Suchergebnisse

The California prison system, the largest in the country and the most at risk legally, operated at almost 200 percent of rated holding capacity, with more than 160,000 inmates. A special three-judge federal court had found that these conditions, in which suicides, violence, and lack of health care and other social services were endemic, violate the Eighth Amendment's cruel and unusual punishment clause and ordered the state to reduce its prison census by as many as 46,000 inmates, to only 137.5 percent of capacity. In May 2011, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision (Brown v. Plata), affirmed the lower court, upholding what dissenting justices called perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our Nation's history, one based on a judicial travesty. Operating under intense legal, political, and budgetary pressures, policymakers must search desperately for other ways to reduce prison overcrowding until the necessary but politically elusive structural and policy changes can be made. Under these difficult conditions, any policy that promises to reduce overcrowding without undue risk to public safety deserves serious consideration. In what follows, I propose such a policy. Simply stated, the federal government should deport some immigrant criminals before they enter prison, not after. This would seem to be a no-brainer. Adapted from the source document.

THOSE DISTURBED BY THE United States' largest-in-the-world incarceration rate have some new reasons to be cautiously optimistic. President Obama nominated an opponent of the drug war to the Justice Department's highest civil rights position, signaling the possibility that the costly and counterproductive imprisonment of drug users may be coming to an end. Conservatives from Newt Gingrich to Jeb Bush to Rand Paul are advocating for less incarceration and an end to employment discrimination for people with criminal records, hinting that crime panics won't be the campaign fodder they once were. The public is also less concerned with crime. In 1994, 37 percent of respondents listed crime as the most important problem facing the country. In 2014, only 2 percent did. That might be because only half as many people reported being the victim of a violent crime in 2013 as did in 1994. The incarceration rate is also declining (albeit slightly) after 40 years of steep increases. Adapted from the source document.

National Election Study data, 1990-1992, & Uniform Crime Report arrest rates are used to test alternative explanations of the incarceration disparity between blacks & whites & to investigate state-to-state variations. Multivariate regression analysis indicates that such disparity is affected by several factors, including racial disparity in arrest rates & economic well-being. Further, it appears to be ameliorated by black political mobilization in both conventional & unconventional forms. Incarceration disparity between blacks & whites is a complex phenomenon that cannot be explained by one overarching theory, such as inordinate black involvement in crime or racial discrimination in the criminal justice system; an integrated approach using economic, legal, & political aggregates is suggested. 2 Tables, 29 References. Adapted from the source document.

The fate of US blacks, from the time of Jefferson to that of Reagan & Clinton, trapped within four successive 'peculiar institutions', is analyzed under a sociological spotlight. The origins of American racism & its outcomes in today's hyperghetto & prison regimes are examined. Adapted from the source document.

Outlines the future necessity and practicability of the present and emerging alternatives to prison incarceration and their effects on the state's efforts to solve the dilemma of prison overcrowing. Explores potential legal issues that may surface as modern technology becames more intertwined in the criminal justice system. (PAS)