Nancy King to Speak at Marquette on Punishment for Repeat Offenders

kingI’m looking forward to this year’s Barrock Lecture on Criminal Law, which will be delivered by Professor Nancy King of Vanderbilt Law School on November 18.  King has long been one of my favorite writers on criminal procedure and sentencing.  Whatever the topic, she can always be counted on to bring a refreshingly commonsensical perspective to bear.

King’s Lecture will focus on the sentencing of recidivists.  Here’s the description:

Courts and legislatures today routinely authorize punishment for repeat offenders that is far more severe than the punishment assigned those convicted for the first time. This reliance upon criminal history when setting sentences has a surprisingly fascinating history. It also has an uncertain future. Recent constitutional rulings may threaten established procedures for assessing sentences for prior offenders; researchers continue to question the relationship between criminal history and either culpability or future dangerousness; and commentators disagree whether using criminal history to calibrate punishment entrenches racial disparity in sentencing or, rather, helps to avoid it. Professor King will address these and related issues as she discusses the ongoing challenge of punishing recidivists in the 21st century.

The Lecture, which is open to the public, will start at 4:30 in Eckstein Hall.  Registration information and other details are available here.

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Nationally, Police Get Good Marks From Citizens; Locally, We’ll Soon Find Out

Police_vehicle_from_Manchester_(New_Hampshire)_02Last week, the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission announced that it would conduct its first survey of citizen satisfaction with the police.  The results should provide us with helpful new ways to evaluate the Milwaukee Police Department’s performance and identify areas in need of improvement.

Unfortunately, media coverage provides a very distorted picture of police-citizen interactions.  What makes the news, of course, are the incidents in which officers become violent or exhibit extreme callousness.  When video is available of such incidents, as is increasingly common, the disturbing images may be repeated endlessly on TV or circulate virally on social media.  Viewers may be left with the impression that such incidents are the norm.  However, the vast majority of police-citizen interactions occur without anything newsworthy happening.  Among other things, the Fire and Police Commission’s new survey should give us a much better sense of what happens in the more routine interactions and how those interactions affect public perceptions of the police.

Although data of this sort have not been available for Milwaukee specifically, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics did sponsor a national survey in 2011 regarding police-citizens interactions.  The results, released in two reports earlier this fall, indicate a remarkably high level of citizen satisfaction, even among the minority groups who seem to bear the brunt of the high-profile incidents of police misconduct.  

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Thoughts on the Holder Address: Two Cheers for the New Paradigm

In August, Attorney General Eric Holder delivered a widely noted address to the American Bar Association that seemed to promise significant changes in federal prosecutorial policies.  I wrote these reactions for the Federal Sentencing Reporter.

Following decades in which the U.S. Department of Justice has consistently advocated for a rigid and harsh legalism in criminal justice policy—in which DOJ, in the name of abstract principles of national uniformity, has willfully disregarded the devastating impact of its charging, plea-bargaining, and sentencing practices on real-life human beings—Attorney General Holder’s ABA address seems a breath of fresh air. He calls for a more flexible federal criminal justice system, in which prosecutorial charging priorities are more specifically tailored to meet local needs, in which sentencing is more individualized to the offender and prosecutors sometimes forego mandatory minimum sentences, and in which individual U.S. Attorney Offices experiment with new diversion programs as an alternative to conventional case-processing. Holder believes—correctly, I think—that a more flexible and pragmatic system can achieve better public-safety results at less cost than a system in which preserving the integrity of the federal sentencing guidelines is the overriding value.

Through Holder’s address, DOJ offers its most prominent and unequivocal endorsement yet of an emerging new criminal justice paradigm.  

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