Tracey Meares to Deliver First Barrock Lecture on Criminal Law

Professor Tracey Meares of Yale Law School will be here on Thursday to deliver the first annual George and Margaret Barrock Lecture on Criminal Law.  Tracey is one of my favorite authors on criminal justice issues, and I am looking forward to hearing what she has to say on a topic that should be of particular interest in Milwaukee: “The Legitimacy of Police Among Young African-American Men.”

Tracey has coauthored a number of publications with her Yale colleague Dan Kahan, who spent a couple days here in the fall as our Boden Lecturer.  In connection with Dan’s visit, I commented here on one of the seminal Meares-Kahan articles.  I expect that Tracey’s talk on Thursday will touch on some of the same themes that were raised in Dan’s exchange with Mike Gousha and Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm in October (webcast here).

In addition to the short-term prospect of Tracey’s visit, I am also delighted to know that the Barrock Lecture will provide many future opportunities for us to bring other criminal law luminaries to Marquette.  The lectureship was established through a generous gift from the estate of Mary Barrock Bonfield to honor her parents.  Her father, George, was a Marquette lawyer, Class of 1931.

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The Future of Milwaukee Public Schools

We are entering what may prove to be a remarkably rich and productive period of public conversation regarding the future of Milwaukee Public Schools.  As reported by Alan Borsuk in this morning’s Journal Sentinel, the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance just released a study that documents extraordinarily high costs in MPS, particularly with respect to employee benefits.  But, as Borsuk observes, this is just the first in “what is likely to be a parade of major developments and studies that may reshape the future of MPS.”

Next up is a report by the Public Policy Forum on school system governance issues, which will be the subject of a panel discussion at the Law School on Monday evening at 7:00.  Moderated by our own Mike Gousha, the panel will include many of the leading figures in local government and education, including:

  • William G. Andrekopoulos, superintendent, Milwaukee Public Schools
  • Dr. Howard Fuller, director, Institute for the Transformation of Learning, Marquette University
  • Alderman Willie L. Hines, Jr., president, City of Milwaukee Common Council
  • Jennifer Morales, director, District 5, Milwaukee Public Schools
  • Dennis Oulahan, president, Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association
  • Tim Sheehy, president, Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce
  • Rep. Annette Polly Williams, 10th Assembly District, Wisconsin State Assembly

More information about this public event is here.

It is hard to think of any more important long-term challenge facing our community than improving the financial health and academic performance of MPS.  Let’s hope that the emerging public conversation at Marquette and elsewhere will contribute to thoughtful, well-informed change.

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Community Justice in Wisconsin

I am looking forward to the Law School’s 2009 Public Service Conference, which will address “The Future of Community Justice in Wisconsin.”  Organized by our Assistant Dean for Public Service, Dan Idzikowski, the Conference will take place on Friday, February 20.  Dan has supplied the following post to explain the significance of “community justice” and why it is such an important topic today, particularly for anyone interested in the fairness and effectiveness of the criminal justice system:

Community justice councils, or criminal justice coordinating councils, have been established in several communities across Wisconsin. These councils bring together key local decision-makers to address the coordination, cost, and effectiveness of the criminal justice system in their area. Milwaukee County, which has the State’s largest concentration of offenders and criminal justice resources, recently established its own Community Justice Council. Remarkably, this council has brought together leadership across the political spectrum to address crime and corrections in the Milwaukee area. The Marquette Law School Public Service conference is designed to support this collaboration and bring together criminal justice experts to lend their counsel to these efforts. For example, Jeremy Travis, the keynote speaker, is the President of the preeminent John Jay School of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, the former director of the National Institute of Justice at the U.S. Justice Department, and the author of several books and studies on community corrections and reentry issues.

Why is community justice a critical public issue at this time? The past two decades have seen an explosion in Wisconsin’s prison and jail populations. Since 1990 over a dozen new state-operated correctional facilities were brought on line, and existing institutions were expanded. The cost of providing corrections services in Wisconsin grew from $178.4 million in 1990, to $583.4 million in 2000, to $1.2 billion in the current biennium.

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