criminal justice

• 
• SOURCE: The Nation
  12/14/2020
  

  Unequal Before the Law

  Sara Mayeux's history of public defenders shows how the liberal reform movement that established a system to provide counsel to the poor buttressed the systemic slant of the justice system against them. 

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  12/11/2020
  

  Biden Made Big Promises On Juvenile Justice. Activists Worry It's Not Enough

  Historian David Stein argues that social movements can't expect the Biden administration to voluntarily commit to deep reforms of juvenile justice systems; they must organize and exert pressure to force those changes. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Hill
  12/2/2020
  

  Democrats Introduce Legislation to Strike Slavery Exception in 13th Amendment

  The proposal would eliminate a loophole written into the 13th Amendment that allows involuntary servitude to be imposed on persons convicted of a crime. Some recent scholars have argued that this exemption is a foundation of the current system of mass incarceration. 

• 
• SOURCE: Made by History at The Washington Post
  10/21/2020
  

  Disenfranchisement in Jails Weakens our Democracy

  by Charlotte Rosen

  Because the pretrial population is disproportionately non-White, this kind of “de facto disenfranchisement” constitutes an abhorrent form of racist voter suppression, despite rarely gaining the headlines and outrage that long voting lines do. 

• 
• SOURCE: The City
  10/20/2020
  

  Unions Seize on Ex-Cop’s Academic Flap in Push to Keep NYPD Misconduct Records Secret

  St. John’s University students posted adjunct professor Richard Taylor’s police complaint history after what they called a racist lesson. The school suspended him — fueling cops’ latest argument for keeping their records under wrap.

• 
• SOURCE: Places Journal
  10/15/2020
  

  “Nothing Stirred in the Air”

  by Stephen Dillon

  The architecture of the "supermax" prison targets the senses and emotions of the incarcerated as a means of control in the wake of political organizing inside and outside of prisons in the 1960s and 1970s. 

• 
• SOURCE: Racist Roots: Origins of North Carolina's Death Penalty
  10/5/2020
  

  “The Death Penalty Is Another Confederate Monument We Must Tear Down.”

  A collaborative project examines the history of capital punishment in North Carolina, beginning with an introduction by death penalty litigator Henderson Hill. 

• 
• SOURCE: JSTOR Daily
  9/28/2020
  

  How Mass Incarceration Has Shaped History

  Political forces pushing for mass incarceration have been closely connected to those restricting the power of labor and pressing to keep wages low. 

• 
• SOURCE: Nursing Clio
  8/6/2020
  

  News From the Dead

  by Eileen Sperry

  The experiences of convicted women who were "resurrected" after being unsuccessfully hanged illuminate the precarious legal and social standing of women in early modern England. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New York Times
  6/17/2020
  

  The Rape Kit’s Secret History

  This is the story of the woman who forced the police to start treating sexual assault like a crime.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  6/17/2020
  

  Bail Funds are Having a Moment in 2020

  by Melanie Newport

  Activists have supported protestors by contributing to bail funds, but it's time to follow through on the longstanding call of social movement leaders to abolish cash bail as a symbol and symptom of unequal justice.

• 
• 6/7/2020
  

  Interconnected Histories of Race, Violence, and Policing in America

  by Michael J. Pfeifer

  A historian of criminal justice contends that two conceptual boundaries--between North and South and between lynching and police force--help conceal the racist violence in the American system of justice.

• 
• SOURCE: Jacobin
  4/16/2020
  

  “Prisons Are Microcosms of the Broader Society”: An Interview with Heather Ann Thompson

  "The COVID-19 outbreak is essentially a reaping of what we’ve sown with mass incarceration, from a public health perspective."

• 
• 9/3/19
  

  Thou Shalt Not Ration Justice

  by Pamela Metzger and Andrew Davies

  The Norman Lefstein legacy: passionate, tireless efforts for indigent defense reform.

• 
• SOURCE: Diverse Education
  8/23/19
  

  Historian Carl Suddler's New Book Probes Black Youth, Criminal Justice

  Dr. Carl Suddler, an assistant professor of history at Emory University, puts the intersection of race, gender, youth and incarceration under a searing spotlight in his new book, Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York.

• 
• SOURCE: Vox
  6/20/19
  

  The controversial 1994 crime law that Joe Biden helped write, explained

  The 1994 “tough on crime” law remains a big topic of debate in 2020 Democratic debates. Here’s what you need to know.

• 
• SOURCE: Salon
  1/3/19
  

  Criminal justice reform in the U.S. has a long history of repressive outcomes

  by Tony Platt

  A decade from now under the First Step Act, expect that incarceration will be not so much reduced as diversified.

• SOURCE: National Review
  7-9-13
  

  Victor Davis Hanson: Revolutionary Tribunals

  NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is The Savior Generals, published this spring by Bloomsbury Books. In ancient Athens, popular courts of paid jurors helped institutionalize fairness. If a troublemaker like Socrates was thought to be a danger to the popular will, then he was put on trial for inane charges like “corrupting the youth” or “introducing new gods.”Convicting gadflies would remind all Athenians of the dangers of questioning democratic majority sentiment. If Athenian families were angry that their sons had supposedly died unnecessarily in battle, then they might charge the generals with capital negligence — a warning to all commanders to watch their backs. As in the case of Socrates, a majority vote often led to conviction, and conviction to a death sentence, or at least ostracism or exile. The popular courts freelanced to ensure that “the people” would hold sway over the perceived powerful and elite.