws has progressed historically in The Empire State. To explore this phenomenon, we undertake content analysis of federal prosecution summaries for all environmental crime prosecutions stemming from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency criminal investigations from 1983 to 2019. We explore which federal environmental laws were violated, determine which charging statutes were used, analyze sentencing patterns, and illustrate the broader themes that emerge in such prosecutions over 37 years. …

Decarceration's Inside Partners, Seema Tahir Saifee

Fordham Law Review

This Article examines a hidden phenomenon in criminal punishment. People in prison, during their incarceration, have made important—and sometimes extraordinary—strides toward reducing prison populations. In fact, stakeholders in many corners, from policy makers to researchers to abolitionists, have harnessed legal and conceptual strategies generated inside the walls to pursue decarceral strategies outside the walls. Despite this outside use of inside moves, legal scholarship has directed little attention to theorizing the potential of looking to people on the inside as partners in the long-term project of meaningfully reducing prison populations, or “decarceration.”

Building on the change-making agency and revolutionary ideation inside …

An Algorithmic Assessment Of Parole Decisions, Hannah Lacqueur, Ryan W. Copus

Faculty Works

Objectives: Parole is an important mechanism for alleviating the extraordinary social and financial costs of mass incarceration. Yet parole boards can also present a major obstacle, denying parole to low-risk inmates who could safely be released from prison. We evaluate a major parole institution, the New York State Parole Board, quantifying the costs of suboptimal decision-making.

Methods: Using ensemble Machine Learning, we predict any arrest and any violent felony arrest within three years to generate criminal risk predictions for individuals released on parole in New York from 2012–2015. We quantify the social welfare loss of the Board’s suboptimal decisions by …

Certain Prosecutors: Geographical Arbitrariness, Unusualness, & The Abolition Of Virginia’S Death Penalty, Bernadette M. Donovan

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Virginia’s abolition of the death penalty in 2021 was a historic development. As both a southern state and one of the country’s most active death penalty jurisdictions, Virginia’s transition away from capital punishment represented an important shift in the national landscape. This article considers whether that shift has any constitutional significance, focusing on the effect of Virginia’s abolition on the geographical arbitrariness of the country’s death penalty.

As a starting point, the death penalty in America is primarily regulated by the Eighth Amendment, which bars “cruel and unusual punishments.” The United States Supreme Court has held that the death penalty …

Atkins V. Virginia At Twenty: Still Adaptive Deficits, Still In The Developmental Period, Sheri Lynn Johnson, John H. Blume, Brendan Van Winkle

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Twenty years ago, in Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Eighth Amendment prohibited states from executing persons with intellectual disability. While the Court’s decision is laudable and has saved many of the most vulnerable persons from the executioner, its effect has been undermined by recalcitrant states attempting to exploit language in the opinion permitting states to create procedures to implement the (then) new categorical prohibition. In this article, we examine how some states have adopted procedures which are fundamentally inconsistent with the clinical consensus understanding of the disability and how one state, …

It Just Makes Sense: An Argument For A Uniform Objective Standard For Incarcerated Individuals Bringing Claims Under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, Pearce Thomson Embrey

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

In July 2020, the New York Times published an article on a Department of Justice report detailing the systematic abuse of incarcerated individuals by prison guards within the State of Alabama’s Department of Corrections. This report evidences the challenges faced by incarcerated individuals seeking to vindicate their Eighth Amendment rights. In a legal sense, those individuals who turn to the court system for relief face an almost insurmountable burden of proof. This Note begins by surveying the history of excessive force claims under the Fourth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments, as well as deliberate indifference claims under the Eighth and Fourteenth …

Defending The Less Dead: Using The Decriminalization Of Sex Work To Combat The High Incidence Of Serial Homicide Of Street-Based Sex Workers, Lauren E. Fernandez

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

Sex workers have historically represented a disproportionate percentage of all victims of serial murder. Several serial murderers in the past thirty years have evaded detection for years, taking the lives of dozens of victims, by targeting sex workers, playing off the biases of society and law enforcement, and counting on the halfhearted investigation techniques that often followed missing person reports for less valued members of society, or the “less dead.” This Note argues that the decriminalization of all aspects of sex work is the surest way to improve the safety of street-based sex workers and reduce high victimization of this …

Far-Fetched Uses Of Drug Detection Dog Alerts: A Case Note On United States V. Braddy, Daniel Kaseff

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Solitary Confinement: What The United States Can Learn From England And Norway, Markus Wieshofer

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

The note argues that the United States should reform its solitary confinement system by adopting key aspects from England and Norway, such as robust oversight mechanisms and a rehabilitative focus, to address the harsh conditions and negative effects of solitary confinement on inmates.

Police Vehicle Searches And Racial Profiling: An Empirical Study, Griffin Edwards, Stephen Rushin

Fordham Law Review

In 1981, the U.S. Supreme Court held in New York v. Belton that police officers could lawfully search virtually anywhere in a vehicle without a warrant after the arrest of any occupant in the vehicle. Then, in 2009, the Court reversed course in Arizona v. Gant, holding that police could only engage in vehicle searches after such arrests in a smaller number of extenuating circumstances. This series of cases became a flash point for the broader debate about the regulation of policing. Law enforcement groups argued that administratively complex rules, like those established in Gant, risk officer safety. …

Policing The Police: Personnel Management And Police Misconduct, Max Schanzenbach

Vanderbilt Law Review

Police misconduct is at the top of the public policy agenda, but there is surprisingly little understanding of how police personnel management policies affect police misconduct. Police-civilian interactions in large jurisdictions are, in principle at least, highly regulated. But these regulations are at least partially counteracted by union contracts and civil service regulations that constrain discipline and other personnel decisions, thereby limiting a city’s ability to manage its police force. This Essay analyzes police personnel management by bringing forth evidence from a variety of data sources on police personnel practices as well as integrating an existing, but relatively siloed, literature …

Highly Automated Vehicles & Discrimination Against Low-Income Persons, William H. Widen

Articles

Law reform in the United States often reflects a structural bias that advances narrow business interests without addressing broader public interest concerns.' This bias may appear by omitting protective language in laws or regulations which address a subject matter area, such as permitting the testing of highly automated vehicles ("HA Vs") on public roads, while omitting a requirement for a reasonable level of insurance as a condition to obtain a testing permit.2 This Article explores certain social and economic justice implications of laws and regulations governing the design, testing, manufacture, and deployment of HA Vs which might advance a business …