October Conference to Consider the History, Legacy of America’s First Crime Commission

Along with my colleagues Dan Blinka, Dean Strang, and Gordon Hylton, I’ve been organizing a conference at Marquette Law School on the Wickersham Commission, America’s first national crime commission. Appointed by President Hoover (left) and including many legal luminaries of the day, the Wickersham Commission produced an extraordinary series of reports in 1931 that examined in great detail the causes of crime and the operation of the American criminal-justice system. Perhaps best remembered for the critical light it cast on extreme police interrogation tactics, the Commission’s work might also be thought of as the coming-of-age of American criminology, as a progenitor of the contemporary “evidence-based decision making” movement, and as a centerpiece of the first presidential effort to craft a comprehensive federal crime-control policy.

The conference will kick off at 4:30 on October 4 with a keynote address by one of my favorite authors on crime policy, Professor Frank Zimring of Berkeley. Registration information for the keynote is here.

The conference will continue with a series of panels beginning at 8:30 a.m. on October 5. Speakers will include distinguished historians, law professors, and criminologists.  CLE credits will be applied for. Additional details and registration information are available here.

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Who Is a “Supervisor”? We Know One When We See One

Justice Potter Stewart famously eschewed a formal legal definition of pornography, and instead embraced the “I know it when I see it” test. Based on his opinion yesterday in United States v. Figueroa (No. 11-2594), Judge Posner seems to have a similar approach in mind for determining whether a drug trafficker is a “manager” or “supervisor.”

Under § 3B1.1 of the federal sentencing guidelines, a manager or supervisor of criminal activity receives a substantial sentence enhancement. An even larger enhancement is contemplated for some defendants who qualify as a “leader” or “organizer.” The guidelines suggest a seven-factor test for determining whether a defendant is a leader or organizer, but are silent on the meaning of manager and supervisor. However, in the Seventh Circuit and elsewhere, it has been common for courts also to look to the seven factors when making manager/supervisor determinations.

Writing for the panel in Figueroa, Judge Posner seemed to scoff at this approach: 

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Florence v. Board: With Proactive Policing at Issue, Supreme Court Backs Discretion

I’ve been working through my backlog of reading from the academic year, including the Supreme Court’s April decision in Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of County of Burlington. This is the decision in which the Court upheld the use of routine, suspicionless strip searches of individuals arrested and jailed for minor offenses.

It strikes me that part of what was really at issue in the case went unmentioned by both the majority and the dissent. The case is framed on both sides as being about corrections administration, but it is perhaps just as much about policing – how much discretion are we going to give police to detain citizens and impose on them the humiliation, stigma, and danger of incarceration with a general jail population. This discretion seems a powerful tool in support of proactive, crime-preventive policing, but it is also prone to abuse and seems hard to reconcile with ideals like checks and balances and “innocent until proven guilty.”

Writing for the Florence majority, Justice Kennedy presented the case as a conventional prisoner rights case. 

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