Mass Incarceration

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Temin
Keyword(s):  
Jim Crow ◽  
White Men ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Private Prisons ◽  
Mass Imprisonment ◽  
Local Police ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Poor White ◽  
The Government

The United States has a dual justice system; the FTE sector pays fines, and the low-wage sector goes to jail. One out of three black males spends time in prison in a new Jim Crow system. Poor white men are far less likely to be imprisoned, but they still are a majority of prisoners. This dual system is administered by all levels of government, from the Supreme Court to local police and prosecutors. Mass imprisonment destroys social capital in black, brown and white communities alike. Mass imprisonment costs the government large amounts of money that could be used elsewhere. Current policies are complicated by the growth of private prisons and restricted to helping prisoners re-join society.

scholarly journals Freedoms of Expression, Political Extremism and Seditious Speech in the United States Supreme Court’s Jurisprudence Part I

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 7-21
Author(s):  
Łukasz Machaj
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Case Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Constitution ◽  
United States Supreme ◽  
Political Extremism ◽  
Constitutional Protection ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Sedition Act ◽  
The Government

FREEDOMS OF EXPRESSION, POLITICAL EXTREMISM AND SEDITIOUS SPEECH IN THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT’S JURISPRUDENCE PART IThe article is the first part of a monothematic cycle devoted to the case law of the Supreme Court of the United States concerning the scope of constitutional protection of seditious and pol­itically extremist speech under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The author discusses the historical origins of the problem in question, focusing particularly on the decisions and practical application of the so-called Sedition Act of 1798, a regulation which drastically restricted the freedom of public debate by de facto criminalising speech that was critical of the government. Although the normative act in question has never been the subject of the Supreme Court’s rulings, it was unequivocally condemned in the obiter dicta to several statements of reasons behind the Su­preme Court’s opinions and is commonly deemed unconstitutional in the doctrine.

scholarly journals What Can We Expect of Law and Religion in 2020?

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-86
Author(s):  
Leslie C. Griffin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The United States ◽  
Establishment Clause ◽  
Free Exercise ◽  
Free Exercise Clause ◽  
Religious Person ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Government

The United States is in a religion-friendly mood—or at least its three branches of government are. The Supreme Court is turning away from its Free Exercise Clause analysis that currently holds that every religious person must obey the law. At the same time, the Court is rejecting its old Establishment Clause analysis that the government cannot practice or support religion. The old model of separation of church and state is gone, replaced by an ever-growing unity between church and state. This Article examines how much union of church and state this Court might establish.

Constitutional Law in 1920–1921. II: The Constitutional Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the October Term, 1920

1922 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 228-244
Author(s):  
Edward S. Corwin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Search And Seizure ◽  
Evidential Value ◽  
Relevant Evidence ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Constitutional Decisions ◽  
The Government ◽  
Search Warrant ◽  
The Right

The “self-incrimination” clause of the Fifth Amendment was brought forward in five cases, in three of which it was attended by the “search and seizure” provisions of the Fourth Amendment. The most important of these cases was Gouled v. the United States, in which the court was asked to pass upon the admissibility in evidence, first, of a paper obtained surreptitiously by officers of the government from the office of the accused; and secondly, of papers, described to be of “evidential value only,” which were taken from the office of accused under a search warrant. The court, declaring that the constitutional provisions involved must receive “a liberal construction, so as to prevent stealthy encroachment upon ‥‥ the rights secured by them,” held that the government had no right to the possession of any of these papers nor to the use of them as evidence. At the same time, it was held that if the government had had the right to seize the papers in question, for instance, as so much contraband property, and had done so under a warrant sufficient in form, “then it would have been competent to use them to prove any crime against accused as to which they constituted relevant evidence.”

The Practice and Case Law of Israel in Matters Related to International Law

1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 803-853 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rotem M. Giladi
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
International Law ◽  
Case Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
District Court ◽  
Sovereign Immunity ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Civil Suit ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Government

The case of the Canadian ambassador's residence has been the subject of several court decisions at various instances in Israel. These decisions (as well as others relating to the doctrine of sovereign immunity) have been reviewed in former issues of this section. On June 3, 1997, the Supreme Court, in its appellate jurisdiction, gave its judgment in this case and delineated the application of the international law doctrine of sovereign immunity in Israeli law. In a different case decided on the last day of 1996, the Tel-Aviv District Court was required to rule on the applicability of this doctrine to a civil suit brought against the government of the United States of America. This District Court decision now needs to be examined in light of the recent ruling of the Supreme Court in theEdelsoncase.

scholarly journals PIERWSZY BANK STANÓW ZJEDNOCZONYCH JAKO PIERWOWZÓR SYSTEMU REZERWY FEDERALNEJ

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 171
Author(s):  
Wojciech Kwiatkowski
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Federal Reserve ◽  
Financial Stability ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Government ◽  
Banking Institution ◽  
The Right

First Bank of the United States as a Prototype for the Federal Reserve SystemSummaryThe article describes the history of the First Bank of the United Statesfirst banking- institution, that was charted in XVII-th century North America as an effect of a cooperation of two federal bodies – Congress and the President. Although, the federal government possessed only 20 %, of the shares with federal licences it could conduct its activity on territory of the whole country. Moreover – the Bank is now referred to as the first central bank in the United States because of its national scope and services rendered to the federal government. The Bank helped the government to obtain emergency loans, facilitated the payment of taxes, and served as the receiver and disburser of the public funds. In addition, it issued bank notes and made them fully redeemable in coin. During a 20-years period the Bank achieved a commercial success and maintained a financial stability. However, in 1811 Congress did not renew the charter because the Bank’s constitutionality was questioned.Alexander Hamilton (the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury), who was [the followerof creation of the bank, already in 1790 assumed that the federal government had the power to charter banks because the Constitution granted the government the right to establish institutions necessary for its operations. Addifferent viewpoint was presented by Thomas Jefferson who favored a more decentralized government and believed that only the states could charter banks under the Constitution. Furthermore – because the Constitution did not expressly grant the power to Congress, he reasoned that federally chartered banks were unconstitutional. Finally in 1819, as a far-reaching decision, the Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall followed Hamilton’s reasoning and ruled in case McCulloch vs Maryland that the Second Bank of the United States was constitutional. For U.S. federal government this decision of the Supreme Court was very important about 200 years later – in 1913, when president Wilson, many politicians’ and main U.S. bankers decided to create the Federal Reserve System.

Introduction

Free Justice ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Sara Mayeux
Keyword(s):  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Defender ◽  
Criminal Proceedings ◽  
Public Defenders ◽  
The Public ◽  
Indigent Defense ◽  
Private Charity ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The 1960S

Today, thousands of public defenders around the United States represent indigent defendants in criminal proceedings. At a moment of widespread concern about mass incarceration and racial and class inequality, public defenders are seen both as participants in, and adversaries of, the carceral state. The introduction to this book provides an overview of how public defenders became so widespread in American courtrooms. At the turn of the twentieth century, many elite lawyers expressed skepticism about the public defender. They posited that the legal profession should remain independent from the state as much as possible, and that indigent defense was better handled by private charity. They established voluntary defender organizations. But by the 1960s, prevailing views had changed. Many elite lawyers now endorsed the public defender, especially after the Supreme Court decided the landmark case of Gideon v. Wainwright, which expanded the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The book argues that these developments can be explained by shifts in liberalism and how lawyers conceived of the profession’s place within liberal democracy.

Mass Incarceration in the United States: From Punishment to Public Health

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernest Drucker
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
United States ◽  
Social Stigma ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Supervision ◽  
Recidivism Rate ◽  
Mass Imprisonment ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right

Mass imprisonment in the United States is an epidemic that has spread across five generations affecting millions of individuals, their families, and hundreds of communities. The United States imprisons more people than any other nation in the world—with over 2 million behind bars and another 5 to 7 million under community supervision on parole and probation. With 5% of the world’s population, the United States has 25% of all the world’s prisoners. This U.S. system imposes many punitive policies, holding more of its citizens in isolation and solitary confinement than all the other prisons of the world combined and imposing the highest rates of life sentences of any nation. This public health analysis of mass incarceration in the United States (first proposed in Ernest Drucker’s 2011 book, A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America) must therefore also address the high rates of prisoner reentry that accompany it—with over 600,000 U.S. prisoners reentering society each year—with the highest recidivism rate of any nation. This population is disproportionally poor and members of America’s large minority populations (African Americans and Latinos). The public health model provides a new tool for ending the American epidemic of mass imprisonment and, of equal importance, healing those who have survived its blows. This stage of the American story of mass incarceration is covered in Drucker’s 2018 book, Decarcerating America: From Mass Punishment to Public Health. But releasing people from prisons is not enough—the taint of punishment has a long-lasting and debilitating effect on the millions who return from prison to their home communities—facing social stigma and the many restrictions placed upon them as part of the conditions of parole—including limits of their access to public education, healthcare, and housing—as well as convicted felons’ loss of the right to vote. The United States badly needs a paradigm shift that replaces these impediments to successful reentry after prison, creating instead a positive place and normal life for this population in the outside world.

Urban Riots and Rioting in the United States, 1800–2000

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Elkins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
White Men ◽  
The United States ◽  
Group Affiliation ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Urban Conditions ◽  
The 19Th Century

Rioting in the United States since 1800 has adhered to three basic traditions: regulating communal morality, defending community from outside threats, and protesting government abuse of power. Typically, crowds have had the shared interests of class, group affiliation, geography, or a common enemy. Since American popular disorder has frequently served as communal policing, the state—especially municipal police—has had an important role in facilitating, constraining, or motivating unrest. Rioting in the United States retained strong legitimacy and popular resonance from 1800 to the 1960s. In the decades after the founding, Americans adapted English traditions of restrained mobbing to more diverse, urban conditions. During the 19th century, however, rioting became more violent and ambitious as Americans—especially white men—asserted their right to use violence to police heterogeneous public space. In the 1840s and 1850s, whites combined the lynch mob with the disorderly crowd to create a lethal and effective instrument of white settler sovereignty both in the western territories and in the states. From the 1860s to the 1930s, white communities across the country, particularly in the South, used racial killings and pogroms to seize political power and establish and enforce Jim Crow segregation. Between the 1910s and the 1970s, African Americans and Latinos, increasingly living in cities, rioted to defend their communities against civilian and police violence. The frequency of rioting declined after the urban rebellions of the 1960s, partly due to the militarization of local police. Yet the continued use of aggressive police tactics against racial minorities has contributed to a surge in rioting in US cities in the early 21st century.

scholarly journals Interrupting Intergenerational Offending in the Context of America’s Social Disaster of Mass Imprisonment

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (11) ◽  
pp. 1545-1561 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael E. Roettger ◽  
Susan Dennison
Keyword(s):  
Antisocial Behavior ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Peer Groups ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Life Course Perspective ◽  
Stress Exposure ◽  
Mass Imprisonment ◽  
Social Disaster ◽  
Exposure To Trauma

Paralleling the growth of the U.S. criminal justice system in recent decades, American families have increasingly experienced a social disaster of parents, and subsequently their children, undergoing imprisonment. Adopting a life course perspective to examine the likely drivers of the intergenerational transmission of offending and incarceration, we contextualize the development of antisocial behavior in an era of mass imprisonment. In doing so, we draw from the literature on the sociology of disasters to examine how traumas related to intergenerational incarceration may be both understood and ameliorated through appropriate policies and interventions. We argue that it is possible to better frame how risk factors for antisocial behavior, such as prenatal maternal stress, exposure to trauma, and deviant peer groups, may be integrated with factors that promote resilience and recovery. This includes improving safety, self-efficacy, and connectedness to prevent intergenerational offending and incarceration and facilitate desistance. By framing mass incarceration as a social disaster, a multifaceted, comprehensive approach takes on new urgency so as to reduce the prevalence of intergenerational offending and incarceration among millions of families in the United States.

Constitutional Law in 1930–31: The Constitutional Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the October Term, 1930

1932 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 256-284
Author(s):  
Robert E. Cushman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Federal Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
District Court ◽  
Constitutional Change ◽  
The People ◽  
William Clark ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Eighteenth Amendment ◽  
The Government

In November, 1930, Judge William Clark of the United States district court in New Jersey achieved nation-wide notoriety by a decision holding that the Eighteenth Amendment was not properly ratified and is therefore not a part of the Constitution. A prosecution had been brought against one Sprague, under an indictment charging unlawful transportation and possession of liquor in violation of the Volstead Act. This indictment Judge Clark quashed on the ground that the Eighteenth Amendment upon which the Volstead Act rests should have been ratified by conventions called for that purpose in three-fourths of the states, rather than by the legislatures of those states. This conclusion he supported by a long argument emphasizing the fundamental character of the constitutional change effected and the importance and necessity of having such a change accomplished by the agency of representatives elected by the people of the several states for that specific purpose. An appeal from Judge Clark's decision was at once taken by the government under the provisions of the Criminal Appeals Act of 1907. In fact, it was to meet just such situations as this that the act of 1907 was passed; for without the possibility of such appeal a decision of a lower federal court adverse to the constitutionality of a federal criminal statute might be final within the district concerned. No question of double jeopardy is raised by this procedure, since the accused is not placed in jeopardy until the trial jury is sworn and the quashing of the indictment occurs long before that point is reached.

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