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Conversations about police reform in lawmaking and legal scholarship typically take a narrow view of the multiple, complex roles that policing plays in American society, focusing primarily on their techniques of crime control. This Article breaks from that tendency, engaging police reform from a sociological perspective that focuses instead on the noncriminal functions of policing. In particular, it examines the role of policing in the daily maintenance of racial residential segregation, one of the central strategies of American racial inequality. Unlike previous work that touches on these issues, this Article argues that police reformers and police leaders should adopt an anti-segregation approach to policing. It also offers legal frameworks and policy prescriptions that flow from an anti-segregation ethic in police governance.

This Article begins by setting forth a rich account of residential segregation, clarifying the distinction between easily measurable proxies for segregation and the type of segregation with which law and policy should be concerned: the spatial separation that confines, subordinates, and dominates. It then identifies and illustrates six mechanisms through which American policing perpetuates residential segregation, drawing from sociological research, including qualitative narratives collected in Dallas County, Texas; Cuyahoga County, Ohio; and Baltimore, Maryland. Next, the Article sketches the architecture of anti-segregation policing, offering legal frameworks based on fair housing law and federal and state consent decrees, as well as a non-exhaustive set of practical approaches police departments could take to advance an anti-segregation agenda. Finally, the Article engages a fundamental question central to police transformation movements today: Is meaningful police reform, including anti-segregation policing, possible in a society that is structured through race?

There is emerging consensus that various components of the criminal legal system have gone too far in capturing and punishing masses of Black men, women, and children. This evolving recognition has helped propel important and pathbreaking criminal legal reforms in recent years, with significant bipartisan support. These reforms have targeted the criminal legal system itself. They strive to address the pain inflicted by the system. However, by concerning themselves solely with the criminal legal system, these reforms do not confront the reality that Black men, women, and children will continue to be devastatingly overrepresented in each stitch of the system. As a result, these reforms do not reach deeply enough. They do not address or confront the reality that simply being Black has been and will continue to be criminalized.

This Article asserts that measures beyond these reforms—measures that reach the root of racial criminalization—are necessary for true criminal legal system transformation.

 

All punishment comes to an end. Most periods of imprisonment are term limited, and ninety-five percent of prisoners will eventually leave prison. Though it is tempting to think of the “end” in concrete, factual terms—for example, as the moment when the prisoner is released—this concept also has normative dimensions. Core to the notion of term-limited imprisonment is the “principle of return”: the idea that, when the prisoner has completed his or her time, that person is entitled to return to society. Yet, for the principle of return to be meaningful, it must include the idea of a fair chance of reestablishing oneself in the community. The “practices of incarceration”—including the prison environment and prison programs—are thus critically important because they can either facilitate or impede a prisoner’s reentry into society. However, apart from the question of whether conditions of confinement are cruel and unusual as defined by the Eighth Amendment, these practices of incarceration have largely avoided scholarly scrutiny. 

This Article uses the case study of higher education programs in prison to expose the interdependence between the practices of incarceration and the principle of return. Drawing on original interviews with key stakeholders, it investigates how the features of higher education programs reflect and reinforce core beliefs about the goals of punishment and the state’s responsibility towards those it incarcerates. The Article critically examines the dominant harm-prevention justification for prison higher education, and the desert-based objection to it, finding that both are inadequate for failing to take into account the principle of return. 

This Article espouses an alternative approach that would recognize the ongoing relationship between prisoner and polity and devise incarceration practices accordingly. Building on insights from communitarian theory, this approach, which foregrounds the prisoner’s status in the polity, uncovers pervasive “us-versus-them” narratives in the prison context. The first such narrative is between prisoners and those members of the polity who view prisoners, falsely, as having forfeited their claims to membership in civil society. This view of prisoners, as members of a permanent and lower caste, is in direct conflict with the principle of return, which mandates that prisoners have at least a plausible hope of basic reintegration into society and that they avoid further harm—what might be termed “punishment-plus.” The Article also scrutinizes a second, more localized “us-versus-them” narrative between prisoners and correctional officers, which arises from their similar backgrounds and the common deprivation experienced by members of both groups. 

Finally, the Article recommends institutional design changes to mitigate “us-versus- them” dynamics: empowering stakeholders, for example, by affording correctional officers educational opportunities that would help professionalize their role and ease their resentment towards prisoners; and increasing exposure and empathy between incarcerated and non-incarcerated populations, such as by piloting a program that would employ recent college graduates to teach in prison. These and other proposed reforms would refocus the conversation around imprisonment to account for the central role of incarceration practices in revitalizing the principle of return, as well as the inextricable connection between prisoner and polity. 

Judging from present-day legal and popular discourse, one might think that the Punishment Clause of the Thirteenth Amendment has always had one single, clear meaning: that a criminal conviction strips the offender of protection against slavery or involuntary servitude. Upon examination, however, it appears that the Amendment’s Republican framers took an entirely different view. It was the former slave masters and their Democratic allies in Congress who promoted the interpretation that prevails today. From their point of view, the text clearly specified that, once convicted of a crime, a person could be sold into slavery for life or leased for a term at the discretion of state legislatures and officials. But contemporary Republicans emphatically rejected that reading. They held that convicted persons retained protection against any servitude that was inflicted not as a punishment for crime but for some non-penological end, such as raising state revenue, generating private profits, or subjugating black labor. Within a few months of the Amendment’s ratification, the Republican majority in the Thirty-Ninth Congress had outlawed the early, race-based forms of convict leasing. When that proved insufficient, the House passed a bill outlawing race-neutral convict leasing, which the Senate postponed when the focus of Republican strategy shifted to black voting rights. 

The Republican reading faded from view after the Democratic Party regained control of the Deep South. For several decades, white supremacist regimes incarcerated African-American laborers en masse and leased them to private employers without facing a serious Thirteenth Amendment challenge. Present-day scholars sometimes treat this silence as evidence that the Amendment authorizes such practices. Courts similarly honor the Democratic reading on the assumption it has always prevailed. So thoroughly has it triumphed that even prisoners’ rights advocates accept it as constitutional truth. 

Neither courts nor advocates have, however, taken into account the framers’ views. Their interpretation sank from sight not because it was wrong but because Democratic paramilitaries terminated Reconstruction, freeing states to expand convict leasing and insulate it against challenges, constitutional or otherwise. Had the Republican reading been enforced during the era of convict leasing, it might have prevented one of the most barbaric and shameful episodes in United States history. And perhaps, if revived today, it might yet accomplish similar results. Nothing in the text, original meaning, or Supreme Court jurisprudence of the Punishment Clause blocks that path. 

There is an ongoing movement to democratize the criminal justice system. Providing more avenues for layperson participation, “democratizers” believe, will result in a more egalitarian system. But how to incorporate the public is an ongoing and complicated question. This Note takes a first step in disentangling important differences within the democratization movement. In doing so, it defines for the first time a sub-group of democratizers, which it terms the “localizers.” Analyzing this distinct strand of democratization serves two valuable functions. First, because democratization and localization reforms have often been lumped together, critics of the movement to democratize the criminal justice system have overlooked the unique problems that localizers’ reforms raise. This Note fills a substantial gap in the extant scholarship by providing tools for scholars to evaluate and critique some of the distinct concerns of localization. Second, and perhaps more importantly, this Note serves as a practical road map for localizers by raising questions that they must consider before advancing their reforms, many of which could, if effectuated correctly, immensely improve the current state of the criminal justice system. 

This Note argues that policy proposals mandating law enforcement involvement in campus sexual assault cases are harmful to survivors of sexual assault and are inconsistent with Title IX. Title IX’s gender-equality goals require schools to address sexual assault as a civil rights issue, with a focus on its impact on survivors’ continued access to education. Mandatory police involvement proposals will frustrate that goal. These proposals take a criminal law view rather than a civil rights approach, and in doing so, import obstacles that survivors have long faced in the criminal system into the campus process. What is more, these proposals will have the effect of making it more difficult for survivors, particularly those from marginalized communities, to report their sexual assaults to their schools. If survivors are not able to report, they will not be able to access the accommodations they need to continue their education, and schools will not have the information they need to adequately combat sexual assault on campus. Efforts at reform would be better served by focusing on improving the campus process than on limiting survivors’ options.

Algorithms are capable of racism, just as humans are capable of racism. This is particularly true of an algorithm used in the context of the racially biased criminal justice system. Predictive policing algorithms are trained on data that is heavily infected with racism because that data is generated by human beings. Predictive policing algorithms are coded to delineate patterns in massive data sets and subsequently dictate who or where to police. Because of the realities of America’s criminal justice system, a salient pattern emerges from the racially skewed data: Race is associated with criminality in the United States. Because of the “black-box” nature of machine learning, a police officer could naively presume that an algorithm’s results are neutral, when they are, in fact, infected with racial bias. In this way, a machine learning algorithm is capable of perpetuating racist policing in the United States. An algorithm can exacerbate racist policing because of positive feedback loops, wherein the algorithm learns that it was “correct” in associating race and criminality and will rely more heavily on this association in its subsequent iterations.

This Note is the first piece to argue that machine learning-based predictive policing algorithms are a facial, race-based violation of the Equal Protection Clause. There will be major hurdles for litigants seeking to bring an equal protection challenge to these algorithms, including attributing algorithmic decisions to a state actor and overcoming the proprietary protections surrounding these algorithms. However, if the courts determine that these hurdles eclipse the merits of an equal protection claim, the courts will render all algorithmic decision-making immune to equal protection review. Such immunization would be a dangerous result, given that the government is hurling a growing number of decisions into black-box algorithms.

One of the predominant themes in the criminal justice literature is that prosecutors dominate the justice system. Over seventy-five years ago, Attorney General Robert Jackson famously proclaimed that the “prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America.” In one of the most cited law review articles of all time, Bill Stuntz added that prosecutors—not legislators, judges, or police—“are the criminal justice system’s real lawmakers.” And an unchallenged modern consensus holds that prosecutors “rule the criminal justice system.”

This Article applies a critical lens to longstanding claims of prosecutorial preeminence. It reveals a curious echo chamber enabled by a puzzling lack of dissent. With few voices challenging ever-more-strident prosecutor-dominance rhetoric, academic claims became uncritical, imprecise, and ultimately incorrect.

An unchallenged consensus that “prosecutors are the criminal justice system” and that the “institution of the prosecutor has more power than any other in the criminal justice system” has real consequences for criminal justice discourse. Portraying prosecutors as the system’s iron-fisted rulers obscures the complex interplay that actually determines criminal justice outcomes. The overheated rhetoric of prosecutorial preeminence fosters a superficial understanding of the criminal justice system, overlooks the powerful forces that can and do constrain prosecutors, and diverts attention from the most promising sources of reform (legislators, judges, and police) to the least (prosecutors).