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Race And Washington’S Criminal Justice System 2021: Report To The Washington Supreme Court, Task Force 2.0 Research Working Group

Seattle University Law Review

This report is an update on the 2011 Preliminary Report on Race and Washington’s Criminal Justice System. This update does not include as context the history of race discrimination in Washington, and readers are encouraged to view the 2011 report for its brief historical overview.14 The 2011 report began with that historical overview because the criminal justice system does not exist in a vacuum. Instead, it exists as part of a legal system that for decades actively managed and controlled where people could live, work, recreate, and even be buried.

Members of communities impacted by race disproportionality in Washington’s criminal …

Introduction To Julie Bilotta’S Story, Sheila Wildeman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Julie Bilotta’s contribution to this special volume is a straightforward denunciation of prison-based inhumanity and institutionalized misogyny. I write to show solidarity with her and to alert the reader to some of the ways her story exposes intersectional injustice while enlivening feminist abolitionist prison resistance. I write, too, to challenge my own and others’ thinking about whether or how law (litigation, law reform) might contribute to that resistance.

In her essay, Julie offers an intimate glimpse of prisons as sites of reproductive injustice. As this special volume attests, incarceration in Canada and elsewhere produces systematic gendered harms, including lack of …

Community-Oriented Policing: Building Trust And Collaborative Relationships With The Black Community, Tunice M. Cole

DSW Capstone Projects

Black people die at the hands of police at a disproportionate rate. In the United States, Black citizens are three times more likely to be killed by police than White citizens. This, along with other factors, has caused a lack of trust, legitimacy, and relationships between police and the Black community. Examining this problem from a socio-ecological and social constructivist perspective suggests that the solution encompasses the use of community feedback and experiences to build and develop a model of community-oriented policing that addresses the issues of the community being served.

Product one of this capstone was a systematic literature …

No Runs, Few Hits And Many Errors: Street Stops, Bias And Proactive Policing, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Equilibrium models of racial discrimination in law enforcement encounters suggest that in the absence of racial discrimination, the proportion of searches yielding evidence of illegal activity (the hit rate) will be equal across races. Searches that disproportionately target one racial group, resulting in a relatively low hit rate, are inefficient and suggest bias. An unbiased officer who is seeking to maximize her hit rate would reduce the number of unproductive stops toward a group with the lower hit rate. An unbiased policing regime would generate no differences in hit rates between groups.

We use this framework to test for racial …

Criminalized Students, Reparations, And The Limits Of Prospective Reform, Amber Baylor

Faculty Scholarship

Recent reforms discourage schools from referring students to criminal law enforcement for typical disciplinary infractions. Though rightly celebrated, these reforms remain mere half-measures, as they emphasize prospective decriminalization of student conduct without grappling with the harm to generations of former students – disproportionately Black – who have been targeted by criminalizing policies of the past. Through the lens of reparations theory, this Article sets out the case for retroactive and reparations-based redress for the criminalization of students. Reparations models reposition moral norms. They acknowledge state harm, clarify the losses to criminalized students, allow for expansive forms of redress, and cast …

Ending The Discriminatory Pretrial Incarceration Of People With Disabilities: Liability Under The Americans With Disabilities Act And The Rehabilitation Act, Margo Schlanger, Elizabeth Jordan, Roxana Moussavian

Articles

Our federal, state, and local governments lock up hundreds of thousands of people at a time—millions over the course of a year—to ensure their appearance at a pending criminal or immigration proceeding. This type of pretrial incarceration—a term we use to cover both pretrial criminal detention and immigration detention prior to finalization of a removal order—can be very harmful. It disrupts the work and family lives of those detained, harms their health, interferes with their defense, and imposes pressure on them to forego their trial rights and accede to the government’s charges in an effort to abbreviate time behind bars. …

Equality In The Streets: Using Proportionality Analysis To Regulate Street Policing, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The racially disparate impact and individual and collective costs of stop and frisk, misdemeanor arrests, and pretextual traffic stops have been well documented. Less widely noticed is the contrast between Supreme Court case law permitting these practices and the Court's recent tendency to strictly regulate technologically enhanced searches that occur outside the street policing setting and that--coincidentally or not--happen to be more likely to affect the middle class. If, as the Court has indicated, electronic tracking and searches of digital records require probable cause that evidence of crime will be found, stops and frisks should also require probable cause that …

Book Review, Justin Murray

Publications

No abstract provided.

Prosecutorial Nonenforcement And Residual Criminalization, Justin Murray

Publications

In recent years a small but influential group of locally elected prosecutors committed to criminal justice reform have openly refused to enforce various criminal laws—laws prohibiting marijuana possession, sentencing enhancements, laws authorizing the death penalty, and much more—because they see those laws as unjust and incompatible with core reform objectives. Condemned by many on the political right for allegedly usurping the legislature’s lawmaking role and praised by many on the left for bypassing dysfunctional state legislatures in favor of local solutions, these prosecutorial nonenforcement policies are commonly said to have the same effect as nullifying, or even repealing, the laws …

Police Officer Attitudes About The Importance Of External Procedural Justice, David Borchardt

Theses and Dissertations

External procedural justice has been found to have a relationship with cooperation, compliance, and police legitimacy. Extant methods to increase external procedural justice during police-citizen interactions have been met with mixed results. Fair policing from the inside out proposes that organizationally just treatment of officers will lead to external procedural justice during encounters between officers and citizens. Police organizational justice, comprised of the dimensions of distributive justice, procedural justice, interpersonal justice, and informational justice, has been found to have a relationship with external procedural justice, however, the majority of research has been conducted using overseas samples. The minority of work …

2022 Data Updates Accompanying Andrea Fenster & Margo Schlanger, Slamming The Courthouse Door: 25 Years Of Evidence For Repealing The Prison Litigation Reform Act, Prison Policy Initiative, Margo Schlanger, German Marquez Alcala

Other Publications

This entry is for underlying data, excel versions, and replication code for tables included in Fenster, Andrea and Margo Schlanger. "Slamming the Courthouse Door: 25 years of evidence for repealing the Prison Litigation Reform Act." Prison Policy Initiative (2021) found at https://repository.law.umich.edu/other/173/

This 2022 data update is supplemented by 2022 BJS Court Orders files and supercedes the 2021 data update found in this repository./

2022 Data Update For Slamming The Courthouse Door Table F: Incidence Of Court Orders, Margo Schlanger, German Marquez Alcala

Other Publications

This dataset encompasses Table F: Incidence of Court Orders, Local Jails and State Prisons, 1983-2006, 2019 and the underlying data, excel versions, and replication code for this table.

This data accompanies:

Fenster, Andrea and Margo Schlanger. "Slamming the Courthouse Door: 25 years of evidence for repealing the Prison Litigation Reform Act." Prison Policy Initiative (2021). https://repository.law.umich.edu/other/173/

Along with the 2022 Data Update Files, this file supersedes the 2021 Data update found in this repository.

White Paper: Effective Communication With Deaf, Hard Of Hearing, Blind, And Low Vision Incarcerated People, Tessa Bialek, Margo Schlanger

Other Publications

Tens of thousands of people incarcerated in jails and prisons throughout the United States have one or more communication disabilities, a term that describes persons who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind, low vision, deaf-blind, speech disabled, or otherwise disabled in ways that affect communication. Incarceration is not easy for anyone, but the isolation and inflexibility of incarceration can be especially challenging, dangerous, and further disabling, for persons with disabilities. Correctional entities must confront these challenges; persons with communication disabilities are overrepresented in jails and prisons and the population continues to grow. Federal antidiscrimination law obligates jails and prisons to …

The Implications Of A Militarized Police Force In The United States, Nhat Dang

Themis: Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic Science

The police model in America is slowly changing. From the early days of America, the police were modeled after the London Metropolitan Police. Over time, this has changed from a civilian police model into a more militaristic one. Police militarization in America can be traced to the implementation of the 1033 program, which granted local law enforcement agencies surplus military equipment such as weapons, surveillance gadgets, and armored vehicles. This research paper examines the effects of increasing police militarization on public perception and public trust of police.

Violence Everywhere: How The Current Spectacle Of Black Suffering, Police Violence, And The Violence Of Judicial Interpretation Undermine The Rule Of Law, David B. Owens

Articles

No abstract provided.

Viral Injustice, Brandon L. Garrett, Lee Kovarsky

Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic blighted all aspects of American life, but people in jails, prisons, and other detention sites experienced singular harm and neglect. Housing vulnerable detainee populations with elevated medical needs, these facilities were ticking time bombs. They were overcrowded, underfunded, unsanitary, insufficiently ventilated, and failed to meet even minimum health-and-safety standards. Every unit of national and sub-national government failed to prevent detainee communities from becoming pandemic epicenters, and judges were no exception.

This Article takes a comprehensive look at the decisional law growing out of COVID-19 detainee litigation and situates the judicial response as part of a comprehensive institutional …

Are Constitutional Rights Enough? An Empirical Assessment Of Racial Bias In Police Stops, Michael Frakes, Rohit Asirvatham

Faculty Scholarship

This Article empirically tests the conventional wisdom that a permissive constitutional standard bearing on pretextual traffic stops—such as the one announced by the Supreme Court in Whren v. United States—contributes to racial disparities in traffic stops. To gain empirical traction on this question, we look to state constitutional law. In particular, we consider a natural experiment afforded by changes in the State of Washington’s rules regarding traffic stops. Following Whren, the Washington Supreme Court first took a more restrictive stance than the U.S. Supreme Court, prohibiting pretextual stops by police officers, but later reversed course and instituted a laxer standard, …

Jail Health And Early Release Practices, Brandon L. Garrett, Deniz Ariturk, Jessica Carda-Auten, David L. Rosen

Faculty Scholarship

Local jails in the United States incarcerate millions of people each year. The COVID-19 pandemic made jail health a pressing public health concern nationally, where releasing individuals from jails occurred across the country in order to prevent pandemic spread. But releases also faced substantial resistance and exposed long-standing challenges in delivering adequate healthcare in jail settings. People in jail have substantially higher levels of medical need than individuals in the general population, with large numbers having serious mental illnesses and substance use disorders. Further, overcrowded conditions and poor healthcare standards and delivery make jails harmful to those already-vulnerable people. What …

How Federalism Built The Fbi, Sustained Local Police, And Left Out The States, Daniel C. Richman, Sarah Seo

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the endurance of police localism amid the improbable growth of the FBI in the early twentieth century when the prospect of a centralized law enforcement agency was anathema to the ideals of American democracy. It argues that doctrinal accounts of federalism do not explain these paradoxical developments. By analyzing how the Bureau made itself indispensable to local police departments rather than encroaching on their turf, the Article elucidates an operational, or collaborative, federalism that not only enlarged the Bureau’s capacity and authority but also strengthened local autonomy at the expense of the states. Collaborative federalism is crucial …

Race In Washington’S Juvenile Legal System: 2021 Report To The Washington Supreme Court, Task Force 2.0 Juvenile Justice Subcommittee

Seattle University Law Review

Part I of this report provides the core work of the subcommittee and is intended to function as a stand-alone document, expressed in youth- friendly language, that sets forth: (1) the youth-articulated goals for systemic change to the juvenile legal system; (2) a narrative of how the system currently works and the harms caused; and (3) the change needed to bring about the youth-articulated goals for systemic change. This document is intended to be a youth-centered blueprint for change—a tool for community advocates, a framework for policy makers, and a call-in to the many institutional actors to center the leadership …