Imprisonment Trends in the Heartland

A draft of my new article, “Mass Incarceration in the Three Midwestern States: Origins and Trends,” is now available on SSRN. Here’s the abstract:

This Article considers how the mass incarceration story has played out over the past forty years in three medium-sized Midwestern states, Indiana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. The three stories are similar in many respects, but notable differences are also apparent. For instance, Minnesota’s imprisonment rate is less than half that of the other two states, while Indiana imprisons more than twice as many drug offenders as either of its peers. The Article seeks to unpack these and other imprisonment trends and to relate them to crime and arrest data over time, focusing particularly on the relative importance of violent crime and drug enforcement as drivers of imprisonment growth.

The article builds on my series of “Tale of Three States” blog posts from about a year ago. It will appear in print later this year in a symposium issue of the Valparaiso Law Review.

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Lessons From Sixteen Years of the PLRA and AEDPA

I have some reflections on the great 1996 prisoner litigation reforms in an essay newly uploaded to SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

In 1996, Congress adopted two sweeping statutes that were intended to restrict the ability of prisoners to obtain redress in federal court for violations of their constitutional rights. This essay introduces an issue of the Federal Sentencing Reporter assessing the legacy of these two laws, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty and Prison Litigation Reform Acts, and considers the extent to which these statutes highlight structural flaws in the way that the political and legal systems engage with prisoner litigation.

The essay, entitled “Not So Sweet: Questions Raised by Sixteen Years of the PLRA and AEDPA,” was published at 24 Fed. Sent. Rep. 223 (2012).

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Habeas Corpus and the Right to Effective Assistance of Counsel

My new article on habeas corpus and the right to effective assistance of counsel is now out: Bypassing Habeas: The Right to Effective Assistance Requires Earlier Supreme Court Intervention in Cases of Attorney Incompetence, 25 Fed. Sent. Rep. 110 (2012).  Here is the abstract:

This article considers the interplay between habeas corpus law and the Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel. Certain peculiarities of federal habeas have given a schizophrenic character to recent Supreme Court decisions on ineffective assistance. At the same time that the Court has displayed a new willingness to extend Sixth Amendment protections to the plea-bargaining arena, the Court has also evinced a particular hostility to ineffective assistance claims arising in habeas. The present article identifies the roots of this schizophrenia in the Court’s 2000 decision in Williams v. Taylor. The Court’s trajectory from Williams to the present suggests that, absent a significant ideological makeover, the Court is unlikely in habeas cases to bring greater vigor and clarity to the right to effective assistance. The Court and advocates pushing the Court to adopt stronger Sixth Amendment protections should thus focus their efforts on cases emerging directly from state-court systems, rather than on collateral post-conviction challenges in federal court.

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