Annotated Bibliography One: Incarceration Is At An All Time High
Bibliography:
Fitzgerald, J., & Vance, S. E. (2015). How Today's Prison Crisis is Shaping Tomorrow's Federal Criminal Justice System. Federal Probation, 79(2), 24-28.
Summary:
The authors discuss both proposed and recently introduced initiatives by the Sentencing Commission and the legislative and executive branches of the federal government that will likely drive workload up in the federal probation and pretrial services system by authorizing early release to supervision for several categories of federal offenders in custody. The BOP (Federal Bureau of Prisons), as of December 2014, is filled 28% past its capacity of inmates. This raised eyes and brought attention to the issue from all branches of the government. It was suggested to policy makers that they should look at options such as 1) Modifying mandatory minimum penalties 2) expanding the use of Residential Reentry Centers 3) placing more offenders on probation 4) reinstating parole for federal inmates 5) expanding the amount of good time credit an inmate can earn and finally 6) repealing federal criminal statutes for some offenses. The article goes on to explain what each of the four branches does I great detail and what it would mean to actually pass legislation.
Potential Quotes:
To begin my capstone, I located a major issue that I personally have heard about in the news. This issue was the mass number of incarcerated citizens in the United States. This number may be due to the fact that a large percentage of citizens are wrongfully convicted or sentenced to the max sentence for minuscule crimes. This article took statistics from the United States government and offered solutions to this issue. Since this article is purely statistics, it doesn't discuss the issue of wrongfully convicted felons that may be due to race. This a topic I will discuss further in my research throughout the year. The quotes I will write with are as follows:
-“As of December 2014, the BOP housed 214,149 inmates, which is roughly 28 percent over its rated capacity.”
-“…the Congressional Research Service prepared a report that noted the ‘historically unprecedented increase in the federal prison population’ since the 1980s that has ‘made it increasingly more expensive to operate and maintain a federal prison system.’”
In order for my project to be as unbiased as possible, I must utilize as many statistic from trustworthy sources as possible. These quotes were obtained from the Congressional Research Service, a committee that works for our Government and obtains statistics that relate to the entire United States.
Assessment:
John Fitzgerald’s article is featured on the United States Court’s official website as a credible source on the topic at hand. Fitzgerald utilizes a wealth of knowledge when it comes to knowing the process to pass legislation and what has been tried in the court systems. The statistics Fitzgerald utilizes comes from the United States Congressional Research Service, a trustworthy source. This lengthy article develops statistics in extensive detail while explaining the issue with high incarceration rates and how we may be able to solve this issue by implementing new systems to lower the rates of prisoners.
Reflection:
My overall question for the capstone will have to do with the ‘fall of the criminal justice system’. I have been doing my own research by reading books and witnessing it first hand at my internship. This article is just another source that will help me answer my question at the end of the year. When gathering information to present to the school board I need to be weary of where it comes from and if the source is credible. I also need to look at trends in the last 60 years for our prison systems so I need to go to a library and start digging to find anything that will aid me in my discover. For my bibliographies, I will write one on the issues with our criminal justice system, where we can trace the origins of how our system broke, and a real proposal on how to solve the issues in our criminal justice system.
Annotated Bibliography Two: The Point in History in Which Our Criminal Justice System Broke
Bibliography:
Stuntz, William J. The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Belknap Press, 2011.
Summary:
The rule of law has vanished in America’s criminal justice system. Prosecutors nowadays decide whom they wish to punish and how severely their punishments are. Jury trials are on the decline. Inconsistent policing, rampant plea bargaining, overcrowded courtrooms, and even more unnecessary sentencing have produced a gigantic prison population, with black citizens the primary victims to this mistreatment.
Potential Quotes:
Fearing the loss of the justice system as he knew it, Stuntz wrote The Collapse of American Criminal Justice in which he takes readers deep into the dramatic history of American crime. Digging into these crimes and the strategies that attempted to control them, Stuntz reveals what will happen if we abandon local democratic control. The system has become more centralized, with state legislators and federal judges increasing their powers. The liberal Warren Supreme Court’s emphasis on procedures, not equity, joined hands with conservative insistence on severe punishment to create a system that is both harsh and ineffective. Stuntz believed that even though Earl Warren, as a supreme court judge, targeted civil rights “Warren’s court increased the gap between rich and poor defendants—and, given the racial distribution of poverty in midcentury American, between black and white defendants as well.” (218). This is where Stuntz makes the connection that people first see the criminal justice’s systems wrong doings.
Assessment:
The Collapse of American Criminal Jusitce is credible as Shultz has his own experience first-hand as a law professor, at Harvard University, who devoted his career to ending the scourge of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system before his early death at fifty-two. Granted, this novel also is based on one-person’s perspective, Stuntz handles it by adding in supporting facts from historical statistics that are from sources such as the constitution and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. At the end of the novel, Stuntz has eighty pages that further explain where he gained his knowledge from when discusses a source.
Reflection:
The intriguing thing about this novel is that almost every chapter has quotes in the front of them ranging from famous politicians to ordinary people talking about the topic of that chapter. At the beginning of chapter 4 where Stuntz discusses the failed promise of the fourteenth amendment Stuntz quotes the fourteenth amendment “No state shall…deny to any person the equal protection of the laws.” This quote has an underlying tone throughout the entire novel because later on in the novel Stuntz pinpoints what exactly caused this amendment to be a failed promise to every person in the United States. The point of the amendment was to undo the Black Codes that were created after the thirteenth amendment was passed, which freed slaves. The hope was to put African Americans back into a form of slavery by making them indentured servants. Thankfully, the first civil rights act of 1866 which did overturn the Black Codes. This was only the beginning of the fight for freedom. Along with the laws, there was still backlash from citizens who viewed African Americans were inferior to the Caucasian race. The laws for rights were enacted but they were fairly enforced all over the United States. Throughout the entire novel, Stuntz successfully brings back every claim he makes to a historical moment and backs them with statistics during that time.
Annotated Bibliography Three: Into Scholars Eyes On How to Fix a Broken System
Bibliography:
Leipold, Andrew D. “What’s Wrong with the Criminal Justice System and How We Can Fix It.” What’s Wrong with the Criminal Justice System and How We Can Fix It.
Summary:
With change on everyone’s mind, our criminal justice system has man faults such as how cases seen in court are often processed quick, too little time and attention for a judge to spend on each matter. This has increased the number of lawyers using negotiation and settlement rather than practicing in a real court of law which leads to putting away citizens for minor crimes or getting off guilty citizens whose crimes deserve jail time. Police do a lot of investigating but without much supervision which leaves room for abuse of power or lack of abilities to perform in important cases. The statistics for offenders who need counsel given to them by the state has been increasing significantly since the 1960s in a system that has little budget for attorneys giving defendants inadequate counsel. The final issue the United States has seen rise is the fact that not all racial, social, or ethnic groups are getting treated equally under the law. In Andrew D. Leipold article, he invites other scholars to share ideas in the article that will “propose a reform of the criminal system that would both attack a specific problem and could be implemented without huge cost, without spending an unrealistic amount of political capital, and without changing the composition of the entire Supreme Court” (Leipold 2).
Potential Quotes:
During my research, the most prominent issue I could find in almost every case is wrongful convictions and I’m not the only one who agrees, Professors George Thomas and Sandra Thompson at the University of Illinois state that “What we know for certain is that the results in an individual case of wrongful conviction are catastrophic, and the result of many such convictions for society as a whole is worse. The criminal system as currently constructed simply cannot endure with a huge number of innocent people sitting behind prison walls” (Leipold 3). This quote will help in my presentation as it aids me with professionals who also see this issue as one of the biggest, if not the biggest, issues the United States faces with criminal justice. Now that the problem is pinpointed, their solution entails “that these difficulties endure, not because we lack workable alternatives to current eyewitness practices, but because we lack the will to implement them. Current practice permits the police to conduct the eyewitness identification without any real oversight, a process, Thomas argues, that is fraught with unnecessary risk. Among other things, he proposes that the identification procedures be carried out under judicial oversight, a move that in a single step could alleviate a huge number of concerns about the reliability of the process” (Leipold 3-4). “Improving the mechanics of eyewitness identification is one of Thomas’s two ‘windows into innocence.’ A second reform, he says—one that would also help weed out unreliable identifications—is to broaden the “shamefully narrow” discovery that is permitted to criminal defendants. Giving a defendant greater access to the prosecutor’s case, beginning with the right simply to learn the names of the government’s witnesses, would go a long way to uncovering biased and mistaken witnesses” (Leipold 4).
Assessment:
Andrew D. Leipold is a credible source due to the fact that he is an American lawyer, focusing in criminal law, criminal procedure and juries and jury behavior, currently the Edwin M. Adams Professor of Law at University of Illinois and formerly the Editor-in-Chief of Virginia Law Review. Mr. Leipold is one of many who have witnessed the wrongdoings of our system first-hand and gathered some of his trusted colleagues to write an article in which they put together their thoughts to each propose an issue they have extensive knowledge on and to offer a reform that can work under a budget.
Reflection:
This source was extremely helpful in my research as it provided me with a plethora of issues and handed me some propose reform that I can offer up in my presentation to the Board of Education. By starting small and singling out the issues one by one, we can implement change that over time will help reshape our criminal justice system into one that is less full of flaws.