Violent Crime & Recidivism: Symposium Issue Now Available

The threat of violent recidivism looms large in policy debates about sentencing and corrections. Prison populations in Wisconsin and across the United States remain near historic highs. Yet, efforts to bring down those populations often run into the objection that most of the individuals in prison have been convicted of violent crimes. What if these individuals reoffend after release? The stakes seem frighteningly high when we contemplate the possibility of shorter sentences for individuals who have physically harmed others in the most damaging and disturbing ways–shootings, stabbings, sexual assaults, and so forth.

Last summer, Marquette Law School hosted a conference that brought together leading researchers to address the question of whether there might be better alternatives than long-term incapacitation  for responding to the threat of violent recidivism. Those of us in attendance enjoyed a thought-provoking series of presentations and some lively Q&A with audience members. Now, the papers from the conference have been published in a symposium issue of the Marquette Law Review.

Here are the contents:

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SBA Statement in Support of BLM and Against Racial Injustice

Logo of Student Bar AssociationTo Our Peers, Professors, And Administrators:

Marquette University Law School Student Bar Association writes to you today to address the tragedy that we as a community and a country have faced in the last three weeks. Not one of a pandemic, but rather the state-sanctioned murders of Black Americans. Namely, Ahmaud Arbery, Nina Pop, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless others. Their deaths are not novel, and we would be remiss to categorize them as such. Their deaths are the tragic manifestation of a long-standing system of racial oppression that continues to unjustly claim the lives of Black Americans.

We want to be loud and exceptionally clear: SBA believes Black Lives Matter. We are an anti-racist organization, and we condemn every form of racism. We stand in solidarity with the members of the Black Law Student Association, the Black community of Marquette University, and the Black community around the world. 

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Tommy Thompson Told His Daughter to Try Being a Public Defender –and It Launched Her Career

Kelli Thompson admits she wasn’t entirely eager to become a lawyer, particularly the kind involved in courtroom work. As a student at Marquette Law School, “I probably did a very, very good job of staying far, far away from any kind of trial advocacy or litigation type of class. I think my thought was I would get the J.D. behind my name and just do something else. The something else, I have no idea what that was going to be.”

But, she said during an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” program at Eckstein Hall on October 15, 2019, “In my third year of law school, I think it was killing my father that I was not even considering going into a courtroom.”

Her father, by the way, is Tommy G. Thompson, who, at that time in the mid-1990s, was governor of Wisconsin.

Kelli Thompson recalled, “At that point in time, he certainly wasn’t pushy, but he said, ‘Before you decide you hate it (courtroom work), you at least have to try it.’ . . . He said Marquette has wonderful clinical programs.” He told his daughter to pick one. “I said, ‘OK, you pick for me because I don’t know what I want to do’ . . . He said, ‘There’s no doubt, public defender, you should go there.’

So she did. “I can say quite honestly, after my first couple of days, I was hooked,” Kelli Thompson said.

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